426: Tim Allen Loves the Ballet

Chuck, I could talk for hours about the conversation I just had, but what's the point since the conversation I just had went on for hours with my old friend Tim Allen?

Two hours and ten minutes, to be precise. But who's really counting? Well, aside from you, no one.
I thought the time flew by. Tim

is such a pleasure to be with. Now I owe him another one because this is the second time he's come by on the podcast.

But boy, he came armed this time with a whole slew of topics that I did not anticipate. I'm not going to say anything else because the conversation speaks for itself.
It takes its time.

I hope you'll strap in and enjoy it. I don't think it's too big a spoiler alert to tell you that among other things you may not have known, Tim Allen

loves the ballet.

Right after this.

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Like I said, cutbacks.

Only the best. Because you can't afford a piece of bamboo with little stripes on it.

Because that would have been a lot of money to have a clapboard. Oh, God.
Is that what they're officially called?

Is a clapper. A clapper? Yeah, I think so.
I do. I'm constantly messing with our lady.
I always put a ruler when she's not looking in there so it doesn't. Yeah.
And she goes, what the?

It's not funny to her, but. I do one where I lean in super close and then act like they catch my nose and really just keep going with it.
I've made people cry. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, if you commit to it.

Yeah.

Here comes your coffee. Look at that.
Lucas is weird as well. Logan is coming in hot with the coffee.

He's just kind of. We asked him if he, like, would you like anything at all, anything? And he was like, no, nothing.
Maybe, maybe coffee, iced. with a straw.

Because that's what we have said around. Anything that's horribly hard to get in this presents.
There we go. I hate iced coffee, but I need a little caffeine today.

We're sorry we couldn't get a large.

Yeah. Is this enough? Because I'll be pissing this out pretty soon.
Oh, terrific. All right.
Well, we'll keep this one short. How much time do you have, by the way?

I don't have a time limit. I don't want to say I don't have a time limit because it sounds like if you asked for a...
Chuck, let me know. It's been three hours.

I don't want to be disrespectful to the men of science. You got it hard to deal with.
We'll get you out of here in no time. What's wrong with your tooth? What happened?

Something happened to the nerve on the inside of one of these seats, so they polished on the inside. The guy said, I would avoid hot beverages.
If you have to drink coffee, use a straw.

I don't know what that is, but it seems fine right now.

Because I'm listening to, generally,

I don't listen. But I have a,

I bought a sports car this year. That's weird.
You? Well, I got big, you know.

big V8s and I bought an old Porsche, but you can't drink anything in it and hear you in a car if you're ever driving to do any of my production errands. You're in your car as an office.
Right.

And I can't drink in that car because it's too bouncy. So

my life is over. Hey, did you see my truck? That I said.

Well, what do you think? Loved it. I thought about you every step of the way.
It was the whole whole show. I don't care.

I totally lost what you were talking about half the time going, but look at that freaking Bronco.

Wow.

It wasn't a Bronco, man. The one I sold at the auction.
Oh, that one.

That's not the one you're on on your show. No, not the one on the show.

The one on the show is overdone like everything else.

You'll never use it. No, no, somebody bought it at Barrett Jackson for $1.5 million.
Price. Yeah.
But for a show, right? No. They're anonymous.
I don't even know who it was. Right.

I've been to Barrett Jackson and bought probably five cars down there. Yes, I did see that car.
And I said, who made that for you? The company... is called Sugar Creek.

They're up in Ohio, Washington Courthouse. And the guy is called John Richardson.

You should know him. You'd love him.

That's what he does, his resto rods or whatever you call it. Well, yeah, and no.
What he does for real is he sold you all the bacon you've ever eaten. He's the guy that sells the bacon

to like Oscar Meyer and Smithsfield. They're like the major bacon wholesaler.
But he's crazy for cars.

I'm stuck on the bacon thing.

I know, but literally at Sugar Creek, there's this bacon factory, and across the street is a 10,000 square foot fabrication house with a couple dozen dudes who are the best at what they do.

He's probably got 200 old junkers behind the building, and they're constantly in the process of turning these old turds into these beautiful, beautiful classics that guys like you would buy.

I just had a car dealer come by my shop in North Hollywood and the same thing. I said, Resto rods have taught me the value of GM, Ford, Chrysler, Ferrari.
That's what they do for a living.

We build hot rods at my shop. Isn't that beautiful? And then me, the functional guy, goes, has anybody driven this?

Because generally, it takes three to four years to make some of these really high-end resto rods, and it takes five years to sort them out because they don't work. They're not functional.

Old Porsche design. Form follows function.

I love that. Sometimes it looks horrible, but it works.
Porsche has been able to manipulate, at least in my view, they've been able to manipulate beautiful design into a functional piece.

Was that really Porsche that had that turn of phrase? I don't know. I studied.
That was minor in college design and forms falls function. I thought that was Bau House, actually.
Yeah. Yeah.

I've always loved that whole thing. Well, it's design, but it's also philosophy adjacent.
Yes. And you're an old philosophy freak.

Quality is the enemy of capitalism. That's when I'm turned into a Marxist.
Because he's right. They don't want...

Fisker Tools, I believe, was the, if I got the guy right, he said, just make me the best wrench, I'll figure out how to sell it.

Don't make the one that sells best, which is a bag of wrenches from overseas.

We're like 11 bucks for 30 wrenches. And they're broken in the bag.
They're really broken. And if you pick up a Fisker

flat-nose pliers. As soon as you hold it, you go, huh, you know,

wow, that's weird. But it's also $39

for one wrench. Or Wilton Vice Company.
I make jokes about them all the time. I wanted to replace the vice in my house, and it's an old,

it just started wobbling. I didn't notice that it was wobbling, and I said, do they make better vices? And Craftsman Sears' old company used to make, in the 60s, they were pretty good.

Craftsman has since turned into mass production. So I'd go online and I'd do this all the time, search, how much could you pay for a vice?

And so I get get into this at Wilton, I believe, Will Turner, Wilton, I think Wilton, and it was in Ohio, I believe, again. And then I'm going, I called up, he says, who pays $2,400 for a vice?

And she goes, sir, you called me,

and I go, okay. Point taken.
She goes, you're looking at a machinist vice. You probably don't need that.
It has declinations on the, so you could put a watch in there. It'll only do.

And I go, all of our gears are internal. What's it called? It's forged steel.
It's not pounded or 50,000 pounds per square inch, the anvil on top.

You can actually use that anvil that's on the top of the vise.

I end up buying two of one for my buddy Hanks, who's got an office around here. And I said, it is like buttery smooth.

No matter who comes into my shop, the big shop, they'll sit by the vice and I go, what is, ooh, what is that? Hanks isn't Tom? Uh-huh. He's got it.
So you guys are still on a last name basis?

You're that tight? Yeah, we are. Hanks, well, it's Woody or Hanks, one of the two.
It's either a fabric cowboy that nobody wants. So is he a geek, too? With this.
He's a geek.

And by the way, you know what I'm talking about.

We got more mail. Last time you and I chatted, I told the story of the time you and I missed our cue

on

Last Man. Right.
Because I asked you some question in passing backstage, and you started talking about it was a blender, and you were trying to take a busted blender.

and explain to your grandkid or something, you know, show them how it could be fixed. But it was all like one piece of extruded plastic.
Right.

Dude, you lost your mind. Yes.
It was just the two of us in the shadows behind the flats. And you're like in my face and you're frothing.
And you're like, and I'll tell you something else, Roe.

The way they made this thing. And meanwhile, the audience is like,

who cares about them? I care about this little piece of rubber that caused this entire problem of the stupid.

And that caused, I did a history channel show over that. Yeah.

Over that blender, April Wilkerson, who is a do-it-yourselfer that's the best in the world that we've had on that show she got a hold of it my shop got a hold of it nobody could fix it april did fix it eventually first off i don't want to give the brand away there's no way to get the screw to unhappy after what you just did to fisker well well fischer was good i love fisker is great yeah what was the bag full of wrenches that showed up already busted i don't want to i think you alluded to craftsman went all commercial craftsman used to be the best used to be i thought craftsman should have crazy they

i thought they should have branched off when sears Sears went under, Craftsman should have been its own hardware store. I've always thought it should have been their own hardware store.

Because now I don't know who makes good ratchet anymore. Craftsmans are okay.

I don't know who makes the top, the high-end one. I'll tell you this, Craftsman saved QVC.

When I was there in 1990, they were starting to circle the drain because they couldn't get any name brands. It was all just...
stuff for sale. You'd went on a carnival midway, you know.

And then they made this deal with Craftsman, and all of a sudden the viewership went crazy, and we started selling all kinds of tools thanks to craftsmen. Thanks to Craftsman.
But that was 1990.

Right. Then, when they made it, but I said that the blender idea was it is not stopped.
I have a

technical house. I like my house technical, but my technical department in my house looks like a battleship.

The room down in the basement, where all my furnaces are, even guys that come fix it, go, who did this?

Because it's all bleach-white walls, and I got so you can get behind the air conditioning unit, behind any kind of, I want where you fix it, is looks better than where you operate it. That's my deal.

My whole thing is, I'm out in the brand as Questron

because you can, from a distance, I can turn on lights in certain parts of the house.

It's but it started going funky on me three weeks ago with some lights didn't work, some lights went on all by themselves. It got so frustrating, and then you got IT guys, and I said, I know,

what can I do before a white van with ladders on it shows up? And it's always the same thing.

You unplug it. Now, I don't care how big the components are.
Eventually, a guy goes, we'll try the freak phenomenon, then

plug this one up. Or hard restart.
Hard restart. I go, isn't there a switch you could have that has a hard restart in it? Well, anyway, they tried that.
Nothing.

Then he goes, he sends me a video and he goes, I don't know what I'm even looking at. And he says, that's the back of the floffles.

There's a two-module.

The green area, which is a sneaker function of anything. They go, do they just unplug it? No, no, no, no, unplug it.

You know, put your elbow on your knee, look at the gods, and then blink, and there's something you got to pull. Sure.
The whole thing was based on,

don't even understand it. Copper is brittle.

Copper wire sometimes just separates. I mean, in the middle, it's something about copper.
Hot, cold, hot, cold, hot, cold. Electric.
Eventually it just popped.

And I'm talking about a wire you could barely see, barely see it between another clip that had nine wires in but a ground wire was in there and that ground wire was tapping once it stopped all the lights went out the whole house went out because of a little tiny wire and i said that is something about technology and something about how things get done is what's fascinating to me and which is why i love what you do i love being part of this thing and as i told my shop i break stuff literally before I fix it.

Like this guy came through, the second guy came through, and he found that without yanking stuff out.

And I don't know what he used, what tool he used, but that's my weakness is plumbing and electronics, electrical stuff. Well, your strength is reductive.
I've always admired that about you.

Two things.

First of all, you distill stuff really fast to the tiniest component part, whether it's a little filament of copper or an O-ring or some little rubber cannibal pin or it's a Johnson rod or whatever it is.

And then you build from that. And

I think that's just interesting as a personality quirk. But what I like is

that

you work in this big machine. Like you're in the Disney machine, you're in the network machine, you're in the scripted machine.

And you've got to be in rooms all the time with writers who don't know their ass from a hot rock, but who want to write. I wouldn't say it that way in front of them.
No, you wouldn't, but here I am.

I'm not in that world.

But I know for a guy who's a bit of a pedant when it comes to the specificities of maybe his automobiles or electronics, you want to get it right. Right.

Even in a world of fiction, you want that stuff to be real. I don't think you can base fiction on reality, even the comedy I do.
And we've had this discussion. Last Man Standing.

And now when I decided to do Shifting Gears, I said, if you did another one, I said, well, I thought they were kidding.

Because I was doing Santa Claus's series at the same time they're saying, how would it do a linear TV show? Hey, look at this, by the way.

There we go. We're not screwing around.
We're not screwing around. Chuck is actually doing something over there on the show.

Something to see it come from Caroline Cassidy and Carrie Burke from 20th Century. We had lunch, and they were saying, What would you do? Caroline Cassidy,

fortunately, her family lost their home in this fire. I keep thinking about all that she's done, and just amazing that the amount of pain this has caused this business.
And they move on.

She had seen me in Vegas, and she said, I had no idea, didn't sound like a compliment. She said, I had no idea that you had this sort of impact on people.

And I said, because I've been working stand-up for years and still sell out these big venues. And she said, I just don't know it.

I said, well, my publicity people push other stuff that's not about my stand-up. And so she says, there's so many people that, and your sense of humor.
And it hasn't really been

the show is partially home improvement was based on my act. The first six episodes were my first act, my first Showtime act.
Met her pigs. Yeah.

good stuff 1990 1990 i felt terrible about myself after watching that

i love and hate men who grew up in a family seven boys and two girls so it was all about men's perspective but run by women which is life in itself so it is anyway i told these people if i did another one i want to be a widower recently widowed

And they love that because they said then we could date.

Network like that. I'm not so interested in that part of it.
I love grief as it's run my life with loss and other people's loss. I've always admired people that have lost

something deep and yet they still have a

true north.

I don't understand that. I've fought it my whole life.
And so I want to do that and then I want to be in the car restoration business because I love construction. I did that home improvement.

I love the outdoor equipment business, did that last minute. If I did it again, I want to be in restaurant rods

in this business right now where the I'm not finding the new generation that into it.

And in my case,

my shop is next to a dance academy, and I used to hate dance. I thought it was phony and stupid.
And now I've like ballet and like art. I said, that's the best of mankind.

How did that happen? Like, that's really interesting to me because

I got a riff on.

Every bad thing that's ever really happened socially starts when you take the art out of it. Yes.
Like when the vocational arts became votec,

and then shape and then shop and then whatever.

Look, when did it occur to you that maybe

the art was the thing worth saving?

There's a very poignant moment in the great film, It's a Wonderful Life, when George Bailey realizes that Uncle Billy is a terrible employee.

It's right after Uncle Billy takes a moment to gloat in front of Mr. Potter, but then stupidly leaves his newspaper behind along with $15,000 of bank deposits, which Mr.
Potter steals.

It's not long after that that poor George Bailey is standing on the bridge over the Bedford River, ready to take his own life to avoid the scandal put in motion by Uncle Billy's carelessness.

It occurred to me.

as I watched this timeless classic the other night that George could have saved himself a lot of trouble by calling Zip Recruiter and finding himself a bank clerk with the necessary temperament and experience for the job.

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Because of that, when you remove that, part of it was a bad joke, perhaps, is Stalin, I was looking at the murderers in Mao Tzi Tung.

Hitler was a child compared to those two. Mao Tzi Tung and Stalin, there was 20 million or millions and millions of people.

And I don't understand that process of a human being that gets that low and then Stalin would go kill you know I want all of them dead tomorrow and all these dead but don't touch the ballet dancers and somehow it always was weird to me that the Russians were so violent in their own people and yet oh the dance and what was it about dance and then I took my family to Francis of Versailles where I think King Louis invented the tap shoe and all that stuff and my niece is in the Washington Ballet and I said

the work these people do is amazing.

And I say this in

the only word I come is for nothing. They're just expressing, they're not using a tool.
Their body is an expression of, I don't get it. I don't get any of the opera, any of that.

But my gosh, it's these people expressing the best of creation.

Do you remember the scene in Shawshank

when Robbins locks himself in the warden's office and he plays an aria

and it's broadcast all throughout the prison and the men have never heard

this sound. They've certainly never heard opera.
I think it was Maria Callus. And they just stand there and they weep.
They don't even know why they're weeping. Exactly.

It happened to me a couple years ago, weirdly, in Vegas. I was probably just super tired after a long day of shooting, and I wound up at Cirque de Soleil.
It was a production of Ka.

And I'm just sitting there in like the fourth row, watching the body bend in ways that men can't in such an incredibly synchronized, beautifully choreographed work of deliberate art.

And I realized, God, I'm crying like a baby. Don't know why.
That to me is art. Yeah, and I said, that's, I've lost track of why we were on the subject.
I said, that's. Or your tooth and a straw.

And that's why I get, I said, oh, getting back to my show, and I said that I want it based in this, and I want the creative process. I want a contrast between the people that do resto rods.

You get the guys deep into the process that we just had, I don't know if it's a word's called, filigree, where they etched the bumper. I'm building a really

love of this project, but it's been so stressful. I'm doing a 30, 1932

Victoria Victor, I call it Coupe.

And I bought it from a guy who had it. I saw it on an auction site.
It had been in the Detroit Auto Show in the 60s, but it's been through guys' garages.

But the stance of it, I always buy stuff, the stance of this thing, I said, damn, that's nice looking.

So I took it all apart, and then I saw King, one of the English guys, had a XKE that he put an electric motor in.

And I had it all backwards. It was the inverter I was looking at.
He opened the hood, and the inverter was in there. I said, damn, that's not bad looking.
I love Big V8s.

As I'm designing it, I said, I'm going to make an electric hot rod

because it's really about the style of the body that I care about.

So this has been about a six-year project because I don't know diddly crap about electric motors and nor do most hot rodders in North Hollywood.

And the guys, the EV people in Southern California, didn't know how to speak nor did the hot rodders know how to speak to them without knowing them. It got into a

name-calling and I said, guys, this is not helpful. The hot rodders need the thing to then build around it.
EV guys, no, we need the plan first. We don't want you.

And they were just trying to protect, they'd start talking real slow. You don't understand the synchronicity of the inverter to the batteries.
Guys, love to be talked to like that, by the way.

Yeah, real, yeah. Hot rodders love that.
They love that. That little

hat them on the head sometimes.

But the art form, the guys that actually do it, now we've gotten synchronicity between the EV people so we can make it work.

That in parentheses said, now, there's a lot of batteries under my ass because it's a hot rod.

They're not the gas tank I thought in my head, you just take the ass tank out, put a battery that back there. That's for about six miles.
You have to put them under the seats. And

I'm going through technically, if these ever catch fire or arc or whatever they do, he goes, yeah, that'd be a problem.

You'd switch them off. He goes, no, it doesn't work like that.
Once they arc and they get into that, it's kind of dangerous. I said, my voice usually goes, well, I would have my kids with me.

You know, would you drive your kids in this? He goes, yeah.

And it's always that Uppenheimer moment. You know, sure.

Will it light the whole atmosphere on fire?

There's a chance it would. Can we eliminate that chance? No, there's really a, you know, we don't really know.
It was like that Higgs-Boson thing, remember?

And it's like, yeah, we're going to basically break this bead of light a couple times over, and then we're going to go ahead and collide a couple atoms. And, you know,

could be an event horizon, I suppose. Could be the end of everything.
Could be. Probably not.
I don't think so. This is, I used to do this bit on, and it was in the movie Oppenheimer.

And they did it, where they had, they said, what are the, I think Matt Damon's character. So what are the, you said, barely any chance.
Well,

it's minute. And they're arguing about it.
And they have, I think, Little John or Little Boy and Fat Man or whatever it was, the only two they made,

they never really tried them. They said, well, so it could light the atmosphere in New Mexico on fire.
He goes, could.

Probably won't. Probably could.

Is there a chance it would light all the atmosphere on fire? Well, that's an outside possibility.

So you could...

catch the

world's atmosphere on fire. And he goes, it's a very, very slight chance of that.
And then you have a bunch of guys going, ah, hell, let's try it again. And they went ahead and blew it up.

And even in the movie, they were a little too close to that thing.

The point I'm trying to make was that the art of putting stuff together, I admire.

Where you're pointed with it, why I love ballet and now I'm...

I say I love it. I still don't get it.
And it's hard to watch except with my niece. And my daughter was in dance school.
You need a docent, right? You need somebody to say, and this is why.

This is what's important to it. But mostly now I'm fascinated by the workload it takes to be able to do that.
I didn't even know those wood shoes, whatever they're called.

I didn't know that they put their foot in a wood shoe or

where they dance. They're not slippers.
It's a thing.

I didn't know that.

That's why they can spin on top. But the muscles, what it takes to do it, and why are you doing this? I have to express a movement of my body compared to music.
And I go, I find it amazing.

Like, that's why I said it's, you don't, weeping is fun. I don't cry much.
I'm not a crier, but I think, you know,

when I see something

like that that is transcendent, it's Shakespearean. It's what a piece of work is, man.
That's all. It's like, wow.
You know,

I spoke as I walked in here, as I've had between my philosophical studies,

been real intense with a bunch of my guys that we talk philosophy.

We're right back to where, and even in college, in the last triestie or whatever you do, the four-hour session, you have to give your profile. And

Dilworth, that was my professor's name, is the most depressing group of men in a room. It's like, and I'm going, were any philosophers funny? I mean, was any of these guys?

There are, currently, there are some guys, but not Schrodner or any of these guys or

Nietzsche could tell a joke. Some of them, but none of them actually, I think Wittgenstein, I think

he eventually got out of philosophy because there's no end to this.

There's no, you're asking,

just because the question exists doesn't mean there's an answer to it.

And you get into this darkness, and then I said, this whole occurrence, I call it, this emanation, I call it, is temporary. You're talking about life.

Life itself is.

And I just saw a movie, Lucy. with Scarlett Johansson, which says we're trapped by time.

There is a concept without time. That's where we emanated from.
It doesn't exist. And then the physicist in CERN, I took my younger daughter to CERN, he says, time is a construct.

There is an element in the quantum level that time is irrelevant. And I said, irrelevant? And it was called spin dynamics.

And I go, first off, I don't know what math proves this, but that's all they're doing, is slowing the spin down of a packet. That's what they call particles.

They use the word particle for your head, but there's, when you keep looking at it smaller and smaller, or scale, they call it, there's nothing there. It's a packet.

But if they slow it down, whatever the hell that means, the antiparticle also will slow down. And if you turn the particle the other direction, the other one does the opposite direction.

It's antiparticle. I said, well, that's not, I guess I can understand that.
No matter how far away the other one is. Ah.
And I said, that's exactly the noise I meant. Ah.

What does that mean, a couple miles? No, sometimes the antiparticle is several billion light years from here. And I said, first off, how do you know that? Oh, and they'd show me a blackboard.
Yeah.

Squiggles on it. Oh,

that says that.

So there's an element at the micro level, and he even said it's not even a level. We don't call it, because I said, how many miles small is a boson, Higgs boson? He goes, it's not miles.

At that point, call it scale.

But we're at zero, let's say, plus 24 is the event horizon, minus 23 zeros is a Higgs boson, they think.

And I said, so how do you know that? And what a weird world it is at the quantum level that time is irrelevant. It doesn't exist.
So then I'm starting to think

what I... is consciousness, as human consciousness is without time.
Just did it this morning. I'm conscious of a dream that a lot of things happen.

I was on a motorcade, I did something, and we went and ate,

and it was 8.08 when the kids went to school, and I was still in bed. My wife took them to school, and I said, it was 8.08, and all of a sudden, it was 8.14, and I had had a day trip.
Yeah.

So wherever that world is, I'm experiencing consciousness in a dream. It is a dream.
However, time was irrelevant. It was very manipulatable.

Just so I understand, we're talking about the events of this morning. Yes.
And you got up and you went to some philosophy group where you sat down with friends. I work out

what I'm talking about. I've got two other guys that don't like this whole thing.
I've got...

What do you mean? Don't like what whole thing? Is this determined or is it free will? This is the oldest conversation ever. Schroedner's cats, that whole thing.
Yep.

At the quantum level, it appears to be both at the same time, at the same moment. The slit experiment with light, it's particles and it's a wave.

And if it's a wave, it's predetermined that light knows where to go.

We did it on Last Man Standing because it was in the movie Arrival, where the aliens didn't understand anything that that woman was saying. And she says, I got 30%.
We just have no background.

But they did, what is it, boil? When you stick a pencil in water,

it bends. No matter what water, no matter what pencil, no matter what time of day, the light immediately goes the fastest direction.
Never been in that water, but it always goes the fastest direction.

The formation of thought is that light has already been everywhere. It's timeless.
And so the aliens in that movie said, yeah, we understand that. And that was this thing about.

That was Jody Foster, right? Rosalie? No, no, no. Amy Adams.
Oh, right. Yeah.
That was a good one. Yes.
And so

in that...

In my brother in the philosophy guy, no, but I can make a decision. I have free will.
I said, it does appear that way. They say, Why do you say it like that? He says, Because I can't.

I went and edited a film once in college, and the best-looking girl in school finally responded to me.

I was a geeky kid with zits, and half into the weightlifting thing with the football team, and half with the geeks. And I loved industrial art, so I was all over the school.

But this girl, I made friends with her mother, is what you do when you want to get her mother. He is such a kind boy.
I would go to their house and help clean up stuff.

And at one point, she got, why don't you come over tonight? And I went, I can't believe it. I'll be over there after I edit this film.

And if you've ever edited a film, pretty soon I'm done. Oh, God, it's 3 a.m.

And she's pissed because she never showed up. And I've always wondered what would have happened had I not edited that film and gone to her house.
Sliding doors. Sliding doors.

And I said, to my buddies, it's impossible.

Metaphorically, there's no way to, I can't go back and do it. Then it would be going back and it'd be doing it a different way.
Sure. And I said, so there is a potential that it

is both. Now, there's an old, I believe it's mystical Judaism.
I think it was what, a Kabbalah thing I'd read.

Guy goes out of an office building. There's a homeless guy sitting

on the side.

The first go-round, guy goes out, ignores them. I don't want to deal with homeless people.
I've got my own life.

And he walks out, and there's a pillar, a light post, and there's a doctor between him and the light post across the street. He walks out, gets hit by a car.

Because the pillar was there, the doctor didn't see any of it. He walked around the corner.
And he gets hit, not gravely injured. Second guy goes out and at least looks at the guy

and says hello, you know, he says, you know, I don't, but he pauses a minute. This time, the doctor now can see all this, hears the noise, comes across and helps him.

Third guy goes out and helps the guy, misses all the drama. And he said, so those three

choices could exist temporally

in different worlds.

Every decision you make, free will, is another world. And deja vu is when one crosses the other one.
You come back and go, I've been here, I've done this before. If you go, this is a

mystical religious idea. If you go by the will of the emanation, where the emanation comes from, is kindness.
Love conquers all.

That love might be and consciences might be eternal. They don't have any time frame to them.

And if you go with what they try to say in religion, help somebody, be there, extend yourself, then that will, you go by that will and things will go better for you.

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No, I've been doing this as a I've been a religious kid because I was forced to as a kid and then spent some time incarcerated, so I had to search, you know, why is this, it wasn't even just me, why do horrible things happen to good people?

What is that all about? That's the essential one.

I just don't know that. And then I was given a little message, and it's actually the book of Job, which cut to.
I don't even know where that's from. And

this has been a year, almost a little over a year. I read the

Aramaic, French, Latin, and Greek versions of the Old Testament page by page. I put it down if I drift.
I got all the way through the Old Testament.

I'm four pages into the New Testament as of this morning. Reading it as a scientist, is what one of two guys told me, a priest and a rabbi.
EXE, let the words come to you. Do not look for meaning.

It will come to you. And all of that, it's been life-changing.
I mean, I can't believe it's not what I thought it was. The Bible is not what I thought it was.
It's very little preachy stuff.

You know, it's mostly the Torah is about law.

You know? Consequence. Yeah, law and consequence and all this.
And the book of Job is the one that affected me most. And even in this version, they're not sure where that was even written.

It might have been written way before the Old Testament. This whole story about a guy who asked the emanation, why are you so mean to me?

And I said this one time in a

prison, you know, I was doing a shop thing, I was cleaning up, and I said, I saw some of the meanest people that were treated well and some of the nicest people treated horribly.

And I just never got that. And I got this kind of wind.

I said, listen, you keep asking me this question, I'm going to tell you, and I guarantee you're not going to like the answer. And that was Job.
It was a reminder of a short story I'd done.

Magician, when I was on the road early and doing comedy, we'd open for magicians or strippers. I actually preferred magicians because it was more fun to watch.

After a while, you watch strippers, it's like working in a chocolate factory. You're just kind of bored with chocolate.
I get it. You got the boobs bouncing.
I get it

with the pole and all that. But magician.
It's a good trick. A good trick.
Oh, what is that?

And I asked Mark Kornhaus, with this magician, I said, he would rip a newspaper into all these pieces, and then he goes, and it's all back together and I'm

my God that's magic he's really a magician so I'd ask him

can you show me how you do that he goes no but it was so direct yeah come on I'll pay you no

I'm not paying D I'm not showing you magic trick it's and it's the same line he goes if I showed you

several things are going to happen you're going to go

That's stupid.

And then magic will no longer mean the same to you. And that story kept back with the story of Job.
If you ask the emanation why this is like it is, first off, you're going to go, what?

You won't understand anything. And in that book of Job,

one variation,

the emanation very rarely talks to humans because it's like speaking to an ant. You can't understand anything, it says.
And it said, listen, do you understand why the waves stop at the shore?

Probably not. Do you understand why birds fly at a certain time of day, but not others? No.
You know, part of the planet is frozen solid.

Do you know the stars all move in the same direction? Do you know any of that? You weren't here when I started it. You weren't here when I created this.
You weren't here for any of this?

And this is the first question you want to know is why did you do this?

I'm so angry. I want to split you into little pieces.
But my anger is mitigated by my amazement that you do. That's the thing about man.

There's something about Joe I liked, that whole story, that as dumb as we are, we do ask some amazing. Stubborn son of a gun to us.
We are

stubborn son of a gun. And we add, why is this and how can I help? If you add that to that.

Why is this and how can I help? Why is it and how can I help?

I think the magic thing is super interesting, both in the context of your career and your philosophy and in everything you're saying, because

I went down deep a YouTube rabbit hole the other day. Have you seen, I think it's Card tricks by Jason Chuck, the stuff I send you? Oh, yeah.
Love that.

This guy, if you haven't seen him, Tim, I'll send you a link.

It's card tricks. It's sleight of hand.
Yes. But it's so good.
So good. But the context, like, you know, he is a master of ledger domain.
You know.

It's just like the Cirque de Soleil. It's just like the art we're talking about.

He's human and he's doing a thing that you can't do. But

forget the context and imagine having that skill throughout the long history of time and imagine being able to show somebody a thing, not in the context of a magician, but of a firebringer, a god, right?

Wow.

What choice do we have as mere mortals when confronted with something so outside our bounds of imitation or comprehension that to accept that, yeah, this is a superior being or this is a different kind of being.

They're not.

They can just do a thing we can't do. But if it's not for the magician construct, we're not capable of thinking about it in that way.

Make any sense? Yeah, I call them naturals.

You meet people that have an ability that's

almost an anti-constitution thing. We all are created equal.
We are not.

I've had naturals in my life. Where did you get that ability? Where did that come from? Why is that different from the dancers that are the best of the best? I have.
My agent is a Stanford,

got a scholarship

for golf. Within three weeks of being at Stanford, he realized he's never going to be golfing like the guys that...
that he's golfing with.

I was a race driver for Ford on Trans Am for about six years, and I took a whole bunch of big movie producers out to Willow Springs here to just goof around with some of my race cars.

And I took some famous director, and two of them were so slow that the guy said,

I think we're going to put you in a kid's car. And they weren't being joking.
And the guy was such a formidable director. He went, I would like that.

He wants to go. And the other guy who's directed big films, never been in a race car.
He was two seconds faster than me immediately. Never been in a race car.

It's so humiliating to see a guy have a natural ability. People that paint or fix or that some,

I find that formidable about in what is their vent to the source. I've often said humbly, when I'm killing in a big audience, this is not coming from me.

I'm working it. I'm riding this.
I don't know what political, religious persuasion I really am.

Because the more I look at the emanator,

I tag it, I make names, and I go through these whole things. It's in a big chair and it's got a beard for some reason.
It looks like Father Time.

If it doesn't have a beard, you have no idea, I keep saying to,

as though it's saying to me, you have no idea how big I am. Right.
And how insignificant you are, and yet you have a capacity to go, yeah, I think I get it.

You know,

I'm bigger than big. I'm past big.
I invented big. I invented everything.
You will sit there and go, all right.

I think I got it. It's like infinity.
It's like, well, here's what it is. Right? It's like, okay, I got it.
I got it. No, actually, you don't.
You don't got it. You don't have it.

And then you'll step back from there and go, oh, I get it. Okay.
I don't have it.

You know, I got it once. I was talking to you earlier about this show, How the Universe Works, which I've been narrating forever.

Like every episode, both is a reminder that nobody's getting out of this live. And.
Oh, I've got to go back to that.

Okay, thanks a lot. I'm going to go have a hamburger.

And why not?

We're trapped by the language. We only know what we think things mean based on our understandings of the words we think we know.

If you think there's life on other planets,

then you have to be prepared to accept that there is life on an infinite number of planets. Because

in an infinite universe, there is infinite life by definition.

And so it's really interesting when people are making an argument for, well, yeah, look, the universe is so big that there has to be life somewhere else. It'd be crazy if it was just this.

So at least one other place. But it's like, no, no, no.

If your argument is it's got to be at least in one other place because it's infinite, then ipso facto, there has to be life in an infinite number of other places because that's what infinite means.

Infinite can't catch up to infinite ever.

Again, this is CERN. The The guy, this is my other group of physicists that are working on.
I can't remember what they're doing now. They're all working in New York on something.
I can't remember.

No way.

Sidebar. My other group of physicists.
Well, some of these guys. What's really happening with you? I don't understand what's going on.

There's some guys I've met when I went to CERN, and then there's some guys that I've met because of that that are doing stuff that happen to have physics backgrounds.

And I said, so they all will reach out at certain times.

And then a lot of doctors I know are kind of physics heads. Like we're all thinking about

why are we not figuring out breast cancer in women? It's like there's a whole bunch of us going,

I need physicists and working men to think about it.

Take it outside of the people. I can't stand that this many women are suffering from this, mothers, family, friends.
And then why are we not focusing on that?

when

what's the lack of focus on that in what I said? You got to bring in in sometimes my mechanics, if they looked at the problem,

and I've done this to my doctors many times, is what if another guy looked at what you're looking at? Would they come up with another solution?

It's another version of eyes.

What's today's? I think I told you the harvest is great, but there's not enough farmers. Workers.
There's sheep or

sheep and shepherds. And I said, I'm missing that problem solvers, which is what I've been such a fan of yours, because that's where your your head is.
You know, dirty jobs.

I loved how you looked at things, because you've got a sense of humor and you're self-effacing, that's the character that's wonderful.

The fact that you're the type of guy that gives credit to these people that fix stuff, and these are the people that don't need any credit. That's the weird thing.

I went to a Medal of Honor dinner. It was five, I believe, surviving Medal of Honor winners and two Victoria Cross guys.
And

My youngest daughter, my wife, and I, you're speechless. The thought process of these guys, well, I'm not going to leave the guys there to get killed.
Right.

But you don't know how to fly a helicopter. No, I figured it out.
I took it back in there. And he took it back in Vietnam, a hill, if I got it right, that was compromised by a Viet Cong.

It had gotten involved in the radio operator, and they had ratted him out. So the Viet Cong surrounded him with, I think, 14,000 or 5,000 troops.
They had 1,200 on top of the hill.

They said, we had position, but because they were so close, we artillery couldn't help us. So we were getting surrounded.
And

so

we were flying people in and out.

I got shot five times, but the helicopter pilot got hurt. And I said, I'm not leaving these guys there.
And I go,

I would run screaming like a hyena. And you went, oh boy, I wonder how these work.
And so you got to pull this, and then the Trump. And he figured it out, went back and saved numerous guys.

And I saw these different guys that fix shit, fix stuff, look,

and I get, I guess, who are these?

How do I

become better at it? How do I motivate other people?

So many mechanics in my group that I like this, an Armenian guy in North Hollywood. The car will come in, and he just stands there going like this.

It's not where you think. He calls it transference.
Generally, where the noise is, isn't what the problem is. It's something on the other side of the car is doing this and it's causing it to do this.

And that guy is so freaking good at.

It's like Dr. House.
Yeah. It's like you're diagnosing a sick person.
Right. Same chip.
Yeah,

look, what happened two weeks prior to this? What?

What does that have to do? And my physician, who I love that, we'd sometimes we'd talk in the examination room for my physical and I'd walk out and I'd go, Did I get a physical?

He goes, I think we forgot. Because we're both talking about

our last one that we both got off track and got into another surgeon that he got me with, do viruses speak to each other?

That was after COVID. And he said, no.
The virologist said that's not possible. And I said, what's a mutation? What motivates a mutation? Nothing.
It mutates.

I know, but it was moving in a direction, let's say, and then it mutated at one point. So

it.

decided to go left instead of straight.

It mutated because it had a, he said, it mutates generally because the cell figures out that's not friendly and they have this handshake, some genetic handshake.

He goes, yeah, it's called levo, something, some word, but bacteria will know because they fight viruses all the time. He goes, yeah, they don't like each other.
Well, let's use the human terms.

But it knocks on the cell wall, and the virus can figure out how to get in. They're manipulated.
They're not parasitic in a way. They're not, you know, they don't,

like alien. They don't turn it in.
I don't know what they actually do. They're not living like bacteria.
Bacteria actually eat and poop. Right.

But they get into the bacteria, and within a short period of time, the bacteria, before it dies, is able to send a chemical signal to all other bacteria that they've been compromised.

So bacteria will change their coding. Sure.
And he says, yeah. Like evolutionary biology.
However, the virus then knows it's been compromised. He goes,

oh, God. And he started to go, yeah.
So the virus then tells other viruses that's that we got to come up with another signal. And he goes, let me get back to you.

He comes back a couple days later, goes, this is not new thought. He goes, it's new for me as a virologist.
I didn't know that they're actually beginning to think, I think, what is it?

It's called virus. It's Lynn Margolis.
I hope I got the right book. It's about that.

That viruses may speak, communicate

on a wavelength we don't even understand. Maybe it's a hive mentality, but why do they mutate? It's not chance.
They're not working, so it changes its direction.

That means it was aware in a weird sense that something happened. So I bring it up to these

the philosophy part of people, the problem-solving thing, that's philosophy. You just wonder why this happens.
The problem with philosophy with me is that you get to

literally some guys, like I think it was Wittgenstein, it was a linguist philosopher. He says, I don't know that you visually

are understanding anything that I say. Right.

I don't know in your head, yeah, when I say orange, if I was in your head, I'd go, what are you looking at? That's a monkey's ass. See, that's not an orange.
It could be an orange monkey's ass.

Well, bamboos definitely have that weird ass shape, whatever that's all about. But it's the,

I mean,

sticking with philosophers, it's Kierkegaard, right? It's the

unexamined life. Yes.
It's not worth living. And sitting here with you now, man, it's clear, I don't know how long you've been this curious a cat

to bring Schrödinger back into it, but

you seem to be really, really kind of centered around

something other than comedy. Is it curiosity?

Okay,

only ten more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line,

but first

There,

the last one.

Enjoy a Coca-Cola for a pause that

refreshes.

Not even generally. My father was killed

by a drunk driver when I was 11 years old.

I realized it at a neighbor's house. I had the University of Colorado football game.
He took all my other brothers and a bunch of carload of kids.

Luckily, he was the only one killed, but he died in my mother's lap. My other two brothers were thrown around the car.
A lot of kids were hurt. He wasn't.

And then I'm walking down to my house, knowing something terrible had happened, even though I didn't do it. I'm praying, weeping.
I said,

I will eat vegetables, whatever is a kid. Just make that whatever is going on, this is terrible.
I will do my homework or what. I was walking down, and none of that happened.

I get to the house, there was police and my uncle was there, said, man up, you know, your mom needs you right now. So no crying, none of that.
How old are you at this point? 11.

And I walked there and the whole time I'm going, huh,

literally as a boy for your fad, he was a great dad, love of my life, I said, this doesn't make any sense. I don't like this.

And everybody's answer was,

And he was a funny guy. And everybody, as I look back, did the best they could.
The priest said he's in a better place. My first reaction was, then why are we in the shithole?

Why are we just start there?

And it never got answered. You know, he was carrying a bourbon around.
I don't know. But he never had the right answer.
I don't think he knows.

Why is this? What's this? That never stopped. The pain of it never stopped.
The discomfort of it. I took for many years I didn't care.
This is meaningless because at any point,

like the aliens in that movie Arrival, Ted Chang, I think, wrote the book. I know he did.
Wrote a series of books about that.

If the aliens live their lives knowing the end of their life, they know that I'm going to die in this time.

And to the humans, that's terrifying to know that. It would change everything.

To the aliens' point of view, well, how do you live not knowing one minute to the next if you're going to live?

They were terrified of us. How do you deal with that? And this is what I kept thinking too.
So we were terrified by the certainty of knowing when our death ended.

And they're terrified by the uncertainty of not knowing. Yeah, and all of a sudden I said, you know what?

I kind of see where you're going with that. And I said, I don't think either one's good.

I asked Amy Adams at a premiere of it,

because in the story, she let her daughter.

In the book, it's tremendous. They weave all these stories in where she got a 21-year-old daughter, and you're watching, but she can't have a 21-year-old daughter.
She's a young scientist.

And he really realized that she's starting to see her future. The more she spends time with these aliens and her daughter dies in the book about 22 in a hiking accident in Tibet.

And I asked her, so you know the future and your daughter is going to die.

Would you have that daughter? And she said,

It was worth the love I had for her while she was here. And I said, it's inherently,

my view, it's inherently selfish. Right.

So why not just conceive the girl two seconds later or not have, don't have sex that night with that husband?

You get a different girl. You get a different girl.
So you do lose her,

but you lose her a different way. Now you don't know how she's going to die.
And that whole thing of certain, of knowing that. And she never had the 20 years.
Yeah. At all.
At all.

So I get where she's coming from. So if you know the outcome, would you still do it, know that they suffered at the end, but you had the 20 years? It's a real quandary about,

and again, this is a philosophical guide that said the universe isn't expanding. The physicists I talked to said it's just getting more complex.
We call it expanding because it makes sense to

you people.

It's easier to understand. It's not growing.
It's just learning more about it. It gets more and more complex as we learn about it.

That whole process started me on asking questions, generally getting no answers. That said,

shop teachers always had an answer.

Right. Put your hands down, stop asking, figure it out.

That's all you can do. And I used to love that about shop teachers.
I used to love that.

Yeah, yeah, that's great. All right.
So just put,

this does, it's worthless. Engaging.
Well, it's worthless without this, and this is really worthless without that. Yes.
It's two sides of the same coin. And that's where I reckon we're out of whack.

And that's why I do what I do.

I'm just trying to get some equilibrium back in the world where the reverence that you clearly feel for people who are capable of flying a helicopter who weren't trained to fly one.

I'm gobsmacked by that as well. But that's adjacent to putting up drywall that's perfectly plumbed.
Exactly. And laying pipe that's perfectly laid, if you will, and so forth.
Like, there's majesty.

I mean, I talked to a Medal of Honor winner as well not long ago, and it's the same thing, man. Like, there's a weird obviousness with which they respond to questions that we don't take,

that we don't think are obvious at all. Well, clearly, I'm not going to leave the guys behind.
The guy,

one of the SEALs, they're shooting in Afghanistan.

When they got, I love military strategy. I was a strategy guy.
It was all supply lines to me. The most boring part of it is, where are they getting the tires? Quartermasters.

Where are they getting ball bearings? And I opened that up and my admiral friends in the Navy said, we learned that early in the war. We started bombing German factories.
They had no ball bearings.

And they tended to use stuff that was very maintenance heavy. Excuse me, but if you're keeping track, he's got the admiral friends, he's got the physicist friends, he's got the doctor friends.

These people exist in small groups that are unknown to people.

This is so interesting.

What are you, 71?

Okay, so you're 11 and your dad dies in your mom's lap, and you come face to face with the uncertainty of the universe.

The meanness of it. The arbitraryness.
Arbitrary meanness of it. The graciousness of it.
Because it says you, and literally the emanation is saying you don't want to, you don't understand.

You don't understand anything. You don't understand.
You will understand pain, but you're going to need,

I think it's like

I love knife sharpening. I just love it.

I've always been fascinated by knives, and

I've gone to three different companies. I went to a butcher, they're a

fishery, and they were slicing up fish.

I hate fish, fishing, but I love, they were slicing up, I go, but to cut through fish skin and to fish so it goes like butter, I go, where are you getting these knives?

Stop, stop, stop. Why do you have to interrupt your story to tell me you hate fish? Well, I just, I'm not a fisherman.
I don't, just the whole thing. I'm not, I eat them.
I like them

kind of.

You don't dream of fish. No, and I have so many fisherman friends.
They just love the fish. Your fisherman group.
Adjacent to the outdoor group.

I have the outdoor group I love that go hunting and they fish. And I used to sell Orvis rods at this outdoor shop.
I learned how to fly fish to have to demonstrate. And so I knew how to do it.

I know how to shoot guns and binoculars and all that, but I don't like this. However, the knife sharpening, in order to sharpen a knife, you have to hurt the knife.

And if you keep it honed,

you can extend it without,

if you will, causing pain. Once a knife gets dull,

honing a knife, the first thing is

it's a rough stone and it takes off a little bit of the,

I mean, microscopically, if I got it right, the good blades just bend microscopically.

You want to bring it back up. If it bends too far, you have to get a new edge.
And that's life, in a sense, is honing. There's going to be some pain in it.
Eventually, you will cut through this thing.

You'll appreciate this. A couple months ago, a guy sat right there named Josh Smith.
Josh runs the Montana Knife Company. I don't know of a better bladesmith in the country right now.

He's incredible, a true artist. Everything we've been talking about, this guy personifies.

His knives aren't cheap, and he started offering a lifetime guarantee on his knives. And

he offered to sharpen the knife for his customers, for the lifetime of the knife, or his lifetime. And I'm like, that just seems like

an awful lot of

maintenance after the sale, but no one does it. And he says, no one does it.
And here's the thing, ma'am. No one does it right.
Right.

And I didn't think to ask him about it in in the conversation.

I wish I would have because part of me feels like if we have the facility and the wherewithal to buy a knife, but we don't have the capacity to care for it properly, maybe we shouldn't own it.

But this guy's in the knife-selling business. So it's like, well, no, that's not really going to work.
So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to sharpen it for you.

And then that makes me think about all the other ways, well-intended makers of things,

right? We can't really trust the consumer to fix that blender because you're just too freaking stupid. You don't have the patience or the intellectual curiosity or bandwidth.

So we're just going to make it out of one piece of extruded plastic. And it works until somebody like you comes along who's like, no,

that actually offends me because

you're still clinging to the uncertain universe where you get to put your hands on a thing and make it better. That's the war we're in right now.

Those are the two different types of people walking around. They want their knives sharpened for them or they want to do it themselves.
I just read this.

If you were to go back in time, could you help them at all? And that is nothing, if I went back 100 years, I would say, we have these things that are, oh, they're phones.

We have a machine. No, that's a freaking blender.
So there's really nothing I could help them.

And in reverse, if you've got someone from way back, 200 years ago, if the only thing they'd recognize here is

a fruit market and a cobbler, and there aren't any cobblers left, I I cannot find other than rare here in Los Angeles someone that will fix a shoe because everybody wears tennis shoes now.

And I have some leather shoes and I had a brand of Sidewalk. It's a group, they handmade shoes in Sherman Oaks.

And you can't, even in Mexico, I have home in Mexico and I'd think they look at it and they go, we can't fix this. You just buy another one.
I said,

I'm now stubborn about that. I don't want to buy another one.
What would it take to fix this? What would it take to fix,

boy, that blender started me on my washer dryer.

I said, but the washer dryer is a motor. We used to do this as kids.

They used to leave them on the sidewalk. And a buddy of mine, Mick Hershley, he go,

the armature, it's got two, the early ones were just electric motor and tons of tumbler, but it's like two ball bearings that go. Yeah.
Then it starts wobbling, and then it starts making that noise.

As you pull that out, put a bearing in, put it back in, There's not much to go wrong with a washer. Yeah.

And he said, so we do that in news. So we had one in our house, and it was doing.
Then the guy said, Yeah, it's going to go. I said, You know what? This isn't that old.
You're in the warranty.

And I didn't know that I was, so I said I wasn't. He goes, Yeah, it's just cheaper to replace it.
Cheaper to replace it. Ping, king, king.
This is all metal. The drum is metal.
This is metal.

What are we replacing? And it's that

digital dashboard. Yeah.

And I said, so we took it apart, went to the shop. It's a

circuit board. And it used to be the circuit boards were all on the back were little welds, not welds, but solders.

You solder two things together. Now it's all that's all internalized.

They don't let you repair it. Because generally what's wrong with that washing machine is that circuit board, one of those solders broke and it's dead or it won't dry or it won't do the cycling.

So this whole thing is useless. All the work, all the people that made it is worthless because of a little solder joint and you don't want to fix it.
And he goes, it's just cheaper, sir.

We'll just get you another one. And then I came up with, you know, I found I do have the warranty.
He goes, yeah, I don't, I'll fix it then. Because

if you we if you at that point made a

Lowe's or whoever did it, if they have to replace it, they will fix that circuit board. But I don't even know if they make the circuit boards replaceable anymore.

i don't think the company that makes them i don't think they

yeah i'm gonna stick with my metaphor man

we all want a knife and we don't know how to sharpen them and we're like what you said but i'm uncomfortable with where it's headed i go to change my life i took richard carner and i did for the history channel um

how thing

break things i don't know what we called it it was a great show went to dwp which i've always disliked i don't know why i've disliked them because it never seems like they do their job department of of Water and Power?

Yeah, I go down there, completely turned me around. How hard these guys work.

The people, not the guys on the Diaz telling why, well, the water system doesn't work in Los Angeles. That guy probably has never worked on it.

It's much more complex how they get the water to us. It's much more complex about the maintenance.

The vision for it

is different than the guys, the men and women that were down there working. I said, we're not making a generation of people that find this admirable.
Yeah. We can't live without these people.

You know, they can't live with them.

They were making the trusses that were the high voltage wires. Of course, me, I'm going, why do they look so ugly? You know, because in Sweden they make them look like dinosaurs or branches.

He goes, we don't have that. That's the functional.
That's what it looks like functionally with the bolts standing that kind of rusted.

You see the high tension. The United States doesn't, we don't, there's not a designer who goes, you could use, you could make a bend.
Where's the form? Yeah, it's just function. Well,

they just don't do it. But the guy was, they was on a, God, I got the name probably wrong.
It used to be Heidelberg with these presses.

It's a press that makes the parts that make the press, that make the press, that make the press.

It's a turning wheel that's

making the case that holds the bearing for the armature at the dam.

It's such a huge machine. And I go, God, that's beautiful.
And he he goes, it's 1939. They do not make them better.
There's nothing wrong with that machine.

You buy those big turning wheels or presses. They made them in 39 and they don't make them any better and they don't repair them.
And the pieces,

the guy was 68 years old, fit. He goes, every day I finish something.

Every day I advance. DWP's ability to do what we do.
And everybody in this place is all alert. And I used to work at Turret Lathe.
Hated it

because it's repetitive. I don't know.
This they fix one thing at a time. And when they do those turning wheels, that has to be so precise because it goes into a sleeve, and then a bearing the size of

a ranch goes in there. And then the armature goes in at this Costiac Lake Dam.
When I saw,

who makes this stuff? Who are the people that make that armature

that goes in? That has to be, it can't wobble.

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I'll tell you, I don't know about the armature, but the ball bearings that you keep mentioning.

I was in business a couple years ago with Federal Mogul, who owns everybody from ANCO to Champion Sparks. Is that Detroit? It's Federal Mogul.
They're out.

Well, it's Carl Icon now, and they're everywhere.

Federal Mogul, if you look at all the brands they own, you start to understand the totality of the automotive supply chain and just how vast it's its own universe.

One of the many companies in that universe is called Moog.

M-O-O-G. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Moog, they're down in Boaz, Alabama, and they invited me down there probably

six years ago to celebrate their 100th anniversary. And Tim, it's enormous.
All they make are ball bearings. Big ones, little ones, medium-sized.
A little bigger than medium.

Nothing in this country runs without ball bearings. It's all ball bearings.
It's in a town most people can't find on a map. They've been at it a hundred years,

right?

And the pride in this factory,

it was like watching that Cirque de Soleil thing in a different way. It was just watching people

so

focused

on one part of their job. And the number of jobs required to get a perfectly round, stainless steel ball bearing to spec,

it's only everything.

Right? Right. And nobody knows about it.
That's how I felt. I left the DWP completely a fan of that

water and power. I'm just, what they do,

they're not the leaders. And it's like the Medal of Honor guy says, well, you should be a leader.
He goes, no, I don't want to do that. I don't.
I like to be told. He didn't say it like this.

I do what I'm told. And I do that very well.
And I said, but I'm not, because we're just missing the leadership.

I don't find leadership where a guy was like you, because I remember my uncle worked for Ford Tractor when Ford used to make tractors, and he was a deadline foreman, but he was actually, he'd step in now and then he was hands-on.

Eventually he got so good, they moved him, and he said that was the death of him. They moved him into a white collar upstairs, and he was away from the factory.

And that transition from the people that do the stuff I think of in the military, I think of more corporals, sergeants, lieutenants, and captains, maybe captains.

Because I don't know that the captain goes into battle.

Typically, no. That's when it ends, and you don't want your best guy in battle.
You kind of want him telling the other guys.

But that transition is where I find a vacancy right now, both sometimes studio, creative, all the,

I call them

the guys that get shit done.

In my business, a line producer. Yeah.

In Vegas, I got to give it to a pit boss. It's a pit boss.
Pit boss. I don't.
Pit bosses, I always said they should have a pit boss in D.C.

So he just walks around the Congress and he taps a guy on the shoulder.

Step away, step away. And another congressman sits down.
But he doesn't say anything bad about what he does. He goes,

come on, come on.

Stop for a minute. Got to go outside.
Get the congressman from Tennessee. Sit there.
There you go.

And we're gonna do this don't you see how like similar that is to when we started this conversation like the armenian you were describing you know the diagnostic guy who just walks in and just kind of looks at the

yeah

no okay right they're assessors assessors but he's done the other part of it and like you gave me credit and i said when i raced i still think i'm good at it i don't take credit for it because it it isn't me

even in the race car I'd go, I think we got brakes in a bias problem in the left rear. And he goes, I don't think so.
And I said,

I generally write. And I have a big car collection and I'll drive them.
And we have two mechanics.

We're using my car collection now in shifting gears, which is amazing because now

that it circles around too. When they were writing it, they go, well, have the guy come in and it'll be smoking.
I go, man.

If it's smoking, it ain't going to be in the shop. It would be outside.
Well, we want it in the shop to get the gag. I said, I get that.
Not going to happen. He wouldn't drive it in if it's broken.

But that's what I meant before when I was trying to compliment you. It's like the writers are looking for a moment, a scene, but you're bringing something.

If it doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense. You know, I get it.

That's annoying in your industry. You're probably very annoying to a lot of people.
Oh, you don't know.

The point I'm trying to make is whether I go to Boaz, Alabama, you know, and spend a day day filming these people who nobody's ever paid any attention to before, you know, to do something nice about the business of making ball bearings, or whether you're, like, you keep doing the same kind of show,

like you change the title every few years. And that's what I've been doing.
It's a dirty job. Somebody's got to do it.
Returning a favor. It's all,

hey, man, get a load of this guy. I know.
Doing this thing in real life. You're doing the same thing with scripts.
I didn't realize it until I met you, actually, and until we worked together.

And since then, I've been watching you a lot. And you're tortured.
You're a jagged little pill. You ask these big questions, and you're still pushing the rock up the hill,

making sitcoms that actually

have something really at their core that's pretty great.

Well, I appreciate that. And I said,

There's something

authentic about having an audience. It's like doing theater,

doing a movie, but a live audience. And even the older guys, this last week we finished our sixth episode for this first season, and the guy says, isn't this amazing? And this is the line producer.

There's live people laughing at what we're doing over here. And we're both standing there.
It was a scene that I wasn't in. I said, this is why I love doing this.
And I said,

the gravity of a studio, and I love the new brass at Disney ABC and 20th, which is a big business.

There's so many of them there's yeah there's so many involved in the decision and you don't have unfortunately I look back at some of the pioneers we just talked about this last night a lot of the pioneers were flawed people sure and we don't want flawed people working so we've done this this thing where you take the flaws out of people so everybody has got this

check boxes they've got the right education, the right look, the right sensibility, but they don't have that like some of the,

some of the major players, will not mention names, out of respect for their families, they were just decisively unattractive people.

But they did the job well. These are big, big, big guys

that worked in the industry, and they had vision. I was looking at the, where did the Ford Mustang come from? Leah Coca.
I'm not sure it was Leiacoca. He was probably,

and I knew him, and he was head of the department at at Ford, but it was a guy in Ford that said, what if we took the Ford Falcon and did this to it? I don't know, because I don't know.

Bill Collins was a friend of mine from northern Michigan, and he was involved in the GTO. Now, he didn't get the Pontiac GTO, if I'm not being clear enough.
And it was, DeLorean took credit for that.

Because it was DeLorean's point of view.

It probably was you got a guy. I hope his name is right.
Tim Kaczynski. I hope I did it right.
For Dodge, who'd made

all the

Unabomber.

Could have been.

You know, he did get out of jail. Unfortunate moniker.
Well, no, oh God, I hope I got his name right. But he was the head of Dodge.
I think he's moved on. He did the demons and all.

He was the kind of guy that

said, huh, I wonder what would happen if we put a 900 horsepower V8 into that car.

And there'd be most people go, why would you do that? That'd be horrible. Gas and everything else.
I just wonder what would happen. I did this to

years ago. I got the opportunity to build a lake home.
And once I started to make enough money, I wanted, I've been through boats, a 14-foot boat.

Don't like fishing, but I like going fast on the water.

28-foot, then I got a 34-foot. Now I wanted one that I could...

like an RV, so you have to get three cabins in it. So it was a 60-foot boat.
Still have it. Went to Italy to buy it.
And I'm in there going,

the only reason the Italian Uniesi built it, because they're the only yacht company in the world that will make a custom-made yacht under 100 feet. Yeah.

We do whatever the customer want, unless they don't like it. That's the Italian way of doing that.
We do whatever you want, anything you want, but we don't do blue.

That was literally three weeks of me arguing with it. We used to do whatever I want.
We see. It's like every great Italian restaurant I've ever been.

You can have anything you want, as long as it's this and this, because that's what we're cooking. And so I said, what are the engines? It's Cat, I got probably of the nomenclature incorrect.

Was it cat 780s or something?

One of my buddies, I did a whole show for Caterpillar comedy show, and for trade, I get one of the engines. Yeah, instead of my pay, I got one engine.
I said, What's the 760s?

And he says, Well, 760-horse diesel. I said, What's the one above that?

And then the cat had a cat at that time. So, Tim, no.

There's a guy in the room I hear going, Well,

who just said, Well,

what is it? Oh, the 810s.

It will fit. Oh, good, great.
What's above the 810? Tim, we're not going there. And the same dude goes, well,

who's the guy that says, well, who says, what would it be like? Let's forget. And so 1160s, they have to put the turbo on the back.

They had to switch some pumps, but it's basically the same block, just a different head on it. It's cut to I've got.
Instead of 1,400 horsepower, I've got 3,200 horsepower, the two biggest engines.

I told Kat, don't do the yellow. Let's do something cool called Kat Marine.

For all your boats, it would be a big bubble, like you're looking through a bubble. It says Kat Marine.
And all the young people loved it. And Kat goes,

we don't need comedians rebranding Caterpillar. I said, I'm not a comedian here.
I'm an old designer from college. Anyway, I got those in the car, in the boat.

The downside is I didn't understand power to weight ratio of diesels. I did know that diesels don't like to be pegged.
Diesels don't like flooring them. They like, you know, 800, 900 RPM.

They don't like,

and the guy said at one point, I've run out of fuel a lot. He goes, you ever see GPH? Did you see that gauge? That's gallons per GPM or gallons per minute or hour.

And I go, no, because it doesn't work. No, because it's pegged.
Every time

you floor these things and it is a fast, huge boat. All the captains that have taught me, I now can captain myself.
the diesels really don't like running like this and I've now learned that I've beat

I've popped filters and stuff like that and

she got two of these engines on a boat at your lake house uh-huh well like on Lake Michigan on Michigan yeah I just you know you just kind of glossed over it but I'm stuck on this you basically worked for an engine

like Yeah, keep your money. Just give me one of the engines.
Yeah, I did. Well, they're a lot of money.

I'm just saying it's. The big diesels, and they said, we'll do a custom-made, work with Uniesi, and we'll send them, but one will be on us.
And they

blueprinted them both. Yeah.

Both of them. And they're white.
They're only two cats that are white. And I will give nothing but kudos to that company.
That company does things right.

I've been working with them for 12 years, probably. I go to Con Expo every year in Vegas.

That company takes quality correct. They take,

what I've heard, they have mechanics are married to the Apple Machines, and they have a, they've come out when we need them. They've been.
It's such a history, man. That company is...

Can't find workers.

They are all the time, all the time looking for machinists. Machinists.
And they have, you know, it's a franchise model, and there's something like a dozen cat franchisees.

that are billion-dollar companies in and of themselves. They're so big and they're so massive and they're so always

hiring. And it's just one of those brands.
You don't see them advertised much because all you have to do is drive around and like, oh, yellow iron. I remember those guys.

I don't know how they compete with, you know, that our

weird competitor, China,

because I don't know the details of it. I know what.

Friends of mine have dealt with them on a large scale.

And I know a comedy joke I did with some military guys, they said, so they don't want to pay for the plans to the, whatever they call the their version of the 737. Right.

And they said, well, we made it better.

Yeah,

made it better. You didn't have an airliner until you took Boeing's designs and just made them cheaper because of the workload.
Right, we've made a better plane.

This was Ceno or whatever they call it, the Chino, whatever they call it. He goes, I know, but you took the original drawings

from Boeing and never paid for them.

This is a what they've been fighting over this.

Were you saying we stole it? Because saving face is a very major part of their culture. And they said, whatever you want to call it, you took designs from somebody else.

We didn't take them, we made them better. Again, it's nomenclature here.
If you would pay Boeing what you owe them, this will all go away.

So you're telling us that we have to admit that we stole the design.

Yes.

You can call it whatever you want. But we go to Hague or someplace over in Europe and decide.
And they did decide that they would do that, but they want the final jurisdiction back in China.

And they said, no, that's not going to. This is never going to stop, Tim.
I mean, this is happening right now with this little thing called a lab leak. Like, we kind of want to know.
Right.

We kind of want to know before we can move on. And what about DeepSeek? Are you reading what's going on? I mean, NVIDIA lost $600 billion yesterday.
Right.

And they didn't see this coming to I I think it's lazy. You know, the headlines, by the time this airs, it'll we'll both be made fools of, I'm sure.

More than.

But I mean,

why would we believe anything China says, honestly? Why would we just take it at face value? Oh, you developed a better mousetrap. You wouldn't have taken any of these processors, right?

You wouldn't have done it. There's no industrial espionage.
There's no subterfuge. If you don't look at it that way, do you recall, and I say this out of...

All due respect because I'm a huge fan of Sony and many Japanese companies. The Japanese did this many, many years ago.

Remember, it was a mimic, didn't come up with the idea, they'd make the idea far better. Right.
And I agree.

There was a point when the Japanese were buying all sorts of land in the United States and all that. It's a mentality that

I get only because I'm a comedian. And comedians, maybe like musicians,

we kind of naturally, like Carlin,

it's observational comedy. And if I'm watching another comic do something funny, I'm observing it.
So I'm kind of, I can invariably steal some of his material, but make it better.

Well, and where do you start the line? Where did you get the,

where did the idea come from?

It's music, man.

For me, everything redounds to music. There are only so many notes.
Yes. It's a handful of notes.

You're not making new notes. You're not making new notes.
Now, you might group them up a little different. You might mess with the tempo.
You might do something with the rhythm.

But in the end, it's variations on a theme. Yes.
That's what it is.

And a great comic set, a great song. But man,

the minute you get too close, now you're Ed Sheeran, now you're in court for five years, now it's copyright. It's too close, I get it.
And I said, I use this all the time. Is it Ferrari?

I think it's a 63

GTO.

That's been mimicked and stolen that design. Once they did that design, and I don't, I think it was fresh.
I don't think that

three-quarter view, the roof, the front, the sides has been in Camaros,

240Z,

Dotson's, or Nissan's. That's been stolen.

They've stolen that idea. How many times has that beautiful shape been stolen? And I said, it's source material.

The original, I got

good friends with Steve Jobs, and and they said

that iPhone was a series of mistakes.

One was called Newton, if anybody remembers. I got every device he'd take, oh, this is good.

It doesn't quite work. That doesn't, yeah,

that kind of works. And it was the idea was, and if I got him right, and God bless him, he's a great guy, great family.

He just wanted to make it simpler to dial. That's why he put the screen on there.
Literally, not his words, his vibe.

He said, if you want to go to the internet, you could do that, but who would want to do that

when you could do it on the computer? Never had any idea that we would completely supplant the internet on the computer by using it on there.

But the original idea of that screen was just so you wouldn't have to go

on the phone. That was the idea of it.
That literally changed everything. I have not seen that same

sense of design because I'm a phone freak. I've got probably 60 phones because I love the technology.
They haven't changed,

you know, up until they were starting to get really wild dial phones. Who is it? Tag Hewer, the watch company was making phones.
And the phones were

still for sale.

Some Russian ones that have a Ulysses Nardine watch winder in the phone so that the phone would wind itself while you're using it. And the phones, even back then,

I don't know what year that was, 2001 maybe, they were nine grand. And they were like watches.
They were that fancy. It was right.
What makes a company like Taghower go?

Well, they thought the phones, that's what it was going to be at. Now let's make the phone high-end.

Better quality, better, everything's going to be jeweled. And then literally a month later, Jobs' phone came out and they went, Well, that ain't going anywhere.
People aren't going to go with that.

It was like, what was this, DuPont?

DuMont. DuMont.

Said, they're not going to give up horses.

You know,

go with this stinky Model A or Model T. That'll be stupid.

He owned all the horse trailers and all the horse things. People love horses.

Who's going to go with this?

Everywhere.

So certain.

But there's a he'd started GM, right? Yeah. Yeah.
He said, well,

and he lost everything. And then he bought all these off-brand Buick, Chevy, Cadillac, and put them into one group.
And I thought, thought, that, what an amazing freaking story.

That will, that whole story again is quality. This is from Leno, and I don't know the truth of this.
Is you could bury a Model T

and it probably would start 50 years later unburied. It there's nothing

that thing is so well built, marine stainless steel.

Have you ever driven one? Yeah, this is so weird, Tim.

A week ago up in Marin, I met a guy named Charlie who has a massive car collection, who has started the only automotive shop class in a Marin high school.

It's a Terra Linda High School, and it's called Shifting Gears.

Neymar's not.

I'll tell him. Hawaii will get, hold on a second.
Yeah, Dick will be in.

He will sue him.

But I'd literally wave goodbye to him as he drove one of his Model T's the two miles to the school because it was the Model T that he could the kids would see it and their minds would explode and they would have nothing but questions and this guy Charlie he says once I get him asking questions once I show them they could be a ball bearing could be a medal of honor could be a Model T but once I get him asking questions I got him that's what we need to do we need to find a way to reinvigorate that children.

I've got to make it like I've told my daughter my sister's really into kind of the JFK just to eat better. Why are we coloring?

And I don't even like to, when they advertise these sugary cereals, this is poison for, it really is poison for kids.

Cheerios are okay, there's still sugar in it, but if you could brand the industrial arts better,

if you brand it to these are cool people, it's just because

hopefully guys like us, I I'm astounded at how impressed I am with plumbers. I know nothing about plumbing.

I just love what they do. And I have a series of plumbers that I deal with and a series of house painters.
Both of them love what they do. Their van is clean.
I mean, it's real tweaked out.

And the guy says, there's nothing like finishing a job. Oh, that's Dirty Jobs 101.
You finish it. A beginning, a middle, and it ends.

And then you start again. A guy when I was growing up, he had a, I think it was a C5.
It was the smallest bulldozer, but it was freaking perfect. And he had it on a perfect trailer and a truck.

And he'd dig the foundation with that. He'd, you know,

pull it out so he'd make himself a ramp, and that's all that was left.

He'd dig the whole thing by scraping the wood thing up, and then he'd hose it off, put it back up on his trailer, and I just always dreamed of that. He'd go home and, honey, what did you do today?

Dug a hole. What's for dinner? But he finished a job.

He had great respect for the machines that do the job. You must respect, like in my business, it's all about the crew, especially the PAs.

The PAs, the people on the start end of that, do so much work for so little

remuneration. The Teamsters get their union covers them.
The actors is a guild. I don't know what the guild does.
It doesn't really protect it. The people that do all the work.

I don't like to be Marxist about it. I don't know how to transfer this mentally.
They need to be better taken care of. It's got to be a cool job okay

only 10 more presents to wrap you're almost at the finish line but first

there the last one

Enjoy a Coca-Cola for a pause that

refreshes

And I just. Well, think about your own deal, man.
You're a comedian. You don't have a guild.
No. Your material, right? And this is the thing that I find the most galling.

We're so litigious, and there's so much copywritten stuff I have to worry about now, even in this little space. But like when you saw your act

appear in the first couple seasons of Home Improvement,

that material basically became the property of Disney. Of Disney.

Like right in front of you. I know.
How'd that, like, were they just making it better?

I was too stupid. I didn't understand.
And I still don't quite understand. That became quite

an emotional process for me because I said, if anybody wrote, and this is because of mistreatment and legitimate concerns from the Writers' Guild against studios that never had any rights to their own material.

So the Writers Guild came up with to protect the writers who do everything.

We don't have anything without the writers. Nothing.
They are the ones that do everything. They got no credit for it.
They got no remuneration. That changed.

And what happens is he overstepped the boundaries a little bit. So that means anybody who wrote my material down,

Writers Guild protected them and not me. And they said, well, he wrote that.
Yeah, but I do it on stage. And so so my.

He transcribed it. He transcribed it.
So you're saying at one point, it wasn't a threat, it was a mild threat. I don't know what that's called.

We could actually stop you from... They wanted me to sign early.

They could stop you from doing your act. They wanted me to stop me from doing my act.
They said we could come into. I said, you know what? I'd like to see it.

And I did a big concert in Frisco after that argument.

And I said, I want you to have guys come in with the little mouse lapels in the middle of an act, 6,000 people go, Cot, we don't want him doing any of the material until he signs his contract.

No,

we own that. And they said, we're not going to do that.
I said, yeah, but you threatened that. There's comics, we're in the burlesque union, I believe.
Magicians, strippers, and comics.

Back to magic again. Yeah, I don't think magicians are protected.

No, but I'm just saying, this whole conversation, like something magic hangs over it, whether it's the art in the vocation or the art in the the comedy or the art in the writers,

this desire or all the philosophy and all of the physics, this desire to try and quantify and understand these things, man. It's what makes interesting people interesting.
Well, I appreciate that.

It's also about translating it to, I so admire what you're doing.

I'm seeing it in some young men that come to my shop and

some of my friends have little boys.

They are now fascinated by cars and fascinated by how it works. In this world,

I know that the little girl across the street is going to be a physicist or a scientist. This girl has figured out.

It's not just a male thing. I know more about males because I grew up in a boy's household.
So I don't understand how the women in my life and also the friends' daughters have that same look.

How does that work? I'm wondering, this girl measures stuff visually. She goes, but if you just, if we did this, you know, she's making it something to do with her dollhouse.

However, she's forming math as it equates to a building problem. She's figuring it out.
She's figuring it out.

And I said, I want that on a fundamental level because whatever we screw up, and we do screw up a lot, we can fix.

That's where your genius, and I've watched you, and that's what I so admire about whatever we screw up, we can unscrew up. We'll see it in the Palisades.
I pray that they figure out

culling the forest. It's been going on.
I'm a 4-H guy from way back. Why don't at least 20,

at least 20 feet to 100 feet around houses, you cull it. You don't allow that scrub to come back.
And whenever the power wires go through the forest, it has to be 50 feet on either side.

They don't go through the forest. You just can't have that.
Those timber roads were natural fire breaks for years. And 30 years ago, Ed Ring sat here a couple weeks ago, right after I called him.

The guy runs the Policy Policy Institute, Water and Energy for California. He's like, we were taking 6 billion board feet of timber out of the national forest for decades.

Now we're taking less than a billion. There's so much fuel.
It's just everywhere.

We are living in a tinderbox. Tinderbox.
We're living in one. And I know you're sensitive to this.
We all just went through it. I was down here when it happened too.

And I just, I keep keep thinking, like, what would happen

in New Orleans if after Katrina we learned that the governor had refused to put in levies? Right, right. Just not going to do it.
Just not going to do it.

Or maybe in Oklahoma, Moore's, whatever that was, that poor town, you know, they just decided, well, yeah, it happens, but we're not going to, we don't put in tornado shelters here.

Yes, we live in Tornado Alley, but

we're just not going to do that. And what is it,

again, you get the philosophical, what is the mindset in that group that decides I'm not going to do that? And I said, why don't these happen in Germany or Spain or other countries? Why just here?

And oddly enough, one of the firemen said, a lot of this is natural. There's a lot of seed pods that are indigenous to California that do not pop unless they're burnt.

So he said, if we weren't living here prehistorically, that's exactly how this thing recircles. It gets wet, scrub comes up, it catches fire, and all the seeds pop.

He said, that's how this thing goes. I said, okay, we have to manipulate.
Unfortunately, we live here too now. So you'd have to at least cull it.

And I was in the Serengeti with my family, and they have these, I think they're called date palms.

I hope I got those ones you see in all the pictures where the stem goes way up and there's an umbrella.

And if California, at least close, they're not whatever they call savannah, they don't need a lot of water, but they shade the ground so the scrub can't grow so if at least close to humanity and you'd have pillars of that we start growing the African trees that are because we don't have indigenous trees I've been planting trees in my area that's one of my fan

very difficult because California if I want to do it for free I mean I'm doing it I'll I'll put them in and I'll take care of them but I need permission to put it in and they sometimes the California tree people I'm a tree per Arbor day guy I don't know, why aren't we picking in our set, the set deck people near me,

trees for the movie community for sets? He even asked me, why did you put date palms in here? He said, well, that's what the city wanted me to put in there.

He goes, say it out loud and tell me why that's not going to be a good idea. I said, date palms, which is tropical, and they're palm trees, which is not,

it's nut-bearing. He goes, so nut-bearing means bugs and birds.
Date palm means it needs a lot of water and it's going to droop. So I've got all these.
in the state, they're, well, it's good looking.

I said, now we're back to that good looking thing. They're not functional.
I've got trees in my horrible area that I've updated all along the pine of trees, all along this bad area of North Hollywood.

And they go, well, what is that thing? It's been hit by a garbage truck. Homeless people slip under it.
It's been caught fire and it's still there.

And that's an indigenous California tree that somebody clipped early on. So it's a bush actually, but they kept trimming it so that it grew into a tree.
It's literally indestructible.

And it's indigenous to California. I said, and I wish I could remember the name of it, because now I'm planting those in a nursery and culling them as babies so that they grow up.

And then I find most shop owners don't want trees in front of their stores because they flower right at the sign level.

So I said, okay, now we've got to change it so you got to cull them longer so they don't flower till they get above eight feet. And then it's right at the top of their sign.

Then they don't mind it, but they don't want to take care of them. Well, these don't need taking care of it.
I don't know what they are.

It's a bush that you cull it into a tree, and it turned into a tree, but I'm not kidding. They think it hits by a car, it caught fire, still there.
These date nut palms that the city made me put in.

I've got two trucks that got to go out to take care of 25 trees that are so buggy. They drop fruit.
The guy says, But this is working with

the translation between getting stuff done, shop foreman, pit boss, line producer, I need those men and women trained with a non-partisan

perspective is how do we get this done?

I used to love the line producer. He has to work with the studio.
Studio says, we're not paying this for that movie.

Union, we're not working for this. He goes, okay, then we're not going to do it.
Okay, stop, stop, stop. We're willing to go to this.
and we're willing to go to this. It's a thing called compromise.

It's not going to look like you want it to look. And it's not going to get the money you want to get, but we're going to move it forward and we'll do the next one.

That line producer,

foreman, I don't have them. I don't see them.
I don't.

They're not being trained for it in school. I make jokes because I hope they don't say it.
The kids at my kids' school, the boys, especially,

they don't seem to have a skill set for anything. There's no industrial arts at the school anymore.
They've taken that out.

Think Think they have a dance part and they have the art part and a photography fund, but still there's no, and if I donate any more money to the school, I'm going to demand the, I can't think of a name for it.

Shifting gears.

But, you know, a name for what? Industrial arts. How do you, I guess the word art has to be, it has to be branded better.
Yeah. I'd probably go back to that.

Industrial arts. I really would.

I don't think

with regard to our earlier point about borrowing material and making it better, I don't think you can make it better. I think that's what it is.

It's industrial, which is masculine and broad and universal, and it's artistic,

which is something different, something more sensitive. But the two smash together.
The two smash together. I used to use the term, I took painting and art most of the time and got so

ADD. I got so bored with, where are the paintbrushes? Oh, we use those for a display over there.
So you go to the art department and nothing was where it was.

Industrial arts, literally, it was set up cleanup. That was basically.
Everything in its right place. And then you got about four minutes to do your work because it's all right, set up.

And everybody go get their tools, they get their workspace, and then you get working on, all right, cleanup. And I go, did we do anything here? And most of it was.

But the tools are always where they're supposed to be. When I want anything, it's in the pot, because you spent most of your time out of respect for the area that you're working in first,

and then finish the product.

Today we're going to do hinges. That's we're working on hinges.
So that's focused on what you're doing. And then remember, you got 15 minutes at the end.
I want everything put back.

You don't just leave it there. The bell, oh, shoot, we were late.
No, that's not how it works. And I said that I'm missing that.
What I didn't like about art.

was that what I didn't like about IE was design because I did get in trouble with my

my industrial arts guy, because he said, we're making,

what are we doing, chairs or something? I said, but I want to make a chair that you can disassemble quickly. He said,

we're not doing that. And I go, well, I don't want to make a recipe box.
He goes, and he even told me, he said, I appreciate what you're doing. You wanted something useful instead of a box.

You're going to fail. And I said, I'm willing to fail if you'll help me make the chair.
And I made a kind of a custom-made chair, which I still have.

I wanted to make a chair that you could mass produce for college kids that was six dollars in wood but it looked and I even took it down to Tennessee to a place that they were going to buy it

but they said you know this is a brilliant idea and I said I think so

so we'll need five hundred thousand dollars up front to make it that we'll do the rest I went oh yeah well that I didn't I have about thirty six dollars I thought you know I thought I'd sell the idea and they said here's what the problem with chairs is, Mr.

Allen. How old are you at this point? It was a second year in college.
Okay. And he said, this is a chairs have already been designed.

So you have to make a lot of these first because as soon as it does well, you're going to get people copying it because you can't patent a chair. You're making it better.

Variation on a thing. You're making it better.
And I said, I called industrial arts, I called design is useful art. That's what I loved about design.

It's the sensibility of art, but I want to use it. I don't want to put it on the wall.
I have a lot of paintings. I love paintings and I'm a painter and I love all that.

I love about industrial arts, the people that make furniture,

tripods.

There's an artistic view. It's like you just said, it's a balance.

It can make it look good. You know, there's people that make this whole device, forgive me, that looks better than this one.

And sometimes it's the most expensive one, and sometimes it's the cheapest one. It's just somebody had an artistic point of view, which is why I love the liberal heart,

liberal politicians. I love where you're coming from.

You don't want people starving. There's nothing around that.

How you do that is, it's California all the time.

Affordable housing for the 62,000 that live downtown. Most decent people that I know that are on opposite sides of the aisle actually want the exact same thing.
Exact same thing.

It's just how are you going to do it? I said that. Shortcuts or not?

Shortcuts or not is the way I it's like, well, you know, we want people to make a living wage, but should you just raise the wage to make it a living wage? And that's going to be, that's a shortcut.

You know, an elevated minimum wage is a shortcut. A rent control is a shortcut.
And if you're not terribly concerned about the unintended consequences, it's an unintended consequence.

What a great word. You think this through.

Oh, God, I hate to even bring it up. I wanted a utility.
I love utility knives. So I built one.

I designed it so that the handle, I took a piece of clay and I squeezed it like this, and then I took that and made that into my utility knife. I got a Canadian company to help me fabricate it.

It comes apart, but it's got a little dial at the back, and it's got 12 blades in it, but you pull the cartridge out, turn it around, and you got 24. And we will all sharpen those blades.

You send that cartridge back for us. And it got huge reviews.
I can't remember. We got a million dollars in sales up front from Builder Square at the time that they've gone away.

And everything was going well. And I was going to do it like Paul Newman.
I was going to sell it into my drill, which I did a drill at the time.

And I was going to, all the money was going to go to charity. And it was brilliant.
We didn't do the metal one. The metal one was formidable, but it was going to be $19.

And it's a lot for a utility knife. And because there's a lot of other utility knives, you know, you unscrew them and you flip the blade around.

This was unbelievable. My brother-in-law is a drywaller, and he said, I sent him out to a bunch of people first.

And we'd already sold the first batch. He goes, this is just unintended consequence.
This is brilliant, Tim. Everybody loves it.

Drywalls, especially, because they go through blades. They just lit new blade, new blade.
He goes, how do you clean it? And I go,

what?

What?

Well, when we're doing drywall, we're pulling a lot of the dust and sometimes it's wet back into the casing. I go, um,

can you give me a minute? And I go take it, and there's no way you can clean it. Want to buy a chair? Holy God, it was horrifying.
I had to call up all the vendors.

I said, we've got unintended consequences. We worked it on every single application.
We never worked it with a wet drywall. Right.
And that's what it was meant for.

And they pull the drywall back in there, and you'd have to unscrew it, take this cartridge out, soak that in water, but it made everything. And I just, oh, God.

And I think about failure is the foundation of success. You've got to fail at this over and over again to do any of this.
And none of the designs I've worked at,

whether that my drill was the best, that was, I moved the handle forward. Now they're all like that.
It used to drills with the handles at the back.

It was like this. I moved it forward so it's middle.
All my first prototype drills, now they all do that. And I put bearings on both sides of the armature.

Unfortunately, that made the drill last forever. Most drill companies don't want that.
And now you've got no planned obsolescence, so you don't have a customer for life.

I said, and my first hammer, the Tim Allen hammer, I used an axe handle instead of a hammer handle. So it had that swerve to it.
What's the corollary for your shows?

Are they getting better as they go? Are they getting, like, are they evolving the same way? Right now, we've got,

they see what I'm doing. I put the

shop part of it is run by a woman named Kate Kate Fox, who did all my History Channel stuff, who's been in the shop.

Arguably happens to be my older daughter.

However, she... Arguably.
Well, because for some reason, if you're a plumber, you want your kids in your business, but for some reason, if you're an actor, it's nepotism. I don't understand that.

She did all the work on History Channel, and she's one of those line producers.

And so I said, listen, you've got to talk to the writers, and they've got to pitch a show, and you've got to go, you have the guts and the authority.

That doesn't work, you can't have that happen.

So, you give them a foundation of why the car shop works, and now it's starting to gel.

Where number one, when you see the shop scenes in shifting gears, it's gorgeous because we're using some really cool cars that are in process. Are they your cars? Uh-huh.

That's see, that's we did ingenious. I didn't want it that way because I, these are rare cars.
What we've done, and also in a real cool way, we're going backwards with wrapping.

It's a 100-point restoration 455 GTO.

Now we've wrapped it to look like it's rusted and needs restoration. So we'll just pull the wrap off over the series because we can't restore a car

in real time.

You know, restorations, as much as they show on those TV shows, you don't restore a car in a week. I don't know how that happens.

You know how long this stuff takes. Editing.
Well, so we've gone backwards in it, and now everything has to be real.

Whatever we're doing in that shop, and I'm loving it, because in the shop we have upholstery gets done and all this, and the show will bleed from that.

I'm able to be the actor, this cat Deninsu, that plays my daughter, same birthday as mine, obviously many years apart, is very much like the character I play. It's a little more cammy,

but I have him as a

wonderful life. If you remember that wonderful life, Jimmy Stewart was getting on a train to go to college, and his dad had a heart attack, had to come back.
I used that.

I was going to the Rhode island school of design got in an airplane my your dad owns a regular heavy machine shop in north hollywood and he had a heart attack and i have to go take care of it

i worked there all my life but mostly did art pieces i was an artist so i've got to have play a character who's not bumbling like tim taylor yeah

Mike Baxter is more of a businessman, outdoor guy, but he didn't ever camp. This guy is going to be a designer.
So he's constantly in his house. There's designs.

He's the guy that is building stuff next to a dance studio. He sees that I want these two worlds to mix.

The young people that I hate on the show, because they're making a lot of noise, just like out in North Hollywood. There's so much freaking noise in that place.

But I walked in there one day and saw the work that these kids do for no, I mean, the chance of them becoming a dancer?

What are you doing?

My niece dancing in the Washington Ballet. Where does that go? It's just an expression of the best of human beings, dance and the arts.

And then I see the restoration business where a guy's just doing this.

I was going to say in this new Vic hot rod, the electric hot rods on the show. We will, this is almost done, so we just took a few fenders off.
We'll get there.

And the guy did, what's it called on shotguns where they etch the, it's filigree, isn't it? Filigree. We have the bumpers are all filigree.
And you'll never see it.

When this show, when this car goes, it won't go to auction because I'm going to keep it. It'll go to SEMA.

The detail on this hot rod, the genius of these guys, Bodhi Stroud, who did most of the interior work, and now the filigree guy, took him six weeks to just do the tips of it. Just the tips.

But it's this. It's a guy that does this, and I can't do that.
I'm more of a,

I wish I can't think, Roy Lichtenstein or Lichtenstein. I met him.
I'm a pop artist. I love it.

And he became like a lot of these guys, his process art. They got so far away from their work, they were telling him, okay, no, no,

paint that, and then they go to another painting. They were, and that's what I've done.
I've built probably 12, 15 cars that I've had very little, I love hands-on, but I'm,

however, I've got other things

that need my time, so I just go, no, all green. Let's go matte, matte finish, matte finish.

But I have to give it up to the painter. He goes, I'm going to just do matte, but I want to put a, well, all right, do that.
And then I do it. That was a good idea.

So I'm mentoring other creative people, but the whole process, what are we doing this for? I said, just, it's temporary, guys.

I'm not going to live.

So

do the best you can to add value to every situation, every single situation. And I want these kids.
As I said, this one young kid coming, he said, little boy. And now I see it.

The kid across the street's got to be three, no, five. And he loves my little collection of

little cars. There's a couple that I won't let him touch because they're priceless, but I said he doesn't know that.

You could be doing anything you want, man, at this point in your life. It's so great that you're doing this.

It's so great that you've integrated everything you give a damn about into an endless sitcom. I mean, that's a...

Seems cheesy when you say it like that.

You integrate all this great stuff into a sitcom. Well, I mean, I just, I say the same thing about myself when I'm trying to compliment myself quietly.

It's like, you know, to be able to sneak your ideas into

a commercial endeavor. There you go.
That's what I mean to say. That has kept me sort of sane, and it seems to have kept you

saying to Jason. I appreciate what you do.
That's why I'm doing this. Guys like you,

I can't encourage enough. men and women like you that encourage others to be of value.
Don't dismiss it, but this is not a value.

I get it.

I switched phones one time because I worked with Apple, so I was on Android phones and then special custom ones I had. And at one point, I got on this.

Finally, I got used to the iPhone, which is years ago. And I go, the battery doesn't last on this thing.
And the guy said, maybe because you're on the phone all day long.

And I,

even if it's videos about work, like, I find

it's a mixed blessing. I can fix anything now because of that phone.
Right. I am shocked.
And I go,

might as well try it. How do you get those little weird batteries out of the small remotes for candles? They have now remotes for candles.
I couldn't open the stupid,

and I go, all right, how do you open the stupid remote from this? And there's some, there's nine guys.

There's nine guys. Some guys are good at it.
Some guys should show you.

The blessing is Google will answer almost any question, especially for

workaround guys like me, how to fix stuff. I can't believe how good they are, how much they are, how much, and these guys do the work, but now they're getting somebody like these guys that show

us

how they do that. And that's where I come in, is I love point of view.
I love shooting. how we're doing stuff.
And I said, that's why I love this live stuff, having a live crew, live crowd.

You, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on our edits, you don't see all of the live stuff because it doesn't fit. Sometimes the laughs are too loud.

Sometimes the laughs don't, they carry into the next scene. And we're fighting that right now.
How do we make this like George Burns and Gracie Allen? When this is how this all started.

It was vaudeville.

crowd got in there and then we added cameras and then pretty soon they had to stop because we had to change things and oh let's the crowd has to be sequestered a little bit. And right now we're,

weirdly enough, I'm getting the mix, you know, the people that are a certain age go, yes, because I wanted to say,

filmed in front of a live studio audience. And the new people go, ooh,

that's kind of old school. And I said, but it reminds the new people that are watching because our show's done so well on linear TV, they're not used to this.

I don't know that the young viewers are used used to a live, they call it a laugh track. I said, it's not a laugh track.
We never show it, but those are people.

That's two, three hundred people in there clapping. And we do, we rehearse so much that we're not, we don't keep them there, but two or three hours.
That's great. It's a live.
Well, you've done it.

Yeah. I've done it with you.
When's it on? Wednesday nights at 8 o'clock on ABC and Hulu the next day.

Well, I'll tell you, man, I haven't seen it yet, but I watched the promo, and it's freaking funny. It is funny.
It is tragically sad.

He's really in pain over losing his wife, which I love playing that. And then two seconds later, it's

making jokes with two grandkids and Cat Dennings.

I got to get you out of here, but God damn it, you just reminded me, too, of, and I'm sorry, dude. I know we got to go.

You told a story. You were in prison, and you were about to get the absolute shit knocked out of you.
The guy's got you by the throat. Right.
And you just start laughing.

They had a thing called Toastmasters. You were allowed to go out of the penitentiary to church that was adjacent and then you got a regular meal, which is great.

So we had a Toastmaster meeting and I'm a pretty good speaker.

So I'd host the meeting and everybody learned how to be express yourself without hitting somebody with a brick or whatever their problem was.

So everybody's pretty cool there and I'm starting to kind of make fun of people and this guy, I took a yeah, and a guy like this robs a bank and doesn't think it's robbing a bank because I didn't mean to.

We get back into the prison. He comes in, and it's always a bad sign when they shut

the doors open when it's open count. And he gets into my cell and he comes in and shuts the door, and there's a sweat.
The voice goes, Hey, why'd you shut the door?

And he comes in and goes right to me with this. Nobody's ever talked to me like that.
You made a fool out of me, and I'm going to make you pay for that. And he's got me up against the wall.

And my face is real distorted because he's kind of missed the shit underneath here because he said, do this.

And

all I could see behind him was my younger brother and my older brother, who used to mess with each other all the time. If they could see my face all distorted like this,

it's going, I didn't, no, everything came out of my mouth was hysterical. And I start laughing with,

and he goes, this is funny to you. And now it made it even more.
And now my brothers are going

behind him. And he's going,

this is not funny.

Now he's starting to kind of go, you are a strange, strange man. And he just drops me.
He goes, just don't say stuff like that to people you don't know.

And he walks out and I'm on the ground going, I don't know what just happened there, but I wasn't scared in that thing because

I deserve it, I guess, because I can't make fun of guys I don't know. But the fact is, the comedy part of me has saved my life

more than any other thing. It's also gotten me a lot of trouble, but because I said it doesn't have,

it doesn't, if ever I get arrested, the comedy guy goes away, goes, I didn't.

He goes, I thought it was funny, but I'm going to just step over it, step away. That's where we land the plane.
That's great. You're about to get the crap knocked out of you.

You laugh, and somehow or another, you're still standing. Right.

Thanks for coming in and doing this. You bet, man.
Really great. You barely touch your coffee.
I don't like coffee.

I just can't. No matter how manly.
We're talking about men's stuff.

This is again with with the comic. Nobody says, look, I want to kill everybody in this room.

It goes to credibility.

You don't go. There's no mafioso movie.
We're going to kill him. Two guys go in to rip him up and make sure his family pays for that.
Hold on a minute.

There's

something about a straw that is just horrified. Yeah.

Yeah, God. But I'm going to leave you with this one about Laugh and says,

my mother's not doing well at all. And I got, luckily, I've got four siblings.
My son, we fly with, and she's really 96.

Everything's falling apart. And we had to move her out of a house.
I built her a house that's on one level so she could, she took care of my stepfather. She married after my father died.
Great guy.

Broke her, she had to lift him up. She just couldn't live in her house anymore.
And if anybody been through this, you won't be able to tell me.

I live in this house and she just wouldn't, she was falling with help in the house. Moved her to a facility of just a quarter mile away from this beautiful house and then

my whole family shows up every Thanksgiving there's a 30 of us and we usually use her house and the doctor said there's a my sister and brother I want to take her back to her house we'll have Thanksgiving there and we'll take her back to the home and the doctor said 50-50 chance she'll come out of this stupor and realize that she's back in her house and will not want to go and you're going to go through this horrible again.

Or she'll just forget and have dinner and then drive her back.

In the middle of dinner, she gets up, walks to her bedroom in the house. My sister sees that.
She goes to the bedroom. I hear screaming.
She comes out in tears. She won't leave.

So she's

catatonic. My brother goes in and he's going to, he's swearing at her.
And I go, hey, guys, guys, let's get out, get out.

Granted, this is a boy that's put my mom through hell. I was incarcerated.
I've been a bad kid. Stealing cars, I was just not a good kid.
So my mom and I have a very different relationship.

She's in bed like this no I'm not going anywhere and she's she's rigamore 105 pounds she's just stiff go ahead try to get me I'm not going anywhere she's screaming go mom mom everybody Jeff Becky out

I'm gonna take you to the car I'm gonna lift you up I'm gonna we're going back there she goes you go ahead and try here's what's gonna happen I'm gonna have to use some weight so your ass bends to get you in the chair.

So it's gonna be uncomfortable, and I'm not gonna hurt your knee. You go ahead and try.
Go ahead and try. And she, so she's like this stick.

I've got the stick, and I had to do one of these where you go

to bend her. Oh,

you didn't get hurt. I didn't hurt you, I just bent you.

I get her in the wheelchair, and as I get down to put her foot in the stirrup, she kicks me so hard my glasses go like this, but it hurt really bad. I go, Jesus, oh,

I look over her shoulder, and my brother is now laughing so hard.

He's just bent over.

It's the prison guy, and she kicked me so, I mean, I go, oh, God, right across here. I go, Jesus, mom.

And then I get her in the stirrups, and then I get out to the SUV, and I got him, get you out of here. And she goes, use your side.
She's back to this. I lift her up.
And she's a baby. I get her.

And as soon as I get her in a vulnerable position, I get her scoop like this. She hauls off and hits me.
fist, side of my head.

Now the glasses fly, fly off, hit the, and I go, my brother's not there this time. I go,

I don't know how to say this.

If you do that again, I'm going to punch you back. Because the reaction, mom, is you don't want, no one takes a punch.
I can't, don't punch me again. We get back to the home.

I'm getting her out of the, I'm doing this to get her out of the wheelchair. And she looks at me, she goes, you got to admit that was kind of funny.

I said, son of a... She did it all for a gag.
She did it all for a gag. And I said, God, mom, you, I didn't pull it, though.
I didn't pull the punch. But you kicked me.
That first kick was it.

I thought she broke my nose.

Well, on behalf of my mother, who's 87 today,

thank you for sharing that. It'll give me something to look forward to in the next nine years or so.

You're the best. Shifting gears.
Wednesday, 8 o'clock. ABC, 8 o'clock.

Fantastic. Tim Allen, everybody.

The philosopher.

Thanks, man.

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