1092: Gene Simmons | KISS and Make-Up

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Speaker 1 Today on the show, Gene Simmons, lead singer of KISS. Whether you're a fan or not, Kiss and Gene are legends in the rock scene and have been for decades.
I really didn't know what to expect here.

Speaker 1 And during the interview, well, frankly, he comes across across a little bit standoffish sometimes. Though in the end, I think this interview did go in a fun direction.
A little vulgar at times.

Speaker 1 That's his personality. I guess a lot of corny sex jokes you might also expect if you were like hanging out with a pervy kind of grandpa kind of dude.

Speaker 1 But we also dive into money, fame, parenting, and even Taylor Swift. All right, here we go with the one and only Gene Simmons.

Speaker 1 I told my trainer that I was interviewing you. He's from Newfoundland, where your wife is from.
And he told me that he had some mutual contacts growing up. And while the internet says she's from St.

Speaker 1 John's, Newfoundland, have you heard about the small town where she's apparently actually from?

Speaker 4 Dildo. Dildo.

Speaker 1 I thought that was fake, but since you've heard of it, it's not.

Speaker 4 I want to tell you the actual. You want to hear something crazy? Yeah, let's go.

Speaker 4 That's kind of crazy. Yeah,

Speaker 1 that checks the box.

Speaker 4 See what I did there? We actually went and visited there because there's a Dildo post office. She hates it when I mention this.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 we ate at the Dildo Cafe

Speaker 4 overlooking Placentia Bay. No.

Speaker 4 Line it up.

Speaker 4 I will Schmoogle. And there's Captain Dildo.
It's a facer, in other words, a two-dimensional thing of a guy with a beard, just like you'd expect. And he's holding like a blackboard.

Speaker 4 And people write, it's about six feet tall. People write sayings.
Stay where you're at and I'll come where you're to. Buy, you know, all kinds of newfield things.
I had a dildoburger.

Speaker 4 I'm not making it up.

Speaker 1 What's what's your girl with the name?

Speaker 4 It's I swallowed. Yep.

Speaker 4 And there's more. Stay tuned, kids.
Get grandma in here. I probably know her.
So there's Placentia Bay. There's Come by Chance, next town,

Speaker 4 and there's Spread Eagle, which is the town next to that. Really? There used to be a Spread Eagle coin before Newfoundland, Newfoundland, joined Canada because they refused to to join.

Speaker 4 They were very rebellious and stuff. I didn't think they joined until

Speaker 4 something like 1950. Before then, they had their own militia, their own currency.
Yes.

Speaker 1 They're like the Texas of Canada.

Speaker 4 Well, different culture. They had displaced Irish with a touch of French and everything.
By the way, if you go there and you want to be ingrained in it, you got to kiss the screech.

Speaker 4 I'm not making any assistance. Yeah, I believe you.

Speaker 1 Why make it up?

Speaker 4 It's already weird. It's dead fish.
And you've got to kiss the thing and do other godly things.

Speaker 4 Well, that has to do with where the sun don't shine.

Speaker 1 It's on brand, man.

Speaker 4 But you coming from hot yoga, what the f is that?

Speaker 1 Hey, man, my producer dared me to go. He said, let's do it.
It's really good.

Speaker 4 Yeah, because you always do what she says.

Speaker 1 Yeah. He's like, worst case, you'll get a story for this show.
Is it a sheet?

Speaker 4 And here we are.

Speaker 1 No, no. My producer's a guy.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 But is he a she? Okay, go ahead. See, nowadays,

Speaker 1 let's not get political yet, Agene.

Speaker 1 You're quite a Renaissance man. Fine artists with gallery shows, film production company, tons of products, not just the Kiss stuff, but I mean, there's food, there's alcohol, multiple books.

Speaker 1 What keeps you doing more? You don't need the money. Obviously, you're trying to stop.

Speaker 4 I really don't. I don't want to pour cold water in your face, but anyone who says you don't need the money is a loser.

Speaker 4 Your ears actually hear you say those things.

Speaker 4 And then you prevent your mind from literally, it's been proven over and over again that the words you say will affect you either good or bad.

Speaker 1 I didn't say you didn't want the money. I said you didn't need the money.

Speaker 4 No, no, everybody needs the money. And I'll explain to you why.

Speaker 4 Warren Buffett, the richest guys in the world, and they are all guys who earned it anyway, get up every day and they go to work to do one thing, make more money.

Speaker 4 You are the gerbil on the merry-go-round. But you're alive.
You're supposed to move or you're dead. If you don't have a reason, look, we can't give birth, despite what some people may think.

Speaker 4 It's called being on crack. So we can't give birth.
We don't have menstrual cycles. What else do we do except work? It's the only...
Oh, she's shaking her head. See,

Speaker 4 shouldn't talk about that. No, we do have menstrual cycles.
No, we don't. So the only thing we can do is, you know, the cart, the horse that pulls the cart.

Speaker 4 And if you're not pulling the cart, what's your excuse for living? What are you supposed to do?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think for me, I've actually, if we're talking personal questions, I have to stop myself from just working non-stop and making money.

Speaker 1 It's not easy because it's actually easier to work than not to work. What easy?

Speaker 4 Doing nothing is easy, but you also don't make money. It's harder.

Speaker 1 It's harder for me to do nothing.

Speaker 4 Is there such a thing, in your estimation, for your life, of having enough money where you don't need more?

Speaker 1 Not really, and that's the problem.

Speaker 4 I think. Why is that a problem?

Speaker 1 Well, I like to spend time with my kids too, and I think they enjoy it.

Speaker 4 Well, you're mixing apples with pure. Well, it has nothing to do with it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the more you work, the less time you get with your kids.

Speaker 4 Yeah, but they're too young to give a fuck. When they get older, I'm not sure.

Speaker 4 We have two kids.

Speaker 1 I know that, yeah. I'm curious why you think that was.

Speaker 4 The first five years or so is a blank. Hey, remember that time when Santa Claus got nope.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that tricky Disney is not.

Speaker 4 In the old days, dad, almost without exception, would get up at the crack of dawn and go out and work. There's no such thing as I got to spend more time with the children.

Speaker 4 No, your job is to go out there and provide for the family. Talking about the soon-to-be trillionaire, believe it or not, Elon Musk.

Speaker 4 He will be the first trillionaire legally, not Putin or anybody else.

Speaker 4 And he's got 12 kids and who knows how many.

Speaker 1 Terrible relationships with a few of them, too.

Speaker 4 Well, unfortunately. So is life.
I'm not here to judge or anything. Just make the observation that you can be a nice person or a horrible person.

Speaker 4 So let's say you're an asshole multi-billionaire who never gave a dime to charity, but that person who built palaces for himself and bought schooners and other useless objects for the rest of us still had to hire people because he's not going to build his own boat or mansion.

Speaker 4 He hired people and even though he's an asshole, he gave them jobs which enabled them to feed their families and put a roof over their head.

Speaker 4 Even the asshole that never contributed to charity is more important than you would ever imagine. They're job creators and all that.

Speaker 1 Job creator, but

Speaker 4 it sounded like I was finished, but I wasn't.

Speaker 1 Is that the highest thing we can aspire to? What? The job creator?

Speaker 4 Would you rather have a good relationship with your kids? No.

Speaker 1 No. Okay, that's the fundamental difference.

Speaker 4 Well, you're either... You live in the planet with other people, and capitalism doesn't work if other people aren't working alongside.

Speaker 4 You know, it's if money stands, if I make all the money in the world and I put it in a box and put it under the bed, nothing happens.

Speaker 4 In fact, inflation kicks in by less and less for the amount of money you have. It is only like running water.
The fact that it runs keeps it fresh.

Speaker 4 Capitalism is based on the idea of, let's say, I don't like you and I'm not going to lend you a dime and all that stuff.

Speaker 4 You're still providing a service and you're you're charging for that, whatever it is that you do. No.
If you're going to be an asshole, it's still better to be a rich, miserable asshole.

Speaker 4 And not to be flippant, because I'm not. I really do.
I give to charity and philanthropy. Last year was about $2.5 million.
But a poor person never gave me a job.

Speaker 4 That's kind of a stunning, horrible thing to say. It is, yeah, but I'm not sure.
But it's the rich people that cause economies to flourish. That 1%.

Speaker 4 They create jobs. They build skyscrapers.
The city doesn't have enough money. They do bonds.
They work in banks. And they loan money to people who don't have enough money.

Speaker 1 What if you could get richer without spending all your time working?

Speaker 4 What if you could get rich, city government?

Speaker 1 What if you could get richer without spending all your time working?

Speaker 4 A lot of those guys commit suicide.

Speaker 1 Is that what you think you would do if you weren't working all the time?

Speaker 4 Well, if you win the lottery, you'll see statistics. Well, exactly.
These people don't turn out well. They didn't work together.

Speaker 1 But you got capital gains. You got money.
You could have liked liked to.

Speaker 4 But you're mixing other people with me. Either we're talking about me.
I'm talking about you.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Oh, me.
Yeah, you're talking about other people. I'm talking about you.

Speaker 4 Is it or not about you? This is all about you. It's the love of labor.
It's the idea that, again, not

Speaker 4 having the ability or facility to give birth, I don't have a purpose in life other than producing, making money. Even if I give all the money away or buy my mother the hip operation she needs, or...

Speaker 1 Your mom's still around?

Speaker 4 No. She lived to be 94.
The idea, though, applies to everybody. Without money, you can't do anything.
Love is the most powerful force on the planet is a lie.

Speaker 4 Money is the most powerful force on the planet. Maybe the only one.
Because if you're living on a Kalahari desert and you're the, that's in Africa, if you're...

Speaker 4 A loving mother and you have a child in your arms and you would give your life for your child. There's a caravan going by.
If you don't have money, you're fucked.

Speaker 4 Your loving child will die in your arms. Even if you're a terrible mother, but you have money, you will both survive.

Speaker 4 It's a horrible life lesson, but not if you look at money as the air that you breathe. It's neither good nor bad.
Or like water. You need water or you'll perish, but you can drown in water.

Speaker 4 Fire is really important.

Speaker 4 It warms the food, kills the bacteria and all this kind of stuff, but you can light a forest fire.

Speaker 4 And if you think you've got enough money, anybody out there listening, I'll give my personal bank information because I want you to wire me any dollar you don't need because I always want more.

Speaker 1 You could do a lot with Gene Simmons' personal banking information, folks.

Speaker 4 Oh, no, just gifting is good. You don't need a bank.
Just send it to me. It'll make me happier.

Speaker 1 I would challenge you on that, but we only have so much please try i'm i'm you win the lottery you got to change your mindset you're preventing yourself oh i'm doing pretty well i think what i'm challenging myself with now is is trying to figure out how to not be only focused on that but the more

Speaker 1 money you make the more flexibility you have with free time i have so much the less money you have the less of a choice you have i think the problem is right now i could have i have the ultimate flexibility but i choose to still work with that time and That's a little bit toxic, I think.

Speaker 4 Who told you this?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, I've learned it from watching my own dad make that same mistake.

Speaker 4 I don't want to get into that because I'm sure there are other elements in that relationship. I'm sure there are.

Speaker 1 Never just about that.

Speaker 4 No. I'm not getting into the muck and mire between you and your dad.

Speaker 1 Didn't ask about that. Yeah.
How many different items does KISS have in terms of merch? Bands have merch, but you have like 5,000 different items, yeah?

Speaker 4 Something like that? Well, over the years. So, you know, they ebb and flow because one entity might have a year window or a two-year window and so on.
Nobody has an exclusive forever, but everything.

Speaker 4 You want me to do the joke, which I've done many times? Sure.

Speaker 4 We have made everything from KISS condoms. We've made KISS caskets.
We'll get you coming and we'll get you going.

Speaker 4 All right.

Speaker 4 I've said it before, but it's still funny.

Speaker 1 Yep, it's still funny. It is still funny.
You speak Hebrew, Spanish? Is it Turkish and Hungarian?

Speaker 4 Spat, no.

Speaker 4 When I was a

Speaker 4 kid living with my mother in Israel because my father ran out on us or went off on his own, take your pick, when I was about seven, and my poor mother had to go out and work six days a week and do what, in some racial ethnic groups, 70 to 75%

Speaker 4 of all households, married or single, are these brave, hardworking, single mothers because guys are assholes.

Speaker 1 Some guys are, that's for sure.

Speaker 4 Predominantly, they leave.

Speaker 4 They just, one day they get up and they leave.

Speaker 4 And they abandon the kids and the mother, and she's supposed to raise the child, make sure it gets to school on time, all that stuff, watch over them, and go out and make money.

Speaker 4 The real superheroes of the planet are women. Yeah, I can get behind that.
Guys just work. Women give life.
Can you make that claim?

Speaker 1 I don't. No, I can't make that claim.
I mean, it was in seventh grade biology. I only played a small part.

Speaker 4 Okay, don't get into that because somebody will step up and say, no, I'm a three-headed zebra.

Speaker 1 Do you think growing up with economic insecurity fueled you to do all the things you're doing now?

Speaker 4 We were always,

Speaker 4 relatively speaking, dirt poor, but I never

Speaker 4 felt poor nor ever thought about poor. Listen to the language.
How did you do on the test? Poorly. How is that? That's poor.
How is that wine? Well, that's rich.

Speaker 4 The language tells you the value of the words. Think of it this way.
We have a double standard. If you work hard and dig ditches, you know that Sunset Boulevard we drove down.

Speaker 4 Somebody had to pave that, pour the asphalt and all the rest of that stuff. They do that every day, vacation time if they can get it, but they get up every day and work at a job.

Speaker 4 They don't like, in some cases hate, in summer, in snow, and everything else. And they hate it just for the money so that they can feed their family and survive.
It's the salt of the earth.

Speaker 4 But if you're an actor or a painter or a rock star or, you know, whatever you are, and you make a lot of money, you're disparaged. And that's a nice way of saying, ah, that has an asshole.

Speaker 4 Well, there's no credibility there.

Speaker 1 I guess a lot of people do call me an asshole. It's usually for other reasons.

Speaker 4 No comment. Well, I called my solo record, one of them, asshole.

Speaker 1 Just naming the self-moniker, self-administered moniker. Was that the idea behind that?

Speaker 4 We all have one.

Speaker 1 Do you consider yourself Israeli and American, or how does that sort of work?

Speaker 4 It's relative, depending on who's looking at you. I see.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 when,

Speaker 4 as opposed to if, aliens land on the planet, they won't understand the differences. If you're in America, whatever racial group, and you come from the south, How y'all doing?

Speaker 4 What are you doing over there? You kind of go snicker, snicker. Listen to how they talk.

Speaker 4 They're from the south. I'm from the ah, those northern bastards.
Then there's east coast versus west coast. And then you look at Middle America.
Well, nothing happens there, but the East Coast.

Speaker 4 And they look at you, and everybody's got differences. Then there's old age, young kids, you're an amoeba, you don't know anything.
Then there's black, white, Hispanic, all the differences.

Speaker 4 Even Cain and Abel didn't get along very well. So your definition of yourself is based on to whom.

Speaker 4 So if I was, quote, African American and I lived in Harlem, I'd never think about being black because almost all my friends and almost everybody around me is black.

Speaker 4 And I don't want to talk for other white people, but there are varying degrees of who your mother was, who your grandmother was, and you can be mixed or not mixed or all that stuff.

Speaker 4 At the end of the day, you try to go through the stop signs and the different lanes of life, and then you die.

Speaker 4 So there's not much going on except trying to figure out how to be comfortable in your skin, skin, whether anybody else gets it or not. So I've always been delusional about myself.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you mentioned that in the book. Tell me what that means.
I mean, I know what it means, but tell us what it means.

Speaker 4 How about this? I know Mike Tyson a little bit. We've spent time over the years.

Speaker 4 And to hear Mike talk,

Speaker 4 if you just turn off the visuals and the history, you would never imagine that that voice was the most dangerous person on two legs that ever stepped into the ring. That's true.

Speaker 4 Mindset and will dominate.

Speaker 4 In fact, if you're about to die in the hospital, doctors try to talk you.

Speaker 4 There's such a thing as will to survive, will to live, and you can be self-destruct in your mind and release toxins, and you hurry up the clock where you die. What do they die from? A broken heart.

Speaker 4 The fuck does that mean? Yeah, I don't know. No, actually, your body releases negative toxins which kill you from the inside.
So Tyson, well, he was always too short to be a heavyweight.

Speaker 4 He didn't have a long reach because he was short. He never had the girth or the strength early on.
He used to get picked on. I don't want to go into how he survived.
He'll tell you that himself.

Speaker 4 And he doesn't have the lowest voice. And there was an impediment.

Speaker 4 You know, all that kith and all that. He decided at whatever point in his life that he's going to be the champion of champions of all time.
And the rest is is just hard work.

Speaker 4 I mean, that's the hardest part. But without lighting the fire, the spark, you're never going to get the forest fire.
So it's mindset. Mindset is everything.

Speaker 4 You're about to walk a tightrope. You know what that is, right? Yeah, I do.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 Well, I don't know if it's 50%, but there's a chance you're going to fall off. Yeah.
Now, you can think about it in two ways.

Speaker 4 One is thinking to yourself, well, there's a tightrope and there's nothing holding that.

Speaker 4 You know, there's a pretty decent chance I'm going to fall and I don't know if I'll get to the other side and all that stuff. Or you can do what champions do delusionally.

Speaker 4 There's no way I'm not going to get double negative, which means absolutely I'm going to get to the other side. What do boxers do in the dressing rooms? I'm going to kill that guy when I get in there.

Speaker 4 What does a coach do when he gets into the dressing room? and sees all these guys with towels. Oh, nice dick.
No, that's another kind of coach. What does does he do?

Speaker 4 He immediately starts yelling at her, who are we going to kill? Who are you going to do? You know, you get, it's called mindset. Yeah.
And that's

Speaker 4 almost everything at the beginning.

Speaker 1 Have you always been kind of like cognizant of self-talk and mindset and stuff even when you're in?

Speaker 4 I'm an only child. Yeah.
I had an advantage. Yeah.
I didn't have to compete with anybody. It was just my mother and I.

Speaker 4 And even if you're dealt unfair cards, you can still get up in the morning and work at jobs you hate. Sure.

Speaker 4 I worked the night shift at Williamson and Williamson, a legal firm in New York City, go in at 8.30 at night, come out 12 hours later.

Speaker 4 I could type really fast because I took typing in dictaphone in high school because the rest of the class were all girls.

Speaker 4 Oh, I see. What's up?

Speaker 4 Did I pronounce that correctly? I think you did. What's up? Yeah, nailed it.
Despite the fact that it's a T at the end and not an S, but I still pronounce it.

Speaker 4 Yeah. That's incorrect, isn't it?

Speaker 1 I don't know. I think it's the

Speaker 4 vernacular. You try to vernacular.
That's a dracular, right? Yeah, you start saying what's up in a big corporate event. See how far that gets you.

Speaker 1 I think you could get away with it. No.
You think you can? I think you could get away with it.

Speaker 4 Oh, I could get away with it. But only because of the fame and the money.
Somebody who's looking for job security? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 4 Not recommended.

Speaker 4 Say yo to your boss. Oh, yeah.
See how that works.

Speaker 1 I don't have one, but yeah, I don't recommend that.

Speaker 4 But it's my culture. I know, but you're fired.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So I always heard you had surgery that got your tongue to stick out further, or is it purely genetic? No.

Speaker 4 I was going to ask how you felt that up to the doctor.

Speaker 4 I guess the doctor pulled me out by the wrong appendix. Yeah, maybe.
See, that was another joke. See what I did there? Yeah, I follow.

Speaker 1 There's so many gross things I could

Speaker 1 go in this.

Speaker 4 I don't care.

Speaker 1 I'm already getting the Terry Gross treatment, so I'm pretty.

Speaker 4 Oh, I'm happy to talk about anything.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Can we see your tongue on camera? Is that something you're willing to do?

Speaker 4 Should I do the joke?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, sure. I don't know the joke.

Speaker 4 Well, I would stick my tongue out, but the floor is dirty. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I've only seen it in videos. I was just curious if we could get it.

Speaker 4 It's probably for social media.

Speaker 1 We can splice it in.

Speaker 4 Of course, you can. Yeah.
I wonder if you can get a doctor to do that.

Speaker 1 Probably not. I don't know how you would bring that up without getting kicked out of the office.

Speaker 4 Well, as girls will tell you, they don't like to discuss it with other guys, but they'll talk to themselves about it. It's the movement.

Speaker 4 Mine is blessed with having the ability to have a spin-and-dry cycle and whip up a good goddamn froth.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 by and large, the mystery of women is that no two are alike. I mean, men are as simple as ABC.
Not even. You don't even get to see.

Speaker 4 There's one movement you can make with your hand. Done.
I figured out all men. With women.
No, soft, fast, too slow, too fast. And also to unlock.

Speaker 4 The honeypot,

Speaker 4 the best you can hope for is to start spelling the alphabet. A,

Speaker 4 B, still, oh, she likes the C. Okay, there's it.
Every girl's different.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I remember learning that in high school.

Speaker 4 That's why guys die younger than women because they want to.

Speaker 1 You know, I was shocked when I found out that you don't drink, don't do drugs, at least not on purpose.

Speaker 1 There was the Brownie incident in the book, but that's incredible for somebody who's been in a massive never smoked cigarette. It's really something.

Speaker 1 You've been in a super famous rock band for decades.

Speaker 4 It's not something.

Speaker 4 It's a choice.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's where I was going with this.

Speaker 1 It's a choice you probably have to make and justify to bandmates etc every day for decades on end it's not easy it's not easy well it's worth noting that the two original guys who did partake

Speaker 4 were in and out of the band three times and then eventually out of the band you can't be an olympic athlete or a football player or something and be high It doesn't work.

Speaker 4 Now, conceptually, I could almost understand the idea of using crack or whatever the hell people call it, if it makes your schmeckle bigger or

Speaker 4 if you get richer or better looking or live longer or, you know, whatever those things are. None of that happens.
In fact, it costs money. And if you drink enough, your schmeckle won't work.

Speaker 4 There's guaranteed you're not going to say anything

Speaker 4 bright

Speaker 4 to the chick you're with. She's judging you, remember, trying to figure out if you're worth her time.

Speaker 4 You may throw up on her shoes that she just bought for the date. And if she lets you get close to her, your equipment's not going to work if you drink enough.

Speaker 4 Oh, by the way, the next day you'll have a headache and you'll be, what the hell?

Speaker 4 What's that?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a terrible sales pitch.

Speaker 4 So when I was

Speaker 4 13, I'd be invited to Sweet 16 parties. because I was always taller and all that stuff.
And, you know, they'd have spin the bottle and all that stuff and rub two two sticks together and start a fire.

Speaker 4 See what I just did. There, kids didn't have no idea what spin the bottle is.
That was a big strip. Really? That's too bad.

Speaker 1 That's too bad. That was a that was

Speaker 1 like a coming-of-age thing. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Sometimes you do it with girls. Yeah.

Speaker 4 See, you're not allowed to laugh at that because now

Speaker 4 you're a cis.

Speaker 4 I'm going to get canceled.

Speaker 1 I don't know. It's fine.
I don't care.

Speaker 4 I don't give a fuck either. And then what happened was

Speaker 4 I would wait until the end of the night when the guys were drunk and passed out and like a vulture swoop in and take any chick.

Speaker 1 Because they were all drunk and passed out of the floor.

Speaker 4 Not the girls.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the guys. Yeah, the guys.
Not, yeah. To be clear.
Yeah, this is not sexual assault.

Speaker 4 You're just an opportunist, which is different. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, you planned it. You're a planner.
I'll give you that. I know you're really into comics and sci-fi as a kid, loved cartoons even as an adult.

Speaker 1 I think you said something like, I would tape them on Saturday morning, even if I had celebrities visiting.

Speaker 4 I had Dick Donner,

Speaker 4 who had just started working on Superman, and Christopher Reeve, who was Superman, I think. And they both came up to my place, and we were talking about movies and stars and things.

Speaker 4 He had taken me over to Margot Kidder's house, you know, Lois Lane in L.A. when I was there.
We were hanging out. And all I remember doing was playing my cartoon collection of Looney Tunes

Speaker 4 to Donner and Christopher Reeve. And I remember Christopher saying, what is this stuff? And Donner was saying, no, no, no, this is cinematic.

Speaker 4 Look at the edit of that stuff and the subtlety of Bugs Bunny cross-dressing with lipsticking on. I mean, it was deep,

Speaker 4 almost Shakespearean. And the kids were watching it and thought that it was funny and stuff, but wink, wink, nuts, nuts, it was kind of grown-up material.

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All right, now back to Gene Simmons.

Speaker 1 The best sort of cartoons in animation is like that, right? You ever see a Disney movie with your kids and there's jokes where you go, oh, only adults get that. Yeah.
That's like that.

Speaker 4 Less Disney and more Fritz Freeling and Chuck Jones and Warner Brothers.

Speaker 1 So the OG kind of

Speaker 4 Disney tunes.

Speaker 1 You never heard that? Original gangster just means like the original, I guess.

Speaker 4 I think that's black terminology. Maybe.
Yeah. I think I like OJ.
OJ? Original Jew.

Speaker 1 I thought you were going somewhere else with that. I can appreciate that.

Speaker 1 I'm allowed to use OJ as well.

Speaker 4 Oh, I don't think Jews care about anything.

Speaker 4 We're not cultural appropriation people, are we? That's

Speaker 4 a point. There's never a Jewish parade.
We need respect. Just don't try to kill us.
We're fine.

Speaker 1 I was going to say, we don't like parades.

Speaker 4 We don't like to gather in large spaces and switch out of the world. Leave us alone.
Just let us make money and we're happy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we're not exactly a gatherer in public without OJ.

Speaker 4 It's not going to be. Again, it's cultural.
Jews have never been accepted. And by the way, Asians have a problem in Western culture, too.

Speaker 4 But I've never seen an Asian parade. Have you? I don't think so.
Ever.

Speaker 4 Because they're too inclined to succeed in life and move on and just, despite what people say, go and make money. Money.

Speaker 4 James Brown said it better than anybody else. Black power is green power.

Speaker 1 How is Kiss's branding costumes and makeup and things like that influenced by your love for comic books and sci-fi?

Speaker 4 Personally, a lot. Specifically, the wings

Speaker 4 that I designed for myself

Speaker 4 was a cross between Lon Cheney Sr. in London After Midnight, which is a movie that people haven't seen in decades, but I've seen photos of it, so the print has been lost.

Speaker 4 And Black Bolt from a

Speaker 4 comic group called The Inhumans. And by the way, I had the rights to make a motion picture out of that.

Speaker 4 Marvel gave me the rights before the superhero cycle, and I couldn't get Universal interested enough. But eventually, there was a Black Bolt series.
I also had Ghost Rider

Speaker 4 before Nick Cage. Yeah,

Speaker 4 I was going to say Nick Cage. And everybody thought, well, what do you mean? It's a burning skull.
It's before the superhero cycle. So specifically,

Speaker 4 the cross between

Speaker 4 London After Midnight, the movie, Lon Cheney Sr., who played a vampire, and

Speaker 4 Black Bolt. And facially, the makeup came from the shadows on Lon Cheney Sr.'s face as Mary Philbin,

Speaker 4 his love interest in the opera, he's playing. Organ, she rips the mask off his face, and when he turns around, there's shadows on his face, and in my mind, I saw that image.

Speaker 1 The branding, especially for its time, was pretty cutting edge, right? I mean, it's still

Speaker 4 one of the first covers of any magazines I got was in a magazine called One Dollar out of Toronto. We were playing there, and on the cover it said something like the devil's disciple or something.

Speaker 4 You know, I was supposed to be evil.

Speaker 4 I don't even get high. I like cookies and

Speaker 1 girls. Not even a euphemism.
It's just actually a euphemism.

Speaker 4 Or a mephism. Yeah.
See what I did there? I did.

Speaker 4 You got dad jokes. Semantics, but I'm not anti-semantic.
You better take your pen out and write things down.

Speaker 1 You know, this is all being recorded, believe me.

Speaker 4 Millennials, a pen is a writing utensil which you hold in your hand. This is a fake one.
There's no button to put.

Speaker 4 It doesn't go on social media. There's paper, too, which comes from trees.

Speaker 1 I'm Gen X. This is one of those times where I'm glad I'm trying to.

Speaker 4 I hate all of it. I know.

Speaker 1 You're one foot in curmudgeon and

Speaker 1 one foot out.

Speaker 4 It's a waste of time. Anybody who thinks, well, I'm not part of you.
Nobody cares who and what you think you are.

Speaker 4 There's only one contest. It's like all the different top 40 things in Billboard magazine.
Top 40 alternative charts, top 40 reggae, top 40 Jewish folk songs, top 40.

Speaker 4 It's all nonsense. There is only one top 40.
You're all in competition with everybody else. Doesn't matter what genre you're in.
Who cares? I'm number one, heavy metal.

Speaker 4 What are you on the regular charts? 98? Yeah, if that. No, that means nothing.
Those are all delusional, self-serving numbers. There's only one rule.
We're all on the same planet.

Speaker 4 We better figure out how to get along with each other.

Speaker 4 Maybe a little more seriously, maybe all our jobs, invariably, big word like gymnasium, is to leave the world a little bit better, just a little bit better than when we came into it.

Speaker 4 Multiply that by 8 billion. That would be pretty good.

Speaker 1 I agree. I mean, the motto of this show used to be leave everything and everyone better than you found it, but it was a little too hokey.
But I still think it's apt.

Speaker 4 Even if it's a little bit. Yeah, I agree with that.
Hitler didn't do a good job. He left it worse.
That's true. Yeah, most people would agree with that.

Speaker 4 And I actually met somebody who said, yeah, but he built good roads. Okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Sure. Small silver lining.

Speaker 1 I don't even know how to react to that. Early in the game, I heard you engineered crowds in the early days so that you would...

Speaker 1 You'd find KISS would be on a stage with another band, put a bunch of girls up in the front row with Kiss t-shirts.

Speaker 1 Kind of like a, not a publicity stunt, but somebody convince what A ⁇ R and those folks from record labels, like, hey, these people are all here to see Kiss.

Speaker 4 At the very first show. Yeah.
Tell me about that. That's smart, obviously.

Speaker 1 That's really sharp.

Speaker 4 Claude. But you're only going to get the respect you demand.
You know, you have to assume that people don't have an imagination. Sinatra had the same thing happen.

Speaker 4 His manager at the time went out and got high school girls. and paid them 50 bucks or something to be in the front and ah, do all that stuff.

Speaker 4 And they were called Bobby Soxers, Sinatra fans, because they were in school, had those Catholic

Speaker 4 skirts. They were called that.
It's not a religious thing. It was just that was just like an Italian t-shirt.
That's what it was called. And those short skirts and the socks went way up the leg.

Speaker 4 Bobby Soxers.

Speaker 4 And then nobody else did that. in rock because it was not credible.
I don't care about credible. I just care about winning.
You're not supposed to do licensing and merchandising. Who said that?

Speaker 4 Can I please meet that loser?

Speaker 4 He's probably still living in his mother's basement.

Speaker 1 I love the idea of you sort of engineered the crowd, finessed the ANR folks, and it didn't matter because it turned out all you needed was their attention.

Speaker 1 But you had the goods to back it up. It wasn't all smoke and water.

Speaker 4 Well, I think, whether it's the least or the most, just give me a chance. Again, because the vast majority in the world never even get the chance.
So, Claw, do the best you can just to get up to bat.

Speaker 4 You may strike out, but if you never swing the bat, guaranteed you'll strike out. You won't even get a chance.
All I want is a chance.

Speaker 1 Do you know who Shep Gordon is? That name ring a bell? I've known him well. Yeah, you know him well.
Yeah. So he's a friend of mine.
And

Speaker 1 that reminded me of something he would do. He's Alice Cooper's manager for people who don't know.
It reminds me of the stuff he would do, like...

Speaker 1 have the billboard truck with the ad break down in piccadilly circus and then take three hours to get it towed and stack the crowd with people people who are screaming with the band t-shirts and stuff like that.

Speaker 4 It's show business. It's smart.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 But there are people, young people especially, who's just starting in a band, who think it's called music. It was never called that.
It was always called music business. That's what it's called.

Speaker 4 And if you believe in truth and advertising, business is cool. Andy Warhol, who I knew, of course, millennials have no idea what I'm talking about.
What's the new generation called?

Speaker 1 The new generation? It's Gen Z, I think, the adult.

Speaker 4 I think that's the I don't give a f generation. Yeah, maybe.
That might be a lot of people. I don't.

Speaker 4 All these names. Who comes up with that?

Speaker 1 I think, you know, that's a good question. I guess I'm not going to be able to do that.
And they line up like

Speaker 4 Jess. I'm part of the YXYZ, but shut the fuck up.

Speaker 4 So Andy Warhol said, business is art, and making money is the highest art. I hope I'm getting that right.
It's pretty much right.

Speaker 4 Because

Speaker 4 almost everybody can do art.

Speaker 4 Not everybody can make money legally. Yep, we're at.
True. That's true.

Speaker 1 I tend to agree with that. I'm not it took me forever to even consider myself creative because I was just trying to, like you said, feed my kids.

Speaker 1 What does it matter?

Speaker 4 Well, what's creative and who determines that?

Speaker 1 I let the fans determine that.

Speaker 4 There is only

Speaker 4 when a painting is really good, it's actually called priceless. You can't put a figure on it.
Money is the judges holding up a number to tell you how well you did in your thing. That's all money is.

Speaker 4 The higher the number,

Speaker 4 supposedly, the better you're doing.

Speaker 1 The market, yeah, it's hard.

Speaker 4 It doesn't really lie, does it? It's what it is. What people say.
How do you pay rent with that?

Speaker 4 You're the best that ever was. Well,

Speaker 4 you're broke. Right, yeah.
It's the 30th of the month. I got to pay rent.
That's right.

Speaker 1 I do try not to look only at my paycheck for fulfillment, but. It's tough not to, man.
It is tough not to.

Speaker 4 I don't understand why that's a negative. You're right.
You work hard. Maybe it's not.
You work hard by the sweat of thy brow. Our people gave that book to everybody in the world.

Speaker 4 It's called the Bible, even the New Testament. It's all Jews.
And it says in the good book, by the sweat of thy brow. Anything that you earn by the sweat of your brow has value.

Speaker 4 When you make money without exertion, the value loses what they call gravitas. It just doesn't impact you the same.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it does feel good to earn as opposed to just to get, eh?

Speaker 4 Yeah. Yeah.
Because then you don't have to say thank you to anybody. Yeah.
Well, maybe.

Speaker 1 I'm still thankful that people watch and listen to what I create, though. I'm going to lie about that.
I feel like that's important.

Speaker 1 Surely you're thankful to your fans as well.

Speaker 4 Of course. They're my bosses.
Yeah. That's what I'm saying.
Without them, I'd be asking the next person in the line if they'd like some fries with that. And by the way, that's an honorable profession.

Speaker 4 I agree.

Speaker 1 I try not to do that too. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I try not to shit on too many professions on the show because, statistically speaking, there's thousands of people who are doing that and listening to this show right now.

Speaker 1 And they're earning their money fairly.

Speaker 4 Is this kind of a big show?

Speaker 1 Is this a yeah, that's what that's what they tell me. That's what they tell me.
Yeah. Fans do often say that you're really polite to them.
I don't think that's surprising, but not everyone does that.

Speaker 4 Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You said you learned that from Dick Clark. Is that true?

Speaker 4 It was one of the life lessons. Kiss was on

Speaker 4 one of the first real rock concert TV shows, early 1974. Dick Clark had already been a mainstay in television.
He had a show called American Bandstand. Yeah, I remember that.
Young teen show.

Speaker 4 Every day after school, people would hurry three, four o'clock in the afternoon, and they'd watch Da Dadda Lad Up, Bada Bada, Lad Up, Da Da Bada,

Speaker 4 written by Barry Manilow, as a matter of fact.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 they'd listen to new music, and everybody would come on there, Madonna and Shmadonna and everybody else. And then kids would listen to new songs.
How do you like that song?

Speaker 4 I give it a 95 because I can dance to it. I like the beat.
You know, they don't know what they like.

Speaker 4 But that was, you know, like kids' stuff. And then in concert was exactly that.
You'd have the groups of the day playing live like a concert. And we were given a slot.
First record came out.

Speaker 4 And we were so thankful for them because we didn't look or sound or walk or talk like the other bands. Melissa Manchester, Cool and the Gang.
I don't remember who else was on the bill.

Speaker 4 And Kiss, I'll tell you very quickly. In the afternoon, we had to do a run-through so the cameras would know who's singing,

Speaker 4 who's going to be where, what are you going to do, so they can cover you because it's television. Was it live? Live.
Yeah, okay. And that was also, and you can't do that now.

Speaker 4 You can't do do that now, yeah. No can say a potty word, and the advertisers get upset.
So we did a song called Firehouse, actually, that Paul wrote.

Speaker 4 And then I'm supposed to spit fire, and I'm talking to the cameraman right here. I'm holding my hand up in the air.
I'm going to be spitting fire. The guy goes, what do you mean spitting fire?

Speaker 4 I'm going, no,

Speaker 4 explain. Actually, there's a fire guy watching.
And it's going to be like this, and it's going to be eight or ten feet.

Speaker 4 He goes, okay.

Speaker 4 So the show starts, and we start doing it and the cameras are all trying to pick up all the shots and I start walking towards the camera and if you ever see that, I start to fit the camera guy jumped off the camera and the camera went up.

Speaker 4 Because of the fire? Well, he was afraid. He was, I don't know what he was afraid of.
Didn't they warn him?

Speaker 1 You said you were going to spit fire.

Speaker 1 Come on, man.

Speaker 4 Ask any girl. Here's what I'm going to do.
No, don't do it.

Speaker 1 That's really funny. So when you're, how does that work? You have alcohol in your mouth and you have an open flame and you spit or is is there some other trick going on? I'm curious how that works.

Speaker 4 Open flame and a flammable. And I've caught fire a number of times.
I was going to ask you that. I don't want to tell people.

Speaker 4 Don't try it. There are so many videos on YouTube with kids who are trying to do that who went up in flames.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it seems like something

Speaker 1 you said there was a fire marshal standing in front of you probably with a, I don't know, fire extinguisher of some kind. That's right.
That's how you do that, kids, not the other way around.

Speaker 1 As a band that wore a lot of, was it Spandex back then? I don't even know if that existed, but you had full makeup, you had blood.

Speaker 1 Was there ever kind of a divide or a split between, you know, Gene Simmons, the guys in the band, and then this alter ego that is Kiss?

Speaker 4 Well, in the beginning, we protected, you know, Superman Clark Kent. Right.
Yeah, that's

Speaker 1 not the exact same note.

Speaker 4 Superman didn't want to talk about Clark Kent. Right.
Likewise, we kept our faces hidden, our actual faces. You know, it's like beautiful women with makeup and all that stuff.

Speaker 4 They don't want you to see them in a potato sack without their makeup on.

Speaker 1 At what point did you realize people wanted to see the alter ego on stage and not actually you guys? It sounds like from the beginning, that was something you decided to do.

Speaker 4 In the days when $25,000 was a lot of money, there was a $25,000 reward on our heads without makeup, yeah.

Speaker 1 For somebody to snap a photo?

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 1 Anybody claim that? Probably not, eh?

Speaker 4 No, not really. They were snippets, but no.
To give you an idea of what $25,000, right before KISS happened,

Speaker 4 I worked on 47th Street in the jewelry district.

Speaker 4 Minimum wage was $1.25 an hour. It skyrocketed to $1.75 an hour.
$100 a week was a good wage.

Speaker 1 People were making $5,000 a year or something like that? That's right.

Speaker 4 And a Volkswagen you could get for $1,500.

Speaker 4 Wow. Brand new.

Speaker 1 That's mind-blowing.

Speaker 4 When I was a kid earlier, 1959, possibly, I bought a movie ticket for 29 cents and I saw two movies and three cartoons. That's crazy.

Speaker 1 That just shows like inflation is just, it's hard to wrap your mind around it.

Speaker 4 Well, this is not 100 years ago. It was a year or two ago.
I think a dozen eggs was $1.50. Now it's $4.

Speaker 1 Yeah, unless you shop in LA and then it's $7.

Speaker 1 What about the groupies and the women? Did they ask you to leave your makeup on and stuff like that?

Speaker 4 Some did, yeah, seems like they would. All were female, so don't get excited.
But some did, yeah.

Speaker 1 You noted several times in the book you've been with 4,600 women. I assume the number is up since then, since this book was published.

Speaker 4 Not so much, not so much.

Speaker 1 You're lucky that thing didn't fall off, man.

Speaker 4 What thing?

Speaker 1 Anything.

Speaker 4 Oh,

Speaker 1 anything could have fallen off at that main way. But now you're, you look, you're a dedicated father now.
Did you expect that in your life? Was that something you always wanted?

Speaker 4 No, I was was afraid of marriage, monogamy, and children.

Speaker 4 I didn't want to turn out like my father.

Speaker 1 Tell us about your father.

Speaker 4 Well, my father ran out on us. See, even that doesn't get close to it.
My father ran out on me. I was seven years old.
I never had a father figure at home.

Speaker 4 I remember my father was, you know, in the army, Israel was always being attacked one way or the other.

Speaker 4 So I remember, I don't know, five or six, there's a machine, a Russian with a Kalishnikov, I think is what it's called.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 as funny as it may sound, he had a uniform and on weekends they'd have to go to the front line. I mean here you are in Beverly Hills.
You know Pasadena is half hour away.

Speaker 4 That would be another country that would want to kill you. And in those days 35,000 rockets came into Haifa or in that area where I lived.

Speaker 4 And on the weekends My father would put on his uniform, take his thing, and hitchhike. They didn't have military trucks.
They still hitchhike in Israel now.

Speaker 4 Well, Israel didn't have an Air Force or a Navy or anything. It was just people with guns, and they still beat five Arab countries.
We went every time.

Speaker 4 And it's generational. Nothing's going to change there until there are new generations

Speaker 4 who aren't dominated by religion. You have to remember World War II as a student of history.
And my mother was 14 when she was in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.

Speaker 4 During World War II, Germans and Japanese, the entire culture, the entire people,

Speaker 4 bought the evil hookline and sinker.

Speaker 4 They were Nazi.

Speaker 4 They loved it.

Speaker 4 And even after two atom bombs were dropped on Japan, they didn't make new terrorists or anything. The next generation said, you know, we were wrong.

Speaker 4 We got to move on. And they stopped worshiping the emperor as God.

Speaker 4 The culture has to change from within. When guys sitting self-appointed religious people become less important, happened with Christianity too.

Speaker 4 The Pope used to be a big deal and he would say crusades for them. After a while they ran out of grown-ups and they had a children's crusade.

Speaker 4 Insane. None of them made it to Israel.
They were all raped or killed before because they ran out of grown-ups. Yeah.
Unbelievable.

Speaker 1 So you didn't want kids because your father ended up running off on you when you were younger?

Speaker 4 I didn't think.

Speaker 4 I had an appetite. And one second, you're nobody.
And girls make you go through an obstacle course. What's your name? What sign are you in? Not on the first date.
First base, second base, third base.

Speaker 4 You know, all that stuff. But you're both sexual.
You both want the same thing. But then they're the cultural mores.

Speaker 4 Girls, women, females have different rules, self-imposed a lot. And some guys think that.
And guys have no rules. It's like two different sides of the same coin.

Speaker 4 You're both human beings, but may as well speak another language. So,

Speaker 4 you know, it was tough for a guy, I don't mean to get a girlfriend, but just to satiate himself, as they say.

Speaker 4 Going from there, and overnight, on the very first show, we played South Edmonton University, and there were girls back in the hotel. We were nobody.

Speaker 4 This is Canada.

Speaker 1 Is that in Alberta, Edmonton?

Speaker 4 One of those places.

Speaker 1 You don't even know. Okay, that makes me feel a little better.

Speaker 4 Right. Yeah, there were girls back at the hotel just because you're in a band.
It doesn't happen to plumbers or dentists.

Speaker 4 And different rules. They didn't even care if you remembered their name.

Speaker 4 You see, they're bored. with their humdrum small-town family life.
These strangers, it's like the circus comes to town. It's exciting.
You know, it's different.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And there was a lot of that for many decades.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I wonder how you got the number 4,600. Surely you didn't keep a spreadsheet.
Did you just back into it from the amount of time involved and like a guesstimation or did you actually track it?

Speaker 4 Photos.

Speaker 1 Photo. You kept photos of everybody?

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 1 Where did you keep that many photos? That's a big stack of photos, man.

Speaker 4 Many model portfolios. From the floor up to here, something like that.
And then when I came clean, Shannon and I burned him together. Oh, you did?

Speaker 1 You burned him with your wife. Wow.
When do we mean when you came clean? When you just told her about it, or like you just

Speaker 4 always saw it in the media and stuff like that. But at some point, you got to grow up.

Speaker 4 I don't think women understand that just because there's a guy who's 25 or 30 years old and he's 6'2 and weighs, I don't know, 190, 200,000. It's a man.
He's got a low voice. No, he's not.

Speaker 4 She's smiling.

Speaker 4 You're a 14-year-old horny kid. And if she turns her back, you'll climb on her mother.
You're inconsolable. You just have an appetite.
I mean, it's nice.

Speaker 4 Hello, nice to see it's better to treat everybody nicely, but I don't believe for a second that men become mature enough until they're 60s. 60s? Oh, yeah.
Really?

Speaker 4 Well, look at the divorce rates. Well, yeah.
Why do they

Speaker 1 fit?

Speaker 4 Why do divorce rates happen? Why are they so high? Because the guys fuck around. Why do they do that? Because even though they're grown men, they desire the other women.

Speaker 1 When you were doing that through the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, did you ever think, this is maybe pathological? There's a lot of this. Or was it like, hey, this is normal? This is normal for every guy.

Speaker 1 Every guy who could do this would do it.

Speaker 4 Is that what you're thinking? Never thought in any of those terms, nor would I hardly ever use the word pathological. In all other ways, I thought I was responsible.
I show up on time.

Speaker 4 I treat people nicely. I make money.
I buy my mother houses. You know, I take care of everything.
No drugs, no booze. I don't even smoke cigarettes.
And I like girls.

Speaker 1 Socially acceptable vice.

Speaker 4 I didn't care what was or what was not socially acceptable because in my delusion, it didn't matter to me what people thought of me. It still doesn't.

Speaker 4 And in this woke world, that's a problem.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, I noticed that you got a little, you got one for.

Speaker 4 Well, I've got my judge and jury over there. My media maven.

Speaker 1 Seems so bad.

Speaker 4 She's perfectly nice. Oh, she shakes her head every once in a while, or her legs start.
No, no, no, don't lose it. We did KTLA this morning.
Oh, yeah. And I started to make a comment.

Speaker 4 I don't remember what about. And you get one of those.
Oh, I see. Okay, okay, okay.
Don't go there.

Speaker 1 Was it live?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 1 That's why you got the elbow, for sure.

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Speaker 1 KISS was around, was it the satanic panic? Is that what they called it?

Speaker 4 The Titanic Panic?

Speaker 1 The Satanic Panic.

Speaker 4 I'm sorry? The satanic panic, right? Oh, satanic.

Speaker 4 What's satanic?

Speaker 1 Is that not how you pronounce it? No. What did you say?

Speaker 4 Satan or satanic?

Speaker 1 Satanic.

Speaker 4 I feel like this is just a comes from the Hebrew word shatan, which is the choice.

Speaker 4 Not an embodiment of evil. Christians made it with the horns and the tail.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 4 Jews created the idea, but as a choice, just like the cartoons, you have a little horned guy on one shoulder and an angel on the other shoulder. You have the choice of evil deeds.

Speaker 4 Shatan is a choice, not a two-legged horn.

Speaker 1 It's a theology lesson, not satanic. I was a theology major.
That's right. You study theology in school.

Speaker 1 I would imagine a lot of religious people were saying, hey, kisses, what a shatanic worship and things like that.

Speaker 4 Satanic.

Speaker 1 Now I'm just mesopathy. Satanic.
Yes. And would now come at you with Bible verses.
Could you come back at them quoting Bible verses? I would imagine. Psalm and verse.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 1 How do they react to that?

Speaker 4 Well, what happened to do not judge lest ye be judged? Let those among you who is without sin cast the first stone. That's right.
Bitch, I know where you live.

Speaker 4 Well, because there's a holier-than-thou sickness mentally, because a little bit of information emboldens, makes somebody think, I'm better than you are. holier than thou.
I know stuff you don't.

Speaker 4 And they often use it as a battering ram to elevate their their own inadequacies.

Speaker 4 So who died and made you God? Since when did you become my judge and jury? I thought this was a personal relationship between myself and God.

Speaker 4 Who are you to get in the middle, whether you're on TV or not?

Speaker 1 Oh, man. I'm guessing the reaction you got to that kind of rhetoric.

Speaker 4 Oh, they turn and run. Really? Oh, yeah.
There was a guy dressed up like what he thought Jesus looked like because there was a historical Jesus. There was a human being.

Speaker 4 And we know that because Josephus Flavius, the Hebrew scribe for the Romans, was a Jew. Hebrew because he came from Hebron.
See, Heb, Hebron.

Speaker 4 Never put that together. Yeah, and Jew because they're Judean

Speaker 4 geographical location. Yeah.

Speaker 4 So.

Speaker 1 Where the hell were we going with this? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm also like, wait, I had the question. And then it was how people react to you coming back at them with...
real biblical knowledge when they accuse you of being saved.

Speaker 4 They don't have to run because they're not qualified to have that discussion. They're talking with mental midgets.
They know a little bit more than God. See that? God will protect.

Speaker 4 So I asked one of these guys who was dressed in what he thought Jesus looked like, straight hair. He looked like he's from Norway and blue eyes and all that.

Speaker 4 I'm going, Bitch, I don't want to tell you this, but

Speaker 4 the real human being, Rabbi Yesu ben Yosef, it's in the Vatican in Josephus Flavius's handwriting. Oh, I forgot.
Most people think his last name was Christ. No.
Mom and Dad were not Mr. and Mrs.

Speaker 4 Christ. Joseph Christ and Mary Christ.
No. That's a title.
It comes Christo in Latin, which means Messiah or King. That makes sense.
That's why he's called the Christ. Nobody says the Simmons.

Speaker 4 Like the President. It's a title.
Or the Christ child or Christ Jesus, like King James. Get it? Mm-hmm.
No, his last name is Son of Joseph. But you don't get taught that because it mixes you up.

Speaker 4 Wait a minute. I thought he was the son of God, but his last name is the son of Joseph.
Yeah, how about that?

Speaker 1 So was it a Hebrew name? Would he have had a Hebrew name like Ben-Yosef or whatever?

Speaker 4 Yes. Even Arabs, Bin Laden, Ben is son.
The British Isles, MacDonald, the Mac is a son.

Speaker 4 I did not know that. Son of Donald, right?

Speaker 1 The music ranking thing. I heard that with hits and music singles, you had a different mindset, right? Didn't care about billboard rankings.
You mentioned that earlier. Flash in the pan.

Speaker 1 The strategy for Kiss was to be consistently good, not just boom on the charts and off the next week.

Speaker 4 Well, it was a different culture. I don't think Led Zeppelin ever had a hit single.
In fact, hit single, there was radio airplay. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And you could get high on the charts, but never singles. And then there were actual sales.
So here's a trick question.

Speaker 4 We all know the Beach Boys had a ton of stuff, ton of songs, 20, 30 songs that everybody knew. Help me, Ronda, Good Vibrate, lots of them.
It's a trick question. Who has actual gold singles?

Speaker 4 More of them, gold singles. Beach Boys or Kiss? A gold single sells more than a million copies.
Beach Boys or Kiss has more. I have no idea.

Speaker 1 The Beach Boys, maybe?

Speaker 4 Who knows? Tide.

Speaker 4 Tide? Beach Boys only have

Speaker 4 Beach Boys only have two gold singles. Kiss has two gold singles.
But they were played a lot more during daytime radio because mom is at home, dad is at working.

Speaker 4 None of that loud guitar stuff, more harmonies.

Speaker 1 I know that Kiss's success was not based on his singles, right? It was based on fan loyalty. And I'd love to hear what you did to engender that in the beginning.

Speaker 1 Like, it was very deliberate, I assume, yeah?

Speaker 4 Yes, because we were Anglophiles. So our favorite bands were English bands, Zeppelin and so on.

Speaker 4 Of course, the favorite of them all is The Beatles, but that's an exception. Nobody could write songs like them before, during, or since.
McCartney is the most successful songwriter of all time.

Speaker 4 You know what a cover is where other artists do your covers. Yesterday Alone was covered by 1,000 plus other artists.
Just that song. And they also did Live and Let, you know, just a ton of stuff.

Speaker 4 But you can't shine the boots of the Beatles. It's a different league.
But, you know, Led Zeppelin never played the singles game. ACDC didn't care.

Speaker 4 They were an album band, so it's a different culture. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's a good strategy, though, right? Because casual fans burn out quickly.

Speaker 4 It's only a good strategy if it works.

Speaker 1 If it works, yeah, I suppose that's true. Having a loyal following like you guys, Metallica, it's just such a better strategy long term.

Speaker 4 But by the time Metallica came in,

Speaker 4 the culture was set. When we were first starting, you still had a lot of pressure to get a song on the radio, get a song on the radio.
I see. And then it opened up.

Speaker 4 Maiden and Metallica and a lot of those.

Speaker 1 What did MTV do for bands like his? Because music was way less visual than it is now.

Speaker 4 A lot of new bands became very famous, very fast, and then died very famous.

Speaker 4 And I don't mean to pick on them. They're fine, I'm sure.
There's a band called Wang Chung. Everybody, Wang Chung,

Speaker 4 they had dance hall days, and they had hits. You can't name anybody in the band, and nobody ever wore a Wang Chung t-shirt.
I'm sure they're terrific and all that.

Speaker 4 So there were lots and lots of bands who had number one songs

Speaker 4 and then disappear. Because you've got to deliver on stage.
If you have a hit single and you just sing in the microphone, they're paying more money for a ticket than they do for the album.

Speaker 1 That's a really good point. So, it's all about that experience, which kissed

Speaker 1 you guys kind of innovated on a lot of that stuff.

Speaker 4 It makes fans. Yeah.
Michael Jackson, without all that dancing and the backwards and the stuff, not the same artist. No, it's not the same.

Speaker 1 Yeah, not the same. His shows were epic for sure.
You're an innovator in your space. What is the next generation of music innovators? Who do you think is really innovating?

Speaker 1 You think it's Taylor Swift? Got to get that sound bite, Gene. You, of all people, can appreciate anything with Taylor Swift.

Speaker 4 are Elon Musk.

Speaker 1 Tell me about that.

Speaker 4 Well, he NASA, with all the hundreds of billions of dollars, couldn't figure out how to reuse a rocket. So every time they launched something, they had to throw it away.
Elon Musk reused it.

Speaker 4 Can land take off, land take off.

Speaker 4 Electric cars outsold all the car companies, changed it overnight. Car companies didn't want to do it.
Unions.

Speaker 4 See what I did there?

Speaker 4 He doesn't care. It always takes one

Speaker 4 visionary, a futurist, who doesn't care, just wants to do what they want to do.

Speaker 4 Alexander Graham Bell, Edison, even Ford at the beginning, who created this kind of assembly line thing, which didn't exist before.

Speaker 4 Futurists don't look at what is.

Speaker 4 They do what they want to do.

Speaker 4 So Elon's got the boring company. He's going to have robot taxis.
It's just all this stuff. It's not waiting to ask anybody what they think.

Speaker 4 He will be the first legal trillionaire, by the way, within two years.

Speaker 1 It's impressive. I'm waiting to see if Boring or any of those companies actually do anything.
Although, look, I'm a happy investor in Tesla, I'll tell you that.

Speaker 1 I invested early, and that turned out to be a

Speaker 1 pretty good shout. Did you invest in anything like that? Do you do your own investments or are you just kind of...

Speaker 4 Myself, yes.

Speaker 1 You seem like the type.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Stock market including crypto futures commodities what what crypto are you bullish on i'm curious probably and this is not advice i'm not a financial advice you have to say that full disclosure i'm not a lawyer i'm a lawyer but i'm not your lawyer it depends what kind of lawyer and which staked but

Speaker 4 probably the two safest for me are bitcoin and ethereum

Speaker 4 and the rest you have to so you do know what you're talking about that's impressive i've got 13 or 14 different cryptos that I play with.

Speaker 1 I would not have guessed that, but

Speaker 1 that is quite interesting. I was told that you were a Renaissance man, like I said at the top of the show.
I wonder, what did your mom think of all this? The music, the costumes.

Speaker 4 My mother, bless her, never really understood it because from her,

Speaker 4 you know, they were lucky. All of Europe, not just Jewish households, but right after the Great Depression, 1920 and line and on, people couldn't even have an egg.

Speaker 4 There are photos of Germans with wheelbarrows full of Deutschmarks trying to get enough money together, just

Speaker 4 stacks of money to get a few eggs.

Speaker 4 People have no idea. The Great Generation.
There were 100 million people that died in World War II. Even white people.
I'm not even talking about black Asia or anything. Just white Europeans.

Speaker 4 100 million died.

Speaker 4 Starvation, war, killings, and all this stuff. It was insane.
People who lived through that have a completely different point of view about life and the value of things.

Speaker 4 My mother, in the translation, in Hungarian,

Speaker 4 every day above ground is a good day, is worth taking note of. Kinda corny.

Speaker 4 What

Speaker 4 do you have to complain about living here in Beverly Hills? What exactly? Riots, war? What? Yeah, I know. Some hooded teenagers break into 7-Elevens and all this kind of stuff.
I know.

Speaker 4 I can't tell you how I would react because

Speaker 4 she's shaking down.

Speaker 4 Let's just say there were different rules for the police when I was growing up. There was less crime.
There was less crime?

Speaker 1 That's interesting. I would love to know the stats on that.
I think violent crime is down. I don't know if general crime is relative to what?

Speaker 1 Any other time in history?

Speaker 4 Whatever you say. I don't believe.
You don't believe it? Not at all.

Speaker 1 Get out that phone, Gene, before we close here. I'm curious.
Let's correct the record because I am quite sure of that.

Speaker 1 The largest decline in several decades, which means probably throughout your whole career at least, maybe if we go back far enough, it was

Speaker 1 lower in the 40s or 50s, but certainly after that.

Speaker 4 40s and 50s, 1940s, 1950s?

Speaker 1 Possibly higher, but unlikely. And it's lower now than at any other time in our lives.

Speaker 4 Once drugs became culture,

Speaker 4 we went to hell and back.

Speaker 1 The stats say otherwise. Look, I believe you, but the statistics are we are safer now than we have been in the past.

Speaker 4 Since when?

Speaker 1 In the last four decades.

Speaker 4 For

Speaker 4 possibly. Yeah.

Speaker 4 But that's during the drug world.

Speaker 4 When I was growing up and I went to school, you couldn't even, you weren't allowed to have liquor, booze, beer out in the open. You'd have to have it in a brown paper bag.
That's still the case.

Speaker 4 Oh, is it still? Yeah. I mean, of course,

Speaker 1 no.

Speaker 4 No. Oh, I didn't know.

Speaker 1 In Las Vegas, I believe you can in Las Vegas.

Speaker 4 Oh, they take baths in it over there. Yeah.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 never heard of a drug addict. Nobody smoked that we knew of.
It was looked down on. Drugs are up, man.

Speaker 1 That I'll give you. Violent crime, however, is down, which is a good thing.
However, is that the general indicator of a safe society? Not necessarily.

Speaker 1 I want to end on something that is slightly different than that. I heard you didn't drive until you were 34.
Is that true?

Speaker 4 Why is that?

Speaker 4 Well, if we landed in New York

Speaker 4 and it was shock to me because we're...

Speaker 1 We, your mother and yourself? Is that?

Speaker 4 My mother and myself landed in New York. I never saw tall buildings or every street was covered in concrete or asphalt.

Speaker 4 Every street in the small town and the bottom of Mount Carmel, like the biblical Carmel, that's where I was born. Just like, you know, with the grapes and like those stories in the Bible.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's a real place, and I was right at the foot of those mountains. Used to go up there and get cactus fruit.
There was no infrastructure, just dirt on the road. I never heard of television.

Speaker 4 Literally. Never heard of it.
We didn't have radio. There was a hole in the ground outside.
And you wiped with rags that my mother used to wash.

Speaker 1 Now the phone thing makes more sense. Yeah.

Speaker 4 The phone?

Speaker 1 Yeah, don't touch the phone.

Speaker 1 Now it all makes sense.

Speaker 4 That's a strange connection. Is it? I don't know about that.
No, I just wanted to say that. Okay.
And two Jews talking. How are you? How am I? How should I be? Who wants to know? Why are you asking?

Speaker 4 Good lord. Accurate.

Speaker 1 Accurate.

Speaker 4 And when we first came to America, I was in shock.

Speaker 4 People were big. The buildings were big.
Everybody had cars. The sandwiches were massive.

Speaker 4 In Israel, you you got a newspaper, used newspaper, and they'd give you a slab of meat and some a little thing, a little butter. There was no brands.
That was your food for the week.

Speaker 4 And cornbread, big honkin' pieces of stuff. There were no stuff, barely any canned goods.
And the land of plenty, you bet. I remember my Aunt Magda was married to my mother's brother, who'd done well.

Speaker 4 Both her brothers were very successful.

Speaker 4 And she,

Speaker 4 Aunt Magda, I was looking at the refrigerator because I didn't know what it was. We didn't have one.
Yeah, we never had a refrigerator. Just a white kind of a thing with a handle.

Speaker 4 So I spoke Hungarian as well, so she didn't speak Hebrew. Aunt Magda walked over and she opened the thing, and I couldn't believe it.
This box was filled with food.

Speaker 4 There was fruit and, you know, eggs and stuff, all this food. And I remember looking on the side to my right.
I must have been eight. Actually, I was eight before I was nine.

Speaker 4 See what I just did there? There was another choke. I looked over there and there was this kind of reddish.

Speaker 4 thing and I was attracted by the color and I opened up the top and my aunt Magda gave me a spoon. It was jam.
My Aunt Magda gave, might have been schmuckers. And she gave me a spoon.

Speaker 4 I guess she meant for me to taste it. Sure.
I'd never had jam.

Speaker 1 Tell me you ate that whole jar. I

Speaker 4 punished.

Speaker 4 I tasted it and I went, oh my God, it's crack.

Speaker 4 And emptied out that thing and I couldn't stop eating because I never tasted anything like that. I bet.
And both my mother and Aunt Magda were crying so hard they were in tears.

Speaker 4 And I had no idea with mouthfuls of jam what they were laughing at.

Speaker 1 That's so fun. What a story.
Yeah. You'd never experienced anything like that, eh?

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 4 How could you imagine that taste?

Speaker 1 It must have been a trip for your mom to come to America, too, though.

Speaker 4 From her perspective, yes.

Speaker 4 And I remember

Speaker 4 I'd never heard of television. We went to my Uncle George's house, and in those days, Television screens were smaller, about the size of your head.
Well, mine, yours is a a little smaller.

Speaker 4 It's a little more compact. And you'd have six foot long furniture.

Speaker 4 On both sides, you'd have liquor and sort of like a large cabinet, six feet long, and in the middle would be the television set with a smaller screen.

Speaker 4 And I remember walking in, and it must have been the news hour because there was a close-up of the guy's head, and I thought there was a guy in the box.

Speaker 4 I couldn't imagine that. No, it was being broadcast in the air.

Speaker 1 It is incredible when you think about it.

Speaker 4 I didn't understand what that was. I'd never seen a television set.

Speaker 4 And then when I understood, oh, television stuff, one of the first things I saw, again, that blew my mind, is some guy with a towel or something around his back, and he's flying through the air without an airplane.

Speaker 4 It's

Speaker 4 unbelievable. Right.
Created by Jews, of course.

Speaker 1 Didn't know that.

Speaker 4 Makes sense. All superheroes.
All the comic book companies were invented by Jews. Bob Kane, Batman, Bob Cohen, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, all those characters, Jews.

Speaker 4 It's the Moses myth of Moses whose family were being killed. Krypton

Speaker 4 was blowing up, so they sent Kellal, like Elal, those are Hebrew names, being sent down the space ark. If you ever saw the imagery, he's leaning back with a little blanket on, just like Moses.

Speaker 4 He gets adopted by the Goyim, the non-Jew, Gentiles, in this case, Egyptians, and raised, and he became great.

Speaker 1 We do come full circle, don't we?

Speaker 4 Superman is the Moses mythos, created by two Jews from Cleveland, Ohio.

Speaker 1 Jews of Cleveland.

Speaker 4 But they don't talk about that. The Hulk, the Fantastic Four Spider-Man, Jews.
It's this hiding your public persona and having a secret identity.

Speaker 4 You know, the classic assimilationists, dress British, think Iddish.

Speaker 4 Including the movie industry. Every single, without exception, movie studio was created, invented, and designed by Jews to make non-Jewish movies

Speaker 4 for the simple reason that there were very few Jews. You want to make money? You got to go.
Oh, you got to go to

Speaker 4 a lot of movies with crosses and Christ and all. Whatever you want.
Just buy tickets. Warner Brothers, those are not their names.
You couldn't pronounce their names.

Speaker 1 It's probably like Livshitz Brothers or something like that.

Speaker 4 Yeah. So they changed all their names.
This guy, Fox, 20th Century Fox,

Speaker 4 he was an Eastern European Jew in New York buying fur coats, Foxes, from Canada, shipping them down and sewing them on already-made winter coats.

Speaker 4 So they became Fox fur coats, and people couldn't pronounce his name. So he changed his name to Fox.

Speaker 1 Gene Simmons, an American success story, or is it an American success story?

Speaker 4 No, this is the American success story because

Speaker 4 as proud as I am of the historical and biblical Israel and all that, you cannot rise to this level anywhere else.

Speaker 4 We fly through the air, the computer you're on, T V, movies, it was all invented here, including the phone, by different people from different nationalities.

Speaker 4 That is the that's the wonder of this place.

Speaker 4 But we need much stronger laws. You got to get the scum off the street.
Put me in charge. I'll fix it.

Speaker 1 Gene Simmons for president, 2020.

Speaker 4 No, no, for leader.

Speaker 1 Gene Simmons, thank you very much.

Speaker 4 I just want to say it was a pleasure to talk to me.

Speaker 1 I knew that wasn't going to end how everyone thought it was going to end.

Speaker 1 You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with rapper and singer T. Payne.

Speaker 4 A recorded bartender in a hotel room of a nudist resort. Your ass naked, looking out the window with a cup of coffee, people f ⁇ ing by the pool, just everything's happening all at this one hotel.

Speaker 4 And you're just like, this is nice.

Speaker 4 This is nice. The hardest thing about being number one is staying number one.

Speaker 4 That stuck with me so much that I didn't even care when I became number one because I felt like I needed to work harder to stay there. And everything else was a distraction.

Speaker 4 Brooke was Wells Fargo sending me emails saying your account has reached $0. Oh, wow.
Like, Brooke was me asking my manager, can he buy food for my kids? And this is from like upwards of $90 million.

Speaker 4 Wow. And then going to pure zero.
I mean, because I was young, like, what am I supposed to do? You signed me as a 19-year-old and just hand me $40 million.

Speaker 4 What do I...

Speaker 4 I don't know what to do with this. I had 43 cars at one time.
How many? 43? 43 cars. All the gas goes bad and all of them.
The Ferraris don't crank up if they're not driven every day.

Speaker 4 The Bugatti is stuck in between two Chevies. It took me nine years to lose all that money, and it took me two years to get it back.
I could be a lot richer. I could be going to space in a giant dick.

Speaker 4 Or I could be stuffing my nose and my ears with toilet paper to make sure roaches don't get in it.

Speaker 1 I think I'm fine where I am.

Speaker 4 Yeah. It seems okay.
Oh, man.

Speaker 1 For more on how T. Payne made and lost $90 million and how he climbed his way back, check out episode 551 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

Speaker 1 all right so i did warn you it went in a little bit of an odd direction not really used to that on this show i gave his listening skills a c minus and he gave himself an a uh wonder what the a stands for fun to interview a legend even if he did imply that i was some kind of loser for wanting to be a present father to my kids within the first five minutes of the interview i i don't know i think that probably says more about him and his beliefs than it does about my own.

Speaker 1 I know he was a little bit standoffish, but honestly, I got the feeling he was more playing with me and just being like cocky because he thinks it's funny as opposed to actually being like a true a-hole, although I was on the fence for a while.

Speaker 1 Anyway, Kiss is just behind the Beatles in terms of gold records. It's really just a total icon legend institution in the rock and roll space.

Speaker 1 One thing that we didn't get into that I wanted to, but we ran out of time is how having kids changed him.

Speaker 1 Not a lot of people are expecting him to be this devoted father after all the womanizing and everything. And it seems like early in the game, he really just lived his life for himself.

Speaker 1 And anything he didn't like, he changed it. And he talks about this in one of his books.

Speaker 1 He said, don't like your looks, looks put on a bunch of makeup or change them don't like your name change it don't like where you live move with kids of course it's not as simple as that but i really thought that was kind of an interesting tip you know when i was before kids i was like oh there's so much i don't have any control over i can't do this i can't do that i really think that if a lot of us think bigger you can live anywhere you want you can be anyone you want especially if you work to change yourself that's actually quite empowering All things Gene Simmons will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com.

Speaker 1 Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show.

Speaker 1 Also, our newsletter, We BitWiser, people are loving this. You guys write in all the time.
You can hit reply and reach me with this, and it's just such a fun read, such a fun thing to write.

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It is a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it.

Speaker 1 Don't forget about six-minute networking as well. That's over at sixminutenetworking.com.
I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

Speaker 1 This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.
Remember, we rise by lifting others.

Speaker 1 The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. And the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

Speaker 1 So, if you know somebody who loves music and KISS and Gene Simmons, definitely share this episode with them. They might get a kick out of it.

Speaker 1 In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.

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Speaker 6 thank you for listening to the murdoch murders podcast the show that started it all 93 episodes will take you on a journey of twists and turns ups and downs tears and belly laughs we continue this mission with our newest evolution true sunlight luna shark's true sunlight podcast is the antithesis of true crime true sunlight values accuracy over access journalism.

Speaker 6 True Sunlight is shed with empathy, not exploitation. True Sunlight is the intersection of journalism, true crime, and systemic corruption.

Speaker 6 We continue to shed light on Stephen Smith's case and Alex Murdoch's co-conspirators. But also, we like to take deep dives into other cases around the country.

Speaker 6 True Sunlight empowers listeners to understand their legal and judicial systems with our unique brand of pesky journalism.

Speaker 6 Listen to True Sunlight wherever you get your podcast or visit truesunlight.com to learn more.