#2378 - Charlie Sheen

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Great to finally meet you, man.

It's great to meet you.

It's a trip, and you know, walking in, and I'm thinking,

how is it possible that our paths didn't cross

all those years?

I mean,

it's conceivable we were in the same venue or the same building or at the same party or at least

something.

I kind of avoided parties.

I avoid basically everything.

I avoided parties.

I avoided premieres, any anything where there was a red carpet.

Like, even if I was in a movie, I wouldn't go on the red carpet.

I'd go in through the back door.

Seriously?

Yeah, I don't like it.

Wow.

I don't like all the that fucking look over here, look over here.

That is just too fake for me.

It just, whatever allergy I have to that flares, and I'm like, I'm going in through the back door.

Fuck this.

Yeah, no, I don't blame you.

I don't blame you.

They stopped showing me where the back door was because

I support a similar

entrance

thing.

It's just too weird.

But it's that, it's look over here, look over here.

It's that thing.

Something happens in that moment.

Yeah.

And I think it's like it brings you as close to possibly sterilization as you can can get without, you know,

surgery.

I think it's bad for you.

Yeah.

I think it's like radiation.

Yeah.

Like you could take a little bit of it, but, you know, you don't want to be working the x-ray machine your whole life.

No, no.

And then there's always that one lady who keeps calling you back to her.

Charlie, Charlie.

Charlie, right.

Far left, far left, far left.

And you've looked at her like seven times already.

And then I'm out there thinking, if it took me this many takes to get a scene right, nobody would ever hire me.

You wouldn't get past

the first day well they want to get a million pictures just to get that perfect one with just a little bit of side eye to you just a little something right a little purse of the lips a little something

responding to something yeah something's the one yeah but then they chew which one do they always choose the one that's absolute dog yeah the one with your mouth open exactly or your eyes closed yeah yeah i i what i really don't like is the people who like it Not that I don't like them, is that I don't want to ever see that in myself.

And so when I'd be around them, I would just go, oh, I got to get out of here.

Right.

Yeah, right.

Freaking out.

The trappings.

The trappings.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, is there, because it feels like that system's been in place for over 100 years, right?

Is there another, is there another way to do it?

Probably not.

No.

People like it.

You know, photographers like it.

The press likes it.

It's a big thing.

There's a lot of people.

There's a lot of lights flashing.

It seems legit.

Right, right, right.

Yeah.

I just,

I don't, I can never

feel relaxed when everybody's yelling.

Right.

You know, it's

totally unnatural.

It's completely unnatural.

The only way that would be happening in real life is if you were on trial.

You know, like you were being paraded in front of a bunch of people.

It's him.

There he is.

Look over here.

You know, it's odd.

It's very odd.

Yeah.

It's almost a form of a perp walk, isn't it?

A little bit of a perp walk and just a little bit of a mental illness exhibition.

Right.

You know?

Yeah.

I just had it for the first time

like last, it would have been last Thursday.

The first time ever?

No, for the first time in like

maybe over a decade at the Netflix premiere for the dog.

Yeah.

And it was,

it was kind of cool, like the first, you know, 34 seconds.

I was like, okay, I remember this.

And then it was like, yeah, I fucking remember this.

Wow.

Damn.

And then I like, I'm in the

right, the sun just beating right on my floor.

And it's just, I can feel myself start to sweat.

Now I'm questioning the whole outfit.

You know, the underwear choice, all of it.

It's just like every decision I made leading up to that was completely wrong.

Yeah.

And it's all being documented, you know.

It's so odd.

Yeah.

What's really funny at the, when I'm, when you first walked into the studio, you brought up a tweet that I had sent in 2011.

I think this is when you were going crazy.

Yeah.

And I think this is also when my friend Russell Peters was doing those tours with you.

Oh, that's right.

That said, I need to get Charlie Sheen on my podcast.

I know it's a long shot, but a boy can dream.

If anybody knows him, help me hook it up.

Well, here we are, 14 years later.

You know, it takes what it takes, right?

Yeah.

It's funny because back then, I don't think I had no guests.

I think I had Anthony Bourdain was the only like real guest that I had had

at the time.

Yeah, he was 2011 as well.

And how many shows had you done by then?

Not that many by then.

I don't know.

So, were you just doing solo shows, just like covering topics?

I would do it mostly with my friends, mostly with other comics.

Okay.

We just sit and talk shit.

And then eventually.

Your house?

Yeah, I was at my house back then.

Okay.

So it looked nothing like this.

No, no, no.

It slowly had to get out.

It's like I had too many weirdos that I had to bring by my house.

And I have young kids at the time.

They were really young.

I was like, this is just too strange.

Bring these weirdos

by my house.

And, you know, it was just too odd.

I was like, maybe some people shouldn't know exactly where I sleep.

Right, right.

Yeah.

And it's interesting because driving here,

I was buried in my phone just, you know, for the right reasons.

So I have no idea where we are.

So it was kind of like the version of being blindfolded with a sack over my head, you know?

Yeah, that's probably how we should do it.

Can you imagine then, like, I'm the guy they're blaming for introducing this?

Just put everybody in a blindfold and put them in the back of an SUV and drive them to an undisclosed location and and make the guy drive a few circles around in like some you know neighborhood right over there yeah yeah yeah

um

but we did it we're here that those things that you did with Russell Peters were so fascinating it was the whole thing was so fascinating I watched the Netflix thing I watched the first episode and

the the the whole experience of watching the guy from platoon the guy that everybody knows is like this gigantic super cool movie star hot shots all these different things to watch you just

not just

go off the rails with drugs but like be super open about it you like the first guy super open about it you know and everybody just embraced it instead of it being like oh charlie sheen's doing drugs that's so sad it was like we love him keep going it was kind of crazy all the tiger blood stuff and winning everybody was saying winning all the time and it

What was that like for you?

Was that like

was it the worst kind of reinforcement?

Or did it let you like, were you surprised by it?

That's a great way to describe it.

It is, yeah, the worst kind of reinforcement.

Yeah, it was like

unintentionally or otherwise celebrating.

a guy's demise.

Right.

You know,

and I guess the train wreck was so spectacular that there was such a spectacle that they couldn't turn away.

But they were also being invited in to follow it down the tracks.

Yeah.

You know, and and somebody asked me about it, and and and I, you know, I don't know if I was the conductor, if I was riding the caboose or both simultaneously.

It was a trip because thinking back on it,

it's you know, some of it just kind of exists in

just Polaroid snapshots that kind of drift past through the mist, you know.

Other moments are in high def, but kind of seen through a tunnel vision.

Like, and

it's,

it was, there was an energy, or it was, there was an energy I tapped into that felt like I was playing a role, but I couldn't figure out

what the plot was,

who my co-stars were,

where somebody, you know, somebody show up with like a page one rewrite.

Right.

That's what we fucking need, you know.

And And it got away from me and had it not been encouraged, I think it could have been curtailed, it could have been shut down a lot sooner.

You become kind of captured to the image.

Yes.

And there was something that, and just recently, something I stumbled onto,

it's I was, I was, in some way,

I was being a bully.

It had a bullying kind of energy about it, you know, and I've never been that guy.

How so?

How so?

The way I was attacking people and the way I was challenging people.

I was like the tough guy on the block and had all these soldiers.

I had this cold cadre behind me, and it was like, you know, inviting people into the ring.

I've never been in the ring.

What are we doing?

You know?

You're on coke.

Total cocaine behavior, among other things.

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Yeah, and I think there was a whole testosterone component as well

that was

just out of control because what do they recommend?

Like a quarter-sized dollop and like every other day?

And no, there's a line in the book where I say I was slathering that.

that shit on like a fucking Pons commercial.

Oh, so you were using the cream?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, which is hard to measure.

It's not just hard to measure.

It gets on other people.

I read this story about this guy who is on TRT cream, and his child started showing signs of premature development.

Oh, and they realized that this kid's testosterone level was through the roof because it's through the dermis, right?

It's through the skin.

So, he's getting it on his arms, and then he's hugging his child, and the kid is getting juiced.

Like, what were the kids' numbers?

Do we know?

We don't know.

Like, in the sound of the numbers, I don't think they released that, but they said that it probably permanently affected the kid's development.

Oh, wow, Yeah.

Wow.

Because this kid is like experiencing puberty at three.

You know, you're getting bombarded with testosterone while your dad is holding you.

Insane.

Insane.

Is that part of the reason they recommend like an inner thigh application?

I guess then the only person who would get it is the person you're having sex with.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Or

your horse.

Right.

It's probably good for the horse.

Right.

So there was testosterone and cocaine together at the same time.

That sounds like a combination of hubris.

And a lot of rage.

And a lot of rage.

A lot of rage.

But the rage, I think,

it's interesting because when you finally get some distance from something, you start to realize that it wasn't really so much about what you said it was about in the moment.

And I'm really realizing it was...

It wasn't about the job, wasn't about chunk.

It was about all the stuff in my personal life.

It was about trying to just

be a certain guy at work, be a certain guy at home, and then just never having the time to be a certain guy with me.

And I just, I just couldn't, I couldn't find any place to

find any refuge or solace or any type of just a moment to breathe, just to decompress.

That's so important.

Yeah, and there was a, it's not in the book because I can't really, I don't remember it well enough to put it in the book, and that was kind of how I decided what's in there and what's not, right?

Or if something just isn't true, it's not in the book.

And so,

but it,

you know, I was, I was, I was trying to just kind of,

you know, like, you know, I, I, I, I went through two divorces and had four children during

during that run of eight years, you know.

And so, um, that's crazy.

It's insane, yeah.

And, and

they both, you know, they, they fell apart for for myriad reasons and whatever, and, and, but,

there wasn't time to heal the last one before the next one kicked off.

But that's all on me.

You know what I'm saying?

That's all on me making those decisions.

That's one of the through lines in the book, is that it really comes down to really being all about choices.

But then,

yeah,

but it's just

for it to be, just talking about the bullying stuff, you know, for it to be so directed at a guy who, let's like, if you really break it down, what did he really do to me?

He created this environment with a dream character

in an amazing show, so people tell me, right?

That was

the toast of the town, right?

And all he asked for me was to just, like, you know, just show up, be responsible, know your lines, hit your marks, do your fucking job, you know.

Those were the only demands, essentially the stuff I told him before I took the job that I was going to do.

So, and then I turn it into that.

You know, it's really difficult to really look back on that and figure out why it got that far, how it got that far.

I can help you out.

Okay.

Testosterone and cocaine.

Testosterone and cocaine.

It'll have you having all kinds of conversations with in your head that'll tell you exactly what's what you're doing is correct.

Right.

Sorry.

Did you ever talk to Chuck?

Did you ever hear like

sorry?

Yeah, no, it was.

Yeah, no, that was, I was really grateful we were able to do that.

Oh, that's nice.

Yeah, I was carrying that around for too long.

Yeah.

He hired me for a show he had a few years ago called Bookie with Sebastian Maniscalco, right?

Oh, yeah, that's right.

So I came in and did, I played myself, did a few scenes, did a cameo, you know, did some fun stuff, and just back on a set with Chuck.

And it was like, it was,

it just felt like it, like it, like it, like it did in the in the early part of the day.

Oh, that's well, good on him for not holding a grudge, too.

Yeah, that's, that's awesome.

Sorry, I lost that thought earlier.

No, no, like, where the hell was I going?

Well, it's a, it's a complicated thing to think about.

Like, why did I go off the rails?

You know, it's like, and it's very reasonable.

Here's the thing.

I don't think anybody but Charlie Sheen knows what it's like to be Charlie Sheen.

And in my estimation, there there are a scant few people that have become massive superstars at a young age and came through it sane.

I don't know anybody.

Everybody, I mean, I know people that have regained equilibrium and got their footing back and now they're on the right track.

But no one gets through without a hiccup.

Everyone kind of goes crazy because you're living in this completely alien world that no one can help you navigate.

Even if you've watched the people closest to you

go through it

most of your life and like just like right over there.

Yes.

Like in the in the next room.

Right.

Right.

You know, or in the same room.

Right.

And a bunch of your friends.

Yes.

It doesn't matter.

It's still

bananas.

It's still an alien world that you live in that no one that you run into during the day except the people like that can understand.

Right.

Which is like people are always like, why do celebrities hang out with each other?

Well, because to them, they're the only people that are normal.

Yeah.

They're the only people that, like, I get it.

I can't go to the supermarket either.

I get it.

I, you know, I get fucking TMZ'd at the airport as well.

Right.

It's like, it's normal for them because everybody else is like, wow, it's Charlie Sheen.

And they're just captivated.

Like, you kind of need to be around people that understand what that life is like.

But the problem is, they're all going crazy too.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not, I mean, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a great support group

to a degree.

You know what I'm saying?

I think you can rely on them for the things that you have in common.

Right.

But maybe take the more complicated shit just

right across the street.

Yeah.

To the experts.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You can't rely on them for everything.

No.

Because they're going through it too.

Can I just get a tissue?

Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

Jimmy, you got a box?

Awesome.

Thank you.

Sorry, I'm just kidding.

No worries.

Getting sweaty?

Is it hot in here?

Turn the AC on.

No, I'll tell you exactly what happened.

I lost that thought, and then I tried to cover, and then I realized this is he's not buying this.

And then I started sweating.

And I started fucking sweating.

So I'm just going to lose your thoughts.

It's normal, man.

Just say you lost your thought.

It's all good.

Yeah.

It happens all the time.

It happens to me, too.

Why is that, though?

Is our brain already trying to figure out the next thing that's going to attach to it?

And by doing so, it took that the main thing and just dismissed it?

Perhaps.

Okay.

It's also brains are just not that good.

Huh.

You know, they're pretty good compared to chimp pansies and dogs and stuff like that.

But, you know, they have a lot of issues.

Okay.

Just like we were talking about your memories.

Like

my memories of my whole life are like a series of blurry snapshots that I can go, oh, yeah, then we went there.

Oh, yeah, that happened.

Right.

Oh, yeah.

There's very few memories that I have that are like rock-solid memories.

Right.

Yeah.

I totally get that.

And there's a little thing in the book where I talk about memories are tricky.

And is it a story someone told me?

Is it me in that moment?

Or is it

a creased photo I saw on an old album in the 70s or 80s?

Was the memory given to me or

did I create it?

Right.

Yeah.

And there's also the real possibility that you have false memories, and people do that all the time.

And they've even shown that they can introduce memories into people's minds.

And then with enough sort of encouragement or revisiting it, that person will accept it as a pure memory.

That it actually happened to them.

Yeah, and they'll talk about it outside of that.

And they'll have no knowledge that it was a false memory.

Wow.

Yeah, because it's just not a good system.

It's a system designed to keep you away from scary things.

Like there's the wolf.

Oh, get away from the wolf.

You know, wolves are bad.

I remember.

I remember wolves are bad.

That's the spider that's poisoned.

Get away from that spider.

That's a spider that's poison.

But like day to day,

every day normal shit, it's like, how much of a memory does it really need to keep?

It's just, your brain's just not that good.

And then, and then even, and then so do certain, do, um, certain memories then get overlaid with

a newer version of that?

Okay.

Yeah, they get narratives.

They get narratives.

And you start repeating the memory and your memory becomes of you repeating the memory.

Wow.

So it's like you don't even really have have the memory anymore.

You know how to say it.

Okay.

Didn't that happen with

that one Kaczynski witness?

Did it?

With a Unabomber witness?

Yes.

Interesting.

Yeah, because that's why the first composite that was put out really ultimately wound up looking nothing like

the actual guy.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, there was a thing that, yeah, there was a thing where her memory was corrupted by a different description from somebody else.

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Well, there's also the factor that the Unit Bomber was such a traumatic event that this person was probably super freaked out, which is when your memory is the worst.

Interesting.

Yeah, that's why eyewitness accounts of like murders and chaos, they're really bad.

Right, right.

They're really bad, very unreliable.

There's some really, really awful percentage about even when they wind up in a courtroom.

Yeah.

Like the determining,

like the final nail from the person, that guy, that it's like sometimes it's as high as like 60%

that they're just wrong.

Yeah.

And then they'll convince themselves that they're right because they've already said it.

So then the ego gets involved.

And then, you know, it's just traumatic events leave you, you're in a high state of anxiety and you're not thinking clearly.

You're freaked out.

And, you know, like...

When they have events like, like, say, like 9-11,

if you were anywhere near that and you saw like people jump off the buildings and fall to their deaths, or like your memories of that are probably really clear because it was fucking crazy, right?

Right, right.

But your memories of people that you might have saw that were running away, or maybe you saw a guy in a van and he looked fishy, or maybe this, or maybe that.

It's like, and then a few days go by, and you're you probably haven't slept well, you're all freaked out.

Your memory's probably a mess.

It's probably filled with the news now, now, and then there's other people's eyewitness accounts.

And, you know, you don't know what the fuck happened.

Right.

You know,

you see someone die, you see someone jump off a building, you're going to remember that.

But there's some stuff that it's just...

You know, this is one of the scariest things about transhumanism is that it's really appealing.

And the idea that they give you a little hard drive in your brain.

And now from now on, every time you want a memory, you can go just like, you know, you look on your phone, like your iPhone on this day in 2017, you're like, oh, look at us.

That's cool.

You're going to be able to do that in your brain.

You know, and the way that we're going to buy into it is because our memory sucks.

That's how they're going to sell it to us.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah.

I mean, do you remember your phone number when you were a kid?

No, but I remember my address because it rhymed.

That's nice.

Yeah, it was 7212 Birdview Avenue, Malibu.

Well, you used to remember your phone number.

What happened?

It goes away because your memory sucks.

Right.

I know my parents' number because they still have a landline.

Oh, they're still rocking the landline.

Yeah, they are.

Yeah.

And they have an answering machine.

Whoa.

Yeah.

But during dinner, they haven't really turned it off.

Oh, and then people start talking in the background?

Yeah.

Yeah.

But it's just part of it.

It's part of the experience.

It's part of the experience.

They're rocking a landline with an answering machine in 2025.

That is.

Yeah.

It's probably the way to do it.

I used to love the answering machine.

Would you come home?

The light would be flashing.

Like, someone likes me.

Right.

Somebody called.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

it was cool it's like you had a dog coming home to wait like to visit you when you came home like oh look it's like in deuce bigelow when it's like he's at his lowest point and the thing and the light is never blinking i forgot about that you have no no new messages yeah that was a wild time where you could get phone calls that's the other thing is like you got famous before the internet too which is a different world It's a different world because there's not that many of you.

There's way less famous people.

There's way more famous people now.

Yeah.

You got famous, like super duper famous at 21 years old with no internet.

Trip out.

Yeah, I know.

How does anybody expect you to come out normal?

Jesus Christ.

And you try, you can't really even explain to someone that

wasn't around during all that.

You can't really explain what it felt like because they look at it as the things that were missing.

And there wasn't anything missing.

Right.

It was about having to really be engaged in everything you were doing.

You know, you had to show up to

gain, to get a like.

You had to enter the building.

Right, right.

You know, you had to go on a talk show.

You had to attend a junket.

You know what I'm saying?

And nobody knew.

Nobody knew what the behind the scenes of your movie looked like until years later on the DVD feature or the VHS feature

that they they finally saw some of that stuff yeah it wasn't it wasn't all all access 24-7 365 you know and for some people they can't leave it alone they have to live stream during the day they're live streaming from their trailer they're live streaming on in their car on the way home they're like yeah what is that about they're nuts they're just locked into this weird new world that we're living in but is it i mean is it because there's genuinely people that are tuning in with enthusiasm that are looking forward to that live stream in the car ride home?

Or because the person, or is it a combination?

I think it's those things, and it's also that thing that you said that you didn't ever get, they're scared of.

You didn't ever get alone time.

Just

time to decompress and think.

Just be by yourself.

No phone, no TV.

Just fucking sit on the couch and just like catch your breath.

Right.

And they don't want that.

They're scared of that.

So they're just constantly engaged with something.

I like entire days of that.

Ooh, that's nice.

Alone on the couch.

Yeah.

Watching TV.

That's nice.

It's nice to just shut off, right?

It really is.

It's

all work, no play.

Not good.

Not good at all.

Not good.

Bad for you.

And bad for your work, too.

Because it makes you just kind of, it gets dreary.

You don't have the same enthusiasm for it anymore.

You know, it's like you need discipline, but you also need enthusiasm.

You know what I was going to say earlier?

Thanks.

Okay.

All right.

The memory just, you know,

dropped another token

in the slot

is that now, no, you know, it doesn't even connect.

It doesn't?

Let's find out.

Well, no, then I actually forgot it again.

How about that?

Is that fucking nuts?

It's normal.

It's normal.

When you first got platoon, did you have any idea like what the fuck was going to happen?

I didn't.

I didn't.

For people today to understand how big that movie was, because

it was one of the very first realistic war movies.

And I think very importantly, it was done by Oliver Stone, who was actually a veteran of the Vietnam War.

You remembering what you wrote down?

What you...

Just that piece.

Yeah,

I'm not going to forget it again.

Okay.

Pardon.

Sorry.

But

it was a different kind of war movie, you know?

Yeah.

Much on the lines of your dad's movie.

Yeah.

You know, and that was a very different kind of war movie as well.

Yeah, Apocalypse from Here, Platoon,

you know, Boots on the Ground.

The script didn't read like it was going to be a masterpiece.

The script...

read

like a like a kind of like a docudrama sort of movie of the week.

It didn't

read that script and say, oh, wow, okay, yeah, this is the one.

People are going to really, wow, they're going to worship this thing.

It didn't, the dialogue was very clipped and very,

very specific.

It, it, you kind of never really knew where you were in the script, in the scene descriptions.

You know, it the script was so lean.

I think it was like barely a hundred pages.

Really?

Yeah.

So,

but

I didn't realize sort of

what

we were doing until we were actually doing it.

Usually I can read a scene and get a sense of what my responsibilities are going to be or how we're going to break it down or at least

how I'm going to see it on the screen.

And

I couldn't do that with Platoon because all the terrain, all the scenes, everything kind of felt very similar, you know?

Really?

Yeah, and the original title was the platoon.

You think it's as big a hit if he keeps the the yeah, I don't think it matters.

David, it's a great movie.

Thank you.

It was a great movie.

It doesn't matter.

But we started to feel it as we got deeper into it.

And Oliver did something brilliant where he decided to film it in continuity.

Like from page one, day one, all the way to the final day was the final page.

And that and that gave us a chance to like when something was finished, you were done with it.

And you didn't have to know how you were going to react or how you already reacted to something that hadn't happened yet.

Right.

And when people died in the movie, they got sent home.

So they were just like the next day, they were just gone.

I guess he wanted us to feel that sense of just someone

gone, that loss, that you know, sadness.

Yeah.

Now, I'm not saying that I would know how that felt in the real thing, but we bonded really,

you know, pretty, pretty

yeah, we were bonded in a way that, um, because we we were the only people that we had in the middle of that country, in the middle of that jungle, in the middle of that movie.

Um, so you really missed somebody when they were suddenly gone.

I would love to ask, I mean, I've had Oliver on a couple times, but I would love to ask him what it's like to make a movie about a war that he was starring in, and like what kind of bizarre mental conflicts

yeah, did did he didn't get into any of that stuff without anything.

Not really.

I mean, he talked a little bit about his experience in Vietnam, but I don't think we really talked about...

Did we ever talk about the making of Platoon?

We got so heavy into the JFK assassination, we hardly covered anything else.

Oh, got it.

Especially the last time he was on.

The last time he was on was when they were doing that Showtime JFK documentary.

It was a Showtime thing, right?

Wasn't it?

I think it was, yeah.

Where there was a multi-part piece that he put together.

I saw it.

Yeah.

His recall is insane.

It's insane.

It is.

You have a conversation with him.

He's pulling up dates.

He's got no book.

I mean, how old is Oliver at this point in Tom?

Upper 70s.

I just turned 60.

So if he was in.

78.

He's 78.

78 years old.

Okay.

Rock-solid memory.

I mean, rock-solid.

Wow.

The dude was just pulling up dates and names, and Alan Dulles did this, and Harriet.

Well, it was just like the entire Warren Commission report.

He's like citing different passages in it.

It's bananas.

That's deep.

Yeah.

Wow.

Has he landed on what

can he point to, or is it

several factors?

He can point to, but there is a lot of people that wanted him dead.

And for sure, there was a lot of fuckery going on with the Warren Commission, for sure.

There's a lot of nonsense with the autopsies.

There's a lot of nonsense with the single bullet going through both him and Connolly and

leaving more bullet fragments in Connolly's wrist than that magic bullet was missing, the one they found.

It's like bullshit.

The story is filled with bullshit.

And no one really knew how much bullshit it was until they had that video that they played of the Zapruder film on the Geraldo Rivera show.

Yeah.

When Dick Gregory came on and, who was a comedian, which is pretty wild, came on and had the footage of the Kennedy assassination.

Everybody sees Kennedy's head go back and to the left and you're like,

what?

What happened there?

And you immediately apply just

simple common physics to it.

Yeah.

You know, especially anybody who's ever fired a weapon.

Also, it clearly looks like he got shot in the chest, too.

Like when he grabs his neck.

It clearly looks like he got shot right there.

And there's always that talk about doing a trache that did a trache on a channel.

But you know, there's two different autopsies.

There's the autopsy in Dallas that says it's an entry wound.

And then there's the autopsy in Bethesda, Maryland that says it's tracheotomy.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Two different autopsies.

Make up your mind.

Yeah.

And it also looks like by the time they got to Bethesda, they kind of glued his head back together again, or at least put the pieces back to take a photo of it.

It's like more was missing from what they were talking about in Dallas than the Bethesda.

That's the shot where the gloved hand is like, looks like it's pointing.

Yes.

Yeah.

There's a great book called Best Evidence by David Lifton, and he was an accountant, and he had some sort of assignment involving the Warren Commission report.

And so what he decided to do is read the entire thing.

And so so in the reading of the entire thing, he finds so many contradictions, so many things that don't make any sense that he starts becoming obsessed.

And then he finds out how many people who are witnesses to the assassination wind up dying mysteriously.

Right.

Off the charts.

Yeah.

Off the charts.

Like 95% of them.

All those people that were hanging around, like a giant ton of them died in car accidents.

Weird fucking.

Who is the guy in the train tower?

A guy named Bowers, right?

Who is Bowers?

He was the the guy that saw badge man he saw people behind the knoll he saw the exchange of the rifle he saw all the

shit he died uh

I think he had a heart attack on a train track and then of course also got hit by the train I could be wrong but it was one of those type of things

but of course yeah and then but wasn't it what was the who who's the guy uh who's standing at the when the curb explodes like near the underpass oh yeah that's the guy that's the reason why they had to come up with the magic bullet theory is that teague No.

What's his name?

I don't remember.

Did he die weird?

Probably.

I don't know if he died weird, but he was hit with a ricochet.

Right.

And because they knew that the overpass, that's why they had to.

And that adds a bullet.

Yes.

They had to add that.

And they were, okay, how do we fix this?

Right.

What about?

We said only one guy did it.

It's only three shots.

So how do we come up with a reasonable excuse?

And they came up with the magic bullet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think the

architect of that was

Spectre.

No?

I think it was Arlene Specter.

Yeah, I I think it was his idea.

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They just bullshitted people, but back then you can get away with that.

Right.

You know, it was pretty easy to just bullshit people.

And you see all the additional cameras, like Babushka Lady, for instance, right?

And all that stuff just confiscated.

Yeah.

Never.

Yeah.

Well, they had the Zapruder film for a long time.

I think Time Life had it.

And then somehow or another, Dick Gregory got it.

Was it ever released with missing frames?

Wasn't there the jump cut when he goes behind the sign and then it jumps?

Because didn't they take out the fatal head hit at some point

and then tried to sell that?

Perhaps.

They probably did at one point in time.

But now, obviously, you could see the whole thing.

And then it's also been AI-enhanced.

I don't know if you've seen the AI-enhanced one.

I haven't.

No.

It's grisly.

It's even more gruesome.

It's gruesome.

I mean, I think he was shot from multiple angles simultaneously.

That's what I think.

I think he was shot both from the back and from the front.

And I think Lee Harvey Oswald, if he wasn't involved, he certainly wasn't innocent.

He was probably the guy that they were going to frame it on.

Right.

But I think he was in on the whole thing.

Anyway, I think he killed a cop afterwards as well.

Tippett?

No,

no, no.

Yeah.

Have you ever read that thing about because Tippett's nickname back at the precinct was JFK?

Did you ever read this thing?

Then they show the side-by-side of how much they really look like each other.

Oh, really?

So they're saying he was the body they used for the transfer when they flew with the empty coffin, you know, all that stuff.

Yeah, it's, I mean, it is so

there's so many just,

you know, Warrens to travel down, and there's so many angles to explore.

There's too many.

There's too many rabbit holes to go down.

We were introduced to it as kids because dad played both Kennedys.

So we were seeing documentaries at like, you know, I would have been 10 or 11, Amelia was 13 or 14.

and so we've been involved in this thing for a lot longer than we should have been wow yeah we had access to this stuff and so

it was just nuts that no one was brought to justice and we know for sure more people were involved than Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald there was more people involved yeah no one was brought to justice and they got away with it we don't want to think that they get away with things like killing the president but they did in broad daylight yeah yeah and blaming it on a lone gunman a lone nut.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Who they already had a full description and

rapture and rundown and everything about him.

Whoever they go, they printed articles about him before it was even over.

Yeah.

And then the Jack Ruby thing, where Jack Ruby goes completely insane in jail after he's visited by Jolly West, who is the head of MK Ultra, who is like routinely dosing people with acid.

Yeah.

Jolly West cooked Jack Ruby's brain in jail and just left him insane.

He's the guy from

what's the book that it's

from Chaos.

Yeah.

I actually read Chaos before it got all the attention.

Really?

Yeah.

A friend of mine gave it to me and I was

all right.

I'll read a couple pages and I was like, oh.

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

This is

a different take.

Yeah.

But I'm curious how you felt about the documentary they did about it.

I didn't watch it.

Okay.

I thought it was going to be too quick.

90 90 minutes.

I didn't think it was like enough time.

It's only 90 minutes, right?

I thought it was the first episode.

Oh, so I watched it sort of like a data gathering thing that you usually do with the first episode and kind of just seeing what the director is doing and what kind of stuff they're laying out early.

Yeah.

So, and then when it ended and I didn't see that second episode with the timer, right?

Uh-huh.

And I was, oh, that's, and I thought it was a complete,

I thought it radically underserved the book.

Yeah, maybe they could try again.

That needs to be like an eight-part, two-hour-a-piece series.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah, because it's so nuts.

The story is so nuts.

Just the provable actual facts are so nuts.

That very likely Charles Manson was a CIA asset.

Very likely they had groomed him when he was in prison and taught him mind control techniques when people were high on acid, taught him how to be sober but pretend he's on acid and how to interact with these people that are on acid and shape their mind and even get them to commit murder, all of which is fact.

Yeah, no,

I would say it's insane, but so much of it is, I don't want to say provable,

but has enough supporting evidence to make a compelling case.

And I love that the guy starts out just like a,

you know, just kind of a normal celebrity assignment for Premier Magazine, right?

Yeah, I've been on that magazine.

I had that cover twice.

My story didn't wind up like that.

I think that it was a story for a magazine, and it was just about the anniversary of the murders.

Exactly.

That's it.

That's what it was.

Yeah.

You know, just give us a piece, you know, so people go, wow, crazy.

25 years later.

Wow.

Right.

And then he gets obsessed and he starts realizing, well, this guy was full of shit.

And that guy was corrupted.

Oh, my God.

Look at this.

And hold on.

Who's Jolly West?

You know, like, what's MK Ultra?

This is real Freedom of Information Act.

Get the documents.

Oh, my God.

Operation Midnight Climax.

The government was running whorehouses.

They were running whorehouses and using two-way mirrors and dosing Johns and filming them.

And this has to do with Manson?

Like, what the fuck was going on?

Yeah.

And then you realize that it was all

a psyop to try to demonize the peace, love, and stop war movement.

And that what they really wanted to do was stop the anti-war movement and do something to curb the cultural change that was happening.

And so their strategy was to turn hippies into murderers.

It kind of works.

It kind of works.

Yeah.

It kind of works.

Yeah, I mean, it's a long way to go,

but I think it had the effect they were looking for.

Imagine if they didn't do that.

Like, what kind of cultural change would have taken place?

Because if you think about what happened between 1950 and 1960, it's like the world becomes a different place in 10 years.

Between 1960 and 1970, it's like, what?

This world is crazy.

The music is crazy.

The culture is crazy.

The movies are nuts.

Everything is wild.

It's very psychedelic.

And then Nixon comes along in 1970, passes this sweeping Schedule I Act, makes all mushrooms and LSD, makes everything illegal, all to stop.

the civil wars, the

civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at the same time when they're doing this Manson stuff.

So it was a concerted effort across the board to stop the anti-war movement and to stop the civil rights movement.

They were like, we're losing control and power.

And so,

I mean, it was an evil thing to do, but you kind of got to give them credit because it was pretty brilliant.

Like, they actually pulled it off.

You think of serial killer, you think of Manson.

You think of the family.

Oh, my God, these hippies are murderous.

A bunch of murderous freaks on drugs, cutting women's babies out of their stomachs stomachs and writing pig on the wall.

This is nuts.

And they brought the Beatles into it.

And our own goddamn government engineered it.

They engineered, they stopped what was probably one of the most beautiful cultural shifts in this country's history.

That would have organically still kept evolving into other things that would have blossomed out of it.

Yes.

Yeah, we probably would have rethought government.

We probably would have rethought the type of people that we want as leaders.

We would have rethought our involvement in foreign wars.

There would have been no support for it.

We would have rethought what psychedelic drugs can do for you versus the bad aspects of them.

We would have rethought everything.

The music would have been a lot better.

Music took a big dip.

Yeah, it did.

Music took a big dip after they got rid of the drugs that were good and brought in the Coke.

But people do point to the death of the 60s

occurred up at Cielo Drive.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was effective.

Yeah.

I mean, that completely demonized any peace love and

you know, any of that kind of movement.

Those people became a real problem now because you're now connected to Manson.

It was instantly zero tolerance.

Mm-hmm.

Like overnight.

Kind of nuts.

Yeah.

Kind of nuts that it was really all engineered by the government.

You know, it's really that in itself, in and of itself, is a terrible crime that they

sort of engineered society to their benefit so that they could maintain control.

And the way they did it is by getting a horrible con who had been in and out of jail his whole life and teaching him how to run a cult.

Right.

Right.

A murderous cult.

And setting up at a free clinic in the Haight.

Where my wife's mom went.

Oh.

Yes.

My wife's mom was a hippie.

You have a connection to this.

Yes.

My wife's mom went, she was a hippie in Haight-Ashbury, and she went to the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic.

Treated at that clinic.

Yes.

Wow.

You know, that clinic didn't shut down until after Tom O'Neill's book came out.

That clinic would have been running for over 50 years.

So it ran until like 2022?

Yeah.

Wow.

When did it close?

It closed shortly after that book came out.

My clinic, hey, we're good.

Let's get out of here.

I could have gone there while I was reading the book.

Yes.

The CIA was just running

fucking clinic.

What a trip.

trip.

That is so nuts.

And that clinic also connected to Jolly West.

That clinic also connected to all sorts of other marijuana experiences.

San Francisco is where they were doing Operation Midnight Climax.

That's where they had a brothel.

These are the people that are supposed to be like, protect and serve.

Look out for your best interests.

Right, right.

And these motherfuckers are creating Manson and completely shifting society and turning people into whatever the fuck we we became in the 70s and the 80s.

The book came out June 25th, 2019.

Yeah.

And the clinic closed July 2019.

Seriously.

Yeah, one month later.

Like, fuck,

we got busted.

That dude read the foreword and was like, guys, we got a problem.

Yeah, that's probably how long it took them just to clear the building out.

Yeah, exactly.

And try to figure out whether they're going to kill Tom O'Neill.

Right, right.

Has he been on the show?

Yes.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What's he like?

Is he great?

He's great.

He's actually my good friend Greg Fitzsimmons.

He was his neighbor in New York when he first started working on this.

And then he became his neighbor also in Venice.

Like he's been his neighbor for like 20 years.

So Greg's followed him from this entire journey.

And Greg had been telling me about it for years.

I'm like, when's your friend going to get that fucking book done?

And then finally, he says, tells me the whole story, how it took so long.

Why he's like, you got to have him on.

The book is insane.

I'm like, let's go.

Wow.

So we had him on, and it was incredible.

First of all, I listened to the book first before I had him on.

I listened to the audio version.

I was like, this is nuts.

This is nuts.

If this is all true, this is fucking insane.

And it's all true.

So

they really did engineer a murderous cult of hippies.

And almost used the clinic

as a casting couch, as an audition process for which girls they thought would be the most

vulnerable.

Crazy.

Yeah.

Crazy that the CIA was doing that.

It's just.

I thought they were supposed to just operate on foreign soil.

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Well, sometimes things get messy, but it's like they

you talk to like your average boomer who just watches cable news and reads the newspaper.

They'd never believe this in a million years.

And they'll hear us talking about it, thinking, come on, guys.

Oh, you're out of your mind.

But they also will never read the book.

No, never read the book.

And then when things get proven, they never apologize.

Imagine that.

Never apologize for your baseless conspiracy theories that all turned out to be true.

Yeah.

Because, you know, conspiracies are fucking real, okay?

This conspiracy theory pejorative that they really started foisting on the American public during the Kennedy assassination was for that very reason.

They wanted to make it ridiculous for you to be interested.

That's where the term was coined.

That's where the term became popularized.

Apparently, the term existed before that.

We researched this, right?

Didn't we Google the original?

term of conspiracy theorists.

It's quite a bit earlier, but it was never like a thing in the public zeitgeist.

It became a thing during the Kennedy assassination because a lot of people were questioning it because it looked weird.

You know, everything, even the people that hadn't seen the Zapruder film, everything just seemed off.

It seemed off.

And there were rumblings amongst people that were there.

The big one was the shots from the grassy knoll.

Many people talked about gunshots.

And that one photo where there's like 15 people pointing to the same spot.

And you see smoke near where the bushes are.

And it's not a good photo, but it's good enough that you go, hmm.

it's just too

it was too uniform you know people were they all were pointing we heard shots from back there there is a thing that does happen um especially if you look at dealey plaza have you ever driven through i have yeah i've i've i've walked the whole it's weird crime scene yeah it's weird to be there first of all it's so little it's you can't believe how close everything is it's real little and that they but that they sent him into that tight turn and put him into that next vertical pickle jar i mean

yeah Completely planned.

And you watch the motorcycle cops drop back.

Uh-huh.

Just drop back.

There's something I read.

Did you ever read The Man Who Killed Kennedy?

I think it's Jim Mars.

Do you remember Jim Mars?

Yes.

Yeah.

Did you ever have him on?

No, I didn't.

Oh, okay.

He's.

Yeah.

He wrote Sci Spies,

which

was all about remote viewing.

Oh.

Yeah, yeah.

He's a trip.

He was deep into everything.

I go back and forth on that remote viewing show.

I do too.

I do too.

But there's something in one of his books,

and I've never been able to find it anywhere else.

It's almost like this little detail was scrubbed from the internet that the Morse code signal for victory

right after the fatal headshot went out over every Dallas police radio.

Whoa.

Have you ever heard that?

No.

Okay, I read that.

This is...

Disclaimer.

I'm not coming up with this.

This is not my original

data.

But yeah, when I read that,

that was creepy.

That's crazy.

And I don't know that he would have just added that for color.

That's not something you just throw out there.

Yeah, that's a weird thing to add.

Victory.

Well, a lot of people hated Kennedy back then.

It's hard for us to reconcile now today because we think of him as like one of our greatest presidents.

Of course, because he got murdered.

We always love him after they get shot.

Sure.

But when he was alive, this was like half the country fucking hated him.

And then there was the Bay of Pigs disaster where we lost a lot of people because Kennedy didn't give him air support.

He wasn't told about the invasion until like last moment, and air support was crucial to its success.

He denied air support.

A bunch of people died that weren't going to die.

And so those guys on the ground, my friend Evan has a theory.

My friend Evan, who owns Black Rifle Coffee, who was a Ranger himself.

I met him.

He's He's the best.

I love him.

I love him to death.

But he said, like, those guys, those are hard-nosed killers.

And if they think that they lost their brothers because this fucking piece of shit didn't give them the air support that they deserved, it was Kennedy's idea.

And you tell them that you want to get that guy killed, like, oh, fucking sign me up.

Those guys would do it.

Interesting.

He's like, those would be the type of guys you would have do something like that.

And they would probably tell you this would be a perfect place to do it.

Right, right.

A tight little turn.

Anybody who says, by the way, because conspiracies get, everybody gets binary on this one way or another.

I believe this or I believe that.

Anybody who says that Lee Harvey Oswald couldn't make that shot has never shot a rifle.

You're full of shit.

If the rifle's on, it was not that far.

I'm not saying he could do it 100 times out of 100.

Right.

But the possibility of him having that rifle ready, he's got a scope.

He's got a rest.

The car comes into view.

You roll the sight onto his his back you squeeze off around

squeeze off around and you get a headshot in there that's a hundred percent possible sure I just don't buy it right I don't buy I don't I don't think he acted alone if he did do it he might have done it he might have shot at him he might have even hit him once there was other people there was he was the patsy and I think when he said I'm just a patsy right the way he said it was not like a guy who murdered somebody the way he said it was like I can't believe they set me up exactly like exactly so I think he was in on a bunch of it sure I just don't think he pulled the trigger.

Right.

Or if he did pull the trigger, he was one of many people that pulled the trigger.

That's what I think.

Yeah.

But there was a lot of other people saying, oh, he couldn't have made those shots because the rifle scope was off.

That's, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about because I could get your rifle scope to be off in five seconds.

Okay.

If your rifle scope's perfect because it's zeroed in, bang, I drop it on the ground.

Try it again.

It'll be off by six inches at 200 yards.

Yeah.

You're going to move that thing.

They're fragile.

They require micro-adjustments with little Allen wrenches and hex keys and shit.

Right, right, right.

They don't torque them too much.

You get it dialed in perfect.

On a $37.

Yeah, on a rifle from 1963.

From the back of a magazine.

Yeah, of course that thing can get knocked off easily.

Like almost instantly you can knock that thing off.

There is a thing about the tree, though.

What about the tree?

That he had to shoot through a tree because what they've done and a lot of the reenactments

supporting that he was the lone gunman,

they did cut out part of the tree that Kennedy's behind.

They cut it out for the reenactment?

Yeah,

so he would have a clear field of view.

But he had a clear field of view for at least a brief amount of time.

Sure.

And that's all you need.

That's all you need if you were good, and if you practice.

And I'm assuming that if you're going to go shoot the president, you'll probably get used to firing off a few rounds.

You'll probably set up a target.

You're not going to just hope that your accuracy is still there for three years ago.

Yeah, you're going to practice.

So if you're going going to practice, you're going to be even quicker at racking a new round.

Sure.

He could have done it.

I just don't buy it.

It just, none of the evidence seems to point in that direction, including all the evidence that they try to fabricate.

Like the magic bullet one is nuts.

Anybody who's ever shot anything with a bullet who looks at that and believes that went through two people and broke bones,

that looks like it got shot into a swimming pool.

It doesn't look like it ever hit anything.

No, and I've had people like, you know, debate me and taking the side of the magic bullet.

They're not going to be able to get it.

And look me right in the eyes and believe it.

And I'm just like, okay, well, cool.

This is where we have to

just.

They're out of their mind.

Yeah, we have to walk away.

They're out of their mind.

They don't know.

I could show them, like,

let's go take a bone from a cow.

Let's set up a bone from a cow, and I'll shoot it at 100 yards.

One bone.

Yeah.

Just one.

Just one bone.

And let's take a look at that bullet.

Right.

Yeah.

It's not going to look anything like that.

It's going to be all fucked up.

And there's the fragments.

There's missing fragments from the bullet that are in Connolly's wrist.

That are more fragments that are missing from the actual bullet they're attributing to the wound.

You can't.

It's just.

But they did it.

That's what's nuts.

You know, you're going to talk about it till the cows come home.

Do you know about the palm print, though?

Oh, that

they linked the rifle to Oswald because of a palm print on the

dock dock when they went to visit him in the morgue.

Yeah, they didn't get it till after the autopsy.

Yeah.

Huh, it wasn't there, and then surprise.

How convenient.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And also, like, says who, says who, his fingerprint was on it.

You could just say that back then.

1963.

The government says, we found the fingerprint.

Oswald doesn't have a lawyer.

No one's representing him.

He's dead.

Yeah.

You know, no one's going to say, my client is innocent.

He's fucking dead.

Okay.

Pin it on him.

Nobody gives a shit.

And everybody just mourned the fact that the president was dead.

And then,

you know, all of a sudden you got

Lyndon Johnson full steam ahead with Vietnam War.

Yeah.

It's nuts.

Yeah.

If you usually

look at what happens after the major event, it's like it's things got very different.

Yeah.

They got very different.

That's when you really start to see, like, okay, yeah.

Kennedy was trying to be a real president.

And they were like, oh, none of that.

Yeah, it was was the Federal Reserve, it was Vietnam, it was like all these big, like, really important things.

Big things.

He wanted to kill the CIA.

He wanted to do a lot of things.

Yeah.

And they were like, not today, sir.

And then that's the real argument is we haven't really had a president since Kennedy.

Everything after that has been the president's more of a speaker.

Interesting.

And

the giant machine behind it continues to run exactly as it always has.

Yeah, I mean,

and

just from where I sit, there's not a lot you can do about it.

There's nothing you can do about it.

You can talk, but look, if they haven't done anything about the Kennedy assassination, you can't do shit.

No.

You could put pressure on people, and

you definitely can hurt their chances of getting re-elected if people find out that they're very disappointed in you for not supporting this or not telling us about that or lying about this or you were involved in that.

Yeah, but other than that, like

there's not much, not much you can do.

Yeah, that's why I don't really weigh in anymore.

Good.

It's probably smart.

You know, it just feels like,

I don't know, it's wasted energy.

It definitely is a lot of that.

But it's also like a show.

You know, you could watch the show.

Hey, have you heard the, watch the latest episode of the Epstein Files?

Like, what's going on?

Yeah.

You know, it turns into a show.

It turns into a parlor game, also, you know.

Right?

That's that's how my dad described the OJ case.

He said, this is like the greatest parlor game ever.

Right.

You know?

Boy, I remember watching that verdict on TV live in my apartment with this girl I was dating.

She was a really sweet girl, and she couldn't believe that he was innocent.

Yeah.

She didn't understand it.

She was so confused.

Yeah, I didn't like it.

She was like, No.

No, how?

She just kept, she kept putting her hands over her face.

No,

no.

It completely torqued her whole reality.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was on a mountaintop in Mexico doing a

kind of a

low-rent sci-fi film called The Arrival.

I love that movie.

Oh, okay.

Don't say that was a low-rent movie.

I love that movie.

You know who turned me on to that movie?

Dave Foley.

Dave Foley, who's a good friend of mine from News Radio.

When we were on News Radio together, he fucking loved that movie.

He goes, this is a so underrated sci-fi movie.

I'm like, okay, cool.

Wow.

And I checked it out.

It was great.

I love it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It was the first film that actually incorporated a mashup of puppets and CGI at the same time.

Because at that point, it was either one or the other, and the other hadn't fully, really arrived yet.

Right.

You know, yeah.

So that was kind of cool.

But no, we were.

I was so hoping for the day off to be back at the hotel because everybody knew the night before that the verdict was coming.

Right.

So we had to shoot this scene and and there was a there was a prop man and he had the only this is 95 right he had the only cell phone and it had like half a bar and it's in and it's starting to rain and he's got his ear and his his buddy's got his phone in LA up to the TV when they're about to read the verdict.

So we all gather around the prop man and we're watching him and he's kind of leaning to keep the signal, to keep it, to kind of keep, you know, connected.

And then we can see when he hears it he slumps a little bit right

takes the phone from his ear and slams it into the mud and screams that motherfucker got away with murder

voice like echoed through the mist it was gnarly that's a wild scene that's all I learned about the OJ verdict yeah wow yeah

wow and Dave Anderson was there with me he's a buddy I grew up with he's in the book

He's a two-time Oscar-winning FX makeup artist, you know.

And so, yeah, if you ever run across Dave the Rave, Anderson, ask him about the OJ verdict.

That's just a crazy scene.

Imagine a guy reacting like that.

He was our only connection to it.

And everybody was so invested in this thing.

And it was really hard to go.

And that was like, do you remember time of day that might have happened?

Kind of late morning, sort of, or was it in the afternoon?

I don't remember.

I don't remember at all.

We still had a pretty sizable day to shoot, and it was really hard to regain focus and feel like what we were doing still mattered.

Yeah, because

there was a giant, just there was like a murmur in the universe at that point.

You know, like something, it felt like something had been taken from us.

You know, yeah.

Yeah, civility.

Did you see the last or the most recent OJ documentary?

No.

It's

Murder,

Mayhem, and Blood.

I think it's got three.

Murder, Mayhem, and Blood.

Something.

Murder, Mayhem, and Lies.

Something.

I'm probably way off with that title.

Not American Manhunt?

No.

No, it's actually.

But it's the latest OJ documentary?

Well, I guess Manhunt will be the latest.

Yeah, this is the one that was before that, and it's broken down at the crime scene by two

expert veteran recreationists.

Yeah.

It's a trip.

Do you watch any OJ stuff that comes out now?

No, I try not to.

Because it's just too weird.

Okay.

Do you think there was something else there?

No, no, I think he killed his wife.

Yeah.

And he killed Ron Goldman, and he got away with it yeah and it's just nuts it's just you know it's weird you watch him on like naked gun and you're like that guy yeah that guy murdered his wife with a knife like what yeah he got away with it and he's just golfing yeah it was a follow-up part that didn't really support anything about what he had claimed you remember when he was a rapper

you remember the juice is loose you remember that oh gosh i think i think i just will i willed that one out of my he had like a like a like a king's robe on and like it was a bunch of hot ladies around him.

Okay, it's coming back to me.

Yeah, he made a rap song.

Wow.

Wow.

Yeah, he was like embracing the heel roll at one point in time after the guilty verdict or the not guilty verdict.

Right, right, right.

And so he

got into like rap.

But I mean, probably just for just for a monetary graph.

I would imagine.

Let me

play it.

Play the juices loose.

It's so bad.

Oh, my God.

Is it off of YouTube?

That would be hilarious.

It was part of a TV show.

I saw another clip recently.

Oh, that's right.

He has like a prank show.

He was trying to prank people.

It was like probably pre-

Jackass.

Yeah, but I'm trying to think of the thing they had on MTV that they did with all the celebrities.

I couldn't think of much of it.

Oh, punked.

Got it.

OJ was doing that?

Everybody would just run away pranking him.

Yeah, he did it to a lady, like, walked up to her hotel room with a knife.

Oh, my God.

That was one of of his scenes?

Jesus Christ.

You got juiced, is what it was called.

You got juice.

You got juiced.

Damn.

But I'm trying to find this one.

Also, the music video had a bunch of

Naked Ladies?

Yeah, it was aired on pay-per-view.

Whatever that was.

The Spice Channel or something.

Huh.

Remember the Spice Channel?

Yeah.

But that whole thing, going from that verdict to trying, going back to work.

There's the picture.

It's not something video.

Oh my.

Just the musical.

Look at that.

I remember one time we were filming news radio.

It was in the middle of that North Hollywood shootout.

Do you remember that?

I do.

And we were watching it live on TV while trying to do a sitcom.

And we were like, we probably should take some time off here.

There's a fucking war going on in the middle of North Hollywood.

Wow.

Yeah, that was.

I think that involved a lot of cocaine and steroids, too.

From the brothers.

From the guys?

Yeah, yeah.

I know they were definitely on steroids.

Yeah.

But I think there was probably some...

Or meth.

Something like that.

Yeah, I think meth would have kept them there for a lot longer.

For people who don't know the story, these guys,

did they rob a bank?

Is that what they did?

Yeah, but waited.

Yeah.

Like, could have driven away, could have left with

all the dough.

And they decided to get in a shootout with the cops and killed cops.

Right?

Yes.

I mean, and they got killed.

A bunch of cops got hit.

And the cops were like horribly outgunned.

Oh, yeah.

The cops had their 9-millimeter pistols, and these guys have fucking machine guns and bulletproof vests.

Yeah.

Kevlar helmets.

They had face masks.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Now, do you support that when the dude finally kills himself, that it was a simultaneous sniper shot at the same time?

I never even looked into that.

Is that one of the concerns that you're going to be doing?

Well, it's just, it's, yeah, that's one thing that they claim.

That

he got shot and shot himself at the exact same time.

At the exact same time.

It's possible.

But why would they, like, what does that serve?

Like, what does that?

Maybe they were already going to shoot him, and he shot himself, and they didn't think he was going to shoot himself, and they pulled the trigger right when he did.

Got it.

That's what I would guess, if that's the case.

But it's not like they have to be let off the hook, because at that point, that dude has to be put down.

Yeah.

I mean, one of the guys had already been shot, and he was shot in the leg, and they didn't get him any medical help.

They knew he was going to bleed out.

You know,

I think that was the case.

I think he got shot in his femoral artery.

Yeah, the first guy that says he died by, this is from Wikipedia.

He died by suicide via gunshot to the head from his handgun, simultaneously being hit by rifle fire from LAPD officers with one round striking and severing his spine.

Whoa.

The other guy got shot over 29 times and died from blood loss.

Wow.

I mean, what are the odds that the crazy?

That the thing with the

sounds like there were a lot of bullets are flying in his direction.

Over 2,000 rounds were found.

Jesus, 300,000.

Like, what is that weigh?

Like, if you're carting that around and you've got a whole duffel of cash.

Yeah, you must have a heavy trunk.

Yeah.

Yeah, that is banana.

Half was the police, but

wow.

Still.

Imagine being in that neighborhood.

I think that's where I moved.

2,000 rounds are flying in both directions.

Well, the cops went to a gun store, right?

Didn't they?

I think they did.

Like, right when it started, and they were like, whatever you got you know give us your biggest boar rifle you know whatever you got we'll take it yeah how much ammo you got i mean how long did that go on for

uh about an hour wow

they had homemade body armor swat team wasn't ready for that they had to commandeer an armored vehicle to evacuate wounded people

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Wow.

Yeah, then they that's that kind of sparked the debate for police to get more power.

Jeez.

Yeah,

that was a turning point moment.

Now, if you're a real conspiracy theorist, then you say, oh, MK Ultra tricked those guys into doing that so that the communist can better get it.

Militarized.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, this is the problem with conspiracies.

People

attribute them to everything.

Right.

You really get down the rabbit hole.

Everything's a conspiracy.

Yeah, yeah.

But then when they do that, they kind of

harm the credibility of the ones that can really be

you know considered for for

you know

for for the for how we know them to be you know after after all the extensive research you know no doubt yeah there's real ones but i think that's also part of the thing reason why you know some really silly conspiracy theories get pushed I think they get pushed by bots, and I think they get pushed by paid accounts.

To water down the real ones, to make them look stupid, and they'll attach them, attach a really stupid conspiracy to one that's legitimate.

Right.

And then it discredits the legitimate one.

Yeah.

It's almost like, you know, not to introduce this, but just from afar, it's almost like a lot of the QAnon stuff kind of had that effect.

Just,

you know, I didn't dig deep into that and don't, you know, and only know just the just the basic

talking points about it.

But one thing I did see that felt like a constant was that there was always

anytime they'd mentioned something that was just completely screwy, it was followed up with the ones that we believed to be real.

Right.

You know, there's just kind of this big, just

kind of just put them all in the same

stew.

Exactly.

Yeah, and just stirred that cauldron, you know.

Yeah, that's a very convenient way to bury truth.

The QAnon documentary on HBO was great.

Into the Fire, that was called?

Yeah,

into

something.

I didn't see it.

Into the storm.

Into the storm.

Oh, okay.

It's really good.

Is it?

It's a multi-part thing on all the people that were involved in 4chan and the creation of QAnon.

Who they think the original guy was, and they think another guy took it over after a while and took over the account.

Got it.

And it seems like they were just kind of fucking around at first.

But

it's not definitive.

Like, he's got some really good evidence that points in that direction, but it's just hard to know.

And, you know, everyone always thought that it was someone inside the White House.

There was some secret person inside the White House.

It doesn't seem like this documentary believes that.

The guy who made this documentary pins it on one guy in particular that's a tech nerd that seems to have all of the attributes of someone who could pull off a QAnon type deal.

Check Chevy.

Yeah,

super smart, you know, internet shit poster, you know, running 4chan, you know, and like that's the whole thing over there.

It's like get people to do stuff that's stupid.

Right.

Like they got women to free bleed.

They started pushing this idea that

the patriarchy is making you wear a tampon and you should just, your menstrual cycle should just flow in your pants and who cares?

And this is like a sign of your strong femininity.

It was just them being crazy.

And then a bunch of women just adopted it.

Wow.

Not for long.

It's gross.

They were like, this is stupid.

Probably lasts a couple weeks.

But a bunch of women.

But

people are really susceptible.

You could get people to do that.

Not everybody.

Right.

But it's just like the Haight Ashbury free clinic thing.

Not everybody's going to enjoy your call.

Right.

But if you open up a free clinic, you're going to get enough.

you know, lost children that come in through your doors.

Well, they're going to need your legit services to start with.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah.

You got to sort it out.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

It's just nuts that that's our government.

That's our daddies.

Our government daddies, the people that we're supposed to be looking to to help us lead a prosperous life and secure our standing in the world and make sure we've grow financially.

And these motherfuckers did all that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, you know,

ultimate power, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In any form.

Well, they're bringing it back to stardom.

Like, that's a weird power to get somebody.

It's a, especially when you're 21 years old.

Stardew.

Yeah.

It's a weird power.

Weird amount of freedom.

Weird amount of people expecting you to be kind of wild.

Sure.

Yeah, and again, that thing you talked about where you watch it happen to others, and then suddenly

it's you.

It's

It's a lot more intoxicating.

And then I would always think, okay, so

how were they able to control it?

Why didn't I see them enjoying it at this level?

And it wasn't about, I'm going to show them the way they should have been doing it.

It was just about, hey, guys, okay, cool.

No,

it finally made its way over here

and

it can go to 11,

you know, and not burn the whole house down, you know, when it was still fun, when it was still creative and productive on some level, you know,

because it wasn't about, it was still having to show up and it was still, you know, carving out enough time for the party, but also reserving enough,

you know, energy for the job.

Right.

You know, that's the balance.

That's the balance.

And some people pull it off.

Some people, they're really disciplined and they pull off the work and then they pull off the partying.

Right, right.

And I was able to maintain that for a long time.

And even when it flamed out, like those early rehabs and there was always like there was a job like the day I got out.

Wow.

You know, scripts showing up in rehab.

And it's like, they're just, they're just,

they want you to get well.

Okay.

They want you to get better.

But, you know,

as soon as you're out of here, you know, we got some good stuff for you to look at.

There's also, unfortunately, a romantic notion of a guy getting out of rehab.

Interesting.

Right?

Interesting.

How many cop shows start with a guy who's down on his dumps, putting a pizza in a blender for breakfast?

You know what I mean?

Like, really, like, at his lowest of low points,

drinking, and then maybe his daughter cries and he throws the bottles into the trash can.

He's like, I'm done.

And now he's back.

And there's a romantic thing of getting your shit together.

Sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like, Charlie's back, better than ever.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

And it's, it's, you know, everybody's rooting for you again.

Yeah.

You know,

and they, and they're expecting the guy to deliver

with passion now, real-life experience.

He was a drug addict.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Look at Robert Downey Jr.

now.

Right.

Yeah.

People love that.

They love that.

But the same thing was happening to Downey

when he was in rehab or maybe when he was even in the pen when they people were bringing him.

I think he was, I think they brought him Allie McBeal when he was still in jail.

And I don't think, I think he still got high after that.

You know, and my dad would always be like yelling at the television.

It's like, stop rewarding

this behavior.

Stop rewarding it.

Let him sit in those consequences.

Not out of judgment or out of punishment or, you know, just out of love, you know.

To help him get his shit together.

Yeah.

If you keep letting them fuck up over and over again, they'll continue to fuck up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But if there's always a carrot the day you walk out, you know, something to something to chase

and a soft landing.

Yeah.

You know, that's what was really interesting about this,

you know, this, this, this, uh, this decades, decade-long timeout that

I got put into, you know,

which, you know, at some point the punishment has to just sort of fit the crime, right?

And

yeah, it was, it was, it, it felt like it had, it was a little bit longer than

it should have been.

Yeah.

Yeah, I don't remember any murder charges, you know.

But at the same time,

there's not a chance that I could have

done the two projects that I've that, wow, the book came out yesterday and the doc comes out today, you know.

I couldn't have done either unless I had the kind of perspective and distance from all of that that

I was able to get, to find, you know.

You've been sober for how long?

Seven years?

Coming up on eight.

Eight years.

Yeah, it'll be eight in December.

That probably helped a lot to be away from everything

for you to achieve that.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I was still doing things to, you know, just kind of stay in the mix a little bit.

And, you know, I do signings, I do speaking engagements, do stuff like that.

But it was also like, it's like as soon as I quit drinking, all my kids started showing up again.

And, you know, Sam and Lola were living there, and then

they'd cycle back with Denise, and then Bob and Max would show up, and then

Brooke would come back, and like, okay, so he's going to be here, and then Lola would show back up.

So my house was kind of like, it's kind of like this, it was like a clubhouse, you know.

And I write in the book that

my vacancy sign, you know,

for those children

always, always hangs facing out, you know.

So it was, you know, being called to

a much more responsible and complicated set of responsibilities and order, you know, and just having to do stuff that they didn't care about, you know,

writing of a show or a response to a movie or any popularity or IMDB

stuff.

They were just like, you know, with the basic needs and getting to school and help with this.

And so it was really cool to like suddenly just be that that's the only stuff that that that that that mattered to the people that matter the most.

And so

and and yeah, but you're right that that none of that could have happened if I was away on location or having to be at a studio every week.

But

yeah, I think it's it was about the time that it that it created, you know so

and and it's interesting that that I'm not I'm not like I'm not looking at this as a as a comeback, you know,

it's uh it's a it's a I think it's a reset.

I think it's a reset, you know.

And I didn't I didn't

I didn't rely on anything that I'd done before.

Never written a book, never done a documentary, you know, but to come back with two projects that everybody seems to be really excited about.

Documentary is very entertaining.

Awesome thing.

It's very entertaining.

It's really well done.

like the way it's put together and it's just so the stories are fucking bananas it's just

it's so bananas it's the the whole thing was just so nuts but you know like i said everybody loves the story of someone getting their shit together and that's a great accomplishment of being sober for almost eight years it really is thank you thank you yeah yeah and you know it's um people are gonna yell at me because of how i deal with that with the aa and the book and that's fine i just speak to my personal experiences.

How do you deal with it?

That

I tried it for a long time,

for a combined 21 years,

and just decided that I had to give this a go on my own.

So you just do it completely on your own?

You don't have any

person to call or anything?

No.

I mean, there's people that are sober that I still talk to and see.

But you don't have a sponsor or something.

I don't.

I don't.

No.

No.

I know it does help some people.

Of course.

And that's why I don't want to say that it's,

I'm not recommending that this is another putting.

I'm just saying your truth.

This is how you do it.

I had a very good friend who was an alcoholic who quit one day.

He crashed his car, ran from the cops on foot, got arrested, and then he's like, what am I doing with my life?

I'm done.

And he quit.

Like that.

That day.

That there.

Yeah.

Never had a drink again.

I knew him for 20 years.

It happens.

It can happen.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But I, but I think that I do have the experience of all of that time in and around the rooms.

You know, and

that's not to say that I don't still remember a couple of nuggets, a couple of things that still stuck with me that I still thought, you still see as valuable.

Right.

You know?

But

there's a line in the book that

it's hard to ask for help when somebody else has raised your hand for you.

You know, interventions, you're pulled into a thing, you're told to do it.

All you're doing is just counting the days.

Yeah, that's the part of the documentary, too, when the first intervention, when you got brought into a room and everybody's sitting there waiting for you.

You thought it was a party.

Well, yeah, I mean, that's a little suspicious because it's 9 a.m.

Why is dad having a 9 a.m.

birthday party?

Right.

Unless we're going to Magic Mountain, right?

That's usually the time you leave.

Right.

But that's easy for a seven-year-old, right?

Right.

yeah no that was that was wild um

that is something that i can still see as it happened on the day really turning that corner in the hallway into my parents living room and like

and my brain is still trying to turn it into a birthday party my brain or insisted that that's what we're there for you know that's funny and it just when it starts to dawn on you like have you ever taken a sip of something that was in the wrong bottle but your brain saw the label uh-huh And so it takes your body.

Yeah, to catch up to that.

Those don't match.

Those don't match.

Yeah.

Yeah, I have a story about that, but I probably shouldn't tell it on there.

But,

yeah.

So that one didn't work.

It didn't work that way.

You had to do it on your own.

It worked for a year.

It worked for a year.

But then, like, as is in the dock, I'm at Cage's house, and

on the anniversary, on the one year, I find that beer in his fridge.

I'm like, well, that's there for a reason.

Yeah.

You know, he's just caused us, it's caused to celebrate.

That's not an accident.

Yeah.

And just didn't even think twice.

Wow.

Just was like, ah, finally.

Boom.

And now we're off to the races.

We're off to the races.

Yeah.

Wow.

How did you get sober this time?

I'd gotten off the drugs.

Gotten off the dope.

When I say dope, that's always Coke.

I've never heroin.

I was never a heroin guy.

I'd been off that,

geez, probably over 10 years, you know?

And so, I mean,

more than 10 years, like sitting here today.

So I hadn't fucked around with any of that shit for a few years.

I just committed to drinking, you know,

and then found that to be

like the most unmanageable

drug

that I've ever tried to navigate.

Drinking.

Drinking.

Yeah.

Drinking.

More than cocaine.

Yeah, because there's never a time when you can't get it, you know.

And when I had made the decision that I, okay, I'm just going to drink,

I treated it like I did drugs, you know?

Yeah.

But it's it's it's it's it's really kind of, it's very accepted.

And

it's very socially ingrained.

You know, it's like it's any normal.

Yeah, it's always melt time.

Yeah, you want to smoke a joint in front of someone, they might be like, hey, what do you think is going on here?

Yeah.

You want to have a drink in front of someone, completely normal.

Everyone does it.

Sure.

Yeah.

But so

I knew the way my body was starting to react and that the way I was starting to feel and

just it just I

couldn't feel it how I used to, even at like really powerful

doses.

And that got depressing.

That wasn't like, I'll just drink twice as much now.

That was like, damn, the thing I relied on is now just told me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're too much of a tolerance for me.

Our relationship is now different.

Yeah.

And so

there was a day, and

it's in the book.

And

I was a morning drinker.

I loved,

you know, spiking my coffee.

That's like, for me, it was like the best time to drink.

I mean, you're not going to get shit done the rest of the day, but that's when I felt it.

That's when I could still feel it, was in the morning, you know?

So I'm on, like, my third McAllen coffee or whatever.

And my daughter Sam like calls from she's at the house and calls and says, Hey, um, what time are we leaving?

Like, to to go where?

She had a hair appointment, and it was a Sunday, I think, or a Saturday.

And I've never, ever mixed the cups and the wheel, ever.

I've never had a DUI.

How about that?

That's awesome.

That's pretty good, right?

I just decided, like, a long time ago, like when I was like 17, that that was

never going to happen.

Good for you.

And I was living in a limo back then.

There was, you know, the occasional cab, but these days, these days to get busted for for drinking and driving with the available transportation that is literally 15 choices in your hand,

there's no excuse.

And so I called Tony.

I said, Tony, you know, I can't drive.

You've got to help me get Sam to this thing.

And so he was like,

I'll be right there in 20 minutes.

We got her to the appointment.

It went great.

And there was a moment in the car driving back.

And

I describe it in the book, you know, and I could see her in two mirrors, the visor and the side view.

And she was just kind of sitting back there and

I'm not saying that I know exactly what she was thinking, but I could feel

what I'm pretty sure she was.

And it was just this thing about,

you know, why it's, yeah, it's cool that dad did this, but why isn't dad driving again?

Right.

You know, why is there always...

Disappointment.

Yeah, and it's not nothing with Tony.

You know, he's been around forever.

And so

we got back from that.

And there was something that I couldn't shake.

It was something that stayed with me.

Just the images of her.

This little 13-year-old kid in the back seat.

And her dad can't even take her to

just a basic.

Just like up the highway to a hair appointment.

Like that, that got, that was complicated.

You know?

Yeah.

And I was like, what am I doing?

And then I just sat inside.

I sat inside of that for a while because it didn't feel good.

And I thought, okay, what can I do to not stop feeling like this?

The math is pretty simple at that point.

And

I wasn't going to do a rehab.

I wasn't going to do a big dramatic

life

turnaround.

I was just going to make a decision and stick to it.

And I took a few value, drank a few beers, and then

the next day just woke up and said, I'm done.

And didn't care.

I didn't, I made a decision.

I wasn't going to care how I felt physically.

I was just going to like just.

Grit and bear it.

Yeah.

How long did it take before you felt okay?

About three days.

The story I had written that was going to be a month was just like that that was fake.

And it was, and so, and then just coincidentally,

it it happened to be my oldest daughter, Cassandra's birthday when I quit, December 12th.

You know, it was just like, okay, that's all aligned.

And then

something else happened after that because everybody's going to get a little squirrely.

Like, you know, you put

the problem with a guy like me is that, and people like me, is you're able to put things back together really quickly.

Right.

Right.

And kind of just kind of reassemble the pieces.

So you're not as scared to go off the rails.

Right, right, right.

And

so then I got a call.

This is the post, you know, already had HIV for several years at this point.

I get a call that there's a new medicine, right?

This is about a month after the Sam thing, right?

And they're like, look, we want you to try this thing because it's a much smaller cocktail.

It's much less toxicity and

very few side effects.

We think you're going to do great on it, right?

They said, but you can't drink on it.

The other one, you could drink your fucking face off, like

you could drink like a pirate on the other one, which they shouldn't have told me that you can.

And so

I said, okay, great.

So I tried that one, and

it was working great.

But they said, okay, if you can just stay off the booze, it's going to keep working the light, light, light like it is, you know?

So this other thing showed up in addition to that, like just

in concert with it.

So now I had a couple things going on.

You know, let's keep this thing,

this

evil stowaway is what I like to call it.

Let's keep that thing in the...

you know, at bay.

And let's

rebuild every relationship that matters in your life while you're still here.

Did you have a revelation after a while, after you were sober for a while, where

you stop and think, like, why was I getting so fucked up?

Like,

what was I trying to avoid?

Or what was I trying to enhance?

Or

what was the purpose?

Like, what was I, what, what bothered me so much that I couldn't be sober?

Interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think, yeah,

I think it was more avoid earlier, like earlier in life, like avoid the pressures of fame, avoid the fears of commitment or relationship or being exposed as a fucking fraud at some point, you know.

I think that was earlier, and I think enhance

came later.

That

trying to just make situations just feel more exciting or cooler or

more, you know, sexier or you know what i'm saying like yeah but it's interesting that that you presented both sides of that you know avoid enhance yeah yeah i i i i relate to both you know um yeah i think that's a good thing to tell people too because uh everybody wants to hear the drugs like bill hicks had a great joke about nobody ever hears uh great drug stories Right.

You know, you only hear the bad ones, you know, and it is true.

But the reason why people do it is because it's fun.

Like, it can ruin your life, but it's also really fun.

That's why people do it.

Sure.

This is

important for people to know because you don't want them to think you're lying to them.

You know, and for them to hear you sober and happy and go, okay, that's possible.

You can get there.

Because this guy is admitting what getting high was.

You know, like there's a scene in the documentary where you're talking about the first time you smoke crack where this girl's giving you a blowjob while you're smoking crack, and it was like the greatest feeling of all time.

Yeah.

Like, yeah.

Like, I think that's important to say.

That hasn't been topped.

I probably shouldn't say that.

I don't care.

I don't care.

Yeah.

That hasn't been topped.

Have you ever heard Hunter Biden talk about crack?

I haven't.

No.

He was on that Channel 5 show, and he gives this ode to crack that made made me want to immediately go smoke crack.

Seriously.

Yeah, because Hunter Biden's a very smart guy.

I don't think people think of him that way because of the laptop thing, but he's very intelligent.

Right.

And

very articulate.

So when he's explaining the effects of crack and how different it is and how incredible it is and the euphoria of it, and it's like he's literally saying that he's like getting the itch while he's sitting there sober,

you know,

working on his sobriety, trying to keep it together, after all, it publicly shamed for being out of control, and talking about crack like a lover that you lost in a drowning accident.

Wow.

It's crazy.

I get that.

I get that.

That makes sense.

I bet you do.

There's a moment in the dock where I tell the Sandy story.

Yeah.

And I say, wow, that one actually got me kind of.

Yeah, I could feel that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's the problem.

The problem is it's that's the problem.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The problem is.

Did you know you don't have to did you ever try it or no?

No, I never even did Coke.

Oh, you never, oh, nope.

Okay.

No, when I was in high school, I have a good buddy of mine and his cousin was selling Coke.

Okay.

And his cousin, who was super normal, I knew him forever.

Great guy.

Super cool guy.

All of a sudden, he became weird and pale and lost all this weight.

And it was like he got bit by a vampire.

And him and his girlfriend were selling Coke, and they would just watch TV and do Coke.

Wow.

And they had like this attic apartment, and it was like he had gotten bit by a vampire.

That's how it felt like to me.

It was like he just lost his whole life to Coke.

And then I saw some other kids that had Coke problems around me where they were just dying to get Coke.

And I was like, this is a bad drug.

And back then, I think it was actually Coke.

You know, I don't even know what it was.

Yeah, at least like 80% of it.

Yeah.

In the 1980s, I don't know if they were cutting it with anything, but I made a decision at one point in time in my life.

No, I don't want to have nothing to do with that one.

That one seems to rob people's lives.

Wow.

And you just stuck to that.

Yeah, it just seemed to me like that one can make you a loser.

And then did you roll in circles over the years where it was prevalent?

Or

I knew some people that did Coke.

It never worked out well.

I didn't know anybody who did Coke who like kept their life together.

Everybody who did Coke was like barely together, barely hanging on, always off the rails.

I think there's like one guy.

One guy out there, some superhero.

He was the guy that maintained it all those years was Jack Nicholson.

Oh, yeah.

I think he's the only guy.

Right.

I mean, do we know of anybody else?

Well, they might not be public about it.

Right.

You know.

But what about the rumors that Jack always traveled with like a doctor?

Have you ever heard this shit?

Have you heard these stories?

No.

No?

No.

Oh, yeah.

That he had a doctor

that carried his Coke Coke or distributed it.

That's amazing.

And only gave him just what he needed.

Oh.

Yeah, no, I don't know.

I mean, that's some movie star shit right there.

Exactly.

You get a doctor with a fucking leather satchel to carry your Coke around.

Yeah, and it's just, he's just close to the city.

I'd make him wear a stethoscope everywhere you go, bro.

He has to.

You need to have a stethoscope on.

Everybody's got to know you're legit.

Yeah, but that's like, that's one of the great 80s rumors about Jack.

That's so funny.

I never heard that rumor that.

He's some guy.

That makes sense.

But then you'd be around Jack.

I was only around him a few times but then you know he was cool as hell and you're always kind of looking like all right who's the bag man who's his guy right where is he you know or who's the bag man for that night you know yeah like was it a team of doctors that rotated dangerfield partied till the end

he uh yeah he did he kept that traitor rolling yeah he did

yeah

we lived in the same building for a while you in dangerfield yeah no it's that building in the book called the wilshire on whilst Oh, wow.

Gosh, I maybe saw him twice.

I got in the elevator with him one time, and

we'd seen each other out, but never really had like an elevator moment, you know?

And he goes, hey, kid, how are you doing?

You look great.

And he's like, he goes, hey, hey, he goes, look at that.

Yeah, these guys together with Tennyson.

Wow.

But in the elevator.

Look at Rod.

He looks funny just in his photo.

Yeah.

Just in the photo, you start laughing.

Doing nothing.

He was so good, dude.

I can't tell you what happened that night.

I don't know where we were.

But it looks like the jacket is definitely circa 89.90.

That looks like a backstage something that's on my jacket, right?

Yeah.

Probably at a poison concert or something.

Perhaps.

So we're in the elevator.

He says, hey, kid,

what are you, Puerto Rican?

Right?

And I said, no, I'm Spanish-Irish.

And he says, ah, you you don't know whether to start a parade or start a war.

And it's like, doors open and he just walks out.

He just had that on standby or built it in the moment.

He probably built it in the moment.

And I was just like, so I can't really ever describe my heritage without hearing his voice, you know, start a parade or start a war.

That's fun.

And I'm just like, wow.

It just left me with that gold, you know.

We have his handwritten notes at our comedy club in the

room.

Oh, yeah, for one of his tonight tonight show appearances We have his handwritten notes framed all the stuff he's gonna talk about.

Okay, it's pretty cool Wow, and and and would he would he stick to yeah

It's like his jokes and he had like the punchlines for like accented bold letters.

Oh seriously he wrote it all out darker

he was like super organized.

Yeah, super organized

Well, he stopped doing stand-up for a long time and he was selling aluminum siding and then he made it again when he was much older in life.

He came back and the thing that happened was from the time he stopped doing stand-up to when he went back to having a regular job, he never stopped writing jokes.

Like his brain just worked that way.

So he was just always writing jokes.

So when he came back on a treasure truck,

yes, and he just fucking stormed the gates.

When he came back, everybody's like, where's this guy been?

That's amazing.

Yeah.

Wow.

And then he became huge.

Back to school and the Roddy Dangerfield HBO comedy specials.

And that's epic.

Yeah.

Oh, he's one of the all-time.

So he came back

doing stand-up.

I think he was in his 40s.

Got some heat again, and that activated the films.

Yeah, well, the stand-up, he didn't have any heat before, but when he quit, you know, he was just like kind of like getting by, doing all right, and got a job, quit.

I think he might have quit for 10 years.

Wow.

Yeah, and then

the whole time he's writing, and then he's like, fuck it, I got to do this, and then got back into comedy.

Wow.

I hope I'm not fucking that story up, but

I think I'm accurate with that.

See if you can find it.

Make sure that's true.

I'm 90% sure that's true.

But I know that he didn't make it until he was in his 40s.

And

I told this the other day, but I'll tell it again.

I used to work at Greatwood Center for the Performing Arts in Mansfield, Massachusetts.

I was a security guy there.

Okay.

And I was backstage, or by the...

by the outside of the backstage.

And Ronnie Dajafield would go on stage completely naked with a bathrobe on.

That's what he would wear.

And he was wearing a bathrobe backstage with slippers and just walking around.

I was like, this guy's wild.

Wow.

And they're like, he goes on stage like that.

I'm like, shut the fuck up.

Was it partially closed at least?

Or it was just wild.

Yeah, it was closed.

He didn't let everybody see his dick.

But if you went to the green room, you were seeing his dick.

Because he's sitting there.

He would just sit there.

His dick would be hanging out.

He didn't care.

He struggled financially for nine years, one performing as a singing waiter until he was fired before taking a job selling aluminum siding in the mid-50s to support his wife and family.

He later quipped.

So in the 1960s, he started reviving his career.

Oh, damn.

Yeah.

So somewhere close to 10 years, still working as a salesman by day, he returned to the stage, performing at hotels in the Catskills Mountains, but still finding minimal success.

He fell into debt, about $20,000 by his own estimate, couldn't get booked.

Dangerfield came to realize what he lacked was an image, a well-defined on-stage persona that the audience could relate to, one that would distinguish him from other comics.

After being shunned by some premier comedy venues, he returned home where he began developing a character for whom nothing goes right.

Isn't that crazy?

Wow.

Wow.

Damn.

Oh, look at this.

During Roy's comeback bid, who's Roy?

When he was 19, he was Jack Roy.

Oh.

So he had to change his name.

He had to become Rodney Dangerfield.

Oh.

People are recognizing him.

Wow.

I'm going to use that checking in at hotels from now on.

Wanting to distinguish himself from longtime patrons who might have remembered him from the 1940s, Roy asked club owner George McFadden to change his name.

He came up with Roddy Dangerfield.

Wow, he didn't want people to remember him as Jack Roy from back in the day.

He didn't like his old act.

Wow.

Wow.

He said, I don't know where it came from.

McFadden may have taken it from the Jack Benny program on NBC Radio, which first used Rodney Dangerfield as a character's name in 1941.

Ricky Nelson also used the pseudonym in a 1962 episode of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.

Wow.

That's crazy.

Man, Ed Sullivan Show 1967.

Wow.

That's when he popped again.

That's amazing.

That's nuts.

Wow.

Go get him.

Yeah.

Maybe he didn't know whether to start a parade or start a war.

Yeah,

he was a fun guy.

I knew a lot of people who knew him.

I didn't get a chance to meet him.

I saw him once at the Laugh Factor.

I ran into him.

I said hi, but that was it.

I never really got a chance to talk to him.

So you did have a moment.

Yeah, one moment.

Okay, yeah.

He was just leaving the stage.

He was outside, and he had some

hot MILF with him.

Awesome.

Thank you.

I was like, you go, Rodney.

Why not?

Why not?

I think it was probably his wife.

His wife who donated us these

handwritten notes and also the photograph of them, too.

It's pretty cool.

There's a few guys like that that, you know, without them, you always wonder, like, where would comedy be?

Like, where would it ever turn up?

Like, so many people, like Pryor and him, and

Lenny Bruce, so many people that just, like, changed everything.

Carlin?

Carlin.

Yeah.

So many people just changed Kinnison.

Sure.

They just changed the whole thing.

But Dangerfield was one of the rare ones that introduced new comics to people.

Like,

that's where everybody found out about Kinnison.

That's where everybody found out about Dice Clay, Don Marreira,

Lenny Clark, all these guys, Robert Schimmel, they all started out on the Rodney Dangerfield HBO comedy specials.

Wow.

Yeah.

So he would have like he would like have his favorite comedians.

He would just have like a show where he would like introduce his favorite comedians.

But he'd have to scout them at the clubs.

He would go see them.

So he'd just go out.

And he had his own club in New York City, Dangerfields.

Okay.

Yeah.

Wow.

But he was, you know, he was interested in promoting comedy too.

You know, he was just a fucking amazing guy.

That's such a cool moment you had with him.

I can see it.

I mean, it's like it's there's nothing tricky about that memory.

You know, what was it like being with your dad while he was filming Apocalypse Now?

It was, there's a lot of that in the book.

How old were you?

I was, I was, I went there as a 10-year-old.

Yeah, had my 11th birthday there.

Spent a combined total of eight or nine months there, and that was going back and forth.

You know,

it was,

it was just, it was, it wasn't just another country, it was another planet.

You know, we'd seen you know different parts of the world traveling with him, you know, Mexico, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, places like that, you know.

But then you get to the Philippines, and it was just,

you just got a sense that,

wow, this is all going on at the same time that we've been in Malibu, like,

you know,

having fun and just doing

cool shit.

And so you visit a place like that and you get in the middle of it and engage in this entirely just

a new, such a surreal reality.

And then, oh, wait a minute, they're here to make a movie.

And it's about a film that,

it's a film about a war that

barely ended like a year ago, right?

Yeah.

14 months ago when it's Saigon Fall, it was 75.

Right?

I think so.

Yeah.

And they're, I mean, it was like right at the tail end of it.

And so,

yeah, it was, we, you know,

we were able to do enough stuff like recreationally, you know,

there was a lake and you could water ski, you could fish, you could do those kind of things if you didn't want to go to the set with dad.

But once you went and saw the set where dad was, you didn't give a fuck about water sports or fish or anything because

what they'd built and what they were trying to create was

mind-blowing.

Because, you know, Coppola built Kurt's compound out of practical materials.

It wasn't like, you know, like

plaster-covered chicken wire and rebar.

These were like

two-ton boulders

they brought in and started stacking in the jungle.

And you know, and then a lot of it would start sinking.

Couldn't build a foundation in a riverbank, right?

Right.

But then just the mix of people and the talent and Dennis Hopper and Brando and Duvall and

just, it was,

every day felt completely unique.

There was not, there was no,

you'd go to the set and you were going to see something completely different than what you saw the day before.

It was wild.

Wow.

Yeah, and I gravitated towards this gentleman named Fred Blau, who I mentioned in the book.

He was the key makeup artist, you know, FX guy.

And so he was building all the prosthetics for all the carnage you see in the movie.

You know, so I'd walk into his shop and there'd just be arms and legs and heads.

But I knew it was all fake.

You know?

Because as a 10-year-old, when you start seeing how it's made and,

you know, so gore,

I think I write in the book, was never...

Gore in movies was never emotional.

It was technical.

But still kept me really curious about how it was done and just

the artisans behind it that that could create those effects how long were you over there for uh a total of eight months wow maybe nine yeah and it was it was three

years old yeah it was three at first

and then maybe four at first and then we went back and then dad has the heart attack and then we went back and stayed for like another four or four months yeah

so um

yeah it was and and people say so you know growing up on sets you must have like dreamed about being an actor and I'm like yeah until I got to the set that almost killed my dad You know, that's not a job you're just gonna like wrap your arms around and say when can I start you know,

yeah

But it also

it it it just the scope of the filmmaking was really exciting.

And you know, I didn't really understand it as a 10 or 11 year old,

but I knew I knew there was something about it

that required a much

closer look.

And I had a very keen interest in just

what would it take to build

this reality, this fake reality.

Oh, but wait, the subject is based in reality, but everything else around it is fake.

So

that's a very strange experience for a 10-year-old.

It is, yeah.

On such a grand scale.

Exactly.

When it becomes what Apocalypse Now became.

Right.

Because it was like a culturally defining moment.

Yeah.

I mean,

it's a movie that

it kind of eclipses all other war movies.

It does.

It really does.

It does.

It does.

Yeah.

I don't think there's been a film like it before or since.

I think.

No, it's a true masterpiece.

It really is.

Yeah.

And there's no computers.

There's nothing generated.

It's all had to be there on the day.

And when you watch that,

you know,

when Kilgore takes the beachhead, that chopper assault, I mean, when you look at just

what they had, what they committed to to bring that to the screen, it's just, it's impossible.

And then you see some of the documentary stuff about he was like, those were on loan from the Philippine Army.

And then like midday, they had to go fight the rebels somewhere else and they told Francis We got to leave now with the choppers and he's like I have 18 cameras set up the whole the river is filled with bombs.

Where are you going?

We'll see you tomorrow.

Wow.

Stuff like that.

Yeah.

Wow

Pretty wild.

Yeah, but that must have like

For you like to eventually become an actor in platoon

That had to be kind of surreal.

How does that happen?

Right.

How does that happen?

How does that happen 11 11 years later?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or 10.

Yeah.

Yeah, because I did Platoon at 20.

Right.

Yeah.

So how do I go back to the same country

10 years later with the same

subject, right?

Right.

Narrate the fucking thing

and

then

it's elevated to be on par with the one

that's that one of the hottest.

That's one of the only films that gets mentioned in the same breath as Apocalypse Now when it comes to war films.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm a much bigger fan of Apocalypse than Platoon, and that is primarily about just

the scope and the complication and just what, you know,

difficulty factor.

Yeah.

Difficulty factor.

It took forever.

Yeah.

How many years did it take?

It was like eight or nine years, right?

I don't know when Francis conceived it.

It came out in 79.

I think it did it come out in August of 79?

How many let's just Google how many years?

August 79.

How many years did it take to make Apocalypse Now?

I think it went way over budget.

Oh, it did.

Oh, yeah.

And by today's standards, that's like a...

You know, that's like a Fox searchlight budget.

Right.

You know?

And Lawrence Fishburne was like, what?

How old was he?

He started the the film at 14.

I wonder if he started March of 76.

And it came out in 79?

It was originally due to be released on Coppola's 38th birthday of April 77, so it took two extra years.

Wow.

And imagine that.

So

when did the project start?

I mean, varying times of discussions.

Casting started February 76 is when Steve McQueen dropped out.

So it's not as many years as I thought it was.

They shot with Harvey Keitel for a few weeks as Willard.

Did you know that?

Really?

No.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

then Francis, it just was, he'd made the wrong choice.

Harvey was doing it, you know, whatever he could.

But Francis just saw it differently and had met dad during the godfather auditions and said, let me meet with Marty.

Wow.

You can tell people that don't really know my dad that well, call him Marty.

I run into people in the street, and they're like, hey, give Marty my best.

And I'm like, who the fuck is Marty?

People call him Martin.

No.

They know him better.

Well, people that pretend to know someone always like to throw a Y on the end of it.

Makes it look tight.

Interesting.

You know?

Yeah.

So I would be like,

Chucky.

You're still Charlie.

Right, right.

But I would be like, Joey.

Joey, my gosh.

I could never think of you as a Joey.

Yeah.

No.

But imagine this with Apocalypse.

So I spend that much time.

There's all that shit that happened.

I even brought home like props and things, you know, severed hands and ifigow jewelry and all this cool shit, right?

And all these great stories.

And then didn't have anything tangible to back any of it.

I mean, mom took a lot of photos, but like nobody could go to the theater and then say, oh, yeah, Charlie talked about that.

Oh, yeah, he was there that day.

Right.

And we had to wait.

And when you're that age, you know, waiting two or three years, like waiting a decade, right?

So that was kind of a trip.

But when I saw it at the Cinerama Dome

in 70 millimeter, you know,

and it's like, man, when those choppers, when you hear them, you hear just,

they're all around you.

A film will never open like that again and have that kind of an impact.

I mean, did you see it at the dome when you first saw it?

No, no.

I don't remember where I first saw it.

I first saw it, I think, on a regular TV at home.

Oh, shit.

Okay.

You know, because I was too little to watch it in 79.

Is that what it was?

Maybe I saw it when it came out on HBO or something like that for the first time.

When I really got into it was when I got a home theater and I got surround sound and I got Apocalypse Redo, the Apocalypse Now Redo,

the new, newly mastered one.

Got it.

Okay.

It's fucking sensational.

So you finally had that experience.

Oh my God.

It was so good.

I was like, this movie is wild.

It's so well done.

And it's just so epic.

Like, for you to have been there live while they were putting that together and then to see it all pieced together.

I mean,

that had to be an insane experience.

Well, and a lot of it was a surprise seeing it on the screen because, like I talk about in the book, not so much in the dock, it it was hard to get close to the action on Apocalypse because of the way the sets were constructed, because of the way, you know, Francis had everything lit.

It was super claustrophobic, like in Kurtz's Temple and Compound and places like that.

And it was also fucking dangerous to be on that set.

Right.

You know what I'm saying?

Snakes and shit.

And just like a lot of weird people.

And so,

yeah, Francis was just like, come one, come all, you know.

Wow.

But yeah, so then it's like I wasn't there for any of the chopper assault.

I was,

I could see Hopper at a distance in that outfit with those cameras walking with dad.

I couldn't hear what he was saying.

So to then see that scene where, you know, dad first steps off the boat at the compound and Hopper has that incredible monologue.

Yeah.

You know, you got the cigarettes.

That's what I've been dreaming about.

And it's just like, so to have that, that kind of that, that, to have been there that long and still be

a completely fresh cinematic experience was a trip.

Did you ever get imposter syndrome like when you were doing Platoon?

Did you ever get like, how the fuck am I here?

Because it's so quick between you being 10, being in the jungle while they're filming Apocalypse Now, to you starring in Platoon.

Had you settled into that?

Or were you ever like, how the fuck do I deserve this?

One of of the things that John Cryer says in the documentary throughout.

He might be around to say it's very insightful.

Yeah.

It's very insightful.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He said that you probably feel like you don't deserve all this, so you fuck it all up.

Sure.

He's not wrong.

He's not wrong.

But, and then I had a comment in some interview the other day, and I said, well, what the fuck, John?

You could have like laid that on me like, you know, a couple decades sooner, man.

Great advice.

However.

A little late.

Yeah.

Yeah, but you can't tell anybody that.

They have to kind of figure it out.

They do.

But the thing about Platoon and when it happened, the good news is that I had done enough film work.

You know, not like super memorable films, except maybe parts of Red Dawn, I think, are pretty memorable.

Just, you know, what the film kind of was, you know, what it stood for, what it was about.

I think parts of Bueller were kind of memorable first Bueller right sure but

but yeah so so it was so it was just sort of getting

more comfortable in front of a camera more comfortable sort of you know being able to think on film and actually

you know breathe on film I know that sounds kind of like actor schmacktery but it's actually a thing because you're talking about controlling your breath in every other area of life sure right and it's the same is true

as an actor.

Yeah, for sure.

Even doing the show, even doing two and a half for that first scene, I was usually off, I was usually like

about to make an entrance from somewhere, and I'd be back there, and I'd chain smoke and Marlboro Reds and just trying to figure out the first scene.

But then when

you'd hear the stage go quiet, right?

Somebody else, you know, speeding, sound market.

And then if I could get that last breath to go to the bottom,

I knew the first take was going to be awesome.

When the breath stopped about like at the sternum,

I was fucked.

Shallow breath.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Then you can't, then you're changing the thing, and then, yeah, and then that first take is just a pancake,

which sucks because that's the first time the audience is going to see it.

Right.

You kind of want that one to be, you know, if there's a cute girl in the crowd, that's the one you want her watching.

Yeah.

Not the second one where she's already heard the fucking jokes.

Right.

Now you're just doing whatever.

Right.

Now you're like, like, oh, this show sucks.

Exactly.

Yeah.

The live performance thing is weird because they don't really do it anymore.

I mean, I don't think there's very many shows that still do that kind of a sitcom in front of a live audience on multiple cameras.

There's very few.

I think Tim Allen's show still does.

What is that on?

Is that on Fox?

I think it's ABC.

He's got a new one.

Yeah.

So he still does a traditional multi-camera?

Yeah, because

a guy I worked with, a friend of mine is on that writing staff.

God, they used to be all over the television.

I know.

There used to be tons of them.

Oh, I think Chuck's new show on Netflix,

it's called Leanne.

Lorraine shit.

Leanne.

Leanne, yeah.

I think that that's a live audience.

You know.

Okay.

So they're still doing some of them.

Yeah.

They're fun.

It's fun when it works, you know?

Yeah.

It's like it's it's a missing genre in today's culture.

You're right.

It used to be most of what was on late at night

at nighttime.

When you got done having dinner, you would sit down and watch friends, or you wouldn't sit down and watch Seinfeld or Two and a Half Men or

Comfort View.

Yeah.

Yeah.

For sure.

Yeah, we, my family binge-watched Big Bang Theory.

I never watched it when I was on the air.

We binge-watched it.

Seriously.

It's a good fucking show.

Yeah, they were.

It was a funny show.

I dismissed it.

I was like, ah, it's a corny sitcom.

Bullshit.

It's a good show.

Right on.

Solid show.

Right on.

Yeah.

That kid, kid, that young man, Jim, right, had some of the most complicated dialogue that anybody's ever been saddled with ever.

Yeah, he's the first autistic star of an action show or of a sitcom.

There you go.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Where you're kind of celebrating his emotional disconnection.

Yeah.

But delivering it like Rain Man, you know, and just with

laser precision.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a really well-written show.

It's very funny.

That guy, Chuck Lorry, how many fucking hits?

That guy's had a ton of hits.

Yeah.

Maybe more than anybody.

Probably.

Sitcom World?

Probably.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Those guys are friends again.

Yeah, so am I.

So am I.

No, that sucked having that out there.

Yeah.

You know.

You know, I did finally actually remember that fucking thing, and I'm not going to.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

It's the other component to that freaking tour, to that meltdown, to that thing.

There was a moment when I was only in rehab for like, I don't know, three weeks or a month.

It wasn't like one of those extended stays.

It was just like a

quick little

spin drive, whatever they call that.

And I got the call,

we want to renegotiate the giant contract for season eight and nine, you know?

And I was on the phone.

I said,

I don't think so.

And they're like, what, you don't think you're going to get paid?

I'm like, no,

I don't think we should do it.

I think seven is like, you know,

Mantle War 7,

some other cool sevens.

You know,

I think seven is like plenty.

I think we've told all the stories that we can mine from

that Malibu house on the beach with those people.

And they're like, no, no, you don't understand, man.

This is when it all like, this is when it turns into like a legacy play for your fucking kids and their kids.

And then the part they always leave out is an arc.

Yeah.

And our fucking cut.

Yeah, that's the big part.

Yeah, they asked.

Yeah.

And I said on the phone, and Mark and I have talked about that.

I talked to Mark Berg, my manager.

I said, Mark, if I go back there, man, it's going to go really fucking bad.

I just know it.

He's like, well, you're projecting that.

I said, I'm not projecting shit, man.

I'm just smart enough to know how I feel about it now.

I got a little bit of clarity in this month I'm in the thing.

I said, if I go back there, I just,

I got a bad feeling, Mark.

Why going back to work would send you off the rails?

Just that I had run up against a thing that I had lost passion for the show.

I'd lost passion for the process.

Okay, so that if you went and just did it just for the money, you would find some ways to stimulate yourself.

Exactly.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, that I would have to do something to enhance.

I said that about a lot of guys that got caught on shows that sucked.

I knew a lot of guys who got caught on shows where they were getting paid, but they did not like the show, and it was like a bad sitcom.

And those guys all went crazy.

Those guys all started doing a lot of drugs or they started spending too much money or something.

They did something to distract themselves because they did not like what they were doing.

And they didn't feel satisfied.

Right.

But they were getting so much money.

Right.

They're like, what am I going to do?

I'm getting $100,000 a week.

I'm like, right.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

What do you need to do?

You can't quit.

I was making $54,000 an hour.

That's pre-taxes.

So was I.

You said no to season eight and nine.

I'd be like, do I have to wear a dress?

Right?

I'll wear no dress.

I'm like, what do I have to do?

I'm Dangerfield's Robe at that point.

Let's go.

No, but

no, that was after I got kind of crowbarred into it, you know?

Why not crowbarred?

I had to ultimately say yes.

I got to own that, you know.

But

it was just, I was just the wrong guy in that moment, in that pocket of time to like

give that much fucking money to, man.

Right.

You know?

Right, right, right.

And, like, I'd buy a bunch of cars and then invite a bunch of girls over and then just say, pick one.

And then you did that other thing where you had that other show after that that you got paid like a ton of money in advance for, right?

Um,

you're talking about anger management?

Yes.

Uh, no, I was supposed to get

it was designed, it was called a 1090.

Yeah, it was a crazy scenario.

They suck you into that is they say, look, you're not going to get a ton on the front side, but you're going to be, you know, you're going to own a third of the show or like 40, 37, 38% of the show in perpetuity.

So we're going to do 100 episodes, and it's the South Park

model.

That was the first 1090 that really just blew it up, and everybody got fucking rich.

So you do these 10 episodes, you do a 10 episode pilot.

And then if you hit, if the average number of those 10 episodes comes in at like, I don't know, at like a like a above a four or like a five, one or something that is like a share, right?

Then it activates the next 90.

And so then you're doing those 90 to have a sellable

syndication package that will just go all over the world and and you know do what what syndicated sitcoms do and so you've done it yeah you know and you know when you say not a lot on on the front side you're still you know still getting a buck fifty an app you know 200 that's pretty good money right

but it's not but you kind of you kind of eat it on that side knowing that it's an investment for the other thing to to pay gangbusters so you did you guys you did the 10 episodes and then you got to do all of them yes so you wound up up doing a hundred yes but you did them in a short amount a short period of time two and a half years that's crazy i know i know yeah and i was i was not ready to go back to work

yeah and that's the thing i talk about in the book that the only reason i did was i wanted to show those guys across town that i was horrible again you know right right right and that is not that is not any way to any mindset to like lead the troops

and it you know again it started pretty cool i did the 10 it was great you know doing some pretty good work and the shows were smart and funny.

And then we got into that 90, and

it was about 20.

No, what am I saying?

It was probably like

9 or 11 into it.

I started feeling exactly the same shit that I felt

going past that point.

I knew my enthusiasm and passion

had an expiration date.

You couldn't manufacture it?

I tried, but I couldn't.

I didn't, I didn't like the show enough.

I loved the people I was working with,

from the writers to the crew to the actors.

They were terrific.

You didn't like the final product?

I didn't, yeah, and I didn't, I stopped caring.

But I still, you know, had enough dough to keep the lifestyle and all that other fun shit going on and just stayed way too fucking high to really engage in this thing.

I mean, I was doing this thing, Joe, where

I was partying, you know, hitting the fucking pipe, either girls or porn or both or, you know, whoever showed up, yeah, fucking, yeah, hey, come on in, come on in.

There's plenty to go around.

And then

there's this thing, I think I felt like I was time traveling from like 1 a.m.

to like 7 felt like

11, I don't know, 15 minutes.

Whereas, you know, 9 to midnight felt normal.

Wow, we had plenty of time to do everything.

And then, like, the hours I really needed to, like, you know, settle in and enjoy, those just vanished.

And then you're back to work.

No, I got someone banging on my fucking door.

Dude, you're late.

What the fuck?

And I'm still fucking sideways.

Wow.

So I'd pop a couple shots or like half a Xanax or something.

And I said, oh, I just need.

And I would literally do this thing.

It was a 15-minute, 20-minute nap.

Where I would just hit the pillow.

I'd try to meditate with a body just vibrating from crack all night.

Trying to to meditate

at that point i'm trying to fucking time travel i'm trying to levitate right

and

but i could feel okay i've i've generated some calmness okay then i would hit the shower and i would i'd be in the shower and i'd say okay i only have to navigate from this shower to the next shower and that's about 11 maybe 12 hours

shower to shower remember that commercial like in the 70s wasn't there a fucking like a deodorant or a yeah something

called shower to shower yeah like it lasted from one shower to the next yeah yeah so i'm trying to last from one shower to the next man no

and then but i'd get to work and then have that midday drop off

and i wasn't hitting the pipe at work but i needed to keep some some fuel in the engine so i'd be you know i start drinking and then man people look at sitcoms like oh they're out there having a fun time man it is super fucking complicated well you've done them yeah right it's like an it's like a dance isn't it it's like a uh it's like a choreographed thing

and so

it is hard enough to do and to do well completely focused and and and with all your shit intact right you start getting over here and trying to be that specific just with marks with jokes with timing with other people

and then a lot of my energy is going to trying to disguise like the condition I'm really in,

you know, and trying to make excuses.

Right.

Oh, I had a med mix-up today.

Med mix-up.

I'm on two pills or the same fucking thing at the same time every day.

There's no med mix-up.

You know?

It's like, what are we doing?

And so, yeah, and then that turns into that thing where you just, then they start getting behind.

And I would just be like, oh, just sorry for the overtime.

I'll just pay for it.

And,

you know, they should have not taken the the money.

They should have said, we're shutting down.

You need to fucking go

get well or go get just a little better than what you're showing up as.

And so that show kind of never really had a chance to be anything, really, anything special, you know, because

I didn't really care about it.

And the thing that sucks about that, looking back, it's like

think about all the energy and the hard work that all those other people put into it and committed to it because I said yes.

Right.

And there's also, there's a bunch of people that were rooting for you because

they saw what happened with Two and a Half Men.

It was a big public disaster.

You leave.

Is his career ruined?

Oh, no, look, he's got another show.

Oh, Charlie's back.

But did anybody even say,

okay, so hold on.

What did he do between that,

you know,

after that last swan dive into the volcano that we all watched?

And then

he's back on another show like what did he do between then and there well the narrative on you was as an outsider was that you were one of the rare guys who could party like that but still pull it off and have a career right and i think your ex-wife had said that that she never worried about you you would always land on your feet

because you were very talented and you were also very loved you know thank you thank you which is one of the reasons why people embraced you when you were talking about how much crack you were doing you know when you were saying all that

they weren't mad at you.

They're like, he's fucking partying.

It was a very odd time where so many people who don't admit that they party because of their job or because of whatever.

They try to keep it

hidden under.

under wraps.

And you were doing a live interview with this lady and you're talking to her about smoking rocks and she was flabbergasted.

Like you could tell.

She did not expect that that kind of candor with discussion of illicit drugs.

Right.

It was just like,

nobody ever done that before.

Well, she asked.

I mean, but nobody ever embraced it.

Right.

Right, right.

Right.

Everybody else is like, well, you know, it was a terrible time in my life.

I was.

I got so low I was doing crack cocaine.

Right, right, right.

It comes from a place of shame.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And you didn't have any shame.

I didn't.

No.

Because I'd watched something like a couple days before I sat down with Andrea Canning, and it was this old interview with Charlie Gibson on some special they did for ABC, right?

I don't even think it wasn't a GMA piece, it was like a more in-depth, one of those exposés they do, you know.

And it was me coming out of rehab.

And I remember watching myself and just being such a, I was like, that guy's a fucking sissy, man.

That guy's a fucking pussy.

What's wrong with him?

Look at him, all that shame, all that embarrassment.

Like, no, no, no.

We're not doing that anymore.

So that, that got locked in.

Oh.

Yeah.

I remember how I, I just, I remember how I felt watching me doing it their way.

Yeah.

And I was like, no, no, no.

And then, you know, I got all, I got the brain full of, you know, fucking nuclear crazy cream that I'm fucking, you know, just

covering myself in.

And

that's what 2K is.

That's like the doughnuts, right?

And

yeah, man.

And you know where the material came from, right?

Those slogans and all that stuff.

No.

Was Brian Wilson.

From the Beach Boys?

No, the Brian Wilson pitcher for the Giants, the guy they called The Beard.

Oh, yeah.

I was on the phone with him like the day, a couple days before that, because Tony and I, Tony Todd, and I were watching baseball highlights.

I was like, wow, this guy looks, this guy's a fucking trip.

Tony, get him on the phone, right?

And the next day, I'm on the phone with him.

I think he was just trying to give me a pep talk.

He was like, hey, man, just know that guys like us, you know,

we're not like everybody else.

You know,

we're different, man.

We got, you know, we got tiger blood running through our veins.

We got fucking Adonis DNA.

We got,

you know,

we don't know how to lose, man, because we're always fucking winning, right?

So I hear all this, and he's probably thinking, cool, man, I just kind of inspired him maybe just to get to the next moment.

That stuff went in there, man.

And it stayed on a fucking loop.

And

I sat down and the interview doesn't start like that, which is a trip.

I'm trying to keep it together.

I'm trying to give her the stuff she needs to like maybe, I don't even know, what was the thrust of that story, being fired or some shit?

I don't even remember.

So, but there's a moment that's not on film.

And Andrea can't deny this.

She makes a crack about these two girlfriends that I'm living with, right?

And

expects me to just like

let it just,

you know, brush it off and then answer her next question.

And I said, hold on a second i said that was really rude she's like which part i'm like well what you just how you just address them you owe them an apology and she was like uh uh okay i'm paraphrasing some of this right but that this is kind of this is the tone of it and so

how did she address them

um

i felt like they were dismissed as just like uh porn porn chicks, you know, because one was a porn chick, the other was not.

She's going to natty, so she kind of got rolled into that

unfairly, you know.

And so,

so

then they, you know, she, Andrew's like, oh my God, okay, you know, I'm sorry.

I didn't mean anything by that, you know, but I'm over here, you know, with the thing.

Um, and

I'm not, I'm not letting it go.

I asked her to apologize.

We should have been past it.

Now I'm stewing.

Right.

Yeah.

So you ramped up now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's when it turned into, and then I start hearing Brian's stuff.

And I'm like, I don't know, man.

I've had fucking tire blood.

And

then it all just, and then it, it got away from me and I, and I couldn't pull it back.

I couldn't pull it back.

And then everybody's like, okay, well, that was different.

I mean, it's kind of fucking interesting and unique and whatever, man.

Well,

well, let's just, let's, let, let's, you know, let's just have a quiet night and

we'll see how that plays out, you know.

And I wake up into a world of

not the world I said goodnight to six hours earlier.

And

my friends are banging on the door.

People are, you know, sending me, you know, videos and stuff.

And he's like, dude,

the world's on fire with your shit, man.

I'm like, all right, what does that mean?

And there's like, there's folk songs and rap songs and people like marching in the streets.

And there's already t-shirts.

And there's this, it's just, it has just gone.

it exploded.

Yeah.

And so

it's not like I could jump on my roof with a bullhorn and say, all right, everybody, okay, let's just, you know,

seafighters were saying they had tiger blood.

They were joking around about it.

See?

Yeah, I mean, it got,

it got, it got away from it.

It penetrated me.

Yeah.

Yeah, it achieved penetration.

Well,

no one had ever done an interview like that before.

I didn't, I, yeah,

I wasn't thinking about that in the moment.

I was just fucking pissed.

And I wasn't going to be sissy Charles

from the 90s, you know.

It was like this whole

convergence of all these elements and all these emotions and all these feelings, and also the resentment I had in myself, you know, and just like, all right, I'm just going to pick some targets.

And,

you know, would have been nice had it been sort of

if I could have just sort of been herded,

just kind of, you know, away from it, you know.

Have you ever thought of what your life would be like if you didn't do that interview?

I've started to.

No, I've started.

I've started to try to walk into that village, right?

But as soon as I take a look around, none of it really makes sense because

it's,

I can't really imagine it.

You know, What do you think it would?

I mean, what would

it's hard to kind of even put those pieces together?

I wonder if you had ever would have gotten sober.

Interesting.

You mean today's sober solo?

Yeah, today's sober solo.

You might have had to have that complete chaos, tailspin,

free fall crash

publicly to just eventually like gather your shit together and go, okay.

Right.

All right.

Time to learn and grow.

Right.

Obviously, that wasn't smart.

Let's do it differently.

Right.

Let's get it together and step by step, day by day.

And look, here you are almost nine years later.

Almost nine years.

Or eight years.

Yeah, yeah.

That's

you always wonder, like, maybe you have to have.

That was your rock-bottom moment.

And it was public, you know?

The whole world got to see it.

Like a full cleanse.

Yeah.

Wow.

Just a purging of all all of it and you know and still you have to battle with the this reinforcement because now everybody is loving the fact that you know you're winning and that you know you're talking about how much crack you smoke and how crazy it is and you got all these hot girls and everybody's like he's winning he's winning and so now there's no incentive at all to get healthy right which is kind of nuts and not only that financially you're kind of it kind of helps you to be like a little off the rails.

It's like you're kind of known for that, you know?

Like, and then you have this big tour and everybody's coming out to see you.

Right.

Yeah.

You know, which was crazy for you to do.

Like, the first one where you did it without comedians was just bananas.

Yeah,

it was a complete train wreck.

Yeah.

It was a disaster.

But you guys pulled it together.

And that was like kind of the story of like your career when things have fallen apart.

People want you to pull it together.

So even though you had that disaster show and everybody knew it was a disaster show in Detroit, people were still coming out to see the other ones, right?

Right, right, yeah.

I had the option after the Detroit massacre of flying to Chicago or taking the bus, the tour bus, right?

And I said,

I need those seven or eight hours on the bus.

And they're like, why?

I said, because I'm going to rewrite the entire show.

And

I think Natty was on that trip.

I think maybe Rick.

I know Shady was on.

Anyway, and I just, I just, there was a place, you know, a room in the back, and I just kind of barricaded myself with a pad of paper and a pen and just went to town and just sort of started trying to reshape it.

And when I got to Chicago, they were expecting all this, all the special effects we needed from

all that garbage.

I said, we traveled with none of it.

I said, here's the new show.

They were like, you sure about this?

I'm like, just trust me.

And that, and unfortunately, that's the night where it got applauded and kept the train on the tracks was Chicago you know

but isn't that weird I had the wherewithal like in the middle of all that and they still had enough enough something enough of that thing to to to

just you know maybe that's just pride at that point certainly it's also that's the impact of public humiliation like thank you yeah enough how about that time to get this

get this thing back on track yeah and it it was it was just it was the curtain comes up and there's two chairs and i have a moderator and it's just a conversation imagine that yeah didn't reinvent anything no you know and i had oh oh i wrote a letter is what it was um

dear chicago and it's like this whole thing you know including them um and and yeah so i got them i kind of got them back on my side and then we sat down yeah well people realized also you were figuring this tour thing out on the fly.

Yeah.

It was essentially it was 21 cities in like 24 days with no act.

That's what it was, man.

So who do you, I know you had Jeff Ross with you?

That was Jeff Ross, who's great at that.

A master at Off the Cuff.

Wow.

He showed up and really

just put it.

Perfect guy for that.

He put a shape on it.

Yes.

And then you had Russell and some of them too, right?

Yes.

Who's also a master at Off the Cuff.

Yes.

And

he was so relieved that the two chairs had shown up because that's when he joined us in Canada.

Yeah.

No, he was terrific.

Yeah, Russell's awesome.

Yeah.

You know, the first night sitting with him, some dude, like, what's like the Canadian version of like a quarter?

What's their dolly?

A loony, okay.

But that's a dollar?

I think so.

Okay.

Is that the heavy one?

Yeah, someone threw it at him.

No, at me.

Oh.

Like, we're in the chair for maybe five minutes, and I get from the balcony, I get hit with one right here.

Oh.

And it just, it was like getting punched by, like, someone with a skinny metal hand, you know?

And

I just had to, I had to kind of pause into that.

And they got the guy thrown out.

But I just thought, wow, I could have lost an eye.

Yeah.

A Russell could have lost an eye.

And it was just like, wow, all right.

Also, pretty good shot.

Really good shot.

Guy throws a loony from the balcony and he hits it in the head.

That's

impressive.

It is.

Because that's not an aerodynamic thing.

It's not.

No.

You have to kind of factor in.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a lot of flipping them in the air.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

It's kind of like a boomerang or something.

Yeah, it's a frisbee.

It's a frisbee.

It's a little tiny frisbee.

Yeah.

So anyway, so that's, there were just moments like that that I, I guess just little cosmic reminders that not everybody was on my side.

Right, right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which is important, too.

Hey, can I hit the bathroom a little bit?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We can actually wrap it up.

We're getting close.

Okay.

You want to wrap it up?

Can we just touch on a couple things before we do?

Absolutely.

Stay a leak and we'll come back.

Okay, cool.

Should we bring this up?

I guess we have to.

So this just happened.

We just found out that Charlie Kirk got shot.

It's fucking awful.

And is he dead?

No.

I don't think so.

That's what was just.

One of the guys out there just said

confirmed

in the lobby was just.

I've been looking.

I haven't seen anything that said confirmed.

Whoa.

Murder for having a different opinion from somebody else.

Yeah.

Different ideology from somebody else.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't know.

Beliefs that didn't align.

I'm sorry.

Rest in peace for

Jesus.

27 years old?

Maybe?

30?

They even have a suspect?

I don't know.

I don't.

I'm literally trying to track it all on Twitter, and it's all.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Nobody deserves it.

He doesn't deserve that.

Nobody deserves that.

So so

were you saying that MSNBC had a crazy take on it?

What was their take?

I'm literally just reading Twitter, so I didn't see the video.

I just saw people talking about tweets of it.

I'll pull it up, though.

Let me see.

Fuck.

And even now, they could have taken it down.

It was a tweet or a video?

I'm doing the show while I'm trying to figure out.

Right, no, I understand.

I think they were live on the air, and people clipped what they were talking about.

It's not a tweet.

It's not on their Twitter account or anything.

So it's someone's hot take.

I don't think so.

Live in the moment.

Yeah, that's a crazy take.

Crazy take is that what was the take that they deserved it?

No, that's why I didn't want to pair it.

Right.

Here you go.

Dave Portner reposted this.

You found it right here.

It's only 10 seconds.

Which a shooting like this happens.

You can put the headphones on.

You can hear it.

Yeah, again, emphasize what you just emphasized.

We don't know any full details of this.

We don't know if this was the supporter shooting their gun off in celebration, or so we have no idea.

That's what the crazy thing was.

Oh, that's it.

Yeah, if it was a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration,

what

someone shot their gun off in celebration and killed him.

You know, you shoot celebration guns in the air.

Oh, God.

Just

what a crazy take.

Like, it might not have been someone assassinating someone for the wrong opinion.

Huh.

Fuck.

Well, why does something like that have to be spun?

Their ideology.

No, I know what I'm just saying.

It's like.

I mean, they want to try to pin it on a Trump supporter with a crazy Trump supporter with a gun going wacky.

We don't know if it was a supporter shooting off a gun in celebration.

Because you know they do.

Right, right, right.

A lot of folks are just constantly out there shooting off guns at large gatherings in celebration.

Yeah, Fourth of July, you can't leave your house.

What the fuck?

No, that is

that's a...

Wow.

There's going to be a lot of people celebrating this.

It's so scary.

It's so dangerous, too,

to celebrate or to in any way encourage this kind of behavior from human beings.

He's not a violent guy who's talking, talking to people on college campuses.

Wasn't even particularly rude.

He

tried to be pretty reasonable with people.

Everything I saw seemed reasonable.

He's a very intelligent guy.

Yeah.

You know, whether you agree with him or don't.

And there's a lot of stuff that I didn't agree with him on.

That's fine.

You're allowed to disagree with people without celebrating the fact they got shot.

But you can't disrespect his passion.

Yeah.

Well, what you're supposed to do with a guy like that, if you're opposing him, is debate him.

Right.

Have a conversation where your argument is more compelling than his.

Sure.

That's what people should be celebrating: discourse.

You know, we used to do that.

Do some homework and bring it to the table.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's horrible.

It's horrible.

This podcast has been a lot about violence, man.

It has, but not this kind.

No.

I'm sorry, not something

so in the moment right now from someone

this

current

that we see and

are j you know aware of daily

right yeah i mean he's

one of those young influencers right

this time from the right who who is all over social media, always doing these various shows and debating people and talking to people and giving speeches.

Sure.

Yeah.

No one deserves this, folks.

No one that has different opinions.

No one deserves that.

No.

This is horrible.

No.

But I know people are going to celebrate it.

Because this is a fucked up time and people have really fallen into this trap of us against them.

But it's also going to make people not want to be as courageous or not want to be

as forthright with the things they believe.

It's going to put people on guard.

It could.

It also could.

It could do the opposite.

I get that, but there's also going to be that sort of ingrained thing now.

You're correct.

Yeah.

And, you know, and just

going through the whole New York thing, I just, you know, sometimes you're, you know,

there's a crowd and it's all love.

It's all love.

And all they want is, you know, is your signature or a photo or this and that.

But there's so much of those moments where you're spent looking down.

You're looking down the entire time.

Yeah.

And I don't think anybody wants to shoot me.

I don't think that that's kind of out in the world, right?

But it just, it's the type of shit that just lives in the back of one's mind.

Yeah.

Because how could it not?

How could it not?

And then and then a thing like today,

and you're like, okay, that's why

it's in the back of our minds.

Yeah.

You know?

Well, it's, you know, when we were talking about assassinations earlier, whether it's Kennedy or RFK or, you know, you think of him in the past, you think of him like

you don't, when something happens in the current, like right now with this one with Charlie Kirk, it doesn't seem real.

No.

It seems very surreal.

It does.

It seems like

it's going to take a long time before we reference this as something that happened.

Like he, oh, you remember he got shot and killed?

Oh, yeah.

Like, right now, it just doesn't seem real.

It seems, uh,

it seems so crazy that it just not registering.

It's not, no.

Is he a friend?

No.

Uh, I met him once.

Okay.

I met him once at a gun range of all places.

Wow.

Um, wow.

Yeah.

Uh, he was a nice guy when I met him.

Wow.

It's a fucked up time.

People are so divided in this country.

So divided.

And there's so many people that love it.

They love that we're divided.

And they profit off that division.

And they stoke the fires.

And they do it for their own profit.

And it's so fucking gross.

It's so gross.

And to encourage this kind of thing

is really

one of the most

horrific things that you could do after someone dies horribly like this is celebrate.

It's unforgivable.

It should be a wake-up call for everybody.

Like, this is nuts.

This is nuts.

No, it's unforgivable

to spend things like that.

Because the people they're never thinking about is that person's family.

I think

that's just like default with those.

They gaslight you by default.

Right.

So immediately they try to find some reason why the whatever the thing is that's in the news is someone else's fault.

Right, of course.

It's just all gaslighting.

And that's what they're paid to do.

They're paid propagandists masquerading as the news.

So weird.

Fuck.

No, this is a this is a it's a it's a dark day.

Yeah,

it is.

Well, one of the things, two things is going to happen.

Either People are going to realize how fucking insane this is and

we have to have a conversation about being able to have conversations.

Right.

Or it's going to get a lot worse.

That's what's scary.

Scary, this could spark off some kind of a real violent conflict.

You know, that guy had a lot of fans.

Yeah.

A lot of people love that guy.

Yeah, I know.

And if they find out that he got killed for something that they vehemently oppose in the first place, it could...

send people over the edge.

It could.

It could.

Yeah.

There's always that flashpoint moment

in any, you know,

in previous times like this.

Yep.

You know?

Yep.

There's always that tipping point moment.

Like the Rodney King film.

Yep.

Right.

Something just like, that's it.

Yeah.

You know, this also highlights

just

a little bit of perspective, like how lucky

Trump.

was.

Oh, yeah.

You know, and it's just like Charlie didn't get the benefit of a head turn or a couple a couple of microns or millimeters or

you know and it's just like wow wow who who who decides that yeah you know that is just this is something it's bananas yeah but they talked about

yeah

because he makes a reference to something yeah and then it's just yeah and then it clips his ear where if he didn't turn his head he'd be dead

and it would have been on live on CNN.

How do we know more about

an assassination from 1963?

Yeah, than we do from

eight months ago.

That story is fucked.

There's a lot of weird stuff in that story.

There's a cell phone that was traveling because of metadata.

They know a cell phone was traveling from offices outside of the offices of the FBI in that area all the way to this guy multiple times.

Imagine that.

He was 20 years old.

His apartment was professionally scrubbed.

There was no silverware in it.

There he had no social media presence.

He was regularly training with

military guys.

He was regularly training and shooting.

Like one guy had remembered him from a range.

Right.

Right.

Like, what?

He was in a BlackRock commercial

two years before.

Right.

Like, what?

His chosen rooftop is just kind of between the two quadrants that they're assigned to cover.

Not only that.

It's just a blind spot.

The excuse for why they didn't have officers on that rooftop was it was too sloped.

The slope was too steep, which made zero sense.

Wow.

Because he climbed up it.

He was fine.

Yeah, he did.

What the fuck are you talking about?

It didn't make any sense.

Not only that, the one where the snipers were perched had a steeper slope.

It made no sense.

No.

It was fucking nuts.

They found that guy walking around

the grounds a half an hour before the event with a fucking range finder.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If you're not on a golf course with a range finder,

then you, you know.

You're going to shoot something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's what they're for.

But it's just, man, it's

it it sucks that that to say things like, you know,

these are the times we we currently inhabit, you know, and that

there's nothing

that is an absolutely factual statement.

And it sucks to have to, you know,

to

exist

inside of that.

Yeah.

You know?

It's very strange, man.

It's very strange.

Very strange.

Very strange.

It's very strange.

And, you know, we've talked about it a bunch of times, but it bears repeating.

I think a lot of it is highlighted by bots.

A lot of it is people are being inflamed online by people that aren't even real accounts.

Interesting.

See,

I don't study any of that.

Oh, there's a lot of that going on.

I think it's a giant percentage of all online discourse where people are hating and saying mean things about people's political beliefs or anti-Israel things or anti-Palestine things or whatever.

I just think a giant ton of that is foreign foreign governments who are running these bot farms.

Wow.

And it's been proven.

They know for a fact.

China actually got caught recently.

What was this?

The ChatGPT thing?

They were using OpenAI software.

Chat GPT blocked a bunch of accounts for multiple countries that had suspicious activity.

Yeah, and they were commenting on like blocking of USAID money and a bunch of different like political subjects.

But what they're basically doing is just getting people to fight.

That's what they want.

They want constant fighting,

constant like, we have to take action.

We have to, you know,

constantly stoking the flames.

Right, right, right.

Wow.

So it's not even organic.

Some of it's organic for sure, but a lot of it is being enhanced by foreign governments for sure.

And probably some of it by our own government.

What they did with the with the Manson family, you think they stopped there?

You think n some of that kind of stuff isn't going on right now that we don't know about right now because there hasn't been a Tom O'Neill to write a book about it?

Sure.

Sure.

And then we also never know which stuff was the beta test for the, you know, for that for that

specific type of program or that specific type of op to be rolled out yep and like where you know okay let's let's let's see how they react to this yeah yeah yeah oh hell yeah that worked like a charm okay activate

more of those you know yeah

jesus

how do we how do we wrap this up on a positive note i don't think we can no i think it is what it is it is what it is i think we just have to deal with that yeah

well um listen man was great to finally actually meet you This was amazing.

It was a lot of fun.

Thank you.

Enjoy talking to you.

Thank you.

Yeah, no, I think you'll notice now

I always need a few minutes to get warmed up.

Yeah.

Get settled in.

No, you seem cool right off the bat.

No, thank you.

Some great stories, too.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Sometimes my brain, like we talked about,

it wants to go somewhere else when I was trying to.

It's amazing your brain works as good as it does considering all the things you've done to it.

Oh, that's awesome.

Thank you.

If you think about it, thank you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's that part.

Yeah.

There's that part.

That's that part.

Because people are like, you know, hey, man, you should get some laser work on your face.

I'm like, dude, I'm lucky this thing is still fucking attached.

Yeah.

So go fuck yourself.

You actually look way better than you've looked in a long time ago.

Oh, right.

I think the sobriety suits you.

It really does.

Thank you.

You look really healthy.

You know, I took a page out of your book,

a very specific page,

and

even if it's a rumor, it worked.

I use a sauna blanket, right?

This thing called higher dose.

And I'm not sponsored by them.

I just bought one and I fucking love it.

I use it at home.

And then I hear, hey, man, fucking Joe travels with his, right?

I have one of those sauna blankets.

But do you travel with it?

I do if I know that there's not going to be a sauna.

Okay.

Okay.

So I have.

A lot of times I'll just try to find a place that has a sauna.

Okay.

Yeah.

I was like, well, fuck it.

If he's traveling with his.

You definitely can, though.

It's good.

They're great.

I'm going to travel with mine.

Yeah.

So I've had it on this trip.

I've traveled with it.

It's a pain in the ass.

I'm lugging this rolling duffel and shit.

Who cares?

But so, so thank you.

It's worth it, though.

Thank you for the idea.

Those are great because those sauna blankets are great because they're portable and you could always just get it in.

Right, right.

I really genuinely prefer a real sauna if you have one because I like to stretch out in the sauna.

Sure.

It's the best time ever to stretch.

But as far as time

with the portable blanket is like,

I tell people it's like a Bikram class without all the yelling and pain.

Right?

Well, do you get drenched in that?

Oh, sure.

That's a lot of what Bikram is.

A lot of it is heat shock therapy.

Right.

You know, it's also the yoga and the exercises, which are great.

And it's also the fact that you're more pliable when you're really warm and heated up, like that, which really helps.

But a lot of what they're, there was actually a study that they were doing at Harvard.

I don't know if they completed it, but they were doing it a couple of years back about the benefits of hot yoga and whether they're comparable to the medical, the known medical benefits of sauna, which are pretty, pretty well documented.

And

what was the conclusion?

I don't know.

I have to think it's got to be similar because I've been in both.

I've been in a lot of hot saunas and I've done a lot of hot yoga.

And

because of the exercise, I think you reach very similar body temperatures.

Got it.

And your heart rate jacks up because

you're so hot.

You could barely cool yourself off with a glass of water when they let you have a sip.

In between things, you're allowed to take a sip of water.

But it's real similar and it's 90 minutes, which is fucking brutal.

You can get through a real good Bikrim hot yoga class.

At the end of that, man, you're,

yeah, you're going to have a, you have a different day in front of you.

100%.

If y'all did that every day, it was like how everyone started their day.

The world would be so much more peaceful.

Yeah, no, you're right.

It really would.

Yeah, it really would.

It'd be a much, much, much better place.

And you don't have to fucking do anything hard in the gym.

You don't have to lift weights.

You don't have to punch the bag.

All those things are great.

But just do a hot yogurt class for 90 minutes

every day.

You will live in a different world.

Yep.

13 up, 13 down, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You'll live in a world of kindness and sweet people and hello, friends.

Right.

Because you've already put yourself through something that nobody else can deliver the rest of the day.

They can't deliver that kind of pain you just inflicted on yourself.

And it's a constant battle to see if you can use 100% effort.

Exactly.

You're constantly battling.

Can I hold this pose for 15 more seconds?

Yeah.

And there's no cheat zone.

Exactly.

There's no, you can't.

Because you're always doing it 100% of what you can do.

Right, right, right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I was, I, I was, I was going to his

studio on

Rexford in the early 80s.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, man.

We were with that original crew.

Wow.

Yeah.

There's one thing that was really cool.

Kareem was in there.

Kareem Revolution.

Yeah.

Wow.

And you know a lot of the stuff with the arms above the head.

He can only go about here because of the ceiling.

Yeah.

I would come in late sometimes and Kareem would already be in there.

And so his shoes would be like next to his locker.

So I would put my,

still wearing my shoes inside his shoes just because I had just had to.

It was cool as fuck.

It's Kareem, right?

And so, but then Quincy Jones is also in there, right?

And so

the mirror, you could see the front desk where you'd check in behind you, like you could see it, but it was behind us.

We're all facing forward.

And for about a six-month period, you know, Quincy's in a little speedos.

And he's given, you know, he's giving it his all.

He'd be in the middle of like the standing bow or the freaking head-to-knee or something like a triangle or something really complicated.

and he'd stop and he'd leave the class, but you'd see him going to the desk and writing shit down, fucking sweating in his speedo, right?

And he's writing shit down, he's sweating all over the paper.

He'd come back and try to, you know, resume what he was doing.

And then this went on for a while.

And we came to find out later.

Guess what he was working on?

If you think about the year, if you think about like what that, how his mind was being expanded, right?

He was producing Thriller.

Whoa.

Yeah.

And he's getting inspired

during the Bikram yoga.

So we were kind of watching in the mirror

the best, I think the largest selling album ever, perhaps.

Right?

Probably.

Yeah.

It's got to be up there.

Being built behind us.

Wow.

Kind of a trip, right?

Wow.

Yeah.

Wow.

That shows you how hyper-dialed in he is.

Yeah.

Even in the middle of a yoga class, he's got to run out.

He's probably thinking about it with every pose.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Or something.

And just how to write it down.

How to write it down.

Wow.

How to write it down.

Because most people aren't allowed to leave the class.

But Quincy Jones has to write some shit down for Thriller.

You got to let him leave.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He gets that past, doesn't he?

Yeah.

He gets the pass.

Yeah.

He gets the pass.

All right, brother.

This is so much.

This is an absolute pleasure.

Thank you.

This is an honor.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you.

Best of luck for you and everything.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right.

Bye now.

Bye, everybody.