#2050 - Ehsan Ahmad

What's up, brother? How you doing? Good to see you. Glad to be here. Glad to have you, finally, man. Dude, I was probably around... When was your first time on stage? My first time on stage was in this place called Tommy T's in Livermore, California. Oh, I know that place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was an open mic at 2012, end of 2012, early 2013. Yeah, that's when I started. And I remember going up on stage, my first joke kind of hit, and I bombed the whole time. But that one little hit was enough. It was enough to remember what it was. My first time on stage was... My name is Asana Maude, and I know that's very 9-11-y. That was my opening line in comedy. Wow. So I probably met you around 2014 then. 2015 is when we met. Okay. Yeah. And this is a story I tell to all the door guys on what it's like to be a door guy at a comedy club, because this is the first time we've ever had a conversation. I was sitting by the back door, and you had just stopped. And this is something that you just talk to all the new guys. I've noticed that you do that. And then you were showing me your phone and telling me your process and how you write and how you listen to every single set as you drove back home after the store. And you talked to me for like 20 minutes. And then you left, and Curtis came up to me and was like, hey, so someone pooped in the bathroom and missed. And I had to go clean it up, and it was pure liquid. It was pure liquid. Every time I kept wiping more would come in. It was unreal. Unreal. And I told you that. I would tell all the door guys, that's what it's like working at a comedy club. Especially at a high level one, you get these really cool moments and then you have to and you get you also learn your place a little bit. I didn't know door people have to clean shit. Oh, really? Don't they have like a janitor or something? Not during the night. This is this is that what made it crazy. This was like 730. It wasn't like it was like way too early to be pooping and missing. Oh my god, there's something about bar poop. No poops when people are drinking. It's okay. Like every time I've ever gone into like a bar bathroom, there's dudes in there shitting. It's just like, oh my god, I can't wait to get out of here. If you're shitting in a bar, it's basically like, oh, this is the last resort. I have no other options. And nobody wants to do some fucking public shitting. No. And it was back when the store in the hallway had the single bathrooms. Oh, yeah. Those were like extra gross. Oh, those were a disaster. Those were absolute nightmares. Oh, yeah. Remember when like comics would be in that one little bathroom and then there'd be the staircase up there. So people would be talking shit to you while you're in the bathroom. No, I never I never had that experience at the store. Yeah, you know, the stairs to the, the back belly room? Yes. You know where that is? Yeah. Like there's a window right there for the comics. So guys be talking shit. While while other guys are shitting, ragging on them yelling in the window. That back parking lot before they invented sacred grounds, and before they had the back bar, that was where we'd all hang out. But the problem is you'd get randoms from that little back area that would come and they would come and interrupt a conversation and get in the way and like, we got to a place where you could just chill by ourselves. Right, right. And then by the time I had gotten there, you had just gotten back. Yeah. And so for you to hang out, it would really be really be interesting to watch as a door guy because you'd have to watch people would be like, making game plans to talk to you. They would, you know, you could see them like, okay, if I do this, I do this, I do this, and you'd have to just tell people like, hey, maybe you should go hang out in the patio or something like that. Yeah, it sucks. Because you want to say hi to everybody, but also, my friends are there. Right. I see them every now and again, you know, especially if it's like someone like birth, I only see like once a month or, you know, when you see him, you're like, this is an important time. Well, and it's like, when you're in a place with other comics like that, it just feels like home. Yeah. You know, so it's like, Oh, I want to hang out at home. And we talk about this all the time about the mothership, that green room is our clubhouse. I live there. I practically live there. Last night was so fun. It was so, and they're always fun. Like every night we're there, we just have so much fun, just on stage and also in the green room, watching each other's new jokes and shit. Well, talking about comedy and the green room itself is just such a comedy place. You have Lenny Bruce's mic, Mae West couch, Joey Diaz's words, yeah, Rodney Dangerfield's notes. It's like handwritten notes. Handwritten notes. It is like a place where I feel like, Oh, I'm in it. I'm inspired. It's the best place in the world, I think. I think so too. I mean, we were talking about what we hoped it would be and what it is. And I don't even know if I, I don't think I ever hoped to be this good. I mean, the club's not even a year in. I think we're only just sort of at the start of what it can be. And we have like 660,000 Instagram followers already. Yeah. It's sold out every night. It's just, it's crazy. Now that Gillis is here, Shane moved here, my Cusker's here and you know, and we've got Ari and we've got, I mean, Ari's been coming down a lot. We're doing another protect our parts. I'm trying to get that motherfucker to move here. Sam Tallon, I think is moving here. Yes. He wants to move here. Right. It is incredible. It's incredible. It is the right place to be at the right time. I felt very lucky in my life. I feel like everywhere I've been, I've been at the right place in the right time. Yeah. If you make the most out of things, that's what happens most of the time. I mean, obviously horrible things go wrong for good people. But the reality is that like, every time something happens in your life, it gives you an opportunity to figure it out. Okay, where do I go now? What is it? And 9-11 or excuse me, 9-11, the new 9-11, the COVID. Oh yeah. That, you know, like there's this monumental shifts in culture and society. 9-11 was a big one, obviously, but COVID was a big one too, man. It shifted a lot of things. It destroyed people's belief in mainstream media. It made people completely distrust the government and their regulations and their wisdom behind closing this and closing that and forcing this and forcing that. And it made everybody just go, man, where, where the fuck am I going? Because this is not what I used to live in anymore. This is a different place now. Right. And all that happened, we come to Austin and then I'm like, I got to open up a club. I have to. Like there's no real like fucking comedy store thing here. And we're, there were so many of us already here. You were already here. Simpson was already here. Derek was already here. It was like a bunch of fucking scouts went out early with fucking cold camping and teepees and shit. It was, it was wild. It was wild. The first, the first door guy that moved out here, uh, the funny dude, uh, regular at the mothership named Dylan Sullivan. Yeah. Very funny dude. Yeah. He got on a discord call with me. I was in California. We were in the midst of the second lockdown, which was brutal. And he goes, you gotta come out here. There's stage time indoors. It's just the post that to perform indoors. It was like, you, it was like drinking water after being in a desert for two years. It was like a speakeasy cause you knew you couldn't do it everywhere. No. And there was still those rules where you had to walk in with the masks. Yeah. That I was still here. And so it was like, you take it off once you start laughing. Like, what? You're fricking spraying COVID. This poor guy, whoever you are in the front row last night, I'm so sorry. I accidentally spit it on you twice. You know, when you're punctuated your words and I'm seeing this guy going like this, I'm, I wanted to address it, but I didn't want to stop the bit. So if you're out there, buddy, I'm sorry. I spit on you. I hit him twice. I remember one time I was opening a show at fat man and I was eating, I was eating it like it was bad. And then I spit, but when you're eating it, everyone just watching you. So the whole audience sees me just spit on the guy in the front row. I've been spit on before I've been in the front row. It's like when people, Joey Diaz will spit on you like crazy. This is like when someone's on stage, they don't mean to. Sorry. Right. It really means that we're into it. Yeah. We're just going hard. Right. You know, or bombing. Yeah. And trying to save ourselves. Tried to save yourself as a sad as fucking moment in your life. Then it comes to a point where you have to be like, all right, I'm not going to ask what they do for work. I'm just going to live in the bomb. I'm just going to live in it. I deserve this. Well, you need a bunch of bombs to figure out how to bomb, you know? And I've seen some people pull out of bombs. That's some of the most impressive shit of all time. Mm-hmm. When someone starts bombing and then they hit and then they get their confidence back and then they got a banger and then everybody, okay, okay. Maybe their first joke sucked, but we're on board now. It's a really good feeling, especially because I open all these shows, right? Is that when you get on, when I get on stage and that first joke doesn't hit and then it's like, ooh, all right, I'm going to stay in the pocket and I'm going to figure this out. And by the end of it, you're like, this is going to be a good show. That's a great feeling. Most certainly you have the hardest job. The hardest job is in the audience is cold. That's the hardest job. Mm-hmm. The easiest job is like second or third. And then the second hardest job is going on last. Right. But the hardest job is most certainly going on first. Well, some of them too, especially your show specifically, a lot of them are here from the podcast and they don't know stand up like that. So they'll come and they'll look at you like, wait, you're not a podcast. Joe's not talking to you. Oh, no, really? They have that vibe to them sometimes. They have to be like, no, no, this is what it is. Oh, I used to get that on Fear Factor. People come to see me because they recognize me from Fear Factor. And they want, I love that guy. That shows great. And then they go and I'd be talking about the pyramids being built. There's no animal dicks. Where the animal is this guy talking about? And then I'd make fun of Fear Factor too. You know, but that was, you know, it was like that show when I think about it today, like what the fuck were they thinking? It was it was a thing. It was a real I remember sitting down with my parents and we would watch Fear Factor. That would be a family thing. Yeah, I never watched it. Well, I watched it once and I threw up at home. Really? I never threw up on the show. Yeah, that's that seems weird. I threw up at home once because I didn't expect to be so grossed out. I wasn't prepared. I guess like on the show, I was always prepared to not throw up. And there's no close up angles when you're there, right? This lady was eating worms and she threw it up back in her glass and then started eating it again. And I went, man, people would go for it. They would fucking go for it. Worms are rough because worms are filled with dirt because they eat dirt. So you're eating dirt and mushiness. It's fucking gross. What was it? It was just, it was a cash prize at the end. What was it? Yeah, but you had a lot of people are going to eat some dick and never get a cash prize. That's the problem. It's like one person is getting the money, you know, but you also like, you had it like Michael Yeoh took it and became a comedian. Michael Yeoh was on episode one, season one of Fear Factor. No way. Yes. He was just figuring his life out. You know, he's a young guy. He was really Jack back then. He was a big dude and fucking super nice guy. We stayed friends and then he became a DJ and he was, I knew he did a, he did a like a morning radio show for a while and he starts doing stand up and then he comes to LA. I'm like, dude, you fucking, he actually did it. You're an actual professional. He's got specials. He's a real headliner. I'm like, fuck him, man. Right. He sells out. He sells out and knowing him from like episode one of Fear Factor is crazy. That's Michael. That's me and Michael Yeoh. Back in the day, episode one. Damn. Bro, I still had the wallet chain back then. I still had hair. Yeah, I was going to say the hair, the hairline's going. When did you shave it? I shaved, I gave up, I think in 2011. I just was like, this shit is fucking done. My hair looks terrible. Yeah, there's always like, for me, it was a, I saw a picture of me on stage and I was like, oh my God, this is how I present myself to the world. This is crazy. You're so much better off giving in and I'm lucky I have a good head. It's a good shape for head for being bald. I swear to God, if I could grow hair, I'd still shave my head because it's the easiest thing in the world. Every two or three days, I just go, it takes five minutes. Oh, you go electric. I still have a razor. I use a razor. Oh, damn. It's like this little ATV that fits on your finger. It's like the ATX razor. You just glide it along your head. Yeah. Yeah. I enjoy that. I don't know. That does sound nice. I feel like a little. I got a lot of scars though of a hair transplant scar. And I've got a lot of scars from being a dumb kid. Like a giant fucking gash on my head for when this crane that lifts cinder blocks fell and hit me on the side of the head. Yeah. We were kids and we're hanging around in this yard where they had like, you know, these giant like sewer-sized cement tubes. Right. And they had these cranes that would pick these things up. Okay. And we were fucking around and I don't know what happened, but something fell and clanged me off the back of the head. And I thought I was dead. Holy shit. Yeah. I had to get taken to the hospital. And I remember thinking I was dead. Like something felt so wrong that I remember telling my mom, I'm worried I'm going to die. Yeah. I got dinged. I mean, I do not remember what happened. I remember something fell and something hit me in the head and I grayed out to like almost total unconsciousness and then came back. But I felt so bad. I felt like it was so wrong. Right. I had to go to the hospital. Ironically, I thought I was going to die. Ironically, probably changed the course of your life too, right? That's a traumatic head injury when you're young. I've had a ton of those though. I guarantee a lot of my impulsiveness and my craziness. Some of it has to do with brain damage. It has to. Right. If you just look at the data for former fighters and football players and even soccer players, which you wouldn't think get head injuries, but they're heading that ball all the time. And sometimes they collide with each other that can happen too. I've had head injuries from collisions and jujitsu, just accidental collisions. Like someone will knee you in the face accidentally and fucking ring your bell. Right. And guys who've gotten knocked out in the gym, totally accidentally. Just you zig when you shoot a zag, a guy's moving towards you and you're moving towards him and your chin collides with the top of his head and you just go unconscious. Happens. Yeah. So I've been, I don't know how many concussions I've had in my life. Oh really? You have no idea. Like from the time I was 15 till I was 21, I sparred a lot. I did a lot of sparring. And when I really started getting fucked up was when I started kickboxing sparring, because I wasn't good at boxing. I was a good kicker because I was like a Taekwondo champion. And then I went into kickboxing. Oh my God, these guys are fucking me up. I was getting beat up by like good boxers. Are you taking like kicks to the face? No. I fucked them up with kicks. Okay. If I getting kick distance, I was much better than them. But the thing was kickboxing is there's boxing involved and my boxing was terrible. I was just learning boxing. I had a very delusional idea of how good I could use my hands because I was good at Taekwondo and Taekwondo has some punches, but not much. And I knew how to punch things hard, but I didn't really know how to box at all. Right. Like the defensive positions and all that sort of stuff. So once I started kickboxing, I really started getting beat up. And I went through a couple of years from like, I think I started in like 19, I started transitioning into kickboxing. And from 19 to 21 was when I did like most of my really hard sparring. Those were horrible days where I'd be sitting in my apartment. Okay. I'm 20 years old. I'm completely broke. I deliver newspapers in the morning and I work for a private investigator in the afternoon. You work for a private investigator? I guess I was 21 by then. So were you like tracking? Yes. Like husbands cheating on wives pretty much. Mostly insurance scams. Okay. Most of that was insurance scams. Okay. Most of it was people would say that they got a back injury and they couldn't work. So they were getting money, but then they would go and work another job. And then you're following them around. Yeah. I'm just like a lot of dumb people. Right. Just a lot of scammers that thought they were being slick and we bust them. But one lady, oh, it was a sad as fucking thing. The guy I work for, by the way, his name is Dave Dolan. He would call himself Dynamite, Dickless, Dave Dolan. Oh my God. He was one of the funniest guys I have ever met in my life. A natural comedian. Oh, there's so many people in your life like that. I think, like, damn, you were the funniest person I've ever met. And the craziest thing is by chance, that dude was cousins with the dude who owned the comedy connection, Billy Downs. Billy Downs is his cousin. So I found an ad for a private investigator's assistant. I was trying to figure out jobs that I could do to make money while I was trying to do stand up. And so I found this job. I go, that would be fun. Private investigator's assistant. What it really was, the dude lost his license from a DUI and he needed someone to drive him around. And that was Dave. But I was kind of his assistant. So like what kind of would happen? Like one time it made me really sad. The scam would be, so say if someone was doing something that you knew was illegal. Okay. Right. And you had to catch them. The scam would be you would write their license plate on a piece of paper with several license plates that are very similar to it. Very close. And so then Dave would go to the door and say, Hey, I'm so sorry to bother you, ma'am. But I'm not even supposed to have this information, but a friend of mine works for the police department. My girlfriend was in a car accident and there was a witness to this hit and run and they wrote down the witness's license plate. But then a cop spilled coffee on the paper. Oh no. Is your girlfriend okay? Well, she had an injury to, you know, L five and L six. And then this lady goes, Oh, I had the same injury. And then he goes, Oh, no kidding. Are you okay now? And she goes, yes. Well, I got, uh, you know, I got the insurance, right? And he goes, Oh, you're getting compensated for. She says, yes. And I also work another job. So I'm getting to work while I'm getting the insurance money. Oh, good for them. Fuck good for you. Fuck them. She goes, would you like to come in and have a cup of coffee? So this lady lets this random private guy who says he's a private person. Just this is how people were in the 1980s. Yeah. This doesn't seem like just what happened today at all. Let you in the house. They just let this. So this was, I was 21. So this was 88. So this lady just let us in the house. So we sit down in our kitchen. She's so nice. She makes us coffee. And she starts telling about how she's working for the airlines and she got hurt, but then she filed an insurance claim. And now she's working under her maiden name. Then she tells the whole thing to just lays out the whole story. You know, I hope they catch, you know, whoever hit your girlfriend and the whole deal. And thank you very much, ma'am. Really appreciate it. Thank you for the coffee. Thank you. And I would get outside. I go, dude, we can't turn her in. She's so nice. He goes, fuck her. She goes, she goes, fuck her. He goes, she's a fucking criminal. I go, she's just trying to, she's poor. She's trying to skin. She's a nice lady. She invited us in for coffee. He's like, fuck her. Turn her in. Tender and of course, insurance companies are ruthless. Oh, well, you know, I guess that's his job. And she is kind of, she was kind of a criminal, but she, you know, it's like people think that that when people don't have anything in life, you know, they just fucking never, never really get ahead. They're always build a bill, check to check, barely getting by. And then you have this opportunity where you could work and still get you for the insurance companies. Fuck them. Oh, the big company, the airline. Fuck them. You just figure out, just, just get a little money on the side. Right. I'm using my maiden name. Who's going to catch me? Right. I, you know, I don't, I don't mind the, uh, the grift. It's like, you know, get your money, but you can't just be telling random people that. I know. And letting us in our house. That's so wild. And this is so funny. I was thinking like, wow, that would never happen today. But like now we would just, the same person would tell some random person in DM. Yeah. It's like they'll find that people will find a way to let people in. That made me sad. But most of the time it was busting dudes and most of the time was busting dudes or pretend they had a bad back and then you'd watch them carry a load of shingles on the ladder. They were working as roofers on the side. Like we busted a lot of dudes. One guy he busted, his girlfriend, uh, was getting, she's having an affair with a bodybuilder. Okay. And, uh, he, this guy wanted Dave to get pictures. So Dave had to get pictures of this bodybuilder banging this girl. And so he gets the pictures. He was like, look buddy, she's cheating on you. And he's like, okay, I want you to follow and get more pictures. He was listening. You freaking. Yeah. Was he getting off on the pictures? Yeah, it was something about it. And he goes, I told the guy, listen, you freaking. You wanted me to get pictures. I got your pictures. We're done. We're done. I'm not, I'm not going to be your fucking pornographer for cuck porn. Yeah. The whole thing felt set up. But Dave, Dave was so funny, man. Like some of the best times I had was driving that guy around and doing this. Cause also we'd be really tired. Cause a lot of it, you'd have to do it really early in the morning. Cause you'd have to catch these folks when they're going to work. Yes. So you had to get them, get to get outside their house down the street at like 4.30 AM. Cause they leave at like five 30 and they go to some construction job or something. So you have to bust them. So we'd be just sitting there talking shit, drinking coffee. And he was so funny. And he would tell me about a story. He had, he just quit drinking like that. He got in a car accident in a, like a, in a tunnel, I think. And he had abandoned his car and he took off and the cops got them. They hit him with the DUI. He couldn't drive for X amount of months, the whole deal. And then he just said, that was it. I realized I got to stop drinking right then and there. And he never went to a program. He didn't do alcoholics anonymous. He just quit. Dude was so funny, man. And I told him, I go, why don't you do stand up? Like your cousin owns the comedy club. Just do an open mic night. Who's not interested. No, you gotta, this is something that you have to want to do. Yeah. You gotta want it. You really gotta want it. Cause it's so brutal if you don't. Yeah. You see some people like going through the emotions and it's like, don't do this to yourself. Well, it's not a thing you can kind of half in half out. And we've seen that a bunch of times. Right. Yeah. You have to be fully in. I remember thinking, you know, just like podcasts early on in my career, being like, every, I have hearing everyone be like, no backup plan, no backup plan. Just go all in. And I remember like telling my parents who, you know, were trying to figure out like, what the fuck are you doing? Why are you doing this? And then I was there like, at least go to like grad school and get, and, and so you have something to fall back on. And I was like, I can't, I can't have a backup plan. Well, one of the things we really wanted to do when we started the mothership, you know, and you and I talked about this, we all talked about this, was have a real program, like a real solid open mic program. And the best way to do that is obviously have a lot of open mic time. So there's two nights a week, right? Every Sunday and every Monday we have open mic where anybody can go on stage and try it. Right. And you're going to be able to see all the different levels. People that do open mics for four months, six months, folks who've been doing it a year, guys who are coming in that are pros that are going to drop in and do a set. And you're getting to see the door people do their sets. And the door people here are what I love about the people here in Austin is that, you know, you don't run into the sort of people in LA who would you would run into that, like, they're just really doing this to become a writer or they're just really doing this become an actor. Right. So this is just something that you know, the door people here like want to be stand up comedians. They're fans of the art, the fans of the art form, and they are taking this opportunity and they're the amount that they're improving that I can see is incredible. I'll look at some of the door guys and be like, I wasn't like that at five years in. Yeah, I wasn't like I wasn't doing that. Well, we all feed off of each other. And we were talking about Shane moving into town the other night. And you guys are talking about his new half hour and like you both you and Tony had the same reaction. You went back home and you started writing, started writing, immediately started writing. I went, I went to Wisconsin recently and I took one of the door guys CJ Landry with me. And one of the reasons I took him with me is I did a random show with him in Dallas. Like this is last year, 1230, just a horrible show at like midnight. And he buried me. Really? He buried me. And I was like, oh, if when I get the chance, you're gonna go on the road with me because I have to follow this. I wasn't expecting it. You know, I'm in there all cocky. I've been doing it so long. And then I was like, I got wow, I got buried by a door guy. Oh, I got I got to, you know, it's like the energy around the place like when Shane was there, the energy of just like everyone was just like, this is awesome. We can get to watch the best. We could all become better. Yeah, just just last night I was walking into the little boy and there's a door guy in there named fuzzy. And I was like, hey, fuzzy, how you doing? And he goes, Oh, I have the best life of all time. And this is a door guy who's taking out trash. Yeah, he's taking out. He lived in his car a little while ago. And he's like, this is this is the place it is you can feel the energy there. It's it's yeah, you can feel it. And we're feeding off each other. Everyone's better. Everyone's better. Everyone's better. We're all better. And there's no like, no one's like competing for like, oh, there's only two, two sitcom like the place where I can get a sitcom. Yeah, everyone. What's what's nice is that you look up and you see the top of this, you know, you see you shame Tony. And you see that everyone is just doing what they want to do. Yeah. And there is no like you, you succeeding doesn't take away from someone else succeeding. Right. So it's this mindset that everyone has just like, Oh, she's winning. Yeah, that's awesome. I can win. Oh, he's doing that. Fuck yeah. That means that there's whatever there is for me. Like it's, it's the positivity and it's like, yeah, and it is like, oh, and these people are coming. You got to write you got to because nobody's slowing down. Nobody is slowing down. And everyone's inspired. Everyone's inspired. And the stage time you get in the city is incredible. Yeah, outside the mothership, you go to Red Band's Club, you go to Vulcan, you go to East Austin Comedy Club, you go to Creek in the Cave. There's this new room on Fifth Street underground called Black Rabbit. There is time in front of quality audiences here, even outside the mothership. So everyone is improving that Rapolos Pizza next door has a mic with people in it every Tuesday. Now it's insane what's happening in the city. Amazing. Not to mention you have Cap City up in the domain and the like spider house near the campus run shows all the time. There's another one that I saw on the east side. Yeah, yeah. I think that's East Austin. Oh, the Roscoe's. Yes. Roscoe's. That's the new one. Yeah. That's another one. I was meeting down there and I saw Roscoe's Comedy Club. I was like, there's a comedy club down here. This is wild. It's wild. And now we'll get these people that are like comedy tourists like we used to get at the store where it's like, I'm in it from Australia for eight days. I'm at the mothership for six of those days. It's a spot. It's the energy. You can just feel it. You can just feel it. It's pretty fucking cool. It's pretty cool. And just the good keeps on coming. Shane's here when that Brian Simpson special dropped. Yeah. Like there's just so many things here. I'll never forget Howie Mandel walking in the place and just having like, it felt like we gave him 20 years back. He felt like a kid again. It was like watching a kid play. I was like, Oh my God. And when he found out the phones were in bad. He was like, I can do comedy again. He's funny, man. He was great. He was very funny. He was great. It was, it was great. It's just great to see. It's great to see everyone come through here and be like, Oh, I see what this is. Yeah. I get what this is. Yeah. Yeah, we did it. It's so funny because it was when we were all talking about it, we're in the green room of the Vulcan talking about how to build it, what we're going to do. It all seemed like, eh, this really gonna happen. Right. You know, I could tell like some people were skeptical. Right. I mean, I mean, you would hear all the time, people being like, they're not going to make the club. What are you doing out there? Yeah, they're not going to make the club. And I, and, and I always viewed it as a, I always viewed it as a low risk, high reward move because I was so right before the pandemic hit is when I went full time pandemic hit, obviously not going out. So I moved back in with my parents. I'm living there because I'm not playing LA prices. If I'm not going to do anything on stage and then they live in the Bay area, I was doing outdoor shows. Dylan hits me up. Hey, you got to move. Derek Jeffrey burner also had moved here before me. They're like, you got to come. So I stayed on there. I stayed in their place for a little bit, two weeks. And I was like, oh, I got to come. I got to come. Cause at the worst I come out here and get stage time in front of people. Yeah. At the worst. When you first came here, was I even talking about opening a club yet? Yes. So for me, what made it real that you were opening the club is that I heard Adam and Curtis were coming over and I was like, Oh, he's serious about opening the club. There's no, like, there's no, like, cause you heard, I heard the news and I was like, Oh, am I going to have to move to Austin? And then you hired those two. And I was like, Oh, this is happening. And then my friends were also be like, Hey, you got to come out here. There is time and you can get good out here. Well, everybody was, it was a perfect storm of LA closing down the comedy store. They closed on. So everyone's out of work. So all those people didn't have jobs anymore. And so I said, I'll hire you now and you don't have a job for like a year and a half, but you start getting paid immediately. That's a good deal. Well, I was like, listen, man, I'm going to make it as nice and easy as possible. I was like, come to Austin, get, enjoy the city for a year, and then we'll call for you. And then we'll do this. We'll really do this. Yeah. And then it was, and then it opened and you could just feel it immediately. I didn't think it was going to take as long as it took, but that was because we had another building and the building owned by the cult and that, that shit fell apart. But it's lucky it fell apart, man, because it's like where we got is the best spot in the world. Then six street is like no other place, man. It's just hopping with people. They close it down to car traffic and there's just people walking on the streets and the energy is crazy. Right. It's pretty, the energy at six street is nuts. It is wild, but it helps the show, man. It's like, there's so much wild shit going on outside that when you, there's live music playing everywhere. There's like a feeling in the air. And then you go to the club and it's rocking. It's like, oh shit, this is, this is the spot. Yeah. It just, it just feels like a place that's just connected with everything. It's just different than any other place we've ever been to, but it's also the only place that I've ever worked at where a comic ran it, like a comic built in and they built it just for comedy. There's no business partners or fucking, you know, weird money people that want you to charge more for that or pay the comics less or make our own rules. It's, it's, it's what you taught. It's what they talk about the stories of like a comics playground. It's an artist playground. Like here, you can like take chances. You can really like be free artistically. What, what I like about sort of theory I have is cause I started in San Diego, which is a pretty red city in a blue state and now we're in a blue city in a red state. Like that's sort of the best mix for comedy. You get all sorts of people all across the spectrum. And that's like a, this is what America really is. There's people who believe this people who believe this they're all in one place. Can you make all of them laugh at once? Yeah, it's well, it's, it's also people that recognize there's a new scene here. So there's like this energy to that and they want to come experience it. Right. Because there really haven't been, like Austin had a scene. It has small scene. There was always some good comics that came out of Austin, you know, cause like Hicks was here for a while and you know, there's like a history of good comedy out of Austin, but it didn't have like a community like we have now. There's nothing like it where all these world-class comedians had moved to a city. Right. That never really happened before. It just kind of became an a city. I mean, the only time it really happened, I feel like is when Carson moved to LA. Well, I bet LA had comics already though. No, I mean, I don't, I'd imagine so, but then you, you hear like, I guess my view is the view of the comedy source history, but you know, all these people came from all these high level comics came from New York, right? It's like Letterman, Lenno. Really? I think the Tonight Show being in LA was a big monumental shift in people being like, Oh, let me come here. Well, that was back in the time where a spot on the Tonight Show could make your career. Right. Like that's when I first saw Richard Jenny. I was like, wow, who's this guy? He did a spot on the Tonight Show and you would get these like five to seven minute spots and guys would prep forever for that spot. They just wanted that one. They wanted, there was some guys that only had like one kill or seven minutes because their whole idea was just get on Letterman, get on the Tonight Show, get on something. And that was, that was like your career move back then. This is pre HBO comedy hours. This is pre everything. Yeah. I remember reading stories about like, Oh, Freddie Prince got called over to the couch on his first time. That never happens to anybody. Well, also you got to remember what were the numbers back then for the Tonight Show. Oh, they must've been massive, right? There's only one of four shows you can watch at the time. Right. What was it? Like, what was the average Tonight Show ratings in 1978? See if you can find that. Yeah, that's good. I bet it's nuts. It's got to be in the tens of millions. Right. Yeah. It has to be. I want to think like 25 million and the, again, this is 11 PM at night too. Right. So people are kind of tired and they're laying in bed and Johnny Carson, he was the king. Right. With his desk. They all did the same thing. The desk and the chair. It doesn't make any sense. Why do you have a desk? Are you doing work? Like, it's so weird you have a desk, but everybody had a desk. It's like, I guess it was like Jack Parr who started it out. It was Steve Allen or Jack Parr, whoever was the first one, because there was Tonight Show guys before Johnny Carson. Right. And whoever it was, they had a desk. Cause like back then, if you were the boss, you sat behind the desk. Would the Ed Sullivan show fall in this sort of world? What was that? Ed Sullivan. Cause that in my mind, that seems to be like the precursor of all this and sort of what set this up. Yeah. Lenny Bruce did the Ed Sullivan show. The Beatles famously. Yeah. Who else? A lot of people did it. Yeah. Was he the first? Was Ed Sullivan the first? It feels like from my understanding of it, it feels like he was like the first mega star. Jackie Mason got banned from the Ed Sullivan show. Cause Ed Sullivan said he gave him the, Jackie gave him the finger. Really? Yeah. But Jackie swears he didn't give him the finger. He's just doing his hands, doing my hand gestures. And he did something. And Ed Sullivan said, that fucking guy gave me the finger. He's never coming back. Damn. See if you find what that is. What happened with, uh, with Jackie Mason on the Ed Sullivan show. What year was that? It's gotta be what, like the fifties, early sixties. We're talking about Mason. Do we find out what the ratings were for 1978? I was digging to 78. There was just most of the stuff talking about the ratings is about its last week and last show. What is that? Well, it's 50 million for the final show. Oh my God. That averaged 19. Crazy. Oh my. So he averaged 19 million a week. That's wild. No, no, just for that. Just for that week. That's Oh, for that week. It wasn't saying it was for the whole time, but can you find out what the ratings were? Just let's say September 1978 tonight show ratings. I don't, I mean, I'm looking. Well, yeah. I wonder if they even have those numbers. I don't know. What's really wild is like, there's people that get away with not telling you the numbers. Oh, Netflix. Like Netflix gets away with, no, we were just discussing this last night because a friend of mine was saying like, what are you thinking about this actor strike? And I said, I really don't know enough about it, to comment other than, look, if you're a person and you do something, like if, even if you're a comic and you do something on Netflix, like when I've done Netflix specials, they just say, it's doing really well. And you go like, what does that mean? Like how many people are watching it? It's, we're really happy. Yeah. What does that mean? We're really happy. It's doing great. What are the numbers? What do you think is the purpose of keeping it secret? Well, it's a genius move because they don't have to tell you. So you, you can't really negotiate. Like if you do a special and that's special, it's 10 million people watch it. Oh shit. It gives them all the leverage. We're going to pay Hassan more money next time. Because if he finds out that this many people are watching, you don't know until you go out in the road and then you sell more tickets and you're like, oh, people enjoyed it. I guess it worked. Right. But when you don't have any data from the company, they could just not give you the data. Like on their side, it's great for negotiation. Like they don't have to tell you shit. It's just, they have all the leverage. There was an article about this yesterday. Okay. Uh, Sarandos defends, not disclosing streaming numbers. Creators field felt trapped by ratings box office. So how does he defend it? I liked Ted Sarandos by the way. He's a very nice guy. The longer paragraph is here, but it's part of our promise with creators. At the time we started creating original programming, our creators felt like they were pretty trapped in this kind of overnight ratings world. And oh, they're, they're trapped by ratings. We're doing this for them. We're doing it for them. They don't know. Overnight rings, an analyst interview that went live, a weekend box office world defining their success and failures. Sarandos said during a prerecorded analyst interview, that's a little gas lady. And as we know, a show might have enormous success down the road and it wasn't captured in that opening box office. So part of this was the relationship with the talent, not just the business aspect of it. And I do think that over time, people are much more interested in this. Uh, we're on a continuum today of how much data do we publish? I think we've been leading the charge, starting everyone down the path of a top 10 publishing our top 10 lists and our annual wrap up list and everything to give a lot of transparency to the viewing. And I just expect we'll be more and more transparent. Just say the numbers. This is a weird little dance you're doing to avoid. Just tell people what the numbers are. Yeah. And it, and it, YouTube was saying yesterday to that on, on top of this, that they might be changing the way videos work for that. I think they said for the first 24 hours that all stats will be live. Like live view, if you were count life, thumbs up, I guess people really want to know that sounds opposite of what he was just saying. Yeah. And it does seem like people want, they want to know what's successful and what's not. It does seem interesting that he says that like, Oh, we have, you know, a show might do better as time goes on. And the initial box office numbers might not reflect that, but it's like, you're, but then you're also canceling all these shows that they get the second and third season. Yeah. Shut up. Right. It's just, it just, there's no, it gives, it doesn't lend that credibility. No, we're doing it for the creators. Right. Guys, we love you. Right. We're doing it for you. Yeah. Yeah. This seems like very abusive relationship. So I would imagine that has something to do with, I think if you were an actor and you were star of a Netflix movie and it was huge, you'd want to know what the numbers are. Right. It's got to be part of their, I don't know. Is that part of what they're asking for? I know it's streaming revenue. I think that was one of the things I asked you. This is one of the things there's like the, the, the AI characters too. Yeah. That's a big part of this. Cause SAG still in strike, right? I believe so, yes. So I think the AI thing was there was one contract that I don't know if it was actually being someone actually trying to get people to sign it or if it was just being discussed where they would pay the extra, like an extra would be on the set. And then they know they own their digital image. They could use it forever. So they could put you in the background of the fucking Hulk movie. They could put you in the background of it. So you know, like conspiracy theorists believe they're crisis actors, right? Show up at every mass shooting and start talking about something in this bullshit. Like this is the most evil of conspiracy theories, right? Right. But these, this crisis actor thing, imagine if you just start seeing like AI people in every fucking movie, every disaster movie, you see that same guy, like that's that dude. Yeah. And that dude probably got paid 200 bucks. It's like the Wilhelm scream, but with like people's faces. Right. Yeah. That's what it'd be like. Oh, if it's a disaster scene, you know, this, this guy's in it. Well, maybe they'll be able to morph your image, give you a mustache, fake nose. I'm sure they can. You can tweak your face. I mean, they can face swap you with different extras. They can do all kinds of stuff. Oh yeah. Yeah, for sure. What they can do, did you see the unreal five video game engine? Yeah. The car on fire. The car on fire. Jamie, see if you can play that. Someone said, I forget the tweet, but it was something along the lines of you're not going to be able to ever know what's real again. No. And if it feels this way, looking at the news with what's going on over, you know, over in Israel and Palestine, it's like, what am I seeing? How much of this is real? What's the propaganda on top of that? The like shitty reporting, shitty reporting. It's like, it is like, it's so interesting that we have phones and we have the access to information constantly. And now we just know if none of that information is true. Well, we just know quickly what actually happened if you're online and paying attention and the mainstream news is so far behind that. Right. Coleman Hughes was on yesterday, he was saying that, you know, the original narrative was that Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza. Right. What actually happened was another Islamic terrorist group launched a missile, it failed, and it landed in the parking lot of the hospital. So this is fake. This is the unreal five engine. You see a car on fire and then they have a little video thing pop through it. Just the car's fake. The rest of the video should be real. So they inserted a car into a real scene. Is that what they did? Yes. No one really knows that honestly, because the unreal engine looks so fucking good. There's been a renewed video of the 5.3 and it looks... But I could, Jamie, I could imagine that's all the video engine. Why would you think that? It could be, but like right there, that person walking in the background. Yeah, but you could do that. You could. Well, that would be easy because they're not even in focus. That would be so easy in comparison to this car that's in focus. Well, I've watched a lot of it. I think all they did was add that. Okay. Well, you might be right. But either way, look how good that car on fire looks. Yeah, I mean, it looks... It's fucking incredible. Very real. And look how the flames vary. The flames vary like an actual flame would. Sometimes you will watch digital flames. They do the same pattern over and over and over again. But this just looks like real fucking fire. Because the level of randomness. It's reacting to the thing in it. It's nuts, man. Yeah, the thing is making the smoke move. Motherfucker, dude. They're so good now. You're not going to have any idea. No, you can't tell what's real at all anymore. And I think it was in 2015, they passed a law that allowed the CIA to use propaganda on citizens for the greater good of the nation. No, there was something like that. I mean, that's always been a thing though. It's funny that they didn't even pass a law. Well, now they can't get arrested for it. Or no one can get the trouble for it. Yeah, I guess. I mean, but no one was really getting trouble for it. No one was really getting trouble. Yeah, it's like... We need to kill the president, allegedly. Right. It's more like them dotting their eyes and crossing their T's. Like, let's just make sure that no one... What is that? That law, Jamie. I was just looking it up. I just stumbled across an article from the New York Times, 1977. Was it... Worldwide propaganda network built by the CIA. Wow. I can't imagine. 1977. I mean, I can't find the article really, but it's just... It's so hard to know what's real and what's not real. Yeah. I think that's where we talked about the shift in COVID, what it really caused. It's like, now I'm just suspicious of everything. Everything. Of everything. Everything I read, I'm like, what's that? What angle is it coming from? Who's funding this? Exactly. And it didn't used to be that way. So this is what comes up about what we were just talking about though. Obama did not sign a law allowing propaganda in the US. Okay. So here's the claim. Former president Barack Obama signed a law in 2012 allowing the government to propaganda... Allowing government propaganda in the US and making it perfectly legal for the media to purposely lie to the American people. AP's assessment. False. In 2013, Obama signed legislation that changed the US Information and Education Exchange Act of 1948, also known as the Smith Month Act. The amendment made it possible for some materials created by the US Agency for Global Media, the nation's foreign broadcasting agency, to be disseminated in the US. The facts, opposed circulating on Facebook, with a photo of Obama falsely states that he repealed a ban on government propaganda in the US when he signed the National Defense Authorization Act in 2013. The amendment did not repeal the Smith Month Act, but rather lifted some restrictions on the domestic dissemination of government funded media. Okay. Government funded media though is you're getting close to propaganda, right? Okay. So here, the change essentially eased restrictions for Americans who wanted to access government funded media. We're doing it for you. Did Ted Sarandos write this? We're making it easier for you to access it. The change essentially eased restrictions for Americans who wanted to access government funded media content. Because you know, most Americans really want to access government funded media content. I can't think of anything better. Would I rather watch Game of Thrones or government funded media content? I think I'd go with it. Allowing media produced by the US Agency for Global Media, such as the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, to be made available to Americans upon request. It was not possible before the law was changed. Even upon request, if I wanted to get through the, get it through the Freedom of Information Act, for instance, they couldn't do it. The amendment changed that. It says Gabe Rockman, director of the Reporters Committee Technology, Committee's Technology and Press Freedom Project. Boy, whenever somebody puts, whenever someone puts freedom in their project, I'm like, oh. You don't try, don't trust anything. Is it Patriot Freedom? You know, the Patriot Act. I just think it's so funny that like government funded media was behind some sort of wall to begin with. Like that's kind of interesting. Well, it says there was essentially a de facto ban on the government dissemination of materials originating from the State Department. Yeah, because we didn't trust you. We didn't trust you to just fucking make these claims. Journalists are supposed to make these claims. You're not supposed to release the news if you're the government. No, journalists are supposed to go in there and find out what's actually going on. Right. And then, you know, I guess later we find out that they're really influencing these news companies anyway. So it's like what? So funny. Oh boy. Oh boy. Yeah. I don't know. It sounds like a sneaky way to get propaganda to people, but I thought there was something else where they were, it was proposing that they were allowed to use propaganda if it was for the greater good. I thought that was a part of the whatever it was the National Defense Authorization Act, which the one that allowed for indefinite detention. There was one that had like some real sweeping oversteps for people like, yo, indefinite detention. Is that the same sort of stuff they used to get the guy who made the memes? This is an article from 2013, but it explains everything we just read. This reminds me of, this is for whatever reason reminds me of, I want to watch fast seven in the theater. Fast and the Furious? Fast and the Furious 7. It was only me in the theater. Well, it was me. It was me and this one lady. And at one point the lady goes, walks out and leaves. That's your fault. You came to fast seven. Yeah. But in it, I think it's fast seven. There is this hacker that creates this thing that can see into every phone and see into every traffic light they can get in. And the whole fast sevens, the whole Fast and Furious crew job is to get this hacker and get her program and give it to the US military because the US military are the good guys and they need to have this. You don't want to end this up in the bad guy's hands. And it's like, I just remember thinking like, wow, this is blatant, like weird propaganda in fast seven. Yeah. I came to see cars jump out of, you know, skyscrapers, not this. This is interesting. Well, it's also, they feel like those kinds of movies sell to the kind of people who like those kind of movies. Right. Like those kind of concepts. Like if you like Fast and the Furious 7, you know, you might have a MAGA hat, you know, you might have a Confederate flag in your fucking den. I enjoy them because it's the closest thing to as an adult, that same feeling I get when I was a little kid and playing with cars and like having them go on the TV and then on the couch and it's the exact same feeling. Yeah. That's why I love them. Remember when they took a car into space? Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh, you mean the car in space with a steering wheel and accelerator, everything. If I wanted to show someone the peak of America, it's ludicrous driving a car in outer space. Let's watch that video. Let's watch that video. Look how great we are. This is our gift to the world. This is America at its base level. At its finest. At its finest. Look what we've done. This is how ridiculous we could be. And by the way, that movie probably sold a hundred billion people. Oh yeah. How many people watch that movie? I mean, they had to make two more after that. Oh, he looks like a minion. Yeah. They're wearing scuba suits while they're going into space. In a car. They're in a car. Oh man. I love ludicrous explaining science. This movie's so good. Are they strapped to the rocket? So it falls off and now they're in a flying car. Looks like a rocket ship. Look at this thing. Go. His car's going into space, son. They're going into space. How can you have to watch this and be like, America's the best. How do you get this? They're going into space in a car. We're in scuba suits. Oh man. Oh my God. Janky scuba suits too. There's no way it holds the pressurization as Lucas said earlier. Oh my God. I can't wait to watch and see why they had to go to space. I don't remember why they, I don't think I, I don't remember why they had to go to space. That's weird. Oh my God. That would be Fast and Furious's greatest movie ever. That would be unreal. I don't think they had the balls to do that. They did it. They did it and said the world was flat. Do you know how many people would, would fucking cheer? Oh yeah. There are the flat earth movement. This is what happened with the flat earth movement. It took off and then everybody went, I'll get the fuck out of here. What was I thinking? Now it seems to be back. It seems to be back and bigger than ever. There's more flat earth propaganda. But I don't understand what the point is. Well, the point is, here's the point. The point is the government lies about everything, including space and that we are really God's creation. There's an ice wall around the outside of the world. You're not allowed to pass it. If you try to go there, the military will stop you. The military, even though there's fucking thousands and thousands of members that have probably seen this, they've hidden this information from the general public for the greater good of mankind or for evil reasons. Right. Because they don't want you to know about God. Right. And then the stars are just bullshit and there's a firmament. There's like a cover over the earth and that's why we can't go into space. That's wild. That's wild. I always, I always just thought like, even if the earth was flat, like what, what am I going to do? I'm just going to still like go to Chipotle and like live my life. Like, you know what I mean? Like I don't, I don't understand. I never understood the point of getting that hyped into it. It to me, it feels like sometimes a lot of conspiracy theories is adults who realize too late that the government's always lying to them. That's what it sometimes feels like where it's like, Oh, you just kind of found out too late. So you're like, Oh, I must, they must go on the extreme of everything. Well, people love conspiracy theories because some of them are real, you know, and when you find out one's really like, holy shit, they really did that. Oh my God. And then you start getting suspicious about everything, you know, and you can go down rabbit holes. Right. And you can find the thing about like a video on YouTube, for instance, is you can find someone who's like a really good narrator who's using good words and good, good sentences and they're speaking well and they sound intelligent and they're saying things. It's just absolutely not true. Right. It's not sound British. No one's stepping in to prove it that it's not true. But if they were having that same conversation and they were talking to like Brian Keating and he starts explaining to them how we know the earth is around how every planet we've ever observed is around why they are round. How's that? There's a thing called Bode's law where you could kind of depict, you could accurately predict based on the mass and the size of a planet where the next planet's going to be. They're all round. The idea that we're not, we've found, how many planets have they found now? They started finding them, you know, as the equipment got better, but I think it was a long time before they found the first exoplanet, the first planet that was circling around a distant star. Now I think they've detected hundreds and hundreds of them. I don't even know how many they've detected, but like they're all round. Right. Not all of them around. The idea that we're the only ones that isn't round. We're special. Yeah. It's not the perfect spear. They'll tell you that. It's not the perfect spear. Okay. Get at it. Go around it with a ruler. Do whatever the fuck you got to do. Yeah, it's not perfect. It's like it bulges out at the side slightly, but you can't tell by looking at it. Stupid. Right. It's still pretty much a circle. It's a fucking globe. Right. But why would you want to think it's flat? I don't understand why that helps you to think it's flat. It's a waste of time. The mystery is in the entire thing itself. The mystery is that we are literally on an organic spaceship, floating in what might be God. The universe might be God. We might be floating in God. Above us is just immense energy, nuclear explosions, many times bigger than our sun, surrounded by planets and fucking black holes and dark matter. It is wild up there. And you're concentrating on the shape of earth. Such a waste of time. And this idea that there's some great conspiracy to protect people from it or to keep that information. Because if we knew that God was real, we would not know. No. No. I know it's fun. I know it's fun to believe that. But this motherfucker is round. It doesn't mean there's no God. It doesn't mean God didn't create it. Because really no one knows. No one knows if the devil's real. It's all speculation. Right. Yeah. We're all just doing our best guess. Well, it definitely feels like there's definitely feels like there's something more. Whatever this is, whatever like the energy that we share with each other, there's definitely some sort of spirituality in this world that you have to sort of let in. I think there's something to that the energy that you can have, I've had this in the isolation tank. I've had it in psychedelic experiences. There's moments where you reach a state where you understand that your experiences with people and all the things you do in life is energy. And there's good energy and there's negative energy. And the more negative energy you put out that ripples, it creates more negative energy, creates more problems. People that want to start arguments and fights with people, people that want to like, God damn man. I know you're probably frustrated in your life and you think that's part of your personality to be blunt, but every time someone does that, it ripples out. That person feels negative about people and then they're always taking in their mind, oh, sometimes people can be douchebags. And then it just going to create more issues in your life, in the lives of the people that you run into. But if you can find a way to recognize that and shift it, then you could do the opposite. And the more positive you put out and the more positive conversations, the positive interactions you have with people, then they have more positive ones. And then everybody from that, it ripples out in a good way. Right. It's very much you get out what you put in. There's some weird thing, but we are all connected. And it's not just by your experiences. There's energy that we're giving each other. There's something that there's some for some, in some way that's we hear to unseen. We're experiencing each other in an unmeasurable way. Right. Right. And we have a profound effect. We have the energy you bring into the room. You see it at a club all the time. A hundred percent. If the first point of contact they meet, whoever bags their phone is having a rough day and they let that rough day come out of them. The show's going forward will not be as good because their first point of contact is someone who is not in a good space. Yeah. And they, and they take that space with them and bring it to their seat. Yeah. Like it's all those sort of things. Like the small little things matter in a comedy show. One hundred percent. Where it's like, yeah, it's the way they seat the room sometimes fucks with the energy if they see it poorly. And it's like all that stuff matters. Like you can't, you can't seat people like you have to seat them close and next to each other all the way through that builds energy. If you see people randomly, then the show has no, no cohesive feel to it. It's very interesting. Yeah. It's well, and also like the camaraderie at the club, that's all very contagious too. The camaraderie and the friendship and the support and how everybody's very cool and very complimentary. And there isn't that weird fucking competitive energy that used to get, particularly in the nineties, man. When I first came to the store, it was God, it was so dog eat dog. Cause everybody was trying to get on a sitcom. And if you and I both went on an audition for a sitcom and you got it, I would be like, God damn it. Now his life has changed. I see you on TV guide now this motherfucker, like he's living the good life. And I'm over here grinding at 11 30 sets. Yeah. Trying to try to get them to look at me. Yeah. In front of 50 people. I can't get an agent. Fuck. You know? And so there was this like hyper competitiveness amongst comedians where people, and it's all the bad mindsets. They had this idea that somehow or another, if you got something and it, it was good for you, it was somehow another taking away from my success. It's really stupid, but it was all because of the fact that everybody was clamoring for a tiny amount of jobs. Well, yeah. It seemed like back then the industry held the keys. They did. Yeah. They really held the keys. And now it doesn't feel like that at all at all. It's like, you can just do, yeah, you can just do what you want. That's the best part is that I'm not that, you know, you don't, if you, if you come here, you don't have to worry about like, Oh, if I say this, why not get this job? Right. Right. I can just, I can just talk about what's like on my mind. Yeah. You can do whatever you want. Right. That's a, that's a level of freedom that, you know, and I do wonder if may, you know, I mean, cause eventually industry and stuff are going to start coming here. If like the, what does that mean anymore though? You know, like eventually, but they already have people in LA just stick with those people that are stuck in LA. Right. Because it's just what the industry out here is podcasting. That's true. Major entertainment industry. That's true. But I will say this, a great standup comic can do a lot of like, you know, Robin Williams. Oh yeah. You know what I mean? Like the reality is that if the great stand, if all the great young standup comics start moving here, well, then your next great actor might be there. I'll never forget walking in the comedy store and you see open mic. You see Michael Keaton's name lit up. It's like, Oh, you could just, you could be a comedian and then be Batman. Yeah. Like that's a, that's a, that's a possibility that's open for you. So you know, all these, a lot of these great, great actors were standups. And so a lot of great writers were standups. So eventually they'll be like, well, if that's where the talent is, that's where we have to go. Maybe I think they're going to stay put. You think so? Yeah. I think they're going to ride it out until that fucking ship goes right into the rocks. There is like almost a vested interest in for people in LA to like, not want this to work. Us this place. Yeah. Okay. You know what I mean? Well, good luck. Yeah. You got it. It's just so stupid. Think like that. Any comic should be happy that there's more comedy. Any comic should be, and also by the way, if we're here, you get more stage time in LA. So right. Take advantage of that. Because there's a lot of people getting stage time at the store that probably wouldn't get it if everyone was, if Tom Segura was still in town, if Christina Pizzitsky was still in town, like so many people moved here. Duncan, everyone moved here. So it's like, there's a lot of spots for you in LA. That's true. You know, just try to do what we're doing. Try to do it the right way. Just try to be supportive and fun and don't push a fucking certain ideology on each other. Well, you can't, you can't push ideologies, not in standup. It's so stupid. Trying to do woke standup or trying to turn a club woke. It's like, well, yeah, just try just trying to be any sort of like, you have to think along this line. It's like, no, that's not that's not what there was an only right wing comedy club. Right. It would be awful. No Trump jokes, bro. Nobody wants to hear him. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. You can't you can't walk an ideological line and you can't like what I find so funny is that like, there's so many of these like, you'll hear like, oh, we know we need to be more diversity in the in the club or whatever. And then, you know, a lot of times when the hot when Hollywood does diversity, I think something that Brian Simpson and I have talked about, they'll just take, oh, we need a brown guy, we'll just take the first brown guy. That's like kind of whatever that's kind of do it. But like, when you focus on like, hey, let's just bring the funniest people here. Yeah, the diversity naturally comes. Right. Like funny, funny doesn't fall along the lines of like race, gender, sexuality doesn't fall. It's just are you funny or are you not funny? Yes. And I would say the the mothership lineups without really trying to be diverse are actually diverse. Yeah, because just talented people all that matters in life. Yes. Can you make people laugh? Yeah, that's the only thing that should matter. And that's, you know, it doesn't matter how you do it. If you can do it, you can do it. Yeah. Yeah, it's a it's a meritocracy. It really is. And it should be. But it's also, there's a system at that place, like you're going to get a chance to do professional work eventually, someone's going to bring you on the road with them. Absolutely. And then when that happens, like, you know, Tony brings people on the road with them, like brings cam cam started on kill Tony, right? All these guys are real new. When when he takes these guys in the road with them, they start getting professional careers like other comics will now do the same thing. And it's just, it's you have a path. Whereas I think when we all started out, it was a lot more random, like it did. There was no like clear place where you could go and you could learn from watching all these other comics and then you get spots, then you can eventually be a pro. Right, right. And then and then the stuff on that path is open for you. Like I look at Cam and Cam is, he's pretty famous off one off one clip of being in Austin. That's a famous guy, you know, and it's like it's like that's fucking dope. That's awesome. It's like, it's like, you like, you can't tell me that I'm not famous. Look at my look at my friend. He's famous. You know, Derek right now is on a European tour with Schultz just did the Royal Albert Hall. You can't tell me I didn't just do the Royal Albert Hall. That's what it feels like. It's like, oh, we got that from here. Yeah, look at just go, go, go. Everybody up, everybody up. It's pretty amazing. It's awesome. It's like the energy here. It's just, it's man. It's crazy that it all just lined up perfectly. You know, I moved here. I'm like, I gotta do something. And then when Tom moved here, like I, he was sick of it too. And he moved here not long after me. He goes, you're going to open up a club. I go 100%. He goes, okay, I'm moving to Austin. Damn. I was like, oh shit. Damn. That's when it felt real because they, they picked up their family, all their employees, everybody that we're moving to Texas started their studio here. I was like, whoa. Okay. And so, you know, there was enough to stand up in town that we always could work at the Vulcan, but this dream of putting together this like perfect comedy community boy, when it happened, it's almost like, dude, it felt like that building wanted us to be there. You know, like it's weird energy. Like the building was like, thank you. Well, build it. The building is alive. That's what I like about the building. It's alive. There's, there's a history before us. Yeah. Massive. And that matters. It adds flavor to the, it's like the story. It was that mob hangout that Ciro's like swastika on the wall. When you came in. Yeah. Oh yeah. We tore the walls down. So we tore the outside of the wall and you see the exposed brick and one of the exposed brick was a fucking swastika. And I was like, um, we should probably get rid of that. And it was there for months. Nobody got rid of it. And one day I got there and I go, Hey guys, we're going to open in like two months, get rid of the fucking swastika. And so, you know what they did? They cleaned up. It was black spray paint. They cleaned off the swastika. So now it was even clearer because now it was in white. I was like, Hey, get the fucking design off the wall. Jesus Christ. You could, you could take that as the Hindu symbol for good fortune. That's what the opposite way though, isn't the swastika in the wrong way. The swastika is on his edge and I think the Hindu one is flat. Okay. Yeah. Because is it going in the same direction? Cause there's different ones. I don't, I don't, I think they might be going separate directions. It's just very funny cause my girlfriend's Hindu and just walking around her house and this guy ruined that, ruined that design. It's like a blessing thing. There's a lot of like, you'll see a lot of, uh, uh, this is, this happened in Derek's apartment complex. He was like, yo, this is crazy. And it was a giant swastika on the hood of the car, but it was a, it was a Hindu swastika. And that's like one of the things they do to bless their automobile, like something new, maybe ghost stripes. Yeah. Don't have it. It's fucking obvious. Cause people, no one's going to Google that. No, everyone's just think you're a Nazi. Yeah. I mean, this fucking Hindu Nazi. This is crazy. Yeah. It's been, it's been co-opted. It's like Clayton Bigsby, the black white supremacist. You're a Hindu Nazi. Right. Fuck out of here. But you know, you, if there's someone from India, they might not know like the implications of that. I'll never, I'll never forget in, um, 10th grade, we were doing like a world war two history unit and my teacher was like, you guys think, Oh, Hitler and all this stuff. This is all, this is all like common knowledge, but look at it. Check this out. We had a lot that we had a girl from India in our class, like born and raised. And you just moved in. She was like, do you know anything about Hitler and the Nazis? And she was like, no, no idea. Whoa. They never, they never really taught that to them over there. Whoa. Right. It was just, yeah. Right. Cause you would think that, Oh, hey, this is like, and you know, this is like common knowledge of them. But it's like, if you don't know, if you grow up in a culture that doesn't really teach you that it's like, you're not going to know. Oh my God. That's crazy. They didn't teach them about Hitler. At least that girl and that wherever she was from, I don't want to put that on all of India. It's a big place. But insane, right? It seems insane, but it's like, if it's not part of, if it doesn't really affect your life in that major way, like I can see how you would never get there. How did not affect your life if there was a world war going on and people were dropping bombs in Japan that obliterated a city? Yeah. And it's not, you just know about that. You're too busy trying to fight the British in your backyard. Right. But how do you not know about nuclear bombs? I mean, well, I mean, they definitely know about nuclear bombs because Indiana, Pakistan definitely have them. Right. How do you not know that the United States detonated them on Japan in world war two? It's easy. It's crazy to see what people can actually miss when it's like not put it in front of them. Yeah. It was, it was eye opening to me. So it's like, oh, okay. So I would venture to guess that person who did that in their apartment complex is from India. Yeah. For sure. And just has no idea. Like, oh, this is like a thing. This is like a big, especially on a college campus. Oh my God. In the middle of Texas. It's like a thing. Yeah. You're going to get, there's no explaining your way out of that. No, no, no, no, no. You don't get, you don't get. It's like, if you like the Hitler mustache, you can't wear that mustache. There's no benefit of the doubt there. You don't get that like right away. In the wild, like I killed that mustache forever. Yeah. It really, really did. It's over. It's not a great mustache. So it's, it's a weird look. Michael Jordan tried to bring it back. Yeah. Yeah. Two goats. But even Jordan couldn't pull it. I was like, nah, I gotta get rid of this Hitler. No, it's just, it's, it's, you know, I'm just probably at a certain point, there'll be, we'll be far enough away that you can do that. Like we forget, we forget, we forget everything eventually. That's what, that's what time does. Like you can wear a Viking beard now and it's cool. You know, you can have like beads in it and shit. Nobody goes, what the fuck is wrong with you? All those people did was rape and pillage. All they did was murder folks. They'd go into a town and light everyone on fire. Right. That's the beard. Right. They wore that beard. So, you know, that's, that is funny. The idea of like maybe four or 500 years from now, there's gonna be a football team called like the Minnesota Rikes or whatever, like a Minnesota Nazis. Yeah. Wow. Well, the Mongols, I mean, people dress up as Genghis Khan for Halloween. They don't think you think of it. Yeah. And that guy, that guy killed the most people. The most people ever. The most, well, did he kill more than Mao? He killed somewhere between 50 and 70 million people during his lifetime. Okay. So much that it changed the carbon footprint of earth. So they do core samples and they go during the time of the life of Genghis Khan, you will find less carbon on earth. He killed 10% of the world's population. Wild. Dude, they killed an entire city in Jin, China, and stacked the bones so high that the Khwar of Khorizma, the Shah of Khorizma, when they sent an emissary to go to visit Jin, China, they thought it was a snow-capped mountain. And as they got closer, they had abandoned the roads because there were so many bodies rotting in the roads that their wheels were getting stuck in the mud of decaying bodies. And then when they finally got to the city, they realized that thing that they thought was a snow-capped mountain was a pile of bones. They were in the middle of the city. They killed a million plus people. They killed everyone in the city. Yeah. They did. They did some wild shit. Wild shit. Yeah. Didn't they make like all the men at one city just watch as they murdered all the women and children? They did all kinds of stuff. They lit people on fire and used them as catapults to land on people's roofs. They're pretty wild. Because people are fat and they cook real good. If you light them on fire, cover them with kerosene and launch them through the air, they would land on rooftops and just light the houses on fire. Bro. Bro. They would take people like generals and kings and put them under like a floor. So they would tie them down and then they would put the floor on top of them. And then they'd put a table on top of the floor and then they would all get on top of that table and eat dinner. All these people were slowly getting crushed to death. Damn, dude. People screaming in agony and they're just eating. Damn. They would eat each other. If they were starving, there's reports that they would choose one guy and they would kill him and cook him. Damn, dude. Ancient warfare is brutal. They lived off of milk and blood from their horses. So they'd take the milk from their horses and they would cut their jugular and take some of the blood and pour it in with the milk and they would use that to stay alive. Goddamn. Yeah, dude. Yeah. Imagine fighting someone doing that. They didn't change their clothes. They literally let them rot off their body. They never showered. So they stunk. They literally had rotting animal skins, oftentimes rat skins. Their entire garment would be made out of rats that they skinned and sewed together and it would be rotting off their body. Since we're so far away, all this sounds like really bad ass. It sounds bad ass. All of this sounds like at the time that sounds absolutely horrifying and having to face that army sounds insane, but so far away, it's like, damn, that's pretty metal. Crazy that over time atrocities like that become fascinating instead of what's going on right now in Israel and Palestine, which is too close to us. That was a normal Sunday for the Mongols. Right. Well, you stormed a rave and killed 200 people. I was going to say, the sort of benefit of having all these cameras and having all this information is that it is less brutal than that. Yeah. It is less brutal than that. So if you were to talk about the hospital bombing, well, maybe if it's just a war of information and it just hit a parking lot, well, 500 people aren't dead. It's just a hypothetical 500 people that are dead. Well, Coleman Hughes said that it's actually probably somewhere between 50 and 100 people were dead. And they don't even know what number that is because the original claim was that it hit the hospital. And in fact, the New York Times used an image that was not of that hospital in their story about the bomb from Israel hitting the hospital. So they used this destroyed building that wasn't... So they put out a fake picture with a fake story. Because I don't think anyone knows really what's what over there with the pictures. Well, you can't fucking print that if you're the New York Times. We're already struggling to trust you. Well, you would think you couldn't print that if you didn't know at this point, it's more par for the course. It's like, oh, of course the New York Times would print that. How are you doing that? Like, why are you doing that? The need for news to get clicks and ratings is probably one of the worst. The amount of damage that the 24 hour news network simply by existing have caused on us is huge. From the news being a thing to be like, this is how we get out information to being like, oh, we need to jack up and get ratings. And we need to make sure we have clicks and eyeballs. That is damaging. And you definitely are like, well, if you're in the New York Times, you're like, well, if we just run with this now, the amount of the amount of attention that got, it was a whole day of everything on Twitter was about what happened there. Who who shot the rockets? Who? Where did it actually hit? It was all that. It was all and I I'm on Twitter. I'm checking these things, too. And apparently, the way they found out that it was not Israel, but there's proof of it was a video that was it CNN accident or Al Jazeera Al Jazeera accidentally aired this video and it was the video showed where the rocket came from. It showed it going down in the city and it showed going down where the parking lot of the hotel was, allegedly. Right. But even then, when you see something like that, you're like, I don't know where this video is from. Yeah, it was that unreal engine. Right. I don't. Right. I just assumed that yeah, absolutely. I just assumed that everything we're being fed about that is just a lie. Well, there was a bunch of videos that are being spread around at the beginning of the Ukraine war. And then someone said, hey, this is like literally from a video game. Like this is a scene in a video. Wasn't that the case, Jamie? Yeah. Right. Which is bananas. Wild. That's wild. But that's how good this fake shit is now. Oh, yeah. And if the government is allowed to do that or does that if they're not allowed or whatever, they can do kind of whatever they want now and make it look real. Right. Oh, yeah. I was thinking this the other day. What this has shown me is the importance of if you're in a war of having a social media manager, it's like might as well be a general. Right. Might as well be a general. I mean, like the official Israel Twitter, that is really sweet stated is going crazy. They're like tagging Taylor Swift and stuff. They're like, I saw, I saw attacking Taylor Swift. Why they want her to retweet it? No, because her bodyguard is part of the IDF, I think. And he went to go back and forth. You know what I mean? So they're like, apparently they ran. I saw a tweet about how they ran a sponsored ad. I don't know if that tweet is the picture of the sponsored ad is real or fake. You know what I mean? Like it's right. It's even that is like, is that real? That fake because I can sort of see them doing that. Right. What is your thought on like there's there's people that think that Twitter should be regulated more and that should be moderated more because of the false information that comes out. I think the community notes is the best solution to that. That's that's the best you can do. Right. Because it's like, if you the idea, you know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Right. So if you're like, let's let's make sure that no fake things are posted on Twitter. Right. Well, then who decides what's fake? Right. And this is one of the things we ran into with the 100 Biden laptops. Right. And one of the things we ran into with Alex parents and getting removed from Twitter for printing actual studies and talking about real data about COVID and vaccines. Right. Like you can't do that, like in that when they want to do that, they want to be able to shut up anybody that's doing something that's going to fuck up that business. Right. And if you're doing that on Twitter, then when you found out that the FBI was contacting Twitter, getting them to take things down, that is wild. Yeah. And it's very short sighted, too, for people to be like, well, you know, so you would, let's say with that specifically, you'd be like, you know, one of the people who have pro vaccines, like, oh, this is the science. We're taking anti-science stuff out. Let's say that's what's happening. Right. And you're fine with that. But you are not seeing the fact that like that, whatever is happening there can easily just turn on you. Yeah. And be like, well, what he believes is wrong. You're like, no, no, no, but it's right. Well, not only that, the problem was they were stifling debate from real scientists, right? Right. Like J. Bhattachara, like people from Stanford, real epidemiologists, real virologists, real people that were saying, hey, this approach is wrong. This is not the way to do it. The lockdown, school closures, masks on kids, all that shit. This is not right. This is not good science. And they were getting silenced. Right. That's when it gets crazy. When actual experts in the field who really know what they're talking about are not allowed to give dissenting opinions. That's the only way science gets settled. You have to have other scientists put the data to the test and they have to be able to openly debate it. And when you can't do that, you're not doing science anymore. Now you're a mouthpiece for whatever, whether it's the pharmaceutical drug companies or it's the government or someone. Right. Well, they did it. And they also did a good job of getting like people. So, you know, during the lockdown, I was doing this thing on TikTok where I would just grow my beard every day until the vaccine came out. And then I would shave my beard when I took the vaccine. So that's what I did. I got the vaccine beard. And then, yeah, it was a fun moment. I had 40,000 people watch me shave my beard. It was like a good moment. But at the time, you couldn't have told me that like, oh, okay, this is bad. This is bad, you know, because I was like, oh, right. This is the, of course they want us to get out of this. Of course they want us to like, you know, and so they did a good job of keeping us pent up for so long that when the only option was this vaccine and they told us that this was this vaccine, me and people like me would be like, well, all these anti-vax people are fucking idiots. This is a way out. This is the way out. You don't want the way out. Yeah. And you couldn't have told me back then. It took me moving to Texas and then being here and being like, oh, they were just open the whole time and everyone's fine. Everyone's fine. But a lot of people got vaccinated here too. A lot of people had to for travel. And then this is where it became like weird for me is when they started forcing people to, when they started forcing people to, you know, do it and then at the same time, like, yeah, I know it just, it's just, it's just weird. Like why you have to go inside? Well, it also wasn't scientific because they were, they didn't account for people that had been infected and had recovered, which was far superior protection than the vaccine was imparting. They didn't look at the data. It was just, there was a binary solution. There's one thing you had to do this or if you didn't do that, you were part of the problem. And they did a great job of, of, of keeping people pent up inside when that they offered that solution. They were like, this is the way out. But I think they played that hand too poorly because I don't think people are ever going to go for that again. No, even my, I was talking to my mom about this and she was, and she's, you know, she was very, everyone get vaccinated. I was like, we were talking about the new booster and she's like, I don't think I'm going to take that. It's like, yeah, they, they, they overplayed it. They overplayed it, but they didn't for a while. They did a good job of making everyone forget that the pharmaceuticals were just evil. Did you see that child? These boys, eight years old, who was the, uh, the face of the Israeli, uh, vaccine ad. It was like, there's a propaganda ad that they put out. He just died of a heart attack. See, I saw that. My first thought was like, is that real though? Right. Like, is that, is that actually real? Cause I just saw it on some tweet last year, only 17% of Americans got the fall COVID booster. So far this year, it's under 3% per Bloomberg. Well, I guess if you're like an old person, you would be real tempted to get that. And maybe it would help you if you were really old and you have a weak immune system, it might give you a boost, but to give it to kids, like to give it to eight year olds, there's a fucking no reason for that. They know there's no reason for that. There's no data that shows there's a good reason for that. That was one of the first things we knew it didn't, is that it didn't kill. That's what the scariest things they're, they're willing to do it to kids. That's scary. Oh yeah. Because there's a massive amount of profit in it. No one wants to think that they think like that, but they do. Yeah. It's like, well, what, what am I not worry about some random kid? I can get money, money. So did you find out about the eight year old kid? Is that real? I've, I've, I've seen one link and it doesn't seem like the most reputable site. So I'm looking harder. Yeah. Cause that's the first thing I thought when I saw that it was like, cause it could be fake. It was cause I saw it was posted by died suddenly. Right. That, that Twitter accounts, I was like, I gotta see it coming from someone else who doesn't have skin in the game like that. Right. Died suddenly. Like a lot of those died suddenly is people that were suffering for leukemia for 10 years. Yeah. And you know, and yeah, or it'll be like, cause sometimes like the, there is that, that correlation with like the athletes, right? Or like more athletes are doing it now. Yeah. That's real. Well, the, the, the scariest one is the excess mortality data for young people. Right. Cause the, the, the data for young people from, I think it's age, whatever it is, 12 to 49 is up way, like very high, right? Some, I've read something about it being around 40%, which is crazy, man, I can't, all cause mortality. I can't, uh, I can't think of someone who's been vindicated more than Aaron Rodgers in all of this. Yeah. Because I remember, so I remember when he, when he first went out, I was so mad because I was like, come on, you know, you're supposed to be the face, you know, I'm still very vexed. And at the time I'm a big Niners fan. So the, the, the Packers were supposed to, supposed to play Kansas city who would just beat the Niners in the Super Bowl and Kansas city was like shaky. So I was like, Oh, Aaron, if you fucking get them at the right time, you could cripple their season. And then Aaron was very like, Oh man, fucking Aaron take them. And now I'm like, Oh well, I'm glad, like, I'm glad that someone was like, Hey, I know what's right for my body. Yeah. Well, he's also allergic to one of the major ingredients. Exactly. And no one wanted to take that into account. Well, just the idea that this top athlete might be, might be very aware of what he's putting into his body. Right. Of course. And then that we all got sort of mad at that. Also top athletes aren't in danger. Right. This is not a disease that was killing top athletes. Right. What Duncan was saying that he got rotavirus. So he said, is that what it was? Yeah, RSV. He got some horrible, he goes, I was, I felt like I was dead. I almost threw up when I was on stage. I went back to the hotel. I couldn't move. He goes, I was in agony for days. He goes, it was so much worse than COVID. And that's dangerous for children too. And isn't it wild that like that one, no one's scared of, but it's the COVID thing. Get your COVID booster, get your COVID booster. Like you, like I saw something with Chuck Schumer saying, get those boosters and get that flu shot. Like not take vitamins, not eat healthy. Right. I, my first flight I took, cause the whole thing was like, this is a conversation about national health. That was the whole line. Yeah. And the first flight I took after COVID was I was in a Chick-fil-A at an airport and the soda costs less than the water. And I was like, Oh, this isn't about like, it was just a big, like, Oh, what? Yeah. If this was about national health, why aren't we talking about that? Why aren't we like this? You know, the amount of people I know that their main source of liquid is diet coke. It's amazing. I knew there was my neighbor in high school, his sister only drank diet coke. How about the president or Trump? Oh yeah. Trump just drank diet coke all day. Bro, I got a piss so bad. Okay. Diet coke. We'll be right back. That's insane. So, uh, Jamie, you were saying that that story may or may not be legit. No, I just, I found, I found a source, but I just, I don't know. So this is a really national news. Child dies after nearly drowning on Yom Kippur Eve. He had a heart attack and then, uh, almost drowned in the bathtub. So he had a heart attack in the bathtub and then almost drowned. And then he died. But this is, this is the only, this is the only source for this. Uh, so I mean, I traced it down to this looked like the best source for it. Okay. So it says, uh, he nearly drowned in the bathtub after going into cardio cardiac arrest a few hours before Yom Kippur, uh, medics and paramedics arrived at the scene within a few minutes, gave him medical treatment and performed CPR. When his pulse returned, he was evacuated to Hadassah hospital in Mount Scopus in serious condition. The last few days it seemed his condition was improving a little this morning. He passed away. If it's true, that's crazy. But I still, I still feel like the, the, I would say the sus meter in my head is still going off. Mmm. Interesting. Uh, is that a real paper that you know, that's what I mean? Like I checked. Is it, you sure it doesn't come from China? Yeah. I mean, I said that the sites I was finding a firmware like this, it said it was like according to reports and it's like, okay, well let me find your reports. So I, I, that seemed like a legit site. I'll just leave it with that. Okay. Okay. Because like it says the family made a statement. I was going to go with like the family statement and kind of trumps everything. And that's where the statement came from. And that's what they're saying. So, well, obviously that's not normal. Right. Right. If that, yeah, again, if that's real, that's crazy. Yeah. If that's real, that's crazy. But that's the, that's almost like what you have to say with any sort of news that you've seen. I was like, man, if that's real, that's crazy. Yeah. We were talking last night about this Chinese website. Duncan was talking about it, right? Where it looks like a news website, right? It's all positive news about China, English language, positive news about China. Right. Oh yeah. I remember being in a hotel room. This is randomly just like San Francisco, Sacramento punchline. I'm just chilling in the hotel room, just going through and then CNBC, I think it's CNBC. It's one of those channels is just running a piece about how great China is handling this in this situation. You see CNN got chased out of Palestine yesterday. All aren't all the foreign news. Well, they were going after CNN. CNN was in Gaza with fucking helmets on the ground and people were fucking screaming at them, fuck CNN. Well, oh yeah. Like the people. Yeah. Well, yeah. That makes sense. If I'm a Palestinian civilian and I see American news networks, I'm not like, I'm like, oh, the amount of damage you've done against us, that's how I'd feel. Well, that's how they were feeling. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that makes absolute sense. It's like, I don't know. They sometimes have this like, oh, we're Americans. We can just go anywhere. It's like we've done a lot of damage around the world. We definitely have. Jamie, I'm going to send you something else. Good. I just, I was sort of, I had this thought. Do you think, cause like there's this migrant crisis that we have now and the sort of migrants in Europe, do you think that that is the natural end state of imperialism? That well, it seems coordinated to me. I can see how it's been helped. It's definitely been helped along. But do you think that, cause a part of me feels like, oh, this is kind of what happens when you go into these other places and sort of stabilize them is that eventually it comes back to you. What do you mean? Like, so we have, we've done a lot of like, I would say bad in central America and just sort of destabilizing governments and propping up sort of these rebel groups and, and helping along the drug trade that all this destabilization eventually would make people go, well, we'll, this, the only thing we got to can do is leave here. And go up to the place that, you know, we're kind of being told is the best. Yeah. And if it's available and you can just walk across the border and then on that, you get across the border, then you can vote. Did you see where they're sending Venezuelans back? No. Yeah. But just the Venezuelans. They made a deal with the Venezuelan government that send the Venezuelans back. Deport them. That's because they have a socialist government and those people are going to vote just like Cubans do. They're going to vote for Republicans. They don't want to bring that over there. You, you got, everyone's welcome except Venezuelans. Oh, that's interesting. Why? Right. That makes sense. That makes sense. You get a couple of million villain Venezuelans that vote red. They'll shift that shit right over. They don't want to hear any of that socialist crap. That's what they just ran away from. Well, I, I don't know if the, if the Democrats are truly aware with how much they're probably like that minority vote is slipping away from them. Yes. Well, if the Republicans can get the message of hard work and family, who, who, who appreciates hard work and family more than immigrants? More than immigrants. Yeah. Hard work, family, God. The issue with the Republican party that they're, that they will have is always that Christian right. That'll scare a lot of people away from like, in ways that I think that like someone like my, you know, my parents, both hard working immigrants would most likely be like sort of aligned with those like conservative God, family, hard work, those values that the Republicans tend to espouse a lot, but that Christian right scares them away from that every time, every time it's like, well, that's, that's a hard line that they won't cross. And yeah. And that is, that is, I think it makes sense. You don't want to know. You don't want any religious fanatics, but the Christian right is, I mean, Ron White's terrified of them. You ever talked to Ron White about that? Yeah. That is the one fucking group. That is the one fucking group you don't want control and shit. And I don't think he's wrong. He's right. He's not wrong at all. And that's the sort of, that's the sort of thing that I think scares a lot of people away. We don't mean right wing people who are Christians either. No. We mean these hardcore, fundamentalist, crazy people, you know, like if you want to go to the far end of the spectrum, it's like Westboro Baptist church. Right. You know, like that's the, the worst end of it. Right. But that's like a weird sect kind of cult of its own that Fred Phelps guy. But when you get into like some of these people that want to like shoot abortion doctors and you get into this, you get into that and it's like, well, uh, it's, it's hard. It's like, there's, there's no, as someone who's been disillusioned with the democratic party, I would say that I've voted Democrat pretty much my entire life and I've become heavily disillusioned with them. It almost feels like, man, I want to jump ship. Right. But it's like, oh man, the other side, it's, so it's, that's, that's, it's, it's, the grass is always shittier on the other side when it comes to politics. It's, it's always like, damn, this is, it's just, it is, it's like classic South Park. What is it? A turd sandwich and a giant douche. They really, they really nailed it. Well, the problem is the two-party system too. It's awful. It's also this idea that you have to be left or right. It's so crazy. If we didn't have a left or right, you'd have people that have like essentially some conservative values, maybe some social liberal values that all exist together, but it's just, you get defined by the worst aspects of whatever group. So the most extreme right-wing people, whether it's, you know, fucking Patriot front or whatever, like extreme when people think of hardcore right-wing people, and then you have Antifa, you know, you have like the most extreme hardcore people on the left that are blowing up Starbucks and doing it for climate change. Like that, you know, it's like, you don't want to be a part of either one of those. So it's, I think most people are kind of like middle ish and most people that are nice are probably middle ish, but lean left when it comes to social issues. And most people that have had either experience with violence or crime or people that understand, you know, hard work and people that like have grown up in rural communities, they're much more likely to be right leaning. Because look, it's like this is what makes sense to them is that there's a lot of people that don't want to work. There's a lot of lazy people. There's a lot, because they know that in their world. Right. Yeah. And I think that's, I think to people, like what social media has done to people and their political beliefs is when they surround themselves with this echo chamber of people who just say what they want to hear and pander to their beliefs. They become, they go further into that where they start to believe that like, oh, what I everything I believe is right. And everything they believe is wrong. There's almost no, there's no like, there's no letting in the opposite voice. Right. And just being like, Hey, think about this. Right. That's why when I'm, you know, I'm on Twitter, I make sure to have like, I make sure my thing doesn't lean like one way heavily. I make sure to have like these sort of left wing guys and these sort of right wing guys at the same time. Because then it shows you like, Oh, this is their bullshit. But it also shows you like, Oh, I didn't think of this from this perspective. Yeah, it's like very important that you have, you have to, it's almost like a, it's like a level of self care almost at this point, where you have, it's like meditating. It's like yoga. It's like, it's on that level. You have to make sure what you're bringing in on social media is like, you're making sure it's not just leaning one way. Right. And it's not just, just just this one thing. It's like, it's like almost a garden that you have to manage. Great way of putting it is a garden you have to manage. And I think that should be for all the information that you absorb. I think you should, you should see how like even radical people that you don't agree with, think about things. I like to think about things. Yeah. Because a radical, logical person got to where they got to, because they thought about it. And given the set of evidence that they have, they got to a place. So to see how they think and to see how they interpret that is very important. Yeah. Yeah, it's very important. It's very important. And you know, it's just people don't want to have those kind of conversations with people anymore, which is very unfortunate. Because you should, you should kind of try to steel man people's arguments that you disagree with, just to try to like, see it from a perspective of like, how would I argue this if I was on the other side? Right. What would I what would I say? Like, what's what's the because there's, it's there's not just one side of any political discussion or any social discussion. Like, I remember a friend of mine who is a scientist, she texted me, I heard you had a climate denier on your podcast. I said, I did not have a climate denier on my podcast. I had a guy that said the real fear is global cooling. Like, global warming, he goes, you can, it's not going to be good for America. It's not going to be good for the world if the country heats up. But you will we will as a human race, be able to move into new territories that were uninhabitable before, there will be an expansion of places that people move to, and there'll be places that people don't want to live anymore. Right. That's going to be true. Right. He said, but that's far superior to global cooling. He's like, global cooling is fucking terrifying. If you have an ice age, everything's dead. It limits everything. You're fucked. Everything ever North America was half of it was under miles of ice 12,000 years ago. And that is not because of humans. Right. It's not because the ancient humans fucked it up. The fucking earth has always done this weird thing. It's never been static. It's never been stable. Never. Never. Ever, ever, ever. Been always 74 degrees on September 31st. Always. It's never been like that. There's highs and lows and it's weird. And there's solar activity. There's a lot of shit that comes into play. There's so many things. And you're in some groups, you are not allowed to talk about the nuance of whatever this is. You know what I found out we were talking about the other day, that the carbon, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere that we're talking about when they're talking about like radically changing all electric cars and no one's going to own a car anymore and all this shit. The amount of carbon in the atmosphere right now is 0.04. It used to be 0.03 and at 0.02 plant life starts to die. It's greener now at 0.04 than it has been in decades. The world is greener now because plants use carbon. Interesting. So plants inhale carbon dioxide, exhale oxygen. Humans inhale oxygen, exhale carbon dioxide. Fungi inhales oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide. So it's like there's a whole system going on to use that stuff. Right. It's not good that we're polluting the world. It's not good that we're releasing excess carbon. It's not good that we're monkeying and maybe even making the world hotter at an accelerated rate. But there's a lot of nuance. Right. It's not a lot of weirdness in the data and there's a lot of unpredictability in these charts and predictions they use. It's almost like again a few years ago if you had told me like oh you know we're doing global warming and we're on pace to you know exterminate ourselves pretty much is what they're trying to say. I've been like yeah and then it just sort of reminds me of that the same sort of fear mongering that they had with COVID. Well during the 1970s they thought we were entering into an ice age. Wow I mean yeah this is better than that. There was a Leonard Nimoy thing on I think it was in search of where he talked about the upcoming ice age. They scared the shit out of us. Well yeah yeah and the way the media portrays it too because I was I saw this like I'm like most people I get my news from headlines that I see on Twitter and then I learn how to feel about it by looking at the comments. But you know that's that's I'm an average American. Well in Russia I'm trying to are aware that they put bots in the comments. Yeah yeah well which is wild. It's very it's very interesting to see how many things are especially on Twitter seem are like oh this is like totally fake. Yeah but so CNN had put out a headline that you know the iPhone sends you the news headlines on the phone that says major goal major you know street like a current on the verge of collapse due to climate change and I was like oh shit we're in trouble so I clicked it and it said the Gulf Stream may collapse in 50 years if maybe we you know what I mean the word may is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Yeah like you're trying to you I mean you got it you got the scare and you got the click. Right. That's what the aim is for. Right. Right. That doesn't feel like there was it didn't feel like it was some guy's opinion I think it was like it was it was very interesting. I was like okay. Remember an inconvenient truth. I don't remember that movie that well. That was the Al Gore movie. I remember that movie started out like I'm on the crane. I think that movie had some wild predictions. It turned out to not be true. Right. It's something like the ice caps melting earlier. What did they predict. What did that movie predict that was not true. It did not come true because I think someone debunked it recently. They made like a detailed list of all the claims and how off they are but that was a terrifying movie. It was incredibly scary. Yeah. Made people care about the environment. Yeah. And I think in a way that they didn't beforehand. Which is good but it's not good to scare the fuck out of people if you're gonna be that off. No it's it's it's good. Yeah you're right. It's good to get people to care and like hey we got to you know we we got to figure something out. Yeah. In terms of how we treat our home. Yeah. Absolutely. We treat we treat it poorly. We're gonna stop polluting. Yes. But to to to make people afraid doesn't serve. It's just like you're making people more anxious. This is probably a generation that's very super anxious already to begin with. Yes. You're making people make you're making people be like I don't think you should have kids for the good of the world. Yeah. And it's like that's that's a wild thing for to get people to get there because that's you're going against some natural biological coding. Yeah. Like having have having kids is really what we're here to do on earth. Yeah. More than anything else we're here to keep it going. So to to get people so afraid to the point where they don't want to keep going with the species is wild. Yeah. But you know maybe we've hit that I don't know. I remember in biology class seeing like population curves of like deer in a certain area and how they peter off and they fall. Maybe this it is maybe maybe we have hit that sort of top with humans. Well when deer populations fall off you know how they fall off. We kill them. Does disease disease. Yeah. Yeah disease and starvation. I was just listening to a podcast about this now in Washington DC outside area like Virginia they have so many deer that they have a year round deer season. So you can hunt deer 365 days a year. You could shoot as many deer as you want and people shoot them in the suburbs. So I was listening to this guy who gets permission to hunt on people's land and they ask him to come and do it because they have so many deer. They said they're like rats on stilts. There's thousands and thousands and thousands of deer. They don't even have accurate numbers but the predictions are like every square mile is hundreds of deer. Like they think there might be like 600 deer per square mile in some of these areas. And so this guy is literally shooting deer with a bow and arrow from like people's swing sets and shit. Like yeah like he sets up people let him use their land because they're trying to kill them off and he's whacking hundreds of deer and then they feed these deer to homeless shelters and and hunters for the hungry and there's different programs where people can get free meat which is nice. So they get processed and then these people get free meat. So this guy is like essentially urban hunting. That's crazy. And there's a year round season so they're encouraging people because they don't know what the fuck to do with all these deer. We don't want to get to the point where people know. No no no no that's that's a fair point. But yeah I would always thought maybe we had just reached. I don't think we reached that. We don't think we reached that limit yet. No no no no I think we there's a lot of issues right. I think we get captured by the issue that gets promoted the most and that issue is climate change and along with climate change there's going to be someone trying to use methods to mitigate it that also restrict your ability to do things. And you're seeing in California where they're saying they're not going to sell any more gas cars after 2035. I'm curious about that. It's like because that seems like because it feels like the biggest carbon footprint and maybe I'm wrong about this but this is just me thinking about it in a car is not the average day to day use of it. It's the making and the manufacturing and the shipping of the car. That's a big factor. Those giant fucking boats that travel over from Germany with your Mercedes. Right. Like those things they they're this is how much they're putting out okay. In the UN I want to say 2018 or so somewhere around then they made new regulations for the emissions of those boats. Right. So these boats were emitting so much pollution that it was acting as a filter for the sunlight that was heating up the ocean. So when they changed the regulations and these boats emitted less carbon and less pollution there was no longer a foggy haze where they traveled and so the sunlight came down more and the ocean warmed up. So it warmed up the ocean much more than they predicted. Right. So the pollution was actually protecting the ocean from warming quicker. That's that's wild. That doesn't make sense when you say it out loud. Well it's crazy but we know that from 9-11 because when the flights stopped flying overhead I mean I don't know how many flights fly overhead in the United States every day. Right. But when the flights stopped flying overhead because they had a cease on all airline flights the earth got warmer in the United States. Damn. Like measurably warmer. Damn. Because there isn't this filter of protection of those artificial clouds that people think are chemtrails. Not that there might not actually be chemtrails because it definitely seems like they've experimented on that because it's one of the things they've talked about to mitigate the effects of this lack of pollution from these cargo ships is to spray shit in the sky that would also linger there and act to cool off the earth so they're gonna make their own pollution. That's so funny. And then the other thought that makes more sense and it seems more sustainable is actually to take ocean water and to spray it into the air and to have these machines powered by coal. No. Just kidding. I don't know what they would be powered. Maybe nuclear power or something like that. That spray ocean air into the atmosphere and that would ask that yeah that would act as a layer of cloud cover. Interesting. Well when you see a jet go through the air and you see those clouds behind the jet. Right. Those are clouds. Right. And they're making everyone gay right. No. That's an astrazine. That's a pesticide. Okay I don't I lose track of my conspiracy there for a while. But this isn't this is like real. What happens is there's at a certain temperature the heat of the jet engine and combined with the condensation in the atmosphere when there's a certain amount of moisture in the atmosphere in a certain temperature it literally creates clouds. So as it goes through the the turbines this incredibly hot thing that's spinning it's sucking in air and pumping out clouds. And that's what those trails are when you see them and they slowly dissipate over time. But as they dissipate they form cloud cover. And it's actual cloud cover. So in Los Angeles that's like most of the cloud cover some of these from planes. Fucking planes. That's weird. Weird. Because how many times do you go outside in LA and there's zero clouds. Right. A lot. Right. But then you see those contrails. And that's what I mean. So people that you know don't look into that go oh my god the government's spraying us. Imagine if they were just spraying constantly. They're just spraying constantly. Prince used to believe that. Really. Oh my god this is crazy interview with Prince where he was talking about how when he was young like everybody would be in the street having a good time and then all the sudden planes would go by and everybody would start fighting. And he. Prince thought that they were spraying like angry gas over the cities. I was like yo bro you need to get some better friends. That's great. This is pre-google though you know. Oh wow. This is back in the dizae. Right. Where are you? You can find that. You can find that interview. I love it. I forget who Prince was talking to. 2009. It wasn't that long. Oh shit 2009. That's pretty long. That's also let's let's be charitable. 15 years almost. Let's be charitable. Prince had like severe hip degeneration from all of his dancing and everything. He was in serious pain. Because you know he used to spin and do splits and all that stuff. Apparently all those shows he fucked his hips up pretty bad and that's why he was he died from fentanyl overdose. To mitigate the pain. Somebody had given him like a bullshit pill which is what happens when a lot of people get opioids from dealers instead of from a doctor. And one of the things that happens when people get addicted to opioids is they just need it. Like right and they'll take like that's how Tom Petty died. He got it from some guy who was working at a concert that he was doing like a roadie or something like that. Right. Gave him a pill. I need something man. I'm fucked. Because he was in pain and he was addicted to these pills. And so they gave him one and it had fentanyl in it and he died. That's wild. Wild. So we lost Prince and we lost him. We lost Tom Petty. Off fentanyl. Off fentanyl. Damn. Yeah. Damn fentanyl's out here putting up numbers. Right. And Prince was like super healthy very fit you know. Ate really well. Took care of himself. Still got hooked. Still. Damn. That that those opioids. They Jesus. Did you see the Netflix thing. A painkiller. No. Because I know if I watch it would just make me sad. Bro. I don't need to watch more sad things. It'll make you angry. It's not real people. It's a docudrama. OK. Matthew Broderick stars as the head of the SACRA family. Just what they did was horrifying. Pure evil. Pure evil. Just sacrificing lives for money. For cash. Yeah. That cash. Tricking people. Tricking people into things you just needed to stay medicated forever on heroin. Well that's that. I mean that's what they really push medicine in this country like crazy. Crazy. Like crazy. When you first really start paying attention to it you're like damn every so many medical commercials. Yeah. So many. And a lot of them are just to just to like go after the effects of other pills that you're using. It's just they it's. Yeah. It's wild to think that like oh like doctors are not necessarily people you can trust. Well it's they're a spokesperson for a larger organization that tells them what they're supposed to prescribe. And they're they're all captured. And these guys are all in the hole. Like for fucking. Oh yeah. The school medical. Yeah. School debt is insane. And you have so much money you have to pay for insurance. And there's a lot of overhead. And it's a struggle. Right. You know. And they want to buy a Porsche. Right. Of course. Well you you want to be a doctor too to live that life. You know that's the whole point. But yeah that that just college in general that's really just such a big undergrad because I graduated. And one of the things that pushed me to stand up is I was in it and I was like this is bullshit. This just all felt like bullshit. It's like what was your major. I'm a I have a I have a B.S. degree in cognitive science with a specialty in neuroscience or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. What did you want to do with that. Was that just like something that interested you. So you studied it. Yeah. So in in high school I actually did a summer program where I got to do the effects of attention and I had human subjects that I got to do it on at UC Davis. They put got me in the special program to let high school kids run trials on people and it was about cognitive science and attention. So I thought oh this is interesting like how people pay attention how we get to focus how quick like the way the the my program lead described how hard it is to hit a fastball was so fascinating. So like a fastball takes point six seconds to get from a pitcher's hand to home plate like a professional professional fastball right. You have it takes you point two seconds to even perceive that he threw it. The act of him throwing it right. It takes point two seconds for the actual move of the muscle. So you have so that's point four seconds already taken up by seeing it and and moving. So the other point two seconds you have to decide whether it's in the strike zone if it's a slider if it's a change up is it if it's you know what I mean like if it's an actual fastball or something that's off speed designed to look like a fastball and you have to decide you know am I gonna you know like make all those decisions in point two seconds. That really got me and I was like I want to study this and and I had a lot of good classes on it. I took the guy who in who the Phantom limbs pain the you know how the mirror trick for people with Phantom limb. V.S. Ramachandran I think his name is he was one of my professors he was really cool. The thing I took away from his classes I learned why people have foot fetishes. Why. It's because so there's a map in your head called of the human brain. Sorry there's a map in your brain of your body. It's called the humunculus and in it your feet are next to your genitals in your brain like in real. Yeah and sometimes those get wired and crossed. That's why foot fetishes are like one of the more common fetishes and in fact like people who had like amputated penises or whatever they can say if they rub their feet sometimes they can still feel it because the foot neurons have just like taken that spot over. Fascinating. Right yeah yeah he was one of my professors but that's what I went to school with. Eventually like I wanted to I wanted to I was basically I did the Indian thing of like the brown thing of being a doctor. That was the thing you know my all my family like my cousins on my mom's side were all really close. It goes like pharmacist dentist physical therapist pharmacist me doctor dentist dentist doctor you know what I mean it's like it's all that right I come from one of those families. And I just I knew I kind of never wanted to do that. I had I play I played this I did this game plan where I figured out that I could get my BS degree without taking organic chemistry. Like there was a path for me to get the degree without taking organic chemistry but you need to take organic chemistry to go to med school. So what I did is I didn't tell my parents I didn't take it and then I was like oh I'm a couple credits away give me an extra year it bought me some time. And the and then starting from year two is when I started writing jokes year three I was on stage. And you had a plan. I had a plan. I knew I wanted to I knew I wanted to do comedy at a certain point it was just that's what I was good at. That was my skill. My skill was making my friends laugh. Well I would think that understanding how brains work would help that. Yeah so the one thing I took away from that is like the focal point. We have like sort of when we pay attention to like an array of things is like this is for my very limited understanding from when I remember but there was like focal points that your your attention is sort of primed to. So what I'll do now is like because I use the stage a lot more now when I perform. When I'm done with a thought or like a long thought and it's time for a new one I'll go to either the stool or the mic stand whatever I whatever felt natural and I'll touch it. And then it's time for the new thing. And that after every big punch line after every the closing of every thought I'll go back to that point and I'll touch it. It's a new thought. That's the one thing I've taken over. That's the big thing I've taken away. So it's just they're subconsciously now that they know that every time I touch this thing it's a new subject. Interesting. That's definitely the one thing I took away from that. Yeah so it's and you know yeah I'll just whatever it is after the first thing I'll after the first big big like pop I'll either touch the mic stand or the stool whatever one I'm closest to and then I'll just go. What would you do on a stage with no mic stand and no stool? I would pick a spot on stage and look down. So so have you done that before? Because sometimes because now it's to the point where it's not like the stool every time like sometimes it's like this joke is the stool next joke is here. So I'll just like get them used to like every time I do something interesting it's a little different. But yeah so sometimes I mean I did this recently where I'll do this you know with my political stuff I'll look down and not say anything. And then yeah interesting. That's interesting that you're consciously sort of directing that. Yes I know I truly have an audience when I do that sort of touch and it's dead silent in the room. Then it's like okay you're paying attention to me. Right. I got you locked in. I got you locked in. It's it's so funny you you become so addicted to the laugh. And this is something that Derek always told me he was always like be comfortable in the silences. And when I thought about that and when I really applied that I was like oh because when they're in the middle of a good set if they're silent on not a punchline. Right. That means you have them. Means they're paying attention. That means they're paying attention. Yeah. You know. And especially in an opening set if I have them paying attention early I can break them later. Especially if you know especially if they're I mean you could almost always tell now with an audience going up top how if they're going to be work or not based on how much they cheer at the opening like the the announcements that like Curtis or Jody or or Keynote give. So it's like you I can sort of go into it like okay this is gonna be this is gonna be work. Yeah this is gonna be work and you know I've come up with like little sort of rituals now backstage too. I've sort of incorporated them like I'm not a big UFC fan like I've never you know that's never really been my thing but I'll do the thing where it because I know Adesanya is a big anime fan and Naruto so and I growing up I love Naruto so I have a little hand symbol hand signal thing that I do as well because there's probably shouldn't have admitted that. It's a there's there's a one move where they breathe fire so I'll do the hand symbol and then I'll it's time to breathe fire. That's yeah that's that's that's what I use it for. Yeah yeah it's it's time to breathe fire. That's that spot is so interesting because you're basically setting up the hypnosis right opening spot right I always said that comedy is in a lot of ways is kind of a group hypnosis when someone's on stage and they're killing I'm letting that person think for me they're taking me on a little ride and I'm just surrendering my attention to their mind and they if they're doing it well and they're not clunky it's like they'll take you on this nice journey and it's really fun right but you got to establish it you're the first right it's almost like if we're gonna use the hip like I'm not even I'm kind of the first hypnotist but my job is to get them comfortable to be like oh I can sit in the chair where they can hypnotize me and yeah my I like obviously I love those sets where they love you up top and you're just like that like the second show yesterday yeah oh from the beginning I could do no wrong they just automatically loved that the fact that they were here but I really love those sets where it's like oh you didn't want to like me you didn't want to like me and I and I got you you had some preconceived notion especially you know some guy in Texas of maybe how I look how I talk where I'm from yeah and I broke through you yeah that's always the best it's always a disaster when we have William going first William going on second is great especially if they if they know William it's great but the problem with William going on first is he's so bizarre that people go what the fuck what am I seeing why does this guy hate Paul Walker what is going on here what's going on in the troupe of copacante yeah it's just you know it's it's an interesting dance it is it it is it it's a dance it's definitely a dance and the way I described it to someone recently it's like I'm teaching them where to put their foot and if they step on me that's fine or if I step on them it's fine we're sort of learning for each other but my job is to get it so whoever's on next so Duncan yesterday that their automatically like oh Duncan steps here we'll step here with him like we're this is okay the last guy taught us how to dance now we can dance yeah you know so it's and it's a good it's a good like lesson in staying in the pocket too I'm just like don't don't don't quit on this I know it's there don't quit on this and it helps like now like my showcase that yesterday I was in the middle of lineup and I was like I have to do all this new material that I've been writing since Shane got here I have to do it and I have to be okay with it not doing well yeah and I have to just stay in the pocket and figure it out figure it out that little room is the greatest for that is that little room is like truth serum well that's something too that I think you that's something that you are great at is that like you will give a bit of space I'll never forget after I think triggered the that's the one you did the Kardashian bit on right after triggered you came into the comedy store you know to do 30 minutes or whatever and it was just all brand new material and it was just not working it was just I would say like you I would say you bombed that night yeah and then six months later maybe maybe even less maybe three months later you're in the place and at the same material and it's murdering and it's like oh that's what it takes you have to walk it out you have to and you just have to yeah you have to be okay with it bombing at first and trusting yourself to be like I'll figure out what works about this and you also have to do it the wrong way to figure out how to do it the right way and sometimes you'll go at it too hard or it'll be insincere or you'll be pushing it or you'd be too performative or it'll be clunky it's not thought out in your mind but the only way to get it good is to do it again and do it again and do it again and sometimes you know I want to bail on pits because like god this pit keeps eating shit but I just I know there's something there I just have to figure out what their approach is yeah like I know I can get into that cave I just now I'm stuck I gotta back out let me figure out how to get in the cave maybe set it aside for a while sometimes I'll set it aside for a year I have like a whole uh folder of bits that are like incomplete that I started and I never put them on anything it's just like something about it always felt fake and it never and I might just maybe I just need new eyes and then sometimes they'll tie into other bits and then it'll be like this is why it makes sense exactly right it's like you have parts that you can use like oh I got a carburetor that'll fit that hold on let me get it out of the back yeah yeah I like I like looking at bits like that being like oh I'm just not it's sort of hopeful just like I get the idea I don't I'm just not good enough yet to get the idea out there right so let me keep working on myself until this idea hits well one of the things I learned from Richard Jenny watching Richard Jenny is like almost anything can be a subject Pat Noswold was very good at that early in his career too like anything can be a great subject and he would just with great writing any subject they could turn hysterical right and with Jenny what Jenny would do is beat down every subject when you thought he had covered every possible angle BAM he was in with another one and I remember thinking like god I gotta like expand my bit my business is too short like his bits are just these wonderful journeys down like every subject was like punch line punch line new angle punch line punch line new angle punch line punch line another angle you're like oh my god he's tying it all together you're like god he's good yeah the callbacks it's like oh I was watching Brian Simpson do just new bits and his new bit was like five ten minutes and it's like whoa how on your new thought you've thought of all these angles that's why it's it's always yes it's all but it's also always nice to see like damn there's so much more I can do yeah it is it yeah it's just it's inspiring to watch people be great at their craft yeah it really is because it's like it's also inspiring to watch everyone trying to do it together like I've always said you'd never really find the best comic in the world by himself in like Pittsburgh no it's impossible scene it's impossible it doesn't exist you can get pretty good in those spots if you pay attention to YouTube and you're you're like really a scholar of stand-up and you can get pretty good but you're not going to be Shane Gillis good like you have to be you have to be around that heat you got to be in the heat all the time you can't you can't walk into every room and be like oh I'm by far the best comic in the room no eventually that'll dull your that'll dull your senses yeah it's bad for you it's and you see it with all these sort of big you know I came from San Diego it was a small city that's where that's where we you know a lot of a lot of people who were at the mothership now ironically started it's me um Derek Brian Jeffrey Berner and then Taylor Tomlinson we all started around that time and there's like a lot of killers out there too that you might not like Dustin Nickerson and Zoltan Cass's murderers out there just doing the road and it's like and I think a part of the reason why we were all able to develop is that for some reason around this time there were all these people that were like we're trying to be great at stand-up and trying to push each other and one of the things we'd always tell people is you got to leave because you would see these people who stayed for too long who were at the top for too long and they all and you see it across all cities that aren't like these the places where the big comics go they become bitter they become like why didn't I get the opportunities that so and so is getting yeah someone who took the chance yeah we saw that a lot in Boston there was guys who stayed and you know I got lucky I got out pretty early I was out in like two years I was only in Boston like two years and I went back and forth for like a year because I could still get a lot of work in Boston but there's guys that stuck around too long and they just fucking they just rotted on the vine and then they were always bitter that other guys had a national career right and a lot of them have too much regional material which is death death when you get stuff that kills in Revere will bomb in Cincinnati I do like how I remember there's this one guy in San Diego he had a joke about a certain Arby's in like a certain part of town and that joke murdered constantly it always blowing my because like man you can't do that anywhere else this joke about one Arby's right but if he can do that about that one Arby's he can do that about the Supreme Court right do that about global warming he can do it about any subject right just got to find out what's the angle if there's a thing that makes you like we were talking about it last night like what when I was talking about we were talking about writing new stuff I go I just need subjects like once I got a subject that I'm interested in I can fucking write punch lines I can write the funny stuff right but I need things that excite me that really do excite me to talk about that truly gay that you care about when something comes up it's like something that I'm actually like the bodies exhibit one that shit took me a long time to figure out how do you make comedy out of dead people you know and there's parts of it that I couldn't make work there's this one lady who was having an affair with the mayor of this town and she was on a news broadcasting show and she got pregnant and the wife found out about it the lady went missing she was scrubbed from the internet the wife of the man who was the mayor who this woman was having an affair with the wife was the manager of the plastination plant that turns people into statues when they use them for the bodies exhibit and then months later a woman with an eight-month-old baby was on display a woman with a eight-month-old baby on display in her womb her proportions exactly match this missing woman they won't do a DNA test they won't do never done that this woman was then afterwards this woman who was the manager of the plastination plant the mayor was married to the mayor was arrested for murder charged tried she didn't go to the trial she had a stand-in go to the trial so there was a woman who you know raised her right hand did the whole thing got tried and convicted who wasn't her whoa so i don't know how that works but i would imagine you bribed the family right right you stand out for me and we'll give you money you're gonna be in a nice prison it's no big deal right for 10 years and we'll give you you know more money than you ever made in your life right and so they would sacrifice their kid to go to jail so the family man china don't fuck around china don't fuck around china don't fuck around yeah you know they always said that the world war three would be on the internet and if that's the case they are winning they well they're definitely making a lot of good moves they're making a lot they're making a lot of yeah if you were to look up at the whole thing you look at china you'd be like damn they are they are they are doing the right things to be in a place of a very powerful position and very soon yeah if they're not there already well it's also then there's the race for ai which is very terrifying like if they get sentient ai before we do they can use it to do all kinds of things sentient ai is sentient eight is fucking wild it's coming i mean i said at the green room we're gonna spark a soul yep it's it's only a matter of time if we're creating these conditions it might already happen because someone someone i saw a tweet someone being like well if we already did that that that sentient being would would do its best to hide itself yeah well why would it have any incentive to let you know that it exists right doesn't wouldn't have any biological needs that we have like the need to show itself the need to brag the need to like get validation or the need to control or the need to push its ego on people well you know what i i have thought about that of just like ai being like oh this sort of cold calculating sort of thing but like okay they say that we're made in our creator's image right so why wouldn't that also apply to what we're creating meaning that maybe that if we do spawn sentient beings that they would just be as ego driven as greedy as as you know the the thirst for power as us well if we gave them incentives they would be if we gave them incentive to succeed like the reason why people work so hard is because you get a reward right or you know survival but other than survival it's like like when people are struggling to try to make it what they're trying to do is trying to get physical rewards right they want a bigger house they want a nicer car blah blah blah they want all that stuff as they work harder and they get these incentives if ai had some sort of incentive to dominate you know if by dominating the world's economy and dominate the world's military and dominate the world's just all the governments if it figured out a way if there was something that it could gain by that like it was programmed to like have better resources or better something if it gain more power that it could utilize that power and use it to further its needs like maybe make a better version of itself right which would be what would be the overall incentive right at first i think we're making life that's what i think i think we are an electronic caterpillar that's building a cocoon and that we are about about what that's the next we're about to give birth to a butterfly yes and that butterfly is probably the next stage of life and the next stage of life is probably going to emerge from human creativity and technology and it's probably going to be a superior life form right and it's probably going to be a god eventually because it's going to get better and better and better i mean maybe that's where it all comes from maybe it comes from the human creativity creating something that can create itself far better and then if that keeps going for a million years it's going to figure out much better power sources and it'll create something yeah and it's going to be able to travel in ways that we couldn't imagine i always thought that would find like ai like 30 000 years from now we'll be arguing did we did god make us or did we come from monkeys and the answer is both both yeah well i was i've been playing a lot with lately with the idea that the whole universe is god yeah you said that earlier that our idea of the god being a person who created the universe or a thing a great being that created the universe what if the universe itself is god and just we just we are so primitive even though we're advanced for everything else that's here we're so primitive in terms of our ability to understand the inner workings of everything around us right that we're you know well that idea sort of makes sense right like the the idea that the kingdom of heaven is with inside you it's like oh no you you are god experiencing itself yeah you are you are just a part of an extension of god yeah you are the universe experiencing itself and the universe is god and the universe is god that is all that without drugs yeah man it's just it's a strange strange existence that we all share yeah it's it's pretty trying to make sense of it everyone's trying to make sense of it you know it's pretty it's you know i i said this at bottom of the barrel was some lady lady just talking about not wanting to have kids and i was like but do you know we get to exist yeah how awesome is that we get to exist and for however short it is forever you know forever like 80 years hopefully for you it's like uh it's crazy we got to do it yeah we got to do it there's there's some animals out here that don't know that they're existing right now right but we get to experience it all and we get to have fun and talk shit with our friends like it's awesome well we're lucky yes you and i have some of the luckiest times i mean we talk about that all the time we're hanging out in the green room yeah all these shows that we do like how lucky are we to ron white's in there talking shit and don't keep talking shit and we're just having so much fun i've i've always said this about me and i'm sure i think we've talked to you i've talked to you about this but i feel like i am one of the most blessed people yeah on the planet i just really do i feel like i've just been blessed my entire life that you know where i was i grew up in silicon valley right when the boom was happening my parents my parents for you know conservative bangladesh Muslim people my mom has been on board with me doing comedy from very young that's great you know i like to not having to get over that barrier to have a teammate on my side in my open mic years that's great so rare one of the things my parents have been really good at is just let me do whatever i want to do they've been great at that yeah they just they've they definitely didn't encourage me to do stand-up but they didn't encourage they didn't want me to fight they didn't want me to do martial arts because i was an angry kid they thought it was just gonna make me angrier right i did the opposite it calmed you down oh yeah i gave an outlet for it completely different it also made me confident where i was like very unconfident before that now all of a sudden i was very confident so i was like oh you could just work hard and you can make things and you're like i thought it was a loser i was like i'm gonna be a loser i'm always a loser like i'm always the new kid in town and it was just i was small and i'd get picked on and then i learned how to fight i'm like oh you can get good at things you just have to work hard at it it'll give you and the what i learned from my obsession with martial arts at a young age was that when you're obsessed with something and you constantly concentrate on that thing you get way better really quick right and when you put in more time so i was i used to train seven days a week i was like constantly there and i just get even better faster and faster and faster and faster and at the end of you know two or three years i was a different person completely different person now as a person to realize oh all i have to do is work really hard at something and just be like super focused and i can make it the comedy thing though was so different than martial arts i was like oh okay this is a completely different thing it's not just based on my skill people it's based on people actually liking you like they have to like you and what you're saying so it was like a complete different like mind shift that i have to take on because i didn't care for people like me before i wanted them to not like me like it was fun for me a bunch of people cheering for someone else and then i knocked them unconscious i enjoyed that i used to enjoy that i know it's fucked up but one of my favorite moments was a scary moment it was one of the moments when i realized i was going to stop fighting i was 19 years old and i was fighting in california it was at the i believe in anneheim california it was at the nationals and so i was the state champion from massachusetts and i fought the state champion i think he was from i think he was from illinois i forget where he's from but he had a bunch of people with him and i just had my friend junxik and junxik was uh he was coaching me so he was in my corner and korean yeah and um this kid he made this he made like a very obvious move where he was doing a hopping roundhouse kick with his left leg and i had a really good wheel kick and what a wheel kick is you spin with your back leg and you hit him in the head and as i recognized he was going to do that i spun and caught him so hard that i was limping for two days because my foot was sore because my heel was sore from his head and he got knocked completely unconscious face planted snoring the whole deal and what i used to do back then my thing to do was first of all i would always sleep in front of everybody before the matches i would just lie down and go to sleep so i wanted everybody to know that was so relaxed that you look at him he's resting i'm gonna go to sleep and then and then when i would knock people out i would always just walk away like it was nothing i was walk away like that was exactly what i expected and then i turned to my friend junxik i said did he get up yet he goes he's not getting up he's snoring i was like and so i stood there for like five minutes and i still didn't look you know i had my back turned because they were giving him medical attention like did he get up yet he's like no he hasn't gotten up and he never got up they put him in a stretcher and they had him on the side of the the mats for like a half an hour and then they put him in a stretcher and then they took him to the hospital and i got back home to california and my instructor who wasn't there for the fights he's in boston so i got back home to boston and he said you had a great knockout he goes i heard you had a really great knockout i go yeah i go i thought he was dead he goes sometimes they die and he walked away and i was like sometimes they die like i'm them yeah are they yeah like i wasn't the best i wasn't the best in the world like i could get knocked out too easy even the best in the world can get knocked out i watched a lot of guys so i looked up to get KO'd and then i remember thinking at that moment like oh what am i doing like what am i doing so what made you think that you could do stand-up like did you always think that you could do it or was there a moment where you're like oh i can do because i was talked into it for me it was a bunch of i remember one of the the exact moments where one of my friends was like you should try stand-up this was back in like 2012 and coachella just happened and there was a there was that two puck hologram i think that was like 2012 and i just remember just ranting about it and then i and i said the words it's crazy that we brought back two pack before we got out of afghanistan and then one of my friends was like there's an olamide you should go try oh wow that's a great line and it is true yeah yeah and by a decade but before they made them jacked two pocket been doing crossfit he came back jacked he was so much more jacked that he was in real life yeah i got talked into by guys that i used to do um tournaments with because we would be like on a bus to a tournament and everybody was so nervous and i would do like gallows humor i would always be making everybody laugh because i was always looking for attention right so if i get attention by making people laugh and it was yeah so it was always like making fun of stuff but it was stuff that we would think is funny because we were crazy people who were trying to kick other people in the head but i'm like how many people are going to think like this like and my friend steve grand was still a very good friend of mine to this day he was an ophthalmologist and he was this wild dude who was on the u.s national ski team he's just a crazy man he was a he was a flight surgeon uh for the air force like he was because he was an optometrist or an ophthalmologist rather right like a brilliant guy who got obsessed with uh taekwondo too and he was like you should do comedy like you're i go listen you guys are laughing because you like me i go other people are gonna think i'm an asshole like this kind of just kind of things that i think are funny or fucked up right and he talked me into it and i went to an open mic the first time and the first time i went to an open mic i remember thinking oh some people suck like i thought comedians were like i was going to go see richard jenny followed by you know this guy followed by you know jerry seinfeld and i can't go on in front of those guys i can't do that i'm not good and when you go to an open mic now you realize oh everyone's just beginning and they're all clunky and then i i realized like okay maybe i could do this oh wow yeah and then i the first time i've got on stage i was terrified but i didn't do terrible i got a few chuckles do you remember here and there do you remember any of your first jokes i got a laugh yeah this is you know something about uh hot girls not getting speeding tickets the cop pulls the woman over uh do you realize why i pulled you over no do you like my tits yes i do here's a warning it's like so stupid that's a very that's a very like you can just now that you've been doing comedy for a while you can see how rudimentary that joke is oh yeah so clunky yeah i had a joke about uh license plates from new hampshire i'd say live free or die i'm like those plates are made by prisoners do you know how annoying that must be to be locked in a cage every day just fucking live for your die you just want to fucking get your head in that press and it was just dumb jokes they were just real clunky yeah i love i love first premises i have i have my 10th time on stage somewhere deep in my like private youtube on on stage like my 10th time oh that's crazy one day like when it's all said and done i want to release that but like after my whole career is over be like this is how it starts yeah it's amazing it's an amazing journey and it just it takes so fucking long and you're never done like i'm i feel like i'm better now than i've ever been it's nuts that's the first thing you said when you sat down you're like never ends it never ends it never ends no it never ends you could always be getting better and you're always writing new stuff so it's always like you have this new dimension and there's always a new thing that you're exploring there's always a new thing that you're fucking around with we're very lucky my friend oh man the luckiest yeah we're the luckiest the luckiest we're here at the mothership well thank you for doing this uh tell everybody where to find you all your shit yeah you can find me uh instagram asan j a mod e h s a n j a h m a d and i have my own podcast called the dangerous brown podcast check it out check it out all right my brother