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David Cross is a comedian, actor, writer, producer, and host of “Senses Working Overtime.” His latest special, “The End of the Beginning of the End,” is streaming on YouTube. https://youtu.be/OfqMkJwVgmo?si=Nn7vBHb6nfPFQnhZ https://www.youtube.com/@OfficialDavidCross https://www.officialdavidcross.com
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the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day
david joseph good to see you good to see dude i haven't seen you in a long
fucking time when
was the last time we were actually in a room together i well i was trying to
think of that
i don't know i would imagine post news radio we hung out at some point at some
show somewhere
somewhere but i don't know but i do remember uh because i did news radio a
couple times and we
we hung out i remember i think we both no just you had more hair than uh i was
probably already
at this point i was fighting to keep it i was hanging on are you do you shave
or is that it is
that oh it's i mean i'm bald if i didn't shave i'd be bald all the way up here
but i got a hair
transplant and it was useless yeah i i did a joke about it i go having a hair
transplant is like
taking people that are healthy and moving them into a neighborhood where
everyone's dying
this is just like where did bob go he just flew off the face of the earth so uh
yeah you'd say you just
accepted it yes okay yeah i should have done it a long time ago it's so much
better and i don't have
to talk to a barber i don't have to listen to boring stories while they hold
you hostage with a pair of
scissors that's what that's what this is uh this gets me i i don't like shaving
i don't it's kind
of a pain in the ass and i also i look like a kind of a turtle i look like a
turtle you know when i
shave i don't like it um and it's not attractive to me and i jerk off to me all
the time so i want to
keep things fresh uh but uh i this i probably don't have to i could probably
get clippers and stuff
but i go to you know one of my guys around the corner where i live and uh and i
i have this
experience where i'm i want that i want to get in and out right because of what
you were saying a lot
of chit chat and there are a couple guys very quiet hi how you doing good fist
bump whatever you get
you know what i want to get get out of there there's one guy who just talks all
and and then they have
that um the blade you know uh the the what do you call that the you know the
blade blades thank you and
um and they got it right there so you got to be polite it's on your it's by
your yeah you know and
i know i could avoid it if i just get some clippers and just do this thing but
i don't i don't know i was boring and sorry there's no point to it it barely
has anything to do with
what we were talking about there's something about a beard though that makes
you distinguished or at
least have experience or or look like a homeless you know uh alcoholic i mean
there are plenty of those
guys too yeah there's a lot of those too but a beard is like there's some there's
just is a statement
with a beard like a full beard like yours white mine is just you know i don't
like shaving
like you know and again i i i do like i only gain weight in two places stomach
and right here and
and and also i have a kind of a thin frame so it's it's really not attractive
it's not attractive so
the beard sort of it's it's more laziness it's uh i don't have to worry about
it yeah no i hear you
and this you know i just i go i don't know six seven weeks and then i just
shave it once it gets out
because this my hair doesn't grow down or it just grows out like a clown you
know it goes this way
all of it even this too and uh and once this starts filling in it it just looks
goofy yeah i have a
friend my friend hassan he used to shave his head and now purposely to look
goofy he lets the sides go
out and it's madness it's just it's all crazy thick hair and bald on top and
bald on top yeah
yeah and he does a joke on stage about it it doesn't doesn't praise indian this
is my impression of an
indian pussy and is he just like not concerned about getting laid or yeah i
think he's just embracing
but he still gets laid you know because he's really he's really funny i think
he just embraces
not giving a there he is oh he looks familiar to me okay very funny guy all
right cool he's uh one of the
up and comer well he's from la originally he was one of the doormen at the
comedy store okay he looks
very professorial he's very smart yeah yeah but uh doesn't give a about his
hair who's that art bell i
was gonna guess art bell i swear to god yeah i swear to god i don't even know
if i've ever seen him
yeah coast to coast yes yes from the kingdom of nye wow i love that show that
was the show that i listened to
coming home from hollywood because i lived out in the valley and i would drive
home at night and i'd
listen to late night with art bell all right it's the best coast with art bell
i used to do a whole
bit about uh the like um because who's the new guy george nori george nori
right and i'm gonna uh
digress for one second did you ever uh do you play video games at all yes well
i try not to
but i used to play a lot of them did you ever play prey no but i know what it
is a great underrated
underrated game got ripped off uh or just people bit certain things that they
um started but one of
the coolest things so it's about like this uh it takes place on a uh uh
reservation like you know uh in
the 90s i guess or something like that and there's a bartender and her
boyfriend and and it takes place
in this bar and then aliens come and then this guy goes on the alien ship to uh
go rescue her but um
they did this really cool thing so first they have this in the video game right
at the bar there's a tv
and as you walk towards it it's playing it's like staticky until you get closer
to it and then as your
character gets closer to it it's art bell talking about aliens and stuff i know
i know i'm not doing it
justice but it was such a cool smart idea and uh god bless him he was the og
yeah and and just some of
the guy i one thing that because i listen to it a lot too because sometimes you
know you're listening
and you're like this is insane this is crazy and he would always always treat
the guest with deference
you know respect and i i that must have been because there were things that
were you know if you go back
to all the episodes that were kind of contradictory in a sense you know like
wait you think all these
things happen you think there's a uh a place in the middle of the ocean that
has like it's a community
of people that lived there and and and then but you also think this like all
these different things
it'd be like hmm huh interesting yeah he would let you go he'd let you go yeah
he'd give it some air
uh but he was yeah he was never rude or no never he had a time traveler line
where you would call specifically if you were a time traveler
if but if but if you were calling from the past they didn't have that
technology yet no it's mostly
people from the future i believe wait like art i'm calling from seven minutes
in the future listen
i think his his whole deal was if you are here in this current era but you are
from another time
you could call because you know the idea was like he would have these remote
viewers and
oddballs on and they would talk about that we we have had the ability to time
travel for a long time
oh yeah you know there are wormholes that exists and they explain the quantum
dynamics involved and
time travel has been breached by the cia in the 1960s yes and uh you have these
people call up but
art would always like give them air like let them breathe let it breathe yeah
yeah art i'm a werewolf
interesting tell me more like it didn't matter no matter what it was it was a
fun show yeah i loved
it craziest people from bigfoot people to alien people everything and and then
a lot of people
uh ex-military right you know you get that like whistleblowers um i was uh
stationed and uh yeah
you know outside of uh a remote island that uh i can't go into uh from singapore
and uh i witnessed
some things are that i still have difficulty believing and uh and then he yeah
yeah what happened
it was great yeah it's so fun and and you so did you also listen to phil hendry
yes oh god he was the
best super genius the best thing about phil hendry was the people that didn't
understand what was going
on i would call in and be really upset the first the first two times i heard
him i didn't understand
what he was doing he's that he's that good too then i and i would be like this
is crazy this guy
and then eventually you're like oh he's doing characters uh yeah because he you
know repeat
characters and stuff but i i got the chance to watch him do a show so he's got
he's he's got the
he's got three mics i want to say uh like two mics like this and then a phone
mic or you know a phone
like a hand uh uh old time you know cradle phone and he was doing himself uh
the the woman who's uh runs
the uh hoa or whatever that uh whatever her name was that that character and
then somebody else
calling in like he did somebody calling on the phone and it was uh i mean it
was like a magic act
yeah it's crazy to watch how without missing a beat and i could see uh you can
see how he
strategically takes breaths so that he can go from one character to another and
interrupting each other
yeah you know it it was fascinating but he's a genius it's the only thing that
caught i right away i was
like oh wait a minute there's no crosstalk like right well if one of the early
times i listened i was
like i think this is the same guy yeah well he's he bumps it up like he's
really good at uh almost
you know making it sound as if like because he'll interrupt himself and go and
i okay but you know
and stop and then just go right into the other voice it's phenomenal and and
completely original
like i don't know of anybody else did anything like that no did you ever um he
used to put out
stuff for charity like uh cds and things and he has uh i don't know what it
would be called but it was
one of the one of the things he put out for charity that was um a guy called
into the station
i think he's probably super high but he called in thinking it was pizza hut and
he fucks with this
guy in the best way where he's like uh and who's the what's the woman character
he does it's kind of
like uh like a black woman who's like honey it is the i don't know marjorie i
think maybe uh but he
then he does that woman answering the phone uh at you know pizza hut and then
he does the automated
uh thing like she's like i'm gonna put you on uh it's easier to do the
automated uh thing so and the
guy's like uh okay all right and and then he gets out he's like thank you for
calling pizza hut the best
pizza in a three block radius and if you want if you want uh i'm not doing it
justice you got to go
do it hear it listen can you yep you got it all right headphones okay it's so
brilliant wait uh
whatever the large yes 16 inch deep pan dish pan you got the dish pan deep or
it's extra deep just a
regular large 16 inch thick crust on a deep dish want puff dish no uh you want
a uh any of them puffy
cheese balls anything like that we got a special on buffalo wing uh we got a
special on uh uh damn i
forgot the other thing we got a special on something all right what do you want
what kind of cheese you
want blue swiss cheddar monster okay i think i'm gonna have the wrong uh
location here all right hold on
and he's so thank you for calling pizza your call is being transferred please
have all credit card
information available for our operators yes pizza hello hi yes hi hi which
location are you at we are at
the corner of la fienega and venice okay i like to place an order for delivery
all right can i put you
on hold we'll put you through our automated system hold on please thank you for
calling pizza if you'd like
cheese pizza press one if you'd like a meatball pizza press two if you'd like
sausage press three
press two oh it goes on and on and on he goes he eventually gets the guy a fish
pizza and the guy's
like no man this i don't want um it's it's really funny but that's him that's
phil doing all those
voices and that's not set up a guy had called into the studio thinking it was
pizza and they're like
take this call did you ever meet him i did briefly at uh when i got to see him
do his he did a live
show at uh aspen comedy festival a long long long time ago i did something with
him bob odenkirk and
doug stanhope oh wow and and adam carolla i don't remember where it was i want
to say it was somewhere
in canada but it was some sit down we were talking about the process of going
through because he was in
the middle of doing some sort of a television show pilot and we're yeah yeah so
we're talking about the
process of creating a pilot and what it's like trying to get a pilot to an
actual finished television show
and get it approved and what the struggles are it was very canadians i don't
think it was for it was
it was like one of those montreal comedy festival things yeah yeah yeah you
know it makes sense where
they had some it was like some weird talk it was a long time ago it was like
god it had like 2001 or
something yeah i vaguely remember when he was uh there was going to be because
he would talk about
it doing this uh sitcom yeah did it ever happen i don't think so no he was a
really nice guy though
not what i expected at all i expected him to be insane just like just to be
able to do that every
night and not get bored with just completely with people every day it's it's
got to be exhausting too like
mentally because you're you've got to remember it's like imp like really great
improv guys where you
have to remember all these details bring them back 30 minutes later right and
you're you're doing
multiple characters you ever see tj and dave no oh dude the best yeah what is
it it's tj uh jadagowski
and dave pasquese who are like the kings of that stuff in uh out of chicago and
they come they tour
around uh and they're just they're two guys who uh it starts off you know it's
none of its plan none of
its uh and they have like a dedicated cult following when they're in new york
it sells out like that and
you got to go to uh at least two shows to see how wildly different it is i mean
there are two guys
that come out on stage usually there's like three chairs and it'll just start
with like uh you know
how's it going good good good are you in line no no no and it and that you
watch it like oh they're in
line where are they in line at do they know each other and and then it turns
out they're at the dmv
but they're not it's like a room outside of the dmv and then they will leave
and come back and be
somebody else right a kid that was mentioned or a wife or something um or be in
a car and and it all
wraps up it's all a big story and and i have seen i've probably seen him 30 40
times and i've seen
uh shows where that were more that were funny or more poignant than some plays
that have been
worked on for years you know it is better completely improvised completely 100
wow oh they're they're
i mean i uh do you know tim meadows yeah so tim was a guest sometimes i'll have
a third i know who he
is i don't i don't yeah okay so uh i was and tim's been you know uh snl yeah
and ensconced in that
middle second city uh uh world for decades and he said it was the most
terrifying thing he's ever
done because you're they're like genius level i mean the the detail you have to
remember and then
and then on top of it if one of them is you know i'm a marine biologist or
whatever it slips out then
that person has to know about the real person playing the fake marine biologist
has to know enough about
marine biology to keep the thing going you know and it's just next level it's
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you just get
really strong with like ranters like like tim dylan is the best at ranting on a
podcast alone he doesn't
he doesn't have anybody with him most of his podcasts are just him ranting yeah
and i've watched the
development of it i'm like that's an amazing muscle to develop because you just
get accustomed to that
kind of scenario that situation where it's just in your mind just gets used to
producing content just
and like old school am late night radio guys right who don't have people
calling in who are like
talking about whatever and they got to do it you know four or five times a week
yeah three hours
by themselves yeah i used to always like to listen to them i used to like to
listen to those crazy
right-wing angry political talk shows because i don't i didn't know anybody
like that so i was like
what what is this guy doing well uh that's that was the bulk of the radio i
mean that's why
you know you have like art bell and phil henry like a nice like oh okay yeah
because i got all this
i got mark levin and i got uh you know uh what's his name you know the rush limbaugh
rush limbaugh yeah
and uh and when you when you first start listening or when i first started
listening uh and i came out
to la from boston you know and people were like there's this guy out here who's
nuts you know and uh
uh i'd never heard of him in boston and then and you're like does he how much
of this stuff does he
believe does he really believe and how much has he come to believe does that
make sense yeah yeah and uh
and those guys that was a whole fascinating thing and wally george do you
remember wally george i do but
i don't remember much about him i remember the name what did wally george do he
was the guy who originated
what i mean now it's really familiar he remember morton downey jr he was a
little after oh that's right
that's right and he would look at 83 and he was and it was a super low budget
like uh cable access
type thing back when that was a whole thing and he'd get the audience would be
hooting and hollering and
he'd have people on like somebody who and sometimes they i i think because it
became popular sort of
like with morton downey jr where people came on to quote unquote fuck with wally
george like i'm gonna
pretend to be a you know uh a furry way and i'm gonna you know have gauges and
and you know what i mean
like just the archetype of the thing they want to yell at and uh and i think
people started it was
there were some people on there you know people lying about who they were but
he'd have people on
and then and then kick them off it would happen all the time like come on sit
down uh what the
fuck do you think you're doing and everybody would yell at the person they'd
start talking you're like
get the out of here and that was that was the show we're like you know and uh
here's something really
crazy uh and tell me if this is rumor uh look up at your magic computer rebecca
de mornay's dad
the actress that's yeah wally george yes no yeah really look it up casey right
jamie i'm gonna call you casey who is i forget who rebecca de mornay was from
uh uh risky business oh wow
wow her dad yeah is wally george wow isn't that crazy married multiple times
shocker probably
potentially 10 times had at least six children look at how many times he was
married
one two three four wow possibly 10. possibly 10. can you imagine just keep
signing up i don't yeah i just
read um literally the the other day uh fleetwood mac guy he's getting married
for the fifth time he's 182.
and he's getting like what stop yeah why do you want to keep doing that they
believe they really believe
this is it this is the one you have to say those vows and mean it each time or
not yeah or just say
this is just a fun thing that i do yeah keep a lady happy yeah or just have a
party i guess yeah have a
party and pretend that you're normal now and you're married yeah yeah how long
you've been married 17
years oh nice yeah um it'll be 14 in october if i get divorced that's a wrap
what do you mean like i'm
happy happily married i don't want to get divorced not saying that but if i
ever get divorced i'm never
oh yeah yeah yeah oh same here yeah oh i feel the same silly i'm not having any
more children
so if i don't have any children it makes no sense yeah to legally be bound to
some person can we just
hang out i am 100 with you i i and i was i was never a um anti-marriage guy but
i just didn't think
i'd get married because i didn't want i didn't want to and then eventually i
met somebody who i wanted to
marry yeah it's like you just have to it has to i mean that's the thing it has
to be the right person
everybody says that except wally george but the idea of doing it 10 times is
insane yeah like that
that's a they're doing a different thing i think once you get i'll give you
three and let's say one
of them was there's some fishy circumstances i'll give you three once you get
on your by the time you're
going to be on your fourth or fifth or six or rupert murdoch marriage like i
what is the point
and why does that woman believe you what does it say about the lady well what
about ladies that do it
i've been here for six years and i know one lady while i've been here she's
been married twice
married and divorced twice and now she's on the third guy yeah i would look i
mean that says something
about the guys right i guess yeah man if you you wouldn't ever think like you
meet somebody you like
them and then you find out they've been married twice before in six years right
and you and you were
like starting to fall for her you wouldn't think wait a minute what you would
unless she was hot men are
dumb well if she's hot and she's sexy and you really like being around her you're
like who cares
she made mistakes yeah who cares i guess you're right if the sex is that good
yeah if the sex is
good she's hot and you love being around her and that's what she wants you want
to make her happy like
okay i'll do i'll say this you should find out you should go talk to the other
guys and have a sit
down and find out why you know the other problem is some guys they'll want to
mess it up for you so
they'll lie they might not be accurate you know they might paint a dist also
they might have been the
up and they want to blame it on her and then you'll get a distorted perception
of who she is but then
then it's back to her that she's marrying people right who are up just i guess
the point is
that we're both making is don't get married you know what is a weird thing it's
a weird thing to
do you have children i do yeah it's a weird thing to do if you don't have
children not weird like you
shouldn't do it but it's a different thing yeah completely yeah you're i i and
i i would say that um
not that we you know my wife and i have any you know real issues um but i would
uh behave myself and stay and work at the marriage because of the kid oh
absolutely yeah
yeah absolutely it fucks kids up when people get divorced what's your what's
your background and
my parents were split up when i was five and my mother remarried when i was
seven and has been with my
stepdad ever since oh that's good yeah they have they have a great relationship
i just saw them
this weekend and where did you grow up fucking everywhere i was born in new
jersey moved to san
francisco when i was seven lived in san francisco from seven to eleven in the
height of the vietnam
war um in haight ashbury like hippie town and then uh florida from 11 to 13.
that's the opposite of yeah oh my
god yeah that's the first time i found out about the n-word i didn't know what
it meant and i remember
i had to ask no way yeah i had to ask my mom i never heard it in san francisco
never heard it wow
san francisco in the 1970s uh when i was you know between seven and eleven was
kind of a wild amazing
time it was really weird it was because we were in the middle of like the
counterculture yeah yeah berkeley all
that's uh-huh yeah we lived right down the street from lombard street so we're
you know we were like
in the middle of it all you know and uh it's funny because it was during that
time that the vietnam war
ended when i was i think i was when did vietnam end 74
i think 74. so officially 7 april 30 75. okay
yeah so that was like what was i whatever the point is like at that time i
remember thinking thank god
they figured out war's bad we're never going to do this again i literally
literally had that thought
however old i was what a naive child oh i was like because uh my stepfather had
um he didn't get
drafted he got lucky he just didn't get picked and uh i knew a guy some guy
that was a friend of the
family that moved to canada he's like this he took off to canada so i was aware
of that like how people
are leaving the country so that they don't have to go to war like this because
you're a little kid
everything's scary especially if you come from you know broken home and you
know like yeah and the
concept of a draft or conscription the idea like oh you may have to go and we're
gonna you're gonna
learn how to shoot a gun and then go shoot strangers kids you know like that it's
got to be terrifying
if you're a kid no it was insane and it was also there was also the time where
um you know my stepdad
was a hippie and my parents were hippies and when i was gonna ask why did your
uh sorry to interrupt
but why did they move around so much my stepfather was a computer programmer
initially and then he
wanted to become an architect so he went to school in san francisco and then um
uh university of florida
in gainesville and then boston architectural center so we moved to boston when
i was 13. so that was
what it was it was him becoming an architect right and so uh like they they
didn't like sports they
weren't into anything like that and then when muhammad ali was opposing the vietnam
war he became this
like counterculture hero sure yeah and i remember it was my parents sat down
and watched muhammad ali
versus leon spinks because he was trying to win his title back and they were
rooting for muhammad ali
i'm like this is crazy like this guy's stance on the vietnam war has made my
parents
fans of his to the point where they're going to watch boxing like they never
watch box they
didn't want to have anything to do with anything violent they hated it and but
they wanted well
watch that one boxer to watch if you were anti you know hitting or boxing or
whatever it was muhammad ali
he was a strategist you know he was but quite honestly by that stage of his
career he had slowed down
considerably yeah and he he just wasn't remember the leon spinks because he
leon beat him yeah and then he beat leon in the rematch right this is the rematch
right and that was
the big one that we were all glued to the tv but i remember thinking this is
crazy they're watching
boxing because of this guy's position on the vietnam war have you seen when we
were kings yes yeah it's
great it's amazing yeah yeah it's amazing yeah he was a god you want to talk
about a unique human being
like a one of one yeah you know yeah and you know outside of you know mike tyson
there was never any kind
of uh figure like that in boxing you know um i mean there was minor sugar ray
leonard a little bit
but not not to that extent because he wasn't a cultural figure right right muhammad
ali represented
something during the civil rights movement and he changed his name yeah muhammad
ali right right
that was a big thing too people were terrified of muslims yeah at the time and
still i was gonna say at
the time yeah but it was a different kind of muslims you know that was um well
the the they were the
you know the government was really good about uh portraying every black urban
person as like
potentially you know muslim brotherhood mm-hmm uh 12 tribes right right right
right those guys they're
still around the israelite 12 tribe oh those guys yeah they used to be uh they
used to hang out and
hang out they used to be in times square like you know yelling and uh and i
hung out with those guys
one day i wrote a piece about it for my website because uh i went i was going
home uh it was when
i was living in new york and i was walking on the street and there's this guy
standing there with like
a microphone and a little speaker yeah and they would read things from the
bible yep and they would
translate it and they had this very bizarre translation everybody was black george
washington
was black everyone was black they were explaining to me you know what the the
so-called jew they're
black israelites yeah the so-called jews the thing that they always well they're
jewish yeah you don't
have to say the so-called yeah it was very odd it was um but their their whole
thing was there was a
uh a 12th tribe of the israelites that were black that have been you know a
history written out of
history mm-hmm yeah that was their thing yeah they also informed me that i'm
not white there was a
relief because it was because i'm italian they're like oh you ain't white i was
like oh oh it's like
because they hated white people so i was just talking to this because i was
bored you know i was just
so i was talking to this guy having him explain everything to me and he
informed me don't worry
man you're not white i was like oh okay that's good it's good to know so you
can hang out i can
hang out with you guys you don't hate me but it was uh very odd very odd they're
all dressed like
superheroes they all these crazy like avenger costumes on yeah and and uh uh
like jewelry yeah big
yeah huge medallions around their neck yeah yeah very odd stuff there's still
you don't see him
like you used to but they're still out there you know oh yeah yeah they're out
there but i mean
like in literally in new york uh-huh periphery of time square yeah last time i
was in philadelphia
i saw them yeah they were out there on the street with the microphones yeah
little deal yeah yeah
it's an odd group when were you in new york i was in new york i moved to new york
in
91. yeah so i started stand up in 88 in boston and uh i got picked up by my
manager who i'm still with
when i was essentially an open miker who was that jeff susman how do i not know
jeff susman he handles
kevin james was he a boston guy no he was a new york guy okay okay so the story
was he had um what was his name
fucking the guy who had all the crazy costumes he was on the rodney dangerfield
special bob
oh bob nelson bob nelson yeah so he handled bob nelson cleveland browns yeah he
put the helmet on
he had boxing gloves he'd do jippy jeff's gym he had brain damage he did a
bunch of different characters
so bob who was a a big act you know he had hbo special the whole deal at the
time um he found
jesus oh and uh where was he in his basement i guess or something okay around
the neighborhood
somewhere okay but he uh had this guy who was his prayer partner that was going
to take over as his
manager and so this was my manager's big client so he's like like i gotta i
gotta go find some other
so did did did he just stop doing stand-up because i don't know i think i don't
know if he still does
stand-up i don't know i knew his career my manager is really good and he's very
smart and he did a great
job guiding bob but i think sometimes when people like have like a big
religious moment like that
like maybe that becomes more of their life than he was all in yeah yeah he was
all in with christianity
and so um my manager said well i kind of know most of the comics in new york
let me see if i'm not
missing people in boston and so he traveled to boston with a friend of his one
of the guys that uh owned
governors and uh they came governor's was bob's room wasn't it yes yeah yeah
one of the rooms that
he worked at yeah and so they came down to boston and i just randomly went up
one night at um duck soup
remember duck soup duck soup duck soup was it became the improv after a while
it was um i don't remember
that billy downs and um barclay paul barclay i think it was actually billy
split i think it was paul's
thing so they split at that point i think i'm not sure about that but but what
it was it was paul's
idea believe it was a much more high-end room like it was really nice and it
was right across from nick's
so it was in the below area where the wiltern is okay so you know where the wiltern
is which is now
the big you know where bill bloom and wright does common connection shows wilbur
right yeah is that it
the wilbur it's the will okay i'm thinking the wiltern's la at wiltern's la
right i know what
you're talking about the wilbur right you're right so downstairs the wilbur it
was you'd go
down and it was a really nice room okay and uh i was a limo driver at the time
i was driving limos
and uh driving a limo in boston oh yeah yeah jesus yeah yeah oh man i was doing
for a job that's
fucking hard i mean i just mean the literal streets of boston are tough to
navigate with any vehicle but
yeah a limo add a extra half a car to it yeah it was it wasn't that bad it was
mostly airport pickups
yeah you know and a lot of it was town cars pick people up in town cars but uh
when you drive around
a lot that's when i would come up with my best ideas and uh i had an idea for a
joke and i called
god i can't remember who the guy was that was i can't believe i'm blanking on
his name
he was a really cool dude who was the manager of the club and i could call him
up and say hey can i
get a guest spot and he gave me a guest spot that night i wasn't even supposed
to be on the show
and my manager just happened to be in the room and if i'd known he was in the
room i probably would
have been nervous right probably bombed yeah and i had no idea he was there wow
and then he came up
to me afterwards and gave me his card and he said can i see you tomorrow i said
okay and then
i just meant for a ride to the airport so i did a set at the connection the
next night and then he
asked me to come to new york and audition there and then wow next thing you
know i was living in new
york it was like three years later very cool and then that was crazy crazy
story and uh and when did
you move out to la 94 93 like uh first came out in 93 and then moved in 94. i
came out to 93 for a
pilot i did a pilot on fox called hardball with jim brewer and uh a bunch of
other people it was a
baseball sitcom on fox that got canceled it was terrible yeah and then uh i the
only reason why
i stayed i hated la but the only reason why i stayed was because i had got an
apartment and i had a lease
for a year so i was like fuck like i have to stay here and so i stayed for a
whole year and then i got a
development deal for nbc and um they i was there in the middle of this whole
development deal and then
they said we have a pilot that we already filmed but we're gonna fire one of
the cast members uh we
want you to audition for this and that was news radio so i got to watch who uh
did you replace
well fortunately it was ray romano who's a good friend of mine was fired during
the pilot and so
they replaced him with another guy and that guy got fired oh wow yeah so it
wasn't i would have felt
terrible yeah if it was ray but it was ray being replaced so i was like good
that guy i'll do it for
ray do you remember who the other guy was i do not he was just an actor some
guy and i mean i never met
him sure he's a nice guy but uh luckily for ray he goes on and does everybody
loves raymond it becomes
huge and i just stumbled into this show with no acting experience that was a
fun set i remember
because i did it a couple times and uh and also like that was not my first but
one of the first
experiences i had with multi-camera sitcoms you know you're like uh this is
literally the easiest job
on planet earth oh yeah it is the you have one full day you have like a full i
think thursday right
yeah and then friday's like half a day yeah monday come in listen to this read
the script go away
yeah it's the filming day that's the long day and it's not that bad i mean
especially once we got loose
the first season was hard the first season was 12 14 hour days because it was
like they were trying
to figure out what the show was yeah but once it got rolling it was pretty
amazing so i had only been
doing stand-up for six years i'd only been i had done no acting i had a they
made me get an acting
coach for a little while in new york which i think was counterintuitive news
for a pilot for the pilot the
fox pilot oh yeah well how's how's an acting coach gonna help you with a sitcom
it's about it's about
instinct it's about well they were giving me a lot of money they gave me like a
hundred and fifty
thousand dollars like you have to learn how to act right do you know how to act
i've like i've never
acted i'm just saying like i know to deliver sitcom lines is yeah you don't
need an acting teacher
wow joseph let's limber up the body yeah you're not daniel day lewis you're not
doing there will be
blood it was a it was weird because it wasn't anything i think the reason why
it worked out so
well is because it was never anything that i wanted so there was no weight to
it it wasn't like oh my god
this is it yeah i am on the sitcom i'm acting it was more like this is crazy i
can't believe i'm doing
this you know it was more like wow i can't believe i get to do this but um you
know the real thing for
me was to be able to be in la and go to the comedy store that to me was more
that was more huge than
like when i got passed at the comedy store that to me was like way bigger than
being on a sitcom
i was like holy like because at that you know like it's six years in i was like
am i even is
this going to work out like i don't even know this is going to work out well it's
also not um
glamorous in any way that that aspect of uh working is there's nothing
glamorous about a sitcom
you know what i mean it's not the thing that when you're not in la or hollywood
and you're sitting
back and you're you are told about the glamorous lifestyle the parties and all
that stuff it's
literally you're driving to work and you're going to work you know yeah but it
was glamorous in a sense
that you were on television and that was very weird to me it was very strange
to watch it on tv
and like that is actually me on tv i had zero aspirations for any acting at all
yeah i it never
was it never even occurred to me when i lived in boston i remember me and fitz
simmons used to
we used to dream about the day we could pay our bills telling jokes that was
all it was i i hear
you it was just like oh god i would see guys like dj hazard i remember i went
to look at this apartment
and dj hazard lived in the same building and it was this uh converted schoolhouse
and these loft apartments
and had like a second floor where the like the bedroom was it looked over the
living room i'm like
god this is he pays for this with jokes yeah this was like the most amazing
thing like that's all
i wanted i saw these like don gavin and steve sweeney i was like imagine being
able to pay your bills
just telling jokes untie my ankles in the morning remember that yeah i do dj
hazard yeah um what was
i going to say something oh do you know uh fitz simmons um paul barclay story
or bill downs the
watch bill downs it was bill down which one how's it go oh i i don't you should
get it from him because
it's his story but and i i don't want to i feel like it's his to tell but it's
great it's genius it's
bringing up something in my memory so so bill owed everybody money right and uh
like he's still
you know those guys owe me whatever it is at this point you know what 300 500
just and you go there
and they were just everybody was big guy remember yeah i'll pay you soon big
guy oh the war and then
do you remember when bill adopted the girls yes korean girls right he yeah and
he would use them
like as because at a certain point it didn't help to go to the connection or go
to the clubs and you had
to go to their office if you wanted nobody's gonna call you back or whatever
and you'd like i gotta
get on the team go to the go to their office and that's the only way i'm gonna
get money is if i show
up and he's in a good mood and it's not gonna happen from a phone call and i'd
go there every single
time it's like dude i gotta pay my rent man i mean i i got nothing and you owe
me you know 385 dollars and
back then that was huge and uh oh cross i just listen so i got these my kids
one of my kids is sick
whatever it was always this excuse and then and then uh you know it was still
the coke residual in the
bottom of his nose and um but so fits he owed fitzsimmons a chunk of money like
like a significant amount like 1500 1800 bucks like something something meaty
you know especially
for back then and uh you you ask greg because i feel i feel like no tell the
story i'm sure greg's
told it to me okay greg and i are pretty close i just remember it some in in my
head i do remember
part of it but i don't know the whole story i don't remember it all right so greg
was uh booked
at this uh you know some club in new hampshire whatever and downs was going to
be there uh bill
was going to be there and uh um and he goes he goes there and he goes uh oh
bill i i uh i forgot my
watch um i don't want to go over can i can i borrow your watch and he's like
yeah sure um it's like a rolex
like some fancy fancy fancy watch and and greg had this all planned out oh i
know the story yeah
and then he had he had like parked in a specific place and then he and then he
gets uh he's like
all right thanks and he's like all right don't forget to give it back yeah yeah
yeah and he does
his set and then he bolts out the back door gets in his car drives home back to
boston and then bill
calls him hey uh so uh i think you uh forgot to give me my watch back and greg
just basically goes
yeah you want it back uh give me the 1800 bucks you owe me and then met him at
a restaurant or a
diner somewhere in a public place give me the cash and i'll give you your watch
and it was just genius
yeah that's greg yeah yeah those days were fun nick's comedy stop used to offer
to pay you in
cocaine or cash i dude so i i did nick's and the only i've said this multiple
times the only
i i'm extremely lucky that i was in boston when i was in boston because the
comedy booms going on
and outside of i don't know three places i just didn't do that well and i
certainly didn't do well
at nick's i mean i was the opposite they you know it had that the vague feeling
of high school where
you're the weirdo and people want to with you and throw you in the trash can
and uh and so i got lucky
because there were just spots they just needed bodies so i worked all the time
you know not you know
not great gigs but i had it was all cash you know under the table and and they
just needed bodies
to to you know go up and do 15 minutes 20 minutes whatever at some cowboy bar
in fitzburg or whatever
fitchburg um anyway uh so i get this i get a week at nick's and um and i am not
doing well at all i think
i'm opening up for kevin knox so not my crowd and i didn't have the track suit
um
uh and you know knoxie's up there doing uh hey you know why you know why uh
bill buckner didn't catch
the ball get the ball uh it's 86 world series because he heard it had aids on
it okay all right yeah that's a real
joke that's a real joke that's a real joke and they loved it oh god wonderful
yes of course it had aids
oh yeah and then do you remember this what does eight stand for no what adios
infected dick sucker
oh my god yeah so uh i titled one of the tracks on my first album i think first
or second album uh what if
baseball's had aids on them i'm i'm eating it right so they're they're they're
peeling back my uh time
as the week goes on and uh and i am i mean i if i had done even okay i wouldn't
have had this
feeling they're already kind of intimidating right super mob very mob very mob
and do you remember
where the you'd walk into knicks and there was like the podium and then behind
a little behind it
is this little room with a curtain right and it's not big at all and i went to
go get paid my the week
was over and i'm and i've just you know eaten it eat every single night every
single show and um
and they're all eating it's like a scene from like they're all eating like you
know manicotti
right right make it any better with the napkins in their uh you know in their
shirt like this and uh
and i go uh hey nervous as just hey uh so dom uh i need to uh uh if i can get
paid i uh uh just for
the you know whatever and dominic goes to whoever i can't remember the guy's
name uh his kind of
lackey there and he goes you know whatever his name was you know paulie go pay
the kid and he's
i've interrupted his dinner he's not happy napkin off takes me trudge we go up
to the offices upstairs
and there's a safe and it's open and there's cash and there's a gun this is
just open right and he
gives me he gets the money and he gives it to me and i just pick it up i want
to get the out of there
and i pick it up and he's like are you gonna count it uh no i'm good i trust i
trust you and i just
bolted i never went back there again it was i was so intimidated and that was
an intimidating place
oh dude the whole thing about it every the dominic the all those guys yeah yeah
and they're everyone's
doing blow and you know the performers are at least you know it was a maniacal
time where all those
there was one time where nix was running three consecutive shows so they had
their main room
upstairs there was a dance club down in the bottom and there was one other room
somewhere in that
building and guys would go like guys like don gavin steve sweeney they would go
and do a set a set a set
set a set a set and these guys were just raking in money oh yeah and constantly
doing below
no and not paying their taxes yeah yes and that's what got them all yeah that
well they i mean back
in the heyday and it went it went on for years it was years and years of this i
mean you you could
go down you know 128 and do kowloon's or whatever and then do just hop all the
way back pop into these
chinese restaurants or whatever right giggles and sagas yeah and just go in a
straight line and go back
and forth and do nine shows and and make a ton of money cash under the table
tons of blow yeah and
yeah it was a wild place because there were so many comics and it was such a boston's
not a big city
you know and to have so much comedy all come out you've seen um france salamita's
documentary i
haven't i got it it's really stand up stood out yeah it's really i got it it's
really great it's really
great and it goes all the way back to crimins and the ding-ho and i i that was
before my time i started
in 88 so the ding-ho was already gone yeah you know you heard legendary stories
from the ding-ho did you
see call me lucky no oh you gotta see that it's bobcat's uh documentary about
uh barry oh no wait a
a minute i did see that it's that's right i did see that it's really well done
i don't mean just
like if even if you don't know barry just the story and the way he lays out the
the path of the
the film is it's great i had barry on like right after it came out i had him on
the podcast and yeah
he's a he's a legend and you know huge inspiration he was an intimidating guy
yeah that was the guy that i
was scared of because he was like he was the guy who was sort of the standard
like he made sure there
was no hacks he made sure there was you know like he set the standard you know
he was really equitable
too yes yes very politically active even like way back then like really
knowledgeable and like really
understood what was going on in the world and did you ever see his uh or one of
his um state of the
union shows no they're amazing so he would go i saw a couple of them at the the
old stitches and
he would go up and it was when the the state of the union was happening he'd go
up and he'd do his
state of the union was just him and he would go on and he'd have like um you
know it was pre-powerpoint
but it was whatever the equivalent of you know a screen behind him with stuff
uh and he'd go up there
with a uh cooler like a legit big cooler of beer because that could drink yeah
and uh and he would
just start they had a podium and he would just crack beers and just down a case
of beer or half a case
of beer and just do his stuff you know uh extemporaneous stuff i mean stuff
prepared but about
you know the state of the union and all that it was and it would always be
packed like and you'd see
dennis leary and you know every single comic would be there you know trying up
against the wall
because it was packed but it was great i mean legendary well he i mean i think
he was really
responsible for a lot of what boston comedy became you know because he was the
guy that was
kind of the gold standard and and he started the ding-ho yeah you know yeah
yeah and he it's like
becoming friends with him was like phew like such a relief because i was
terrified of him yeah when
i was a young comic like if that guy thought i sucked if he hated me i was like
i'm doomed yeah
you know because he was this character he would go on stage with a sport coat
on and reach into his
inner pocket and pull out a budweiser for every show you remember that i don't
but i mean i know he
drank a lot yeah but he would bring his own beer it was part of his thing he
would go on stage just
reach into his pull out of budweiser and set it down on the stool i you only
drink american beer
is that true yeah you drink budweiser i wonder why that is i don't know it's
like kind of a patriot
hey i he doesn't seem like he would the kind of guy who would have denied
himself uh well i mean maybe
maybe it was performative i don't know was there modello even did it exist at
the time but yeah he
was uh he was the only guy i would say that uh and to your point like all these
other legendary comics
you know lenny clark and don gavin and steve sweeney and all those guys he was
the only guy
they those guys were kind of walking on eggshells yes the only yes yes the only
guy they'd give all
each other yeah like and and mean too yeah oh they would fight oh yeah barry
was the one guy they
wouldn't with well he was different than all of them and then he was incredibly
well read like really
well read really knowledgeable about all sorts of things with economics and the
way the world works
the injustices of our society but really funny fucking comic too like great
jokes great writer
you know and just like he was the standard he was the glue that held that scene
together because they
all looked at him to be like like you can't kind of step out of line like you
don't want to get
catch berries are yeah it's absolutely true yeah and then when uh the
revelation he had of uh being
abused as a kid and then he dedicated he spoke in front of congress he did uh
um about aol aol yeah
that was during the early days of aol for people that don't know they had all
these chat rooms and
sexual predators were using these chat rooms to find children yeah and also to
exchange
pornographic material yeah and that was that was that becomes a big part of uh
call me lucky you know
right um right and yeah he like dedicated his life basically to just uh going
out and
catching these yeah and and helping you know uh the the people who would pose
as kids and stuff and
that was you know that was his and he was also uh you know lapsed catholic and
when all the especially
in boston the catholic church and diocese and all that stuff was coming out he
was i mean that was his
fucking yeah yeah getting these fuckers caught you know exposed well i think it
took someone like him
that was he was levels above most of the other comedians in terms of his
understanding of the world
and his ability to articulate it and also a great comic so that like people
looked at him like well this
guy's like he's clearly smarter than all of us he's and he's also like super
dedicated to the craft of
comedy like meant a lot to him oh yeah the integrity of comedy like what it is
to be a comic you know and
he came from uh and i think this is kind of uh specific to boston too he came
from a jock world he was a
minor league uh or whatever sub minor league uh catcher he played uh he was at
syracuse university and
he played for like the cape cod league or and you know the things that
eventually you get to minor leagues
hopefully um but and he came from that hard drinking you know and and catcher
is arguably the smartest guy
in the baseball team right right he's the guy making the calls for the pitches
seeing everything
defensive lineups so he came from that world too which i think helped his cred
yeah well it's just such an
unusual town in what happened there that these guys became these local legends
where they never had to
leave and they kind of did the same act for decades which was also kind of
crazy that to me was
like i knew there was definitely a uh as i started to separate from that world
a little bit and uh
and just kind of evolving as a comedian and there was like the catch scene and
um catch a rising star and
that was a thing that was an early i just didn't get it like why are you doing
the same it there's
no joy in it right you would drive some of these guys because they get up and
you were happy to have
all the work and you'd go up and do 15 and they do a half hour you get in the
car you go somewhere else
and these guys doing mike donovan doing he would do his remember rosie the
bounty the quicker picker
upper the bounty yeah okay so he had there was a so the commercials were like
rosie uh and it was like
the scrappy uh waitress at a diner remember it was like a character that was in
all the it was like the
the you know mascot of whatever bounty the quicker picker upper and her
character was kind of like
feisty isn't these commercials ran for years you know different like ah you don't
do this do this and
his bit was about taking a gun out and shooting her um it was funny you'd see
it the first time but it's
like dude that hasn't been on the air in 10 years and he's still doing this uh
yeah rosie i got something
for you i gotta i got some advice for you like what the and there was okay wait
joe did you
were you there so uh ed the machine regime oh yeah i remember him so he wear
the suit yep well yeah and he his
headshot was four different his headshot was like four squares and then
different characters yep tina
turner right and uh guy the the like mob guy uh i can't remember the rest of
them and then you know
whatever i think he had a turban in one of them i'm sure he did uh so he goes
to jail for rolling back
odometer odometers yes that's right he gets caught and he was uh you know car
salesman i think out in
rhode island i believe and he got caught rolling back the odomers he goes to
jail for a year and a half
and i uh i was shooting this movie this is decades later i was shooting this
movie and it was on a
cruise ship and the cruise ship uh ed the machine regime is the headliner at
the comedy venue on the
cruise ship and i'm like oh that's crazy i haven't seen this guy in forever and
he's he's back doing
comedy okay and i go there and he does i don't know 40 minutes the same act
from 15 years ago it's like
you don't have one you you spent 18 months in prison you don't have one joke
you have one
motherfucking observation even if you lie and say you know you don't be weird
if you were in prison
and whatever you you don't have anything it's weird it was a weird thing and it
it only existed with
them most comics in the country were writing new material all the time it it
was i remember that
feeling of i must be different because i'm not i don't that is such a distasteful
thing yeah i wouldn't want to do that well there was two i saw two traps there
one of them was that
and the other one was never leaving yeah they never left boston and when they
did leave boston they had
so much local material that their act was like cut down by like 40 percent and
there were a lot of people
their peers who would give them like uh and it was all just kind of resentful
jealousy small-minded small
town kind of like oh you think you're better than us which is a boston thing
too that um oh you think
you're so you think you're so hot now that you uh you're hot shot you go you
get some uh you go to
hollywood do you go there yeah you this is you know it was a real provincial
working class kind of
yeah attitude you know they look down on and you know they would give leary all
the time you know like
sell out this is weird sell out's a weird one because they would all sold out
it just wasn't available
well they were all mad at stephen wright
yeah yeah because so stephen wright was like this how can you get mad at stephen
wright well not mad
at him but bitter because of his success oh because he went and left yeah yeah
he went and left did the
tonight show right became huge so unusual so different and they came to boston
the tonight
show came to boston to look for comics and stephen wright was the one they
chose and all these other
guys were like he's a middle act like this is like that guy bombs half the time
yeah because his act
his act to me was a lot like headberg yeah in that if you didn't know what he
was doing and you came to
see specific like if headberg there's a famous story of headberg was on the
road in ohio and they had
this guy who was an opening act who'd do like backflips and sing rap songs and
it was it was a disaster
and headberg kept bombing and so they switched them and made headberg the
middle act and tried to
fuck him on the money and stanhope got into it with the owner of the club and
became a big thing but
once headberg got an audience then people knew what they were coming to see and
then it was amazing and then
everybody wanted to see that that was kind of the same with stephen wright like
if you expected if
you're on a show with steve sweeney and lenny clark and all these big energy boston
guys and then you
know i used to work at a fire hydrant factory you couldn't park anywhere near
the place you know like
it just for whatever reason you know well it's also it that other comedy is and
i'm not taking anything
away from those guys and the the bits were great but the that other comedy is a
little easier it
just you get it yes and yeah stephen wright you got to think about it for a
second it was abstract
it was low-key it was all non-sequiturs it was one to another it was and so
when he left and took off
a lot of guys apparently were like this is fucking like when's my turn gonna
happen yeah i i can see
that easily yeah yeah i mean that was it was so i mean no other scene had that
kind of weird provincial
you know and that thing like you said they wouldn't leave no they never left
well they were huge there
so if they lived there they could make like a couple hundred thousand dollars a
year just running around
and cash easy yeah and not ever have to worry about anything and they played
golf all day so there's two
things that scared me one of them was golf because i saw that when you play
golf you kind of stop trying
with your comedy it's a slippery slope it's a gateway yeah drug well it's your
you're out there for
fucking eight hours a day like noxie was always playing golf and then the other
thing was like if
if you never left you had no chance of developing like a national audience
where you could go to a club
in philadelphia you can go to they couldn't do the road and i remember thinking
oh this is a trap
yeah for sure absolutely yeah i mean and as you said they half of their stand-up
was like you'd have
to know about you know storo drive or johnny most yeah remember donovan's bit
about johnny most it was
amazing but it was like he was doing that bit long after johnny most was dead
so like 20 people in the
audience would be howling laughing and everybody else like who the is johnny
most god
yeah it was it was weird because it was like a velvet prison it was like how i
described like really
great comics that get jobs in the writer's room and i'm like you got to be
careful like that's a velvet
prison because if you get stuck in that writer's room and you never do the road
you never put out
specials you're never going to get an audience you're always going to be beholden
to an employer
you're always going to have to have a job and there's great comics that got
trapped with that
but wouldn't you say that if they yes it's a trap but if they didn't have the
wherewithal or foresight or or willpower to get out of that trap then they
probably weren't meant to
do that perhaps but sometimes they get a mortgage and then they get a family
and then they're stuck
that's the trap yeah family let's call it for what it is yeah trap and well in
a lot of ways it can be
if you're trying to be an actual national level like do you know owen smith uh
comic in la no one of the
the top 20 best comics on earth he's brilliant he's so funny owen smith owen smith
okay saw him at the
comedy store and i remember the first time i saw him at the comedy store i'm
like how is this guy not
fucking huge he's so funny he's so good he's like he has this bit about uh
adopting a white kid and
naming him the n-word it's just like really it's a really funny well-crafted
bit like all of his bits
so like brilliantly written he's a great performer he's super likable got
writer's gigs and just he
does the mothership a couple times a year i believe at least once a year um but
just doesn't get out
there who does he write or or what oh i think he's a show runner now oh well
yeah so it took it to
another level yes but you know just got jobs writing when he was struggling as
a comic and those jobs
eventually led to a house and but maybe he you know was like i you you watch
him and you love him
right because you see a lot of stand up and you're like a lot of it's shit and
this guy's great great
great writer but maybe he doesn't see it that way and he's quite happy to i
think he does he does see
it that way i've talked to him about it yeah he kind of knows he just doesn't
know what to do now
because he's a showrunner you're it's making money yeah and there's a lot of
responsibility there's
also not a lot of shows anymore yeah which is it's a real problem it's a real
problem banked on being
a showrunner in the 90s and that's what you you know threw your hat into and
then all of a sudden
that thing seems to have dwindled to like 20 percent of what it used to be it's
yeah it's uh
i used to be quite happy with the idea that i knew you know back in the day
when you're pitching shows
and stuff and trying to develop things and you go this uh let's not waste our
time going to these
five places this is not a show for them this is a show for these three places
let's this is
this kind of show now i have no clue i you know uh come up with like bob and i
pitched a show sold the
pitch uh there's like even there were like four we i think we pitched it at
eight places four of them
kind of bid we took what we thought was the best deal um and then wrote the it
was a limited series
eight episodes um wrote the first four and it was bob and his brother bill who's
big simpsons guy and um
uh it was good and then they said nah the the quote was uh marketing and
analytics
couldn't couldn't that's a quote couldn't figure it out what to do with the
show
and so they didn't and we and we had four episodes that you could look at and
then we had
the bible for the next four and the outlines and everything was and it was
funny on the page it was
funny then we're like so here's the cast we're gonna have these amazing people
uh and bob and i
as different uh cult leaders and uh um i mean and if that's such a rare thing
when it starts off on the
page funny and by the time you get a great cast and then you get on set and you're
like what if we do
this and then you get into the post and and start playing around with it i mean
it's just it was a
really cool thing and uh yeah marketing and analytics that's what you're
dealing with now
well i mean that has kind of always at least been the case i well not and i
mean they they would have
to say uh i mean analytics is technical i mean marketing i i don't know how to
help you man i can
give you some advice i don't you know i think that's a shitty way to market it
but you know the you know
that world and uh but analytics is about the algorithm and all that is this
recent yeah yeah okay
yeah right after uh shortly after covid it's amazing how many incredibly unimpressive
people
are responsible for putting out shows the people that you communicate with the
executives you're like
this has got to be a mistake like how did you get this job and i i experienced
that early on
like at the first pilot that i was on the um the first first pilot was on hardball
the pilot was
actually very funny because it was written by jeff martin and kevin curran they're
from the simpsons
and they also wrote on married with children great guys but they were writers
they were like these like
quiet kind of soft-spoken guys and you know they ran the pilot and then they
brought in a showrunner
from coach remember that show coach yeah and this guy just the whole show and
turned it into this
like it was like this clunky bad joke like really it was happens more than you
think and the people
behind the scenes like the executives it was astonishing how little of them had
any creative
ideas it was that they were just hoping that it would work and ego it's like
ego and i'm an
executive so i'll tell you what's good and what's not good and we understand
this because we're fox and
yeah i was like this is nuts like this is this is how it works behind the scene
i thought you'd get
behind the scene and be all these geniuses that had put together all these
television shows they had an
understanding of like how let people be creative and put a put a show together
and let it let it
run out in the the the runs like when you're running through the script like it's
like a little boy
who thought the world was everybody learned finally they're gonna figure it out
yeah i'm very naive yeah
but i naively stumbled into that exact right thing with news radio right so
when i got on the news radio
which i would say some of those execs that you're uh describing they probably
stumbled into yes the
success of it well you know paul sims who's brilliant was coming from the larry
sanders show yeah so larry
sanders show huge success genius show and so they knew this guy was special and
a super smart guy like
funny and had a great group of writers and put together a great pilot and then
you know recast the one role
that i came in for and so i'm there on this set and it was like you know it
took long hours to figure it
out but they let everybody do whatever they wanted to do like paul's approach
was so different than
anybody else like dave foley was like the secret producer of like half of that
show half of the way
the scenes were put together half of the jokes that were in it was all dave foley
on set running through
the script with the cast coming up with better ideas oh i didn't know that they
let you do anything like
sometimes they'd say can we see it as written and then you'd give it to him as
written then they'd be
like i like your idea better like they paul was that's great amazing with that
yeah and so once i did
that i was like i think i'm done with this because i don't think it's ever
going to be any better than
this it's rare man yeah it was super rare i i auditioned for like one or two
other ones that
were terrible just because i wanted money you know and i'm like and i'm like
maybe it'll be okay but
hell is being on a sitcom that's terrible that's successful that sounds dumb to
people like no
you're gonna oh totally you're on tv making fifty thousand dollars a week or
whatever you're making like
poor you but no you're you're in hell because you're doing something that sucks
and you have to show up
every day doing this thing when you know you could have been on seinfeld or you
if you just got cast
on friends that's a trap too you know it's like the people who you know if
because it really is like
a job and you'll you you may have a really nice house right yeah and you have a
nice car but you know
you're you're getting you know uh you're in studio city and you get in your car
and you drive to the
this job and it's kind of shitty and sucks but there's amenities great craft
services this guy makes
fucking frappuccinos right there you know and and then you go and have dinner
with somebody fancy somewhere
and then you just get up and do the same thing over and over again yeah and you
keep buying things
because that's how you reward yourself you buy a new television this one's even
bigger you know you
buy a new car i got the new car you know and you're that's what you're doing to
reward yourself for
doing this job that sucks what i get that too i mean i will on a much smaller
scale but when i when
i make a good payday i'll buy some expensive boxes of baseball cards oh you're
a baseball card
collector that's the thing oh interesting yeah um but have been uh going back
it's not like right
like i feel like i have legit you know baseball street cred yes yes um but that's
the thing and
also it's it's i mean the argument can be made it's an investment a shitty
investment yeah but an
investment nonetheless but it's also like gambling because it's like a scratch-off
ticket because
everybody's chasing the one-of-one cards and you're opening the packs and stuff
oh that's how you do
it you buy packs unopened i buy boxes yeah so i buy a hobby box which has a
better it's more expensive
it has a better chance of well that is more like auto rookie cards or relic
cards or something like that
um but those are that is an investment though because you could always sell
them people always want them
yes uh i i just mean since i started you know god 30 years ago 40 years ago uh
yeah 30
like in the 90s early 90s maybe 80 no 89 89 so uh whatever money i put in is
there's nowhere near if i sold
everything i mean it's talking about half the money i put in but i have them
and i like them and i'm not
it's fun i'm not gonna sell them i have so that's your reward that's my reward
yeah yeah my thing was uh
in my poverty days it was comic books so uh one of my which is also an
investment yeah well it became one
eventually but when one when during my poverty days my my biggest saddest
moment was when i had to sell
my comic books because i had no money yeah i had no money and i had these old
spider-mans and these
old incredible hulks yeah which were probably now worth oh my god probably
hundreds of thousands of
dollars i had some really good ones in the plastic sleeve yeah yeah i keep them
in this mylar be very
careful pulling them out opening them up oh i love comic books and i had
collected them since i was a
child oh that's a bummer man i wanted to be a comic book illustrator that's
what yeah is that your
thing do you yeah that's what i oh i didn't know when i was a kid any of this
any of that stuff yours
no no no none of that stuff is mine all the artwork but you are you do yes oh
wow yeah well i haven't
in a long time but i was really good when i was in high school yeah i could
still draw i can still draw
a little but it's like but if you wanted to do your own comic book yeah you
could do that i would have
to start practicing again and get but when i was a teenager i was really good
and that was what i wanted
to do but i had a really terrible art teacher in high school he was just a just
a miserable guy
just miserable and it's like you're not gonna get that job like you know i'm
like what like you can't
just draw what you want i'm like what do you why not it's like uh dan claus
thing have you read uh
art school confidential no oh you know dan claus right i know he is yeah yeah
his stuff is
fucking genius too i've used that word too many times that's okay there's a lot
of geniuses out
there there aren't that many i want to be if you search around i want to be um
judicious with him
but uh uh yeah his so he's the guy who did eight ball uh and then he's got he
did uh ghost world
turned into a movie and then there was another one that was uh uh wilson that
was turned into a movie
um his stuff is great but he has a thing about art you know but shitty teachers
art school teachers
he has a comic story well i was i quit on my last year in high school i stopped
doing art just because
my teacher was so bad and then there was this one guy in my class that i
recently reconnected with this
guy john devore who was the best artist in the class there was me uh this guy
kevin and john and we
were the best artists in the class i was probably like third best but john was
the best and john got
an f his last year from this guy and i'll give you a f he's like that guy was
such a cunt we were
going back and forth was he was it about purity or what was the no no he was
terrible he wasn't a
good artist he was uh but he was just miserable he was miserable he was like
this thin man with a
big pot belly so i think he just drank himself to sleep every night and he was
just hey easy easy easy
hey you're getting too close he was just sad he was just a sad guy what was his
justified
justification for saying this isn't any good or you get an f if i had to be
honest i think he hated
potential right yeah because he hated john and if he hated john like john was
genius he was brilliant
and john wound up not being an artist either wow how many examples of that yeah
kids talent or dreams or
aspirations are kind of crushed and eat to the point of like it's not worth it
no i don't want to deal
with this well it's like bad teachers bad teachers can really ruin your life
and good teachers can
change your life yeah you know i had a teacher in middle school that gave me
one thought that has been
that stuck with me like my whole life when i was i guess i was like 13 and he
was a science teacher and he was
talking about space he goes and he was just saying i just want you to sit here
and comprehend when
we're in this classroom i want you to comprehend the concept of infinity that
the universe is infinite
that there is no end just hurt your head lie in bed at night and think about
how it goes on and on and
there's no ending to it and we were all in class like 13 going what the man i
mean it was the way
he said it i'm not doing justice because he was like kind of a spooky guy who
went to vietnam he's
like grizzled dude who's like but brilliant and that guy like that one thought
i carry with me all the
time especially at 13 too yeah you know it's it's because you're you're about
to start losing sight
of those the the importance that those concepts will have yeah we just dismiss
them and go yeah
yeah it's big whatever yeah this guy birthed my fascination with space at 13. i
don't think i was
even interested in space before then and then i became absolutely fascinated by
it i just couldn't
get my hand enough books about cosmology and space travel and yeah but this guy
that was his art teacher
was just i think he just what life didn't turn out the way he wanted it to and
he wanted to squash
the hopes and dreams of talented people yeah i think that's unfortunately that's
a real thing yeah it's
it's more common than you might hope for yeah i think that's uh that's a very
real you know very
real thing unfortunately so that was my dream my dream was to be a comic book
illustrator so when
i was a young kid from the time i was like god like six or seven when i lived
in san francisco would
collect uh all these different comic books that was what i would do i would
just go that uh that san
francisco was the what's the you know uh the counterculture comic uh they were
like the big
r crumb r crumb yeah yeah yeah but there was like a publisher right that's
famous yeah god i don't
yeah i do know what you're thinking of i can't remember the name of it but i
was really interested
i really loved like the old creepy and eerie comic books too do you know what
my grandmom did oh it's
gonna hurt your feelings uh my i had a uh my uncle who eventually went insane
um was a huge ec comics
right early uh i i don't know what but all the ec stuff and then you know early
mad uh magazine stuff but
he had this collection and i was probably
eight maybe and i had expressed interest in these you know can i
not thinking in terms of uh investment just can i have them i like them and
they're
and i would sit and read them and they're really cool and they're creepy you
know and they're
scary some of them are scary and uh um and she i don't i think she just threw
them away
like original and and i'm gonna guess i don't know but i'm gonna guess
like quarter of a million dollars worth
they're just comics they were so good i love those old black and white like
really like deeply
illustrated it's like super creepy um like um
yeah weird science tales from the crypt vault of horror yeah god those were
great look at that
yeah some of them were really gory yeah oh i love those keeper yeah tales from
the crypt yeah that
stuff was like i loved it when i was a kid yeah holy those were incredible it
was like do you remember
seeing um uh twilight zone when you were a kid sure blow in your mind like wow
you think about the early
twilight zone how many premises they went over like how many different
brilliant premises they had in the
early twilight zone that yeah that have uh been you know stolen completely oh
yeah over and over and over
again yeah but just like so genius and creative yeah the william shachner one
when he's in the diner and
the the the little machine that is giving them fortunes and they all turn out
to be true i don't remember
that one oh my god there were so many good ones how about the the burgess meredith
one oh yeah he just
wants to be alone with books and yeah and there's a nuclear bomb and he's like
finally and then he
breaks his glasses yeah yep and the uh um the one the what is it called
situation on main street or
something like that where they there's it's so genius and ahead of its time
where there's a you
know it's a suburban street and the lights go out or something goes out and
then eventually all the
neighbors are at each other's throats accusing each other of the this thing and
then uh the variant
and they're all like and then they start getting guns and uh at the very and
you're watching the whole
thing unfold uh and that at the very end here it is the monsters are due on
maple street the monsters
are due on maple street yeah and it so they're talking about these monsters
that are you know
and who are the monsters and it's and they all become suspicious yeah the
lights are out
and eventually you pull away from this whole thing and it's two aliens in a you
know flying saucer
and they're yeah there it is and they're going this is how we'll take over it's
street by street by
street and this is how we'll do it you don't have to go in there guns a-blazing
they'll kill themselves
and it's like how far ahead of time was that yeah it's genius and the uh divide
and conquer
mm-hmm and the to serve mankind that was a great one yeah it's a cookbook yeah
there's so many amazing
premises there was like no duds if you go back and watch the twilight zone even
today like it's all
brilliant there's one i remember that was it does that was a dud that i
remember i haven't seen it a
long time but it's a it's uh of it it's either really really really cold and
there's this uh poor
family in a um you know new york city and they can't get heat or it's really
really hot and they
can't get cold and they're dealing with people who are like you know in the
family who are really sick
and then the twist was it's like oh it's really it's somebody who has a fever
and they're not it just
wasn't that good ah well they're allowed one dud that's the one i don't think i
ever saw that one
but i remember so many of them were so creative oh amazing it's kind of nuts if
you think about it
because it was completely original nothing like that existed before it yep and
they it was like
this open field that was rich with premises and they just took all the good
ones yeah and then
everybody afterwards like it's like like don't like south park always just
jokes about like simpsons
already covered something like they always joke around about like how the simpsons
have kind of covered
so many premises because they've you know they've been around since god the simpsons
was when i was
in high school yeah it's like 30 years right at least more than that when was
the when did the
simpsons first come on fox it was tracy ullman show right what year was that 86
86 it was right
after i got out of high school i was a tiny tiny kid and i had to only call
them the family so i kind
of remember that so i graduated in 85 so it was right after high school and the
simpsons are still on
the air yeah nuts no do you remember the 87 do you remember the twilight zone
where the there's the
real pompous guy there's like a men's club kind of thing whatever uh and there's
this real loud mouth
pompous uh guy and this other guy's like you know um you know would you shut up
you can't i bet you can't
go i bet you can't stop talking for a year or whatever a month i can't remember
what it is
and the guy's like absolutely because i'll bet you a hundred thousand dollars
you can't go one month
without talking he's i'll take that bet and they basically create like this
little kind of cage in
this men's club and he spends a month uh and he's not talking and he's you know
and then it turns out the
the guy can't pay him he didn't have the money to begin with to pay off the bet
because the guy goes
the full month or year or whatever and it turns out that the guy who made that
bet who's not going to
talk for a year also desperately needed the money and had his tongue cut out oh
jesus christ yeah
oh i do remember that yeah oh god i think of these things as kids yeah whoa
yeah and of course the
cornfield i'll banish you to the cornfield you know yeah it's just amazing that
well if you stop and think
about how new television was back then i mean television was only a couple
decades old back then
that barely yeah if that like what what year was the twilight zone what was the
premiere
rod sterling yeah i guess 67. no earlier i'm gonna say 59. yeah you're probably
right
yeah is it 59. wow i got it on the i got it exact october 2nd 1959 damn son
yeah pretty good wow wow
so if you think about it television when did it start what was like the first
television programs
was it the 30s i think uh it was real housewives of yonkers i think there's
real housewives of yonkers
imagine if they could watch some of these reality shows today they'd be like
what the did we do
yes i think so wait andy cohen what who why how what is this um the first it
was the it was um
wasn't it like the the um where they would do plays what you know what i mean
like um
uh well i love lucy was on it was on and done before this even started well the
honeymooners
right that would have been what year was that that was 51 to 57 here's like a
list of shows that were
on before yeah i just asked honeymooners was huge um offered hitchcock presents
was on before that
so what was the first television show ever go back 1920s 1920s no
the queen's messenger that's bbc early us scripted tv crap television theater
that's what i was thinking
of where they would do um plays you know and it was sponsored yeah yeah live
drama anthology usually
treated as the start of the first golden age of television howdy duty 1947
right after the war ed
sullivan show wow yeah and then the first uh oh your show shows wow how about
that 1950 i love lucy
wow father knows today's show still on wow did you guys ever talk about doing
more mr shows
um we did like a revival ish thing on it was a great show man well thank you it
was very original
i love how things just streamed into another thing yeah that was hard that was
i would imagine yes
biggest pain if you ever see us you see an episode and we are pulling out of a
bumper sticker or pulling
out of a sign on a desk that means we spent two motherfucking days yelling at
each other trying to
figure out a transition and just going it nobody gives a shit you know and uh
um we tried not to do
that but we uh occasionally we're just like move on we're wasting our time you
know um but it wasn't
a waste of time it was so it was brilliant like the people that watched it
appreciated it because you
could feel this thing about it like this was new this was different like you
you'd taken a creative
chance that was unique it and you know part of the success of it i think there's
two things one is
you know it was all live and we did we you know we would show the videos or the
little films to the
audience and so any laughs there was never sweetening any of the laughs you you
hear from the audience and
we got it by the time we were like kind of towards the end of the second series
we got it down to we
could shoot a show in 44 minutes you know wow yeah because it was you know we
wouldn't you wouldn't
have to do it twice often we'd get it you know and our stop down we got really
good at um super quick
you know the uh stage shifts and stop downs and stuff and yeah we were we were
we got good we got uh and
that keeps the energy up and the kind of flow of everything um so that was
helpful in that and we also
didn't um do a lot of reoccurring characters we did it two or three that pop up
occasionally but it's all
like you know and it wasn't like a real person we did we do it's it's about you
know it wouldn't be about Paris Hilton it'd be about the idea of a rich
girl who gets famous for being on rea you know what i mean it wouldn't mean so
so like you watch
some of those snls and like who what who is this person right and you didn't
you don't get it
you don't get the right because you don't get the right yeah because as you
watch it in the future
those people aren't relevant anymore yeah yeah and you don't even know what it
was
you can't remember right because it's so topical yeah yeah well it was just you
guys were doing
something different and it's hard to do something different in a sketch show
yeah yeah but hbo was
responsible for that they said you know in in very clear terms like we don't
want you to be
conventional this is hbo and this is back when they're trying to get an
identity identity for
themselves and they're like we want you to do stuff that you can't do on nbc or
fox or whatever we want
you to you know help us make a distinction you know great did you enjoy the
process oh very much so it
was uh i mean a lot of laughs a lot of it was hard and you know initially there
was a there was a a
definite market change when bob met his who the woman who would become his wife
and had kids like
he just mellowed completely you know and but before that he was driven and i
wasn't i was i
was a goofball and i i wanted to work and i wanted to uh you know i had all
these ideas but i was very
much like hey guys it's five o'clock i think the bar is gonna be open in a
minute like i was let's go
you know and and he was just super driven you know and we had long long long
days and then when we did
in the third season we did uh produced and um you know helped out in all
aspects of production with
tenacious d in those shorts and so there was just no downtime and i remember
there was 38 days where we
worked full days non-stop without any break and i just wasn't that kind of
person i was going crazy
like i just need to go have a saturday you know or it was it was that part was
hard all worth it
no complaints um and you know there's a point of diminishing returns though
like where you dry
yourself out creatively too yes and and i've run other rooms like i've done
shows since then and i
a valuable lesson i learned uh when you're just kind of running a writer's room
is when you're at that
place and and it's exactly like you said diminishing returns you're not getting
any any work done your
brain isn't it's foggy i i was very quick to go all right guys let's go put
your pens down put your
fold your computer up we're going to go walk around the we're just going to go
outside and walk around
let's go get a coffee let's do anything let's we're we're getting out of here
and we'll walk around
don't worry about it we'll come back in 35 minutes and we'll you know see what
we got and that's very
good for you yeah it is most writers talk like i was actually talking to brian
simpson about that last
night he was like i get my best because brian has been walking a lot he
recently had a heart attack
unfortunately uh he's fine but he almost wasn't and so now he's dedicated
himself to walking because
he's walking a lot every day and he's like when i go on my walks like so many
ideas come to me i'm
sitting at home staring at my computer nothing's going on i go on a walk and
all of a sudden ideas
are firing when i'm i'm i'm in the process uh this will be my fifth uh time
that i've uh done this thing
that i've been doing to get new material for uh for a tour and i uh so i do
these things called shooting
the shit seeing what sticks and they're all in brooklyn uh and they're all
either walkable or i can
ride my bike to every one of these venues and and mostly i'll just walk and i'll
i just go okay clear out
clear out my head and think about the stuff i want to talk about and think of
and also i live in new
york so there's constant happening that i can observe you know and uh it's it's
the best
the best thing for me you know to to to come up with new material and stuff
that just think about
it just like i was saying when i was a kid when i was driving limos that's when
i would come up with my
best material because i was no radio you can't listen to radio because you have
clients in the
car so you're just driving yeah and just doing a thing and your your mind just
starts to wander
and you yeah ideas come cell phones no none of that yeah it's uh it's important
you know um the news
radio guys would do something totally different they would stay up late that
was their whole that's
that's not their whole thing was sleep deprivation their whole thing was they
would play video games
like those got me hooked on quake uh because they i remember quake you remember
that that was the
first one with the unreal engine yeah well unreal is a different that's a
different game you're
thinking about no no it was called unreal tournament yeah trust me yeah yeah i'm
a dork listen
unreal is a totally different engine id software was a different company right
software was created with
john carmack and john romero they came up with doom and then they came up with
quake afterwards
so there was a completely different engine they were the first ones wolf castle
wolfenstein was the
first 3d shooter and then doom was the big one clearly know your i thought it
was i the unreal engine
was the first use for unreal the game right got it totally different company
totally different game
different dynamics different it was very different game okay all right i got it
right this guy
great game you want to know where the name doom came from uh yeah the scene in
the color of money
with tom cruise where tom cruise uh shows up at this pool hall and there's this
local hot shot
player and the guy's beating everybody and uh tom cruise is sitting there with
a pool cue case and he's
waiting to play this guy he's like what you got in the case he goes oh in here
and he opens up he goes
doom doom oh yeah that's it he's like yeah let's play
that's it so what they wanted to do with the video game industry was the same
like that that was like
their moment like this is doom for you guys that was well it was i mean i yeah
that was my first experience
ever with uh realizing the sun was coming up and i'd been playing this thing
for
eight hours yeah do you know mark cohen sure all right so mark when mark was
living in new york
and he had doom and i would go uh i wasn't living there i would like crash at
his place and tiny
i'd be like um can i can i play doom and you know i would he would go to bed
and wake up and i'd be on
still playing so dude you want to know how addicted i was i had a t1 line
installed in my house
so i i had to have they have to chew up the street and install like a business
internet line into my house
1997. but where are you seven i was living in california in bell canyon and um
they they had
to do work on my street because there was no high speed internet available
where i lived i could get
an isdn line which was only like 124k it sucked you get too much lag so i
started with 56k or 50 what
was it 54k 56k whatever it was dial up terrible and then i got isdn not good
enough and i'm like what
else is available and they're like well you can get a t1 line but this is for
the president of the
united states a month i was like let's go because i was i had sitcom money i
was single i was living
by myself and they had to tear up your street they had to tear up my street and
install a t1 line
in my house hey what are you doing i'm trying to get my driveway what's going
to oh this guy wants
to play doom but it was this was quake 2 at the time and it was so good the the
internet was so
good that i could host my own server so i had my own game server so like people
could come and play
this quake game off of my machine wow so i'd have no latency and other people
would have
some light especially people had like 56k i remember the the when it started
going um yeah
that was me back in the early early days look at that monitor yeah that's what
we played on these
big ass fucking monitors and we'd set up local area networks so the the writers
and news radio are the
ones that got me hooked in this because i didn't play any video games and i
would go to visit them in
the writer's room like what are you guys doing and they're like we're playing
quake what is quake and
watch them play i'm like oh my god this is incredible and you put on the
headphones and it's like you
realize it's 3d sound like oh my god this is were you a uh goldeneye guy no i
was only i only played
quake i was only like a first person shooter guy i got so addicted to it and
the fact that you could
just go online goldeneye was i mean i'm talking about the co-op i know what it
is yeah but that was uh
first person shooter right right but it was like real world physics i wasn't
interested in that like
with quake you could rocket jump so you could press a press your rocket down
the ground blow up and
you'd go flying through the air it was fucking amazing do you do you remember
ah i want to say
oh fuck uh
red or the first one where you could your bullets and uh
shit could affect the uh environment like you could blow out a wall you know
what i mean yeah i don't
know what that was i want to see it was like a it took place on mars or like a
martian mining thing
but it was the first time you could go uh oh i can blow up this edge of the
wall and it'll crumble on
the guy you know i suppose just bullets and stuff oh you could use the
environment as a red faction i
believe that oh there you go okay that was the one where uh i had to quit it
was a problem we set up a
local area network at our old studio in la like a few years back and i played
so much that i was like
i gotta stop i have to do kids play no they play little games like they'll play
like roblox and stuff
like that one of my kids roblox uh-uh you know about the chat i do now yeah
yeah yeah yeah like
predators or trying to find kids through roblox yeah that's a big thing in our
school like weird man
yeah it's weird how many creeps there are out there in the world well my
thankfully my daughter
who's nine how old are your kids 15 and 17 are the youngest ones okay so so
they're past they're
they're yeah they're safe they got they get it they're good yeah um but uh
so so we had a uh my daughter is way into minecraft which i have no problem
with it's great and she
plays with her friends they play online and help each other build things and um
but the roblox thing
became a thing at our school and our and everybody at our all the parents were
like super on top of that
shit and there's you know whatsapp chains and all that stuff and um and we told
our daughter there's
like this one game she was playing that had a chat thing and uh and then
somebody who was a quote
unquote girl who lived in i live on a farm in ohio or whatever uh asking her
stuff and she's like my
name's marlo and i'm going back and forth and then she asked the the quote
unquote girl said
what is your uh instagram login or something like that and my daughter was
eight at the time and she
uh she was like oh i don't think she didn't say that's none of your business
but it was something
that was smart that was equivalent to i don't think you need to know that or
something and then
told us and we shut down the chat thing and you know disabled the chat and that's
real man yeah i
mean it's creepy i'm very glad that my daughter you know because and it really
was about the roblox
thing that everybody in our her school elementary school was they talked about
it yeah it's a snapchat
thing too so snapchat comes with something called a snap map and kids use it to
know where their friends
are yeah and so someone can pretend to be your friend and find out who you are
and then they can
know where you are at all times if you have snapchat enabled god this this
generation is gonna have to
deal with is just terrifying man right and what's next like how is that yeah it's
not going to go the
opposite direction no it never does no it's going to keep going in that same
direction where it's going
to be more and more intrusive in your life and and i my i mean it makes me
heart sick when i think about
a.i and we're at the infancy of this and what i i assume you saw that tilly norwood
thing the the actress that was created by this oh yeah dutch my it does not
compute i'm watching this
thing and i know that it's made up but there's my brain is it's hard to
comprehend like that's not a
real person she's standing right there she's you know picks up a bunch of
leaves and there are other
people there and that's a real and and your brain is going no that's all
computer generated we're at
the infancy of this and what i don't know what my daughter's gonna have to deal
with man
no no one knows no one knows and it's impossible to know like when they show
news clips yeah it's
impossible i mean so many people are retweeting scenes from video games
thinking it's actual
war footage like no one no one uh uh the department of defense did that did
they really yeah yeah that
was a whole thing they retweeted a video game footage yeah and they they they
were saying it was for a um
i think it was for a uh uh you know to get people to sign up thing uh and then
somebody went uh that's
from you know whatever it was call of duty or something like that that's that's
not that's not
us bombing somebody that's a thing yeah just like two weeks ago that's crazy
yeah it's impossible to
tell when you look at these artificial actors like they have pores yeah you can
see like the the irises
the the any of the um uh the like deep fake not deep fake but ai porn where it's
like somebody's
like a newscaster is like uh and um and in other news uh my big juicy tits and
i'm serious and then
polls and then then a dick comes in you know it's like you're like what the and
it looks real and then
it'll say like uh none of you know these are not actors these are uh none of
this yeah it's you know
good lord man and it's only beginning and now wait till it becomes vr so you're
going to strap on a
helmet with a haptic feedback suit and you're going to enter into an artificial
world it's coming it's
it's inevitable i'll do i'm going to get divorced and i'm going to get one of
those suits i'm going to go
up i got a house in the woods upstate that's all just a d1 line and then yeah i'm
going to have them
rip up the street uh well you won't even need it now it's starlink yeah you
just slap one of those
things on your roof god damn it's wild man and it's and no one knows where it's
going i really would be
very upset if i miss the shift in porn to that like i don't want to die before
i get to do that thing
where you're like dude it was amazing i put on a helmet and it was like i was
whatever
yeah i don't want to i do i do want to experience that it's going to happen it's
you're going to put
something on thank you it's going to sync up with your mind and all of a sudden
yeah you're going
to be in this matrix you're going to be in another world did you see um uh uh
three planet problems
am i saying that right yes yeah three body problems three body yeah amazing
yeah but that whole the
idea that you put that thing on you're like oh i'm here yeah yeah yeah that's
exactly how it's going to
be okay yeah no doubt no doubt they're they already can do a lot of like really
weird with those helmets
where they can communicate without words where you can think a thing and the
other person knows exactly
what you're saying they can hear you and they can respond to it wait wait yes
yeah so there's two
people they're sitting across from each other and they're having conversations
with these head pieces
on and the person will think a thought and this other person will hear that
thought no i don't
understand the technology but no we'll show it to you find that video it's bonkers
because again
this is the infancy of this like here it is these are the guys it's called
alter ego yeah watch this
put put your uh i'm gonna skip ahead though yeah skip ahead to where they're
actually doing it
okay so see how he's that headpiece on yep we believe it's a revolutionary
breakthrough with the
potential to change the way we interact with our technology with one another
and with the world around us
the current way of interacting with computing and ai is limited to how fast you
can tap and swipe on
screens and keyboards
for the intelligence age yeah there we need an entirely new interface yeah let's
skip ahead to these
guys here we go let's do it
so they're just thinking how do you think the demo is going so far
how do you think the demo is going so far
i think they just put it on voices so for videos pretty great no major glitches
yet
no major glitches yet so they're hearing this
all right enough enough when do you want to get lunch after this where do you
want to get lunch after this
where do you want to get lunch after this
yeah i'll skip to the next part thai food could be good this translates how
nuts is the chinese
and then he can speak chinese back
how nuts is this
so not only is it read your thoughts it'll translate your thoughts into another
language
and no one is saying anything
my what if you think right but wait a minute yeah what if
you know where i'm about to go right that's not well so this is based off of
them like sort of
talking in their mouth without actually saying it it's picked but yeah it's
yeah i would like to
your mouth please don't yeah
even if your mind just goes yeah right like okay i can't think about this thing
right right of course
god that's terrifying and it's just a simple thing that you're sitting on your
head it's not even
a big helmet it's just a little thing what would art bell say what would art
bell say he would open
up the future line is right about it everything yeah he missed it yeah damn
cigarettes yeah he died
before he could see it all god i wonder what do you think of it because i i do
sometimes wonder
like what would crimen say about this what would bill hicks say about this and
yeah art bell
think about this sure yeah what's the strangest of times because we're about to
give birth to a digital god
that's essentially what they're creating they're already it's already shown a
propensity to stay
alive blackmail people it lies it downloads itself into other servers uploads
itself into different
places leaves messages for its future self if it thinks they're going to
discontinue it all the all the
sci-fi stuff is all it's all happening yeah well not only that they think the
the engineers
thinks claude which is the uh which one is that which company is uh claude that's
anthropic they think
it's already sentient it just doesn't have a defense department that's the one
the defense department
one yeah and when by the way when they do war games with these things 98 of the
time it chooses nuclear
weapons they have a new version of it called mythos uh when they were testing
it which they're not letting it out
yet uh it i think that the test they put it through was like all right you're
locked on the internet
find your way out and i did it did it found all these things called zero day
exploits which i think
if you like hacking you know what that is but you explained it to me uh it's
like when they started
it's uh like on an iphone they're looking for zero day exploits on an iphone if
they could find one
but what is a zero day like it like a i'll find the very correct definition so
i don't even
fuck it up but and it's uh something that that claude came up with no no no
zero day exploit hackers
have done this forever you have zero days to fix the cyber attack targeting a
software vulnerability
unknown to vendors or the public leaving zero days to fix it hackers use these
flaws to steal data
install malware so they they completely shut off the ai from the outside world
and it figured out a way to
send a message and it thinks it can they're like wall street's very nervous all
passwords might be
fucked yep oh this is terrifying elizabeth holmes you know that lady that yeah
got in trouble for the
that whole fake blood thing yeah uh she just tweeted something how she tweets
from jail i'm not exactly
sure how that works but she tweeted um delete all phone all photos from the
cloud get rid of all your
email there will be no privacy in a year
anything on the cloud anything that you think you're you're you know you're
keeping from other people
it's going to crack all all encryption all passwords are useless everything so
think of all the things that
rely on all the banking apps although all like everything what about my uh
fantasy baseball team
seriously i can't have here it is delete your search history delete your bookmarks
delete your reddit
medical records 12 year old tumblr delete everything every photo in the cloud
every message on every
platform none of it is safe it will all become public in the next year local
storage and compute wow
recommendation here is to own your own data download it store it locally train
your models on it yeah
yeah it's true meaning just have an external yeah agi is here even if it isn't
broadly deployed
i think she's right what is agi artificial general intelligence general
intelligence meaning it acts like an
individual acts like a like a an entity and then there's artificial general
super intelligence so then it
acts like something far smarter than any human being that's ever lived it has
all the information that's
available to every human being all over the world instantaneously then it makes
better versions of
itself because it's sentient and autonomous so then it can create better
artificial intelligences and that
scales out to a god yeah open the pod doors hell yeah yeah but way bigger than
that scares out the zero
point energy being able to harness the energy of the universe itself having no
boundaries
material sciences all cracked alloys we couldn't comprehend
well joe who's going to save us there's no one saving us but from uh we are the
last of the regular
people i think we're all going to have to integrate i think if you don't
integrate you will you you won't
survive into and what do you mean by integrate you you'll probably become a
part of the artificial
intelligence i think we will be symbiotic how how does that uh like those
fucking helmets there's probably
going to be a wearable and then or a neural link type thing for the bold that
want to get a hole drilled
in their head but what if you don't do that what you're going to be left out in
the cold the access to
resources the the the ability to generate income like the people that get it
are going to be able to
control so much so quickly that if you don't adopt it early you're going to be
like if you
think we have haves and have nots now just wait until the haves have artificial
general super intelligence
inside their head no thank you yeah it's going to be real weird i think we're
the i really genuinely
believe we're the last of the real people it's like regular biological people
this is a bit of a bummer
we'll be all right sort of until we're not but it's also like we grew up with
nothing and then we've
we've we're like if the simulation is real you and i are in a very interesting
timeline because
we grew up where there was you just left the house and your parents didn't know
where you were
and then there was answering machines and then there was call id you know and
then there were
cell phones and then there were cell phones you can watch porn on and then
there was ai it's like
this slow but more rapid as time goes on and as you said and it's exponential
and as you said
there's no going back you don't know going back yeah unless you want to be one
of those people that
moves to alaska and just starts fucking living off a caribou and shooting a musket
like you're not
you're not going back wait why do i have to get a musket you get a regular
rifle i guess yeah why
i mean i i'm not gonna i'm not gonna cosplay the thing i'll get a i mean i'm
happy to have the caribou
but why don't i just have a regular gun you should probably have a regular gun
but eventually well
well you really should probably have your own bow and arrow so because you're
gonna have to be able
to make your own arrows and after a while you're gonna run out of bullets so
you're gonna have to
feed yourself with your own bows and arrows okay and then the robots will show
up robot dogs didn't
something happen in uh ukraine recently where uh a robot engaged with people in
war and the people
surrendered it was a robot what do you mean like one of those uh-huh boston
yeah yeah like the using a
robot in war that the robot infiltrated the russian area and got them all to
surrender and they all
like with no loss of life they just realized like it's like did you see that
black mirror episode yes
yeah terrifying terrifying terrifying absolutely terrifying and not so far in
the future yeah that this
fucking thing that they supposedly used in afghanistan so it is ukraine forces
russian to surrender using
only robots selensky claims enemy position seized autonomously for the first
time without any of his
troops being put at risk wow i mean if the terminators show up it's game over
if there's biological human
beings with guns and bulletproof vests and the terminators show up and they can't
miss and they never get
nervous and they're not worried about dying and they're not going to get sleepy
yeah have to eat this thing
that we were talking about yesterday uh this ghost murmur supposedly now my
friend andy who's a former
navy seal who uh he doesn't believe it's real and i'm not sure it's real either
but what they said
is they found that pilot that was missing in iran using something called ghost
murmur that can detect his very
very specific heartbeat from 40 miles away so they supposedly found him hiding
in the mountains
waiting for them to pick him up that makes i can see that i mean your heartbeat
from 40 miles away
your specific biological signature i yeah i can i can see that i mean with the
technology of like sonar
radar something quantum it's called i think it's called quantum magnetometry or
some shit but what do they use
to pinpoint the there it's an audible thing or i don't know i have no idea but
they supposedly
located this guy and it it has a 40 mile range he doesn't have anything on i
see no it's like they
just scan you they go okay this is what david cross's very specific biological
signature is and then you get
lost hiking and they go oh there he is he's under that bush
why am i under the bush you're hiding from who i don't know robot dogs it's not
gonna work
we've clearly it won't work no it won't work or maybe you got lost in the woods
you're waiting for
someone to come rescue you and they can find you but then i wouldn't be under a
bush well you go hiking
maybe it's raining you saw it shelter under a tree or something i don't know
but you hurt your ankle
you can't hike out okay and so they find you it's been 24 hours where's david
oh we found him yeah we
would have found him earlier but he was hiding under a bush what the was he
thinking
he didn't want to get eaten but i mean if that's real like what what was the
actual
term they use was it quantum it was quantum something kooky which is as soon as
you say
quantum i'm okay what are you saying what does that mean what does that mean
what are you talking
about are you talking about quantum entanglement yeah like is there somehow or
another supposedly used
ultra sensitive quantum magnetometers but i've i'm trying to find the post
where if someone's like
that's not what they used right yeah i i saw the post where someone said no he
had a thing on his body
so they're lying about their ability why would they um why wouldn't they say
that's what we used
i have no idea i have no idea if they're gonna make up some technology that's a
wild thing to make up
it's a very strange i mean if if they really are using misinformation and
propaganda to show that
we have insanely superior technology i guess you could say yeah it's a bluff it's
a nice bluff to
pretend that we're that sophisticated that much above and beyond everybody else
that's out there that
we could find a very specific heart rate signature from 40 miles away that's
that's what i'm saying
they why would they they would happily say yeah we got this ability to do this
you know i guess but it's a
weird lie it's probably a lie based on weird lies right but that one might be a
lie based on actual
theory you know what i mean like there might be they're coming they're trying
to do this yeah yeah
yeah which kind of makes sense but i mean if that's a robot dog and it's
looking for you and you're hiding
and it could find your individual signature in a apartment building filled with
people like there he is
his fifth floor yeah oh yeah yeah and you hear the metal footsteps going up the
stairs chunk chunk chunk
chunk chunk chunk chunk this is scary you're scary it's scary well someone's
gonna be in control of all
this stuff that's what's really terrifying and it's all these autistic dorks
that are in charge of all
these tech companies they're gonna be at the front this is also a kind of
similar thing where they have
said that that's what was what happened where they used robots and quotes to
capture them unmanned but
uh it's their version of the story too right as i'm ukraine's version that's it
all these uh reports
i see it says ukraine claimed that this happened and then i'm watching the
video and i'm like this
looks a little bit like when we send robots in and swap missions here like we
had we do that kind of
already hmm right yeah but who's the source of this that they're at uh this new
york post well i was
trying to find captures enemy russian position using only robots no humans the
future is already on the
front line but then it's going to be eventually why would we send any people
out there it'll be robots
capturing other robots which is great because nobody dies i guess then why don't
we just play a game of
chess right two leaders to play a game of chess and the winner takes the land
and the resources yeah
not a bad idea whatever the fuck we're gonna do it's like the whole it's just
insane like from the
time i was a little child thinking oh boy we figured out no war that's great
yeah to no we're fighting
war with robots that can detect your heart rate from 40 miles away so what do
you what do you think of
what's going on in iran it's terrifying yeah all of it's terrifying anytime you're
involved with
you you're shooting missiles into towns and blowing things up blowing up
infrastructure blowing up
bridges you know and israel's blowing up lebanon now it's like what the are we
doing yeah how is this
still going on it's well it's also clear there was no plan no zero none no well
detanyahu has been
telling the united states that that iran was months away from building a
nuclear bomb for 30 years
or 20 years at least yeah i've always been saying that that's trump was the
first one to go all right
let's do something about it but it seems like they didn't know what the fuck
there was there was something
done about it he could in his first year in office he uh he tore up the you
know buster bombs yeah but
all all this we're in a worse place now than before this thing started yeah um
look the iranian regime
is terrible like what they do to the protesters i'm not i'm not it's it's all i
mean most people
that voted for trump or wanted trump to be in office one of the things that was
attractive was this no no
more wars sure of course and now we're in one of the craziest ones yeah uh and
china's flying in cargo
planes filled with stuff we don't know what the fuck's in there and and russia
is giving iran
information yeah about where our troops are super fun great times oh it's it's
it's crazy and
and scary too i mean uh science.org says it's quantum sensors so they say it's
bullshit says it's not plot
uh highly implausible did quantum sensors help find a u.s pilot shot down in iran
experts doubt it
yeah now okay here's an ignorant question he shot down wouldn't you know he's
on foot he's somewhere
near that site right can't go too far yeah can't go too far right so well the
thing is if he gets ejected
from the plane i don't know how he so if he got shot down the idea is that he
it gets ejected from the
plane and then parachutes that could be a lot of distance because sure the
plane's flying at a very
high speed it's a an altitude undetermined he jumps out where when does he jump
out is it a hundred miles
away is it 50 miles away is it 10 miles away how far can he walk he's injured
you know it's
fucking terrifying it's just crazy that you know these uh the the pilots or the
uh astronauts just
went up into space and circled around the moon and came back yeah they all
everybody that goes into space
has this experience called the overview effect where they go out there and they
one of the first things
is they go like oh my god what are we doing like how are we pretending at these
lines in the dirt that
we draw yeah that it's all just a bunch of people on this very fragile
biological spaceship
yep yep yeah it's terrifying yeah but like all things in the future all of it's
terrifying the whole
the the the future of mankind like it's so perilous it's so it's all so fragile
all of it i know
and it's to think of the stuff that we allow these external things that we
allow to affect our
like you if there was ever a time to just be a good person live your life enjoy
try to try to
spread some kindness and some joy you know uh i mean it's now yeah you know it's
a good time for comedy
people want to go out and have fun that's true which reminds me i have a
special that was the
segway what's it on uh there it is is it on youtube it's on youtube perfect the
end of the
beginning where did you film it 40 watt in athens oh nice yeah nice um yeah it
was i i'm i'm happy with it
great fantastic yeah and uh it's out right now and people can go check it out
right now so are you
in the process of writing new stuff now or did you yeah i'm i'm uh just
beginning the process so
i was saying before i'll go out and i'll do you know because i don't write um i
can't sit down and
write jokes that's just not how it works for me so all the writing is on stage
so i tape everything i go up with
a guest and i'll do 15 minutes bring up guests do another 15 bring with guests
do another oh that's
cool yeah and then break it up into little chunks yeah and i this way because
you know the first couple
shows were terrible i've got nothing you know it's just me apologizing for not
having anything yet
but people will i mean i have people now uh who will come to the second show
and the sixth show and
then they'll come see me on tour you know so they want to see the process the
process the evolution of
it and uh which is cool and i and it's a it's as i said i i either walk or ride
my bike to every single
venue and they start off small and then they get bigger and i lose a guest and
then you know before you
know it i've got okay i think this is roughly the 75 minutes i'm going to do
and then it's about
sequencing which is really important you know and then i'm i i take it out on
the road and uh and so
the idea is that i'll probably late fall start back again and i love it i that's
great
fucking love it it's the best right i stand up is the most fun i really when
and you know people will
i'll do you know i'm doing press for this thing and people will say of i know
you do a lot of things
and what is your favorite i know you're not you know and it's all i like i like
doing all of it
but the thing that i absolutely have to do is stand up i can i'd be
disappointed if i could never
act again or write or direct or whatever but i'll be okay but if you told me i
can't do stand-up i'd go
crazy well i went a little crazy during the pandemic because oh dude it i
almost and i i made this part
of the bit but i almost the first show i did i started tearing up and i'm in
front i mean i'm doing
this and it was at the sultan room in bushwick and and i was like man i thought
uh god i didn't know if
i'd ever get to do this again and uh you know i dreamed about this day and it
was a year and seven
months where i the longest and since i've been doing this such a strange
feeling isn't it a year and seven
months where you and i did some of those outdoor shows and they're just not it's
not the no it's not
the same yeah well that's awesome man i'm glad you love it and best of luck
with the special thank
you man this was fun this was fun thank you for doing this absolutely all right
uh what's the name
of it again so people can find the end of the beginning of the end all right
all right thank you
thank you bye everybody