Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan experience.

Train by day.

Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day.

See you, bro.

Yes, you too. You too.

And we're up. The fuck is happening.

Yeah. Yeah. Great to be here, man.

My man.

Made it back. Made it back a lot. Last time I saw you. I don't know, my eyes might have been a little crossed.

Well, last time I saw you was last night, right?

That's true. That's true. We'd start with that then, but the.

Last time we saw each other on a podcast.

Yeah.

Things went a little west. We got a little toxicated.

Absolutely. So the whiskey kept pouring. The whiskey kept pouring. And that was when I had that van. So I still have the van, but at the time, I was kind of living in the van, traveling in the van, so I drove heavy Covid.

This is, like, heavy beginning of COVID where it was, like, weird to be around each other. Are we okay? We got tested, right?

We did good. Got the COVID test, and then I had the van out in the parking lot, and we started drinking the whiskey about midway through the show. And then the next thing I know, I'm opening my eyes in my van, and it's the next day, and I'm just like, oh, shit, what happened on the show? So I think maybe the last half hour of the show was such a blur. I don't really quite remember getting the van, but I had a nice sleep in the parking lot. It was amazing. And then I kind of was a little nervous about, like, jeez, that's a weird feeling when you don't know what you said, don't know what you said. And I called my mom, and everybody seemed like people thought it was funny, but, I mean, I think she was a little concerned about the drinking, the amount of drinking. But, no, that was a great time. But I'm not.

It was fun.

Yeah, it was a great time.

It was fun. So we got a little off the rails. You didn't have to go anywhere. Your van was parked.

It was awesome. It was awesome.

What is it like sleeping in parking lots? That's got to be an od thing.

Well, I rarely did that in the van. It was mostly out in these remote desert parks, like out in Bureau of Land Management land, BLM land in the desert. And I was going around filming, but there was a couple of times I'd sleep in a truck stop because I was wanting to make a lot of distance, so I'd drive until I kind of couldn't keep my eyes open. Then I'd pull over at a truck stop and sleep between sketchy proposition.

Right. You don't know who's around.

Yeah. Well, in the desert, it's a little more nerve wracking because you're all alone out there and people can see the van in the distance. And it's a pretty nice van.

That's when the aliens come.

I was hoping for that, but nothing. No aliens. I had a nice flyover from us fighter jet in the Trona pinnacles in this amazing part of desert in California. And I was the only person there, and I could tell this fighter jet saw me. And he just kind of came in right over. Right over. Just to say hi. Yeah. And I didn't get my camera out in time.

I flew in one of those.

Yeah.

With the blue angels.

Oh, yeah.

God, it's insane when you realize what those jets can do. And I think what they were flying was like an FA 18. See if that's true.

Nice.

Yeah, I think that's it. That's what we did.

I believe they are, actually.

I think they have even more capable jets now because this is when I want to say, this is like, 2003, two, something like that. Way back in the day. I have a plaque. It says, you flew with the blue angels.

Pull major g forces. I've never been in a fighter.

Yeah, I think I did six and a half G's, something like that. And I stayed conscious, but then I blacked out when I forgot to do the hooking on a lesser run. Like, it was lesser. It was like four g's or something like that.

Forgot to do the.

But I'm sorry. When you're going through high g's, you do a thing called hooking. I think that's how they say it, where you hold on to the joystick, or you can hold on to your straps on your legs if you're the pastor, like I was, and go like this, and you're literally forcing blood into your head to stay conscious. So while we're doing this, that's what you're doing. See how she's doing that?

Nice.

See how she's doing it?

Yeah.

That's how you stay conscious. That's how you stay conscious. You have to force the blood into your fucking brain.

It seems like it's kind of slightly on the edge of not being a perfect system. Right.

Well, you got to be a bad motherfucker to fly those things. Those guys were all lifting, like, all those blue angels piles. They were all jacked. They're all, like, super diesel.

Yeah.

Because these guys are just fucking girl. They're wrestling with that thing. It's not as simple as, like, you're two. The physical force of going to six g's is so extraordinary. You haven't felt anything like it in your life. And these guys can go to, like, 13 g's. Some of them, yeah, I don't think I. Fucking insane.

I don't think I would want to do that, actually. I sometimes don't want to do those kinds of things.

You don't have to do it.

Yeah, it looks amazing, but I just.

Feel like I'm glad I did it.

Yeah, for sure.

Just as a wake up call, you think you understand. You see a jet, and I think of it almost like, well, obviously driving a race car is very difficult. Right? But driving a car fast is not that difficult. If you have a good car, if you buy a new car today that handles really well, if there's no one around, you can go pretty fucking fast. And it's really in control. But those things are different, man. It's like there's a physical experience. It's so fast. There's so much power and force behind those things.

You got a plane yet? You're getting a.

No. Bill Burr pilots. Bill Burr flies around in a goddamn helicopter. Set me up around downtown LA. You can fly wherever you want in a helicopter.

Yeah. Helicopters are even more of a no no for me because they seem to go down a little too much. I've been in a few. I flew in a Blackhawk through Baghdad and did one of those USO tours. Went. Did stand up over there back in 2003.

How was that?

That was pretty wild experience. It was right before. It was probably, fortunately for my nervous system, right after the mission accomplished banner and right before shit hit the fan with the ieds. So I was kind of thinking, oh, it's okay, no big deal. And we were over there in the green zone, and we were flying around in the Blackhawk helicopter. One night they said, you want to go out on a night patrol in, like, a tank? And I was all set to go, and then they had to cancel it because of some sort of attack. And then we started hearing there's some stuff happening. We were there for a few days only, but they started avoiding stuff on the road and the Humvees. And then the second I got back to stateside, that's when it started to get real bad over there. But I did a few of those. I did Afghanistan as well and was on Chinook helicopters.

Oh, wow.

Because my dad was military, so that's why I'm rocking the canadian army jacket. Canadian army. We've got an army.

I heard recently, recently heard about it. They didn't fight too hard against tyranny.

Here we go. Well, we did, actually. We fought pretty hard against the Germans.

I mean, the internal.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I know, I know, I know, I know.

Internal government tyranny.

Yeah, it's fun. I watch your show all the time, Joe, so it's like. I know. And I'm a very proud canadian.

Tom, you're the granddaddy of the show.

The granddaddy. Well, yeah. I don't know about that, but, I mean, first of all, you've always been very nice to give me a shout out about those early days of broadcasting in the living room.

Well, dude, you're an awesome guy. I've always loved you. You're always cool to be around. And your show in 2007, when I went on your show, that was 100% a major inspiration for me to do this, because I remember thinking, oh, my God, he figured it out. I remember very clearly sitting next to you on that chair going, dude, this is it. This is it. All you have to do is figure out how to make money with this.

Yeah, you said that on the show, which was hilarious, and then you figured that out. Yeah. You really figured that out. That's cool. That was the missing link. Damn it. But no, that's amazing. I remember when we were doing it, I always wanted to do a talk show when I was growing up. I loved Letterman, right. And I'd done my show on.

You were great at it.

Yeah, I really did enjoy. The first show was more me out in the street doing crazy stuff. And then we did a talk show, which was a little bit more of a sort of a nightly show, a little bit more time to talk. And I did love doing that. When the show stopped, it was right at the time of technology changing on the web, and that was kind of always kind of how I was kind of looking at technology, usually, because when I was a kid, I was in a rap group, and it was from technology, right? I remember drum machines came out. We were listening to public enemy and going, what are these sounds? How do you do that? Right? And then I would go work a summer job. I'd buy a sampler and a kai s 900 sampler and a tari computer. And I'm making beats in my parents basement in Ottawa, Canada. No one's making beats in Ottawa, Canada. We started this group called Organized Rhyme. What year is this? Well, we started in mid eighty s.

So this is all pre Internet?

Yeah. Pre Internet. Yeah. This was high school.

So how are you finding out about. There we are back then?

Well, that was friends at school were listening to rap music. So friends at school were like, hey, you got to check out public enemy. You got to check out boogie down productions. I'm like, boogie down productions. And then you get someone to give you a cassette of like the criminal minded boogie down productions bridges over album. And you're listening to it and they're rapping about Scott Larock, their dj, who'd been unfortunately passed away in bad circumstances. He was shot and killed. And then you're listening to this sort of, that was the Internet to was rap music and skateboarding. Thrasher magazine was skateboarding. You'd read stories about skateboarders in California and a magazine. You'd listen to rap music and hear stories about people who were not in Ottawa doing cool shit. And I was kind of wanting to get up on stage and perform. I was kind of dabbling with stand up at yuck yucks in the comedy club in Ottawa.

When you say dabbling, well, I was doing standup.

I was doing stand up, but I never really got to really a level where I was doing it every week. I was going down every week for a couple of years. And actually the reason I stopped was because the rap group got kind of sort of a record deal, basically. And I kind of went focused on that for a while and stopped doing standup. But yeah, the club in Ottawa, yuck yucks in Ottawa, still there. It's moved, but it's owned by Howard Wagman. Yuckyucks is kind of like the improv of Canada. It's chain all across the country. Mark Breslin. Sure. You know, Mark, he started it and it was wild because, I don't know, it was something about the Internet, right? You'd go down to a comedy club and you'd find out about stuff just through word of mouth, like the rap music and like comedy. So I would go down to the comedy club and I remember Norm McDonald would come through and he was probably 25 years old, right? And I'm 16 in the audience. And then I got to become this huge fan of Norm. And he was Norm. But back then there wasn't a lot of people doing stand up like Norm.

Like there wasn't this sort of angle of sort of this absurdity to it. There was a more of a structured down the middle way of doing stand up back then. And so Norm was this sort of curveball. And we just couldn't get enough of it. So every time we was in town, we'd be down there. But howard Wagman told me this story about Norm. And the first time he came down to do stand up at Yuckyucks in Ottawa, and he got off stage and he was disappointed in how it went. Norm was. He said, I'm never doing this again. He walked down the street. Howard Wagman chased him down Spark street in Ottawa and said, no, that was great. You're coming back. And he made him come back, and the rest is history.

Norm was a legitimate genius. Like a genius of life. Like a rare, like, genius in. Not just that his comedy was brilliant, but just like, look at this. I've never seen this before. Like a totally different kind of human.

Yeah.

And genuinely always funny. Like, every conversation was funny. He was just funny. I was on plane with him accidentally. Twice.

Nice. Twice. Must have been amazing.

Twice on two separate occasions, just totally random. We sat next to each other and playing like, whoa, this is crazy.

Yeah.

And the last one, it was so funny because he was telling me about how he quit smoking. Yeah, I quit smoking. Turns out it's real bad for you. This whole thing about quitting smoking. And we're talking about it like, how hard was it to quit? This whole thing? The moment we land, he walks into the gift shop, buys a pack of cigarettes, and he's lighting them before he gets out the door. I go, I thought you quit. He goes, I did. But all that talking about it made me wanting to smoke.

Yeah, it's probably all an elaborate set up, right? He probably was planning it the whole way.

I don't know.

Who knows? He probably doesn't even smoke. He was just doing it as a gag.

No, well, he was into gambling, too, right? So people that have those kind of impulse control issues, like gambling, is a big, impulsive thing.

Like, fucking bet.

I'm going to bet on it.

Let's put the bet. Put it back.

All of it. All of it. That kind of wild, crazy sports gambling, too.

That's not a good addiction to have, especially when you have money, right?

That's a scary addiction, man. I watched Dana white gamble. I watched Dana white play blackjack, and he was down $600,000. And my fucking hands were sweating. I was going, what are you guys doing?

That's real money. Yeah. This is so crazy.

He does it every night. Yeah, he does it constantly. There's people that love it. They love it. They love the action.

It's thrilling for me. It's. Fortunately, I've never liked numbers. Like, math was never something I enjoyed. So when it comes to blackjack, you're going, I'm doing math in my head and I get very uncomfortable. So I go, I'm not going to be good at this.

That's a great, great reason to not gamble. You hate math.

Yeah. I just figured I'm not going to be good at this because I can't even really add up what I'm supposed to be doing here quickly. So I'm just going to just sit on the side. Plus, I'm cheap. I don't want to lose money.

Not a math person either. Yeah, it's a concentration thing. It's like if you concentrated on math, really got good at the basics of it, and then really started getting into more complex mathematics, it'd probably be very fun, probably be very exciting. But the problem is I never concentrated in high school at all. I didn't pay attention to it, so I'm so removed. Like, if people start talking about math, like complex shit, I checked out at long division.

Long division, I checked out.

Are calculators available? They're pretty much everywhere, right. And aren't there's like an unlimited supply of batteries? I'm like, I'm out.

This is what you know now with our phones and our Google and everything. We don't have to learn any of that anymore.

I don't know anyone's phone number.

We don't really have to learn anything anymore.

I know, like, Eddie Bravo's phone number. I know my wife's phone number. I might know two other numbers.

Yeah.

When I was a kid, I had a hundred numbers in my head. Yeah, you can call your grandmother.

I still remember my phone number from when I was a kid.

Yeah, you could call your friends.

I could say it now, but that person probably wouldn't like that very much.

I got my phone number memorized from when I was in high school. It was our first phone number. I couldn't believe we had a phone number. I'm like, wow, we had phone numbers before, but that was the first one that I've remembered. And then that was the first answer machines, too, right? That was wild.

Remember, if you're out and you're trying to meet somebody and they're going to meet you, and then they don't show up and you want to figure out where they are, you'd go to a pay phone, put a quarter in it, call your phone, and then put your code in and check your answering machine or your voicemail from the mall, and.

You thought you were.

And then they'd leave a message on your answering machine to tell you, hey, sorry, I'm going to be a little late. And then you hang up, and then cost you a quarter. But that's how crazy everything's changed in such a small amount of time. You were gone.

No one knew where the fuck you were.

Absolutely.

There was no snap map where kids today, they look at each other on Snapchat maps where they all know where they are at any moment in time. There's no shenanigans.

Yeah. No. I was thinking about how when I was a kid, we would be able to very easily manipulate the situation with my parents and say, okay, I'm going over.

I'm going to Bobby's house, go drinking.

And skateboarding all night. No, that was better like that.

These kids today, they're tracked. Everyone's tracked. It's not your parents. It's the government.

And we're not going to be able to really get rid of it now, too. That's the thing. There's no way this is going to turn back. No one's ever going to decide this has gone too far. It's just going to keep escalating and getting worse. And my eyes are getting bad because I find myself addicted to the phone. As much as I know that it's happening. I'll get on that TikTok and I just start scrolling through stuff, and then, oh, shit. Like 2 hours just went by and my eyes are getting blurry, and it's really kind of starting to.

It's useless.

Piss me off, to be honest with you.

Yeah, for me, it's Instagram. I don't have TikTok, but I use the Instagram reels. God damn it. It's so nuts. Like one after the other. It's so interesting watching this mad scramble of people trying to figure out a new way to get your attention, whether it's through shooting a bow and arrow with your feet over your head at balloons. You ever seen those gals that do that? They stand on their hands and they have a bow in their feet and they have their legs all the way over the top of their head, and they draw the bow back with their feet.

I saw another thing kind of like that, but there was no bow and arrow involved. But, yeah, this is a thing. Yeah, that sounds good. That sounds good. Are they wearing clothing as well?

No, why would they be wearing clothing?

Okay, cool. Yeah, no, I have wear, like, bikinis.

They're hot. Most gals with that kind of mobility, with your body, you're probably pretty hot.

Yeah, absolutely.

How could you not have a hot body if you could do that? If you could get your butt over the top of your head and have your legs pull a bow back and then aim it and shoot it. What?

I certainly can't do that.

Who fucking do that? What percentage of the population can do that?

See, and this is kind of, I think, where we started with us was, how did I find out about rap music? How did I find out about Norm? We had to use a certain sense of creativity, and we had to go out of our way to find out about stuff, right? Sounding like some couple of old guys.

Here we are, a couple of old guys complaining about, but that's what we are now.

How the world was better before, but.

I don't think the world was better before. Yeah, I don't think that's true.

There's some aspects of it that I think forced us to be just a little bit more creative and think out of the box because we were, or at least in a different way, because you'd go find some drum machine, or you'd go down to the little comedy club in Ottawa and stand up comedy wasn't a mainstream thing then. It was pretty big, but not in Ottawa. It was sort of almost like you felt like you were going somewhere that you weren't supposed to go. You go down in the basement, 16 years old, I'm in a bar, and there's some guy on stage, and they're not talking about Norm Macdonald on television yet. He hadn't gone to SNL yet. I remember I'd see him and my friends would see him, and then we'd go to school and we'd tell our friends, you got to go see this guy Norm Macdonald. He'd come every three times a year, and every time he'd come, we'd be there. And it was just like this sort of myth. It was a mythology to it. Then all of a sudden, we heard he moved to Los Angeles because he was writing for Roseanne.

And we all heard about this, and it was this sort of all the amateur comics up and the kids up there doing it. Well, I guess I was the kid doing that. Everyone else was kind of in their 20s, but 30s, but everybody was just kind of like, there is hope we can get out of Ottawa, man.

Something out there.

And then SNL and everything. And it was just amazing to watch him do that. But I was having a good chat with Adam at the club about Norm, because he was, of course, famously his sidekick on his show. So it was such a shame to see norm disappear like that.

He was talking about coming out here, too.

Yeah. But so much has happened since I was here last. I got a lot of stuff I wanted. First of all, before I start talking about me, though, I just wanted to say thanks for having me at the club this weekend.

My pleasure.

So stoked. The club is amazing. And I've been hanging out there for the last two nights, and I came in a little early and wanted to hang out and just settle in. And, man, it's just such a vibe there. It's just such a perfect comedy club. You did such amazing job.

You're the only guy that brings his dog everywhere. That's not ever.

Yeah, maybe ever.

And everybody loves Charlie.

Yeah, everybody loves Charlie.

Could be a. Charlie's in here with us now. Yeah, Charlie's a sweetie.

Charlie. I got Charlie right before I came here the last time. She's named after the John Steinbeck novel travels with Charlie. Because I was out in the van, and that book's about Steinbeck in the camper, made a campervan out of a pickup truck, and he drove across America, and he wrote a book about America and its differences. It's called travels with Charlie in Search of America. And I got Charlie at a rescue called Thrive is the name of the rescue, which is actually run by Jimmy Durante's daughter in San Diego. The entertainer. Jimmy Durante, who? It's like a ranch in San Diego. And they bring these dogs in from the Bahamas and Mexico called Potcake dogs. And Charlie. Anyways, we went out in the desert, and everybody loves Charlie, like you said.

There's Charlie. Charlie looks like she was just taking a.

Like, what the fuck?

You waking me up, dad? But just taking a nap. The funniest thing is Charlie actually goes on stage with you. We should tell people.

Yeah, she just chills out up there. I just kind of take her.

Got to be so weird when you're killing all that noise.

She's kind of used to it, but isn't that strange?

What a strange experience for a. Yeah. To be in the.

Yeah.

And then all of a sudden, she's on stage with Tom Green.

That's right.

She left, is cheering, and she's just sitting there like, what the fuck is this?

Yeah, I'd look at her sometimes and wonder. She left at five weeks old, the Bahamas. So that was a good thing. She got out of there five weeks old and then was in San Diego. She got adopted by somebody else for, like, three months, basically, and then they couldn't keep her. I got her at three. Know, it's funny. She grows up in the Bahamas, then she goes to California. And then I moved back to Canada since I was last year and I left Los Angeles. Following in your footsteps, the exodus continues.

It wasn't just me, man. I keep getting labeled as a pied piper of this, but come on, everybody was leaving.

Yeah. I got to say, though, there was a lot of factors to change my entire life. I sold my house around the time right after I was here, and that.

Was the house that did the Tom.

Green show that I owned for 18 years, that I did the webovision show in Webovision, we called it.

Why don't you do a show now?

So I'm building a podcast studio in my barn. It's in an unheated century barn. Are you going to heat it? No. Not going to heat it. No.

You're going to have conversations where you're freezing it.

Yeah, we're going to wear really warm jackets. That's one thing that's cool about Canada. People talk about the cold and how fucking cold it is up there. But the cool thing about the cold, when you kind of get acclimated to it, is you can kind of regulate your temperature. Like, you wear a really warm arctic jacket in the barn while you're doing the podcast. We'd probably move it in at some.

Point also, you can die outside.

You can die.

Yeah, it's a different thing. Yeah, it's a different thing. And it makes more resilient people. I think it makes better people. I really do.

I was thinking about how you do. There's the barn. Yeah.

You're freezing your dick off, son. First of all, why my dad?

That's my dad there. Yeah.

You know what? You should get sponsored by one of those heater bodysuit companies for deer hunters when they sit in those blinds. Deer hunters, when they sit in tree stands, you know how fucking cold you get?

Yeah.

See, if it's cold out, that's one thing. But if it's cold out and you're not moving, that's another thing. That's another thing. It could be fucking zero degrees, but if you're hiking, you're fine.

Well, I wear these. We're actually talking to a sponsor right now. Might sponsor it. They're this clothing company, Baffin, and they make the warmest jackets, right. So it's like you can really regulate your temperature. Right. And that's the thing, like, if you know how to do that, because it's been a lifestyle change. I got this farm. I'm on a farm now that I live on, and basically, I'm going to live there now for the rest of my life. I know it. I'm never going to leave this place. I love it so much.

That's awesome.

It's a wilderness area with.

I enjoy your videos. From there, it looks like you're really enjoying it.

I am really loving it. It's just such a peace of mind to get up in the morning, and I've got this mule, and I got my strap there on the side. Yeah, I got my mule, and this is a whole new thing, Joe. First of all, I didn't know anything about horses and mules, but I got a mule and a donkey and some chickens.

Mule is a cross between a donkey and a horse, correct? Yes, it works.

And I did not know that a year and a half ago.

They're supposedly, like, the most resilient animals for riding trails and stuff.

It all started with, I found this property and this farm, and I wanted to be outside. And then there was these two old barns there. And I would look at these barns, and I'd say they were kind of calling for something to be put in them. They were 100 years old. There was stuff stored in them. And so some friends of mine and I, we kind of cleaned up the barns, and I got this mule and this donkey. And so initially, the idea was, I thought a mule would be kind of funny, right, because they got bigger ears. And I was thinking three amigos. I was thinking a donkey. I was thinking a mule was a donkey. I didn't even really know that much about it, and I started looking for a mule that you could ride, and there's not that many mules in Canada. They're much more of a southwestern american thing. George Washington brought mules to America. It was a big part know, settling America with. They would use him for farming.

He brought them in.

Yeah. He was instrumental in being a big part of getting mules here. They would use them for harvesting crops and doing all the work around the farms and stuff. They have also been used in war a lot. They've been used in military.

The pioneers preferred them to horses.

Yeah. They're extremely strong, and they're very, very smart.

They can go longer without water.

Yeah, they use less water, less food.

My friend Clay Newcomb is actually a mule expert.

Okay.

He's been on the podcast before.

Oh, cool.

He talked about fancy mules and how you pick a mule and training a mule.

Oh, I follow him, actually. I follow Clay. Clay's interesting he's got a podcast called.

The Bear Grease podcast. A lot of it is about bear hunting in nice, nice, just interesting outdoor stories. He's a very interesting guy, but he just knows a ton about mules.

Well, the thing that's so crazy about them is they're extremely smart to a point that people say stubborn as a mule. It's not really stubbornness. What is it? Self preservation? So they figure out, basically I'm riding this animal. Now, she's a very big mule, as you can see. She's a very big mule. She's called 16. Three hands is the way you measure horses and mules. And she's as tall as they get. Her mother was a horse, so a persheron paint mix. So persherance a workhorse, almost like a Clydesdale, so she gets her size from that. And her father's a mammoth donkey and she's ten years old.

A mammoth donkey.

Yeah. A mammoth.

What a great name.

Yeah, it's definitely created a very large, strong, serious animal.

I want to see a picture of a mammoth donkey.

Yeah.

How big are they?

There we go. Yeah, so you can sort of see.

Look at the size of that fucking thing. That's a donkey.

Yeah.

Holy shit, dude.

And you can ride those too.

But are donkeys harder? Between 901, 200 pounds?

Yeah.

Are donkeys fanny harder to train than mules?

I'm not sure the answer to that. I'm not sure, but I know that mules are easier to train than horses, so I would assume because they learned mules are sterile. They're sterile, yeah.

It's a hybrid animal and it can't breed, which is. Isn't that fascinating that a male of one species can breed, but the male of another species, they make an offspring. It's alive, it has testicles, it has sex drive, it has everything. Can't breed weird.

So the horse has. Let me get this right. I've been trying to learn as much about it as possible because I'm riding this thing and I don't want to die because you can fall off it and it's not fun falling off. I've fallen off a couple of times. Really? Yeah.

It wasn't too bad there in the middle of nowhere.

Yeah, it was my own fault. I was streaming on instagram and not paying attention. That's a good for beginners. Don't let go of the reins and play with your phone while you're riding on a 1400 pound mule. Fanny's 1400 pounds.

Huge, man.

But yeah, I guess. I guess it's a horse. Has 64 chromosomes and a donkey has 62. And so when they breed, it ends up that the mule has 63 chromosomes, which is not an even number, and therefore makes it sterile. So this is what I'm trying to.

That's what it is.

Something number, something kind of complicated like that.

Fascinating, though, that nature figured out a way to stop everything from fucking everything and just getting it pregnant.

Isn't it?

Like, nature is like, we got to have a system in here because that's untenable. That's going to lead to chaos. Like, if humans imagine. Can you imagine humans could get other things pregnant?

It is.

So everything would be a hybrid of a human. Everything.

Yeah. Like, be a lobster human hybrid. Somebody would do that.

Island filled with turtle people.

People walking around with exoskeletons going, hey, this ain't so bad.

You're going to be on the island. I can't believe someone fucked a turtle.

Yeah.

And there's going to be this guy with a turtle shell on. Fuck you. He's going to be mad at you. I'm just saying.

Because people are insane.

Insane.

I mean, somebody has probably fucked a turtle.

100%. Someone's fucked a turtle, right? If you had to bet everything you own for 100%, a guy somewhere has been hopped up on some fucking vietnamese street meth, right? Fucked a turtle.

Of course. Yeah.

Probably american. Probably an american guy from the southwest over there hiding from the law or something. And he's messed up and he fucked a turtle, right?

Yeah. People fucked everything, but no result. Because of the power the nature has made, these protections. Thankfully.

The wildest hybrid, of course, is the liger. Yeah, because they miss the gene that regulates size. They don't have the same gene that, like tiger and a lion does.

I've seen those.

I forget which one. How does it work? Is it a male lion and a female tiger or a male tiger and a female lion? I forget which one it is. But in that combination, when they make a liger, they just keep growing. They're so big.

Yeah, I've looked at these on the Internet. The thing is, I guess a tiger and a lion and a donkey and a horse are close enough together in evolution to be able to do this. And there's, I guess, no animal that is close enough to us to be able to luckily come close.

You know, they've done experiments, or maybe we just haven't.

Maybe just nobody's fucked the right thing yet to figure it out.

I bet someone pulled it off in China or Russia or something like that. They probably got some chimp human hybrid somewhere.

I've heard sort of Internet conspiracy theories that there was a russian experiment that went awry or something like this.

But there was this one very strange case of a chimpanzee that they call humans. And this chimpanzee had very human like features and it lived with a family. I forget if there was a family of researchers, I forget the story. But they always end tragically, because those things, ultimately, as they get older, they want to be the boss. It's a big male and they're going to just fuck you up. They're going to bite your fingers off or bite your friend's finger. It's always something like that. They always do something horribly, horribly violent eventually. But this one that they had, they had him for a long time. And he looked like a human. Yeah, look, it looked weird. And he stood upright a lot and he wore clothes. He's got a big old donkey dick. Look at that. Donkey dick. The humanzee of Orange park.

First of all, humanzi is such a great name. I mean, I almost wish it had worked just for that reason alone. Humansy. I mean, there'd be humans going around. But, yeah, I often kind of have little.

There's some weird shocking pictures of it. Like that one in the upper right hand corner. The one. Yeah, right.

And they're so strong.

Click on that one. Look at its face. It's got an odd face. And there's some pictures, I think, that are probably doctored, that made it a little more human looking to confuse people. But the thing, like, as it got older, see if you can find the older pictures of it. It looked real weird, man. But it was just a chimp. It was just a chimp that had been taught to behave that way. Yeah, look at how he's walking. He's walking like a chimp. He's not walking like a human. Look at the shoulders and the arms. That's a chimp.

I sometimes think about the close calls I've had with a couple of times with animals where I wasn't really giving them the. Not like just understanding the power they had. Like, I had a chimpanzee on a show I did once on my tv show back in the day, and it was a trained chimpanzee, but massive. And I remember after the show, I just said, hey, can I hang out with the chimpanzee? So it came out and I was just sitting out within the parking lot for about half an hour, just me and this chimpanzee right in front of me, looking right in my eyes. It was playing with the buttons on my shirt, and the trainer was 20ft away. And I just thought it was so the cutest thing. And then a few years later, I read about the chimpanzee ripping that killing people and how violent they are. And you go, man, I had a macaw at one point, which I actually had to get rid of. Big red parrot, a macaw. And I got it when it was 13 months old. And this was my biggest disappointment, I'd say, with a pet, because I had gotten this macaw, his named Rex.

He was on the web show for a period of time. I was after you were on that time. And I really love this thing and I love animals. And I was so fascinated by it because I was realizing, oh, this is a pet that I'm going to have for the rest of my life. And I was all dedicated to this. And I was really kind of somewhat moved by the fact that I was going to be having this beautiful macaw for the rest of my life. And it would pick my teeth and it would stick its beak in my mouth and literally just kind of put its plate and chew on my ear and all of this kind of stuff. And then all of a sudden, when it got to be about 13 years old, it just became a real asshole. Like, it really, really changed. It had been going from this little baby to I couldn't put my hand in the cage without it really biting hard, and almost took my finger off. I had to go in the cage to clean the cage, and I couldn't pick it up anymore. And I actually had to find it a new home.

Do you think it just didn't like being in a cage?

I'm sure it didn't. I wouldn't like it myself. And that feels bad, too. That's the thing I don't really like about having.

You're a prison warden.

Yeah, exactly. I started to feel really bad, so I took it back to the bird place where I'd gotten it, and they said to me, oh, yeah, it's been 13 years later. I've been spending $75 a month on walnuts for 13 years. Okay, these eat a lot of walnuts. And then they say, oh, yeah, we don't sell macaws anymore. Because when they get to be 13, they change and they become really mean. I'm like, well, you could have told me that 13 years ago.

There's an internal clock.

Yeah, they just. Like a puberty. They hit like a puberty. So I feel bad, but I got her a better home.

That's why it's scary to be in front of a chimp. The chimp, exactly.

They could just decide, I have these.

Fuck this guy up.

I have these moments where I think about the time when that macaw would have its beak in my mouth months before it could have ripped my face apart sitting with that. But the fanny, this mule, and I have the donkey as well, who was her companion for her, named Kia. She was a two year old donkey, and the donkey will live to be 50, potentially. And the fanny is a big animal, so she could live to be 30, 35 years old. And so she's ten now. So it's a big responsibility, and I really kind of consider them now after having them just for a short time kind of family. It's an amazing thing. But I think the thing that's most interesting about a mule, we won't talk about mules for the whole show, but they are so smart that they figure you out. So I'm new to this, so when I first got her, I was given one day of training on how to ride a horse. So I learn how to saddle her up. I learn how to get up on this thing. You pull the rein, you look where you want to go.

You push with your foot opposite of the side. You want to turn. There's a sort of little rhythm to that. And it went great for about a month. But then she started sort of figuring out that I was sort of uncertain in what I was doing. She started to understand that I didn't know what I was doing. And so she starts testing me, right? And I don't necessarily realize that's what's going on.

Like, how? So?

When I'd be saddling her up, she would move. So I'd go to Sal, her particular saddle, it's a big saddle. You got to put it up on her back. You put a saddle pad on, then you got to put the saddle on. And then she would move into me and kind of push me, and I didn't really know how to prevent that because she's 1400 pounds. So I'd have to kind of lead her around, try to get her back in position, and it became this weird sort of dance of me running around trying to get the saddle on. I'd eventually get it on, but what happens is she ends up losing all respect for me because I'm letting her sort of be the leader, right? And so mule really wants me to be the leader, and it's hard for me to be the leader at first because I'm uncertain. So they sense uncertainty. So when I'm riding her, there's wolves at my place in the woods.

Oh, fun.

Yeah, I got a story about that, too. And there's wolves there. I was showing Jamie before the show. There's video of them on my trail cams, but she sees them coming out of the woods at night. She doesn't necessarily want to go into the woods. She thinks it's unsafe. It's not, because obviously they're not going to attack her and me. She's a giant mule, but she thinks that. So over time, she started to not want to go in that direction. She stopped wanting to turn left, and so what would happen is I started to realize she didn't want to go there. So every time I wanted to go there, I would get nervous. I would feel uncertain, oh, she's not going to want to go there. She would sense that I was nervous and it would double down, and then she wouldn't go in there. So I had to kind of get into this real sort of, sort of a psychological retraining, kind of a mule intervention from the people that raised her.

I have so many questions.

Hold on. Yeah, it's really wild. It's really interesting, the intricacy of how you figure this out.

Now, did you have any training before you got a Mule?

She was owned by a single owner up in northern Canada in a place called Thunder Bay, which is about 18 hours drive north of me. Way colder up there. She's like in club Med down now in southern Canada. She's probably loving it. And her owners were Kaya and Lisa. They breed mules, and they're called twister mules.

Did you get any training?

They drove her down, and we spent about three days. Okay. And they showed me how to saddle up, and they talked to me about it, and I learned as much as one can learn in three days. There's the basics, right?

Right.

There's the basics.

Did you do a lot of it when they were there by yourself? Like, they just told you how to do it and you walked over and did it?

They spent time with me for about three days. But this is kind of, they're telling me I'm doing quite well because I actually am able to handle this animal now. But it's been an interesting journey, the last since June. I got her in June because at first, the very first, sort of on the surface way that you ride a mule is you look where you want to go. Lightly, pull the rain. If you want to go left, you pull the left lane. Rain lightly. If that doesn't work, but you might not even have to pull the rain. You could just look where you want to go, and they feel your body shifting, they sense your intent, and you have to look in that direction.

Like Avatar. When you link up with the dragon.

It'S like telepathy for sure. It really is. And you feel it, and it's such a really cool feeling when you really get into the pocket with it. So then you pull lightly, then you do a little push with your foot. And so that's all sort of very physical stuff. And it worked fine for a while, but then I didn't quite understand the overall psychological sort of hierarchy that gets created and a trust level that's created between the mule and myself. The more I screwed up. Jesus. Even in the barnyard, the more I let her get in my space. You don't ever want to let a mule get in your space, like, gets in your space. A very sort of easy way to control that is you can just put your hands up to her eyes like that. You don't even have to touch her. And then they back off. I didn't know that, right. So I was kind of like, I'm pushing it, trying to stop, and it realizes how small, you realize how small I am, and it realizes I don't know what I'm doing, and it loses all respect. So once you start to learn a little bit deeper about how to handle those just on the ground with her, then once you get up on her, she has a little bit more respect and is more apt to listen to you.

But it was really interesting because they came back. They're really great. They're trying to bring more mules into Canada because they love mules. And there is something very different and special about mules because of their intelligence. And so it's really interesting. They came back and spent some more time with me, and we went out on the trail, and Fanny doesn't like atvs. Okay. So I've got this Polaris side by side that I drive around the property on. It's a know ATV, four wheel vehicle thing. And they were driving ahead of me to kind of instruct me. And I'm following along and we're coming up the trail, and they stopped. And as we approach the ATV, it's parked on the trail. There's a space on the side. I'm going to ride around the trail, but in my head I'm thinking, oh, Fanny's not going to want to go around this ATV. And we get up there, and I try to turn her around the ATV by looking, pulling the rain, pushing my leg, she just stops. And when she stops and when she decides she doesn't want to go, this isn't like a little trail riding carnival horse.

She gets going and will turn and really kind of get quite aggressive in a way, which is kind of exciting, though, I got to tell you. And I was a skateboarder, I got a pretty good balance. So it's kind of interesting. But the thing that was wild about it. So then I go, well, she's not going to want to go around the ATV. I say to Kaya and Lisa, and they no, no. Well, it's not that she doesn't want to go around the ATV. It's she knows that you think she doesn't want to go around the ATV. You have to think in your head that she wants to go around the. Yeah. Because when you're subconsciously, whether we know it or not, as human beings, we didn't always have language. Right, right. Someone invented language at some point. Before that, we were just kind of all this nonverbal communication and energy. Right. So you get up to the ATV, and if I'm thinking she's not going around the ATV, oh, look, my whole body just went like that. I sighed. I felt like a sense of defeat. Right. She feels that just through her saddle.

It's not total, like voodoo. She feels like, yeah, but there might be a little bit of voodoo possibly as well. I mean, seems like there's a magic.

To it, all that to body.

She feels it. She feels it. And she's so smart. So a horse doesn't necessarily sense that as easily as a mule. Quite a bit less easily. So that's why people say mules are stubborn, because they're sensing all of these little nonverbal cues that a horse might just be apt to say, oh, he pulled on the reins, so I'm going to go that way. He pushed his foot, so I'm going to go that way. And that's why also mules are also extremely, they're used in war and they're used in Grand Canyon trail riding and things like this. Because if a horse is walking along the edge of a cliff and a snake jumps out, the horse might be apt to just jump the other way off the cliff, killing itself. Whereas a mule will instantly identify cliff that way, snake that way, danger both ways. Mule will kill the snake. It'll stomp out the snake or at least won't jump off the cliff.

That's way better.

Yeah, better.

I think we should just all have mules.

All have mules. You should get a mule. You should get a mule.

I definitely would not have the time to be training a mule. It seems like that's. Here's my question, though. This is the other question I got to remember. Why would you think that the wolves would not attack the mule?

Well, it's not, first of all, because.

If she's scared of the wolves, I think she should be scared of the wolves.

Donkeys and mules. But especially donkeys. Mules, half donkey. So they're actually used a lot as livestock protection animals because they'll stomp out a coyote or a wolf. So a lot of farmers get them, put them in with their sheep, and they'll actually protect the herd. That's awesome. It's not impossible, but it is pretty uncommon that coyotes in my area, the wolves are not gray wolves, they're timberwolves. So they're not as big as big, but they're big enough, though. They're about the size of huskies, so.

They mostly kill like deer and deer.

And smaller stuff like they don't try.

For elk or anything like that. Because the big gray wolves will take out elk.

Yeah, I'm sure they.

Moose.

Yeah, absolutely.

Moose are so big, man, for a wolf to take out a moose, that's crazy.

Yeah, these are my trail cams at my place.

Dropping a deuce right there on your trail cam, staring you in the eye. That's an alpha move right there, son. I guarantee that's the alpha. Yeah, he knows you got that trail cam and you say, tom Green, check this out, bitch. Yeah, this is right in front of your camera.

So the only way to know 100% for certain that they're wolves and not a hybrid. I know you know all about this, Joe, but like the koi wolves is to do a dna test.

Koi wolf is kind of a know because coyote is a. Yeah. Yeah. The reason why the coyote spread so far across the country is because they have a built in mechanism to protect them from gray wolves, because gray wolves would kill the coyotes, whereas the red wolves in the east coast would breed with the coyotes. And that's where you get the koi wolf. I think they're viable. I think when they breed, they can breed.

Oh, yeah.

I don't think they're like a donkey or like a mule, rather, you know.

Coyote and a wolf.

I think when the koi wolves, whatever they call them, a koi wolves, I think they're viable. I think they have babies.

Yeah, absolutely. No, they are for sure.

Yeah, it's not different.

It's kind of like two different kind of dogs or something.

Exactly.

Yeah. Because I've been getting some information about this from a wolf researcher up who lives near me, and he has sort of put out some trail cams and we've actually laid out some fur traps that can get a little bit of their fur. And we're going to send it for a DNA sample to find out exactly the percentage of DNA that wolf took coyote that we have here because. Yeah, I don't know. When you live out in the wilderness, you find these kinds of things. I find it quite interesting to just kind of really kind of dive into it deep.

You're out of there in the real wild. You're in the wild where there's packs of predators in your neighborhood.

And I wish I had bear footage right now, but it's not online. But this year, I put out my trail cams and I got, like, I'd say a little more than a half dozen distinct, different bears on that exact trail, which know on my property right by my house.

Brown bear or black bear?

Black bear. Yeah. We don't have grizzlies out east, so it's just in Canada even. They're all yet. Not yet.

The liberals will try to reintroduce them. You need more things to be scared of. Well, talking about bringing grizzlies back to.

Yeah. I want you to come to. I know, I know you haven't come to, but lately. But you got to come to Canada because here's the thing. Here's the thing. I watch the show all the time, so I know your feelings about Canada, but here's the thing. Everybody loves you in. So I'm coming down here. Everybody's so stoked that I'm here.

I love Canadians. I just hate their government. Pierre, how do you say his last name? Polyver.

Yeah. Well, it's french. Well, I don't think he's french, but the name's french. Pierre Poliev.

Polyev.

So sort of a weird r. Silent.

R. Yeah, it's a strange, as you see it written down, it's very difficult.

Polyev. Polyev.

Yeah, that guy. That guy makes so much more sense. He's so common sense and just calling out all the nonsense that's been done under this administration, it's just so sad to watch.

So this is the thing that I kind of, I guess, just wanted to throw out there, which is it's not unlike here in the US. Right. You've got Biden as the president now. Right. And then you've got essentially a Democrat. We actually call our Democrats the Liberals, right? That's how unabashed we are. Liberal up there. We actually call the party the Liberal Party. It's not a bad word up there, right? They actually call them the Liberals, and.

The other ones are conservatives and conservatives.

Liberals and conservatives. But it's the same thing. Half the country hates the party in power right now, just like as much as anybody. And it's just a constant thing. And they want to get them out. I just want to, as a proud canadian, want to throw out the distinction that Canada, it's like here. It's the same bullshit that's here. Everybody's arguing about issues, important issues. It's being know through these algorithms. People get mad about it. Then they start arguing. I sometimes kind of go, I wouldn't be interesting if Pierre Polyev won the next election, right? Because then all of a sudden we'd have a conservative government up there. And let's say Biden won down here. You got conservative government up there. And then Tucker Carlson might be going up to Canada talking about how great we are. All of a know, because it just can switch on a know.

It could.

It could go back and it has know. There's been my lifetime. Joe Clark was the first conservative prime minister. Then there was Brian Mulroney, and Stephen Harper was pretty recent. But anyways, I don't like talking politics, but I did bring something about Canada that want to. Okay. It's a good thing. I'm trying not to talk politics too much because it's like, it's gross. Everybody gets all mad. I kind of think, like, wouldn't it be cool if the new thing became. People start to realize that the division is almost worse than what we're arguing about.

Well, the division is absolutely worse than what we're arguing about.

Yeah.

Most people want good things.

Oh, this is for you and your family. Huge this. And I brought one for us, too, just to try. This is the freshest, best canadian maple syrup made by my friends, the convoys, Ryan and Jason. Shout out to Ryan and Jason, George and Darlene. And they make this on their property. They have thousands of maple trees tapped. And this is a family run business. They've been doing this for hundreds of years.

That is a lot of work.

Yeah.

It's a whole maple syrup, like, making me. I've watched people make maple syrup on YouTube. It's a lot of work.

Yeah.

It's crazy how much work is involved.

And it's really kind of incredible to go see how they do it because they've built these, like, I can't describe it properly, but reverse osmosis machines, where they have tubes coming with the SAP from all the. In the spring, the SAP starts flowing, comes through these tubes from all through their woods, on their property. It runs out to their barn, where they have these machines that do something called reverse osmosis. I don't know what it is doing exactly, but they have to do it. And then it goes into this giant vat with fires, with wood, burn fires, and they boil the SAP down until it becomes thicker and there's more sugar content. And then you have this delicious syrup. But I brought a couple of.

It's literally the blood of trees that you pour on pancakes. Are we going to drink it, like, in shock?

I just thought, as opposed to drinking whiskey till we're on the floor this time.

I never made it to the floor, sir. I maintained.

I don't remember what happened.

Motion and the ability to conversate.

Oh, my gosh.

Okay, well, that's diabetes in a shot.

Yeah, we'll just do a shot. But I want you to see, this is real maple syrup. Canadian maple syrup. It's convoy maple syrup. They're my friends. They're the best friends that you'd ever want. And it's not your manufactured, sort of processed shit. Cheers.

Do you have to do it like a shot? No.

Yeah, you can. Yeah, absolutely.

Oh, my God. I can't drink this whole thing.

Yeah.

It's really good, though.

Pour it on some pancakes. Yeah.

It just makes you think, like, how much sugar are you getting from pancakes with a pile of maple syrup? Are you getting a fuck ton of sugar? How much sugar is in, what is a shot glass? How many ounces is that?

I should know this.

1Oz. Let's just see how much sugar is in 1oz of maple syrup.

Yeah.

God, how could you drink that?

Yeah, no, you don't really drink maple syrup. Right? We're just doing it for a gag, for fun. Pour it on your pancakes.

It's amazing how good it tastes on your pancakes.

No, it's good in coffee. Put it in your coffee in the morning. So I keep a big jug of it.

17 grams in a shot glass.

Yeah.

And I guarantee you, if I'm having pancakes, I am drowning those pitches.

Yeah, absolutely. So I'll get you more whenever you need some. It's the best. It's different than waffles with that on it.

Sun, lots of butter.

Oh, yeah.

Up to 20. Up to 20. Okay, 20. So if I'm having pancakes. I'm having 120 at least.

Yeah.

I'm pouring a bunch of maple syrup on that shit.

6Oz.

Yeah, easy. 6oz. Like a glass of it. I'm getting in between the stack. Pouring a little in there.

It's just a nice little boost, a little energy boost.

It's for like 5 minutes. Then you're in a coma for the rest of the day.

Yeah, absolutely.

But I guess if you're out there on your farm fucking throwing hay around all day, exhausted.

I did this summer. In August, I have some fields with hay. We cut the fields and I have some local farmers that help me cut the fields to square bales.

So you're really farming?

Yeah.

Farming. For real?

For real farming. Hay for my animals. Yeah. Had 580 bales of hay off the property this year. And we had to lift it all, carry it all onto a hay wagon. See, because I'm going to try to figure out a way to do it a little differently next year. But normally the farmers that have done my property for years, they've been doing it with these big circle round bales. But I wanted to get square bales this year because it's easier to handle for the horses every day or the mules and the donkeys every day. Every day I go to the Barn, I pick up a bale, feed the, eat about a bale and a half of hay a day. It's cool because from May, June till about the end of September, you don't even have to feed them. They're just out in the pasture eating grass, which I often think about when you think about vegetarians and you go, how do you put on muscle with just vegetarian? You can look at this giant animal. All it's doing is eating grass all day, and they're massive. I got to figure out a better way to get it in the barn this year because some of my friends.

Have to eat it all day long. That's the difference between eating meat and eating grass. If you watch predators, predators eat and then they sleep all day, but you watch a donkey, those motherfuckers are just eating all day long. They have to eat all day long. They're always eating because there's not a lot of protein in that food. It's got to break down and they're weird. Digestive tract. Undulate. Digestive tract.

So Fanny and Kia come from a pasture that had 20 other animals in it to my place where they're just there by themselves with the whole field to themselves. So Fanny was putting on some weight last summer. I have to now kind of monitor how much he's out in the pasture.

I should correct myself. Undulates or cows and shit. I'm thinking of like thinking of cows, right?

The weird stomachs and stuff. I'm not exactly sure how the stomachs work on these.

I don't know how equines, but I know that to think that you could get that jacked eating vegetables is ridiculous.

Right? That's what I was kind of thinking.

Because vegans always like to make that comparison. Gorillas, they eat nothing but vegetables. They have a totally different body.

They are also not humans. Yeah, they're not human beings.

It doesn't mean if you ate what a fucking horse eats, you'd look like a horse, you dumb ass. You're not a horse. And also, do you know how annoying that would be to have to eat grass all day?

It doesn't sound like a blast. Not a lot of variety there. Yeah, I think about that. I have cookies for them. I have sort of a vitamin mix that I give them every day.

Is variation to their diet good though, for some animals when you got it, for instance, apples.

Okay. I have apple trees at the property and that's one of the places she loves to walk towards the apple tree because there's apples on the ground. You can feel her pulling towards the apple tree, but you don't want her to eat a bunch of apples because that can create acid in their stomach and they can get sick.

Yeah, I was wondering that. What happens to them in the wild, though, if they find a bunch of apples?

Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, I'm not sure.

Fucked up?

I don't know the answer to that. But maybe they kind of somehow self regulate when they're left to their own. But you can feed them carrots. And one thing, I haven't done this yet, but I understand that they really, like I was just told because I'm actually thinking, what kind of variety can I give the ladies? So they really like a frozen watermelon to be tossed into there. Oh, no kidding.

Bears like that too?

Oh, yeah.

We went to a grizzly bear. I guess it's just like a conservation center where they have these enormous place. It's in Montana, but they're like captive, but it's really an enormous construction thing. And the bears have like swimming pools and shit. And they would roll them out, these frozen watermelons, and watch them bite through. A frozen watermelon will scare the living fuck out.

Right.

Because they go through it like it's.

Nothing a grizzly does. That I've seen hippopotamus do it on YouTube, but a grizzly does that, too.

I think most of the time the hippos are doing it. It's not with a frozen one. Yeah, but they were saying that this bear's favorite treat is frozen watermelon. So give him a frozen watermelon. You just go through it like it's a grape.

See, grizzlies are terrifying. Although I admit that I am also actually probably. It's probably not really a warranted or fear, but I am nervous about these black bears on the problem.

You should be nervous. What are they talking about?

They do attack people.

Occasionally they will attack you, and if black bears attack you, they're attacking you to eat you. Yeah, it's a little bit different.

Statistically. The ods are in my favor, I think. It's not as, like, grizzlies. They've attacked a lot of people. I think black bears maybe only attack, like, one person a year or something like that.

They attack people?

Yeah.

I mean, there's a guy who got killed over by Rutgers in New Jersey. He was killed by a black bear.

Yeah.

There's a friend of a buddy of mine went hunting for his very first trip. He was in his tent at night, and a 500 pound predatory black bear tried to remove him from the tent, and his friend shot the bear and accidentally shot his friend in the wrist. So he got shot in the wrist with a rifle. The bear gets shot. The bear runs off after it gets shot. And then I think they recovered it. I think it's dead. But imagine your first night ever camping in a tent and a black bear tries to pull you out and eat you.

Yeah. So I think sometimes people bring food in their tent. That's one common mistake.

Yeah, your food, bitch.

Your food. Yeah, your food.

Your food in the tent. Your pigs in a blanket, if you.

Bring in like, that is one thing. That is why they go in the tent slot. They smell someone brought their sandwich in the tent or whatever. That's true, but, yeah, no, I mean, look, I'm right there with you. There's something about it, though, that, well, you know, when you're out there in nature and your sort of natural instincts kick in where you feel you feel it and the fact that there is something unpredictable and that you don't understand out there is kind of exciting, like the fact that there is. I'm not really truly expecting to get attacked by a bear, but your senses are alert. You're listening into the woods. You know they're there, you know, they know you're there and they've probably left. But maybe this is the one time where they're walking along with their cub and you get in the wrong position at the wrong time. And so often when I go for a walk, I have bear spray on me. I sometimes have a rifle on me. I don't carry it with me every time I leave the house, but I've got a few rifles. I've not really been a hunter in my life, but so many people around me, the country, everybody hunts, and I think I'm going to maybe.

How much land do you have?

150 acres.

So it's kind of certainly hunt on that.

Yeah. And there's deer, and it's quite something that I never really expected to kind of live like that, but it's really kind of interesting. And then it backs on to lots of thousands and thousands of acres of protected wilderness.

Are you allowed to hunt back there?

Yeah, and on my property, too.

What is the tag allocation like? Do you get landowner tags? Do you get tags because you're a resident of the area?

You still have to get a hunting license in you if you want to get a rifle. First of all, it's completely different than in Texas, right? You can't just go buy one. You have to go take. It's like getting your driver's license, essentially, you have to write a test and you have to pass it, and you have to do a course, a safety course, and then you have to send that into the RCMP, the canadian, the mounties, right. They review it, and then a couple of months later, you get your non restricted firearms license, which allows you to go buy a rifle. I've been collecting lever action. I'm.

That's cool.

Relatively new to, you know. When I was out in the desert, I had a shotgun with me. I had a hunting license. When I was in New Mexico, I was trying to hunt some quail. Never saw a bird, though, so I was hunting, but I never saw anything. So I didn't really do. I was still hunting, but I never saw why. Trying to think of what I want to tell you here, Joe. That's why I think I really would love you to come up to Canada sometime and visit maybe, and come up and do some shows up there. People would love to see you. And there's just such a huge outdoors hunting, fishing culture. That's what being canadian is once you get out of the city, right? People love to hunt. People love to fish. I go ice fishing with my friends. We go set up a.

Didn't they put new restrictions on firearms up there.

They just banned handguns. Absolutely. But not rifles, which is pretty extreme from an american standpoint, certainly. I mean, to think that handguns, do.

You have to get rid of them?

No, you're not allowed to sell them to anybody and you're stuck with them. And that's probably the biggest change that's happened. There is also no automatic weapons up there. So you can't get an AR 15, for example. AR 15s aren't automatic or. Yeah, that caliber or whatever. Yeah, you can't get those weapons, but you can get a rifle, a shotgun. I have a 308, I have a two, four, three, I have a 22, I have a shotgun, I have 20 gage, twelve gage. All the normal hunting rifles are fine.

What was the thought process behind banning firearms or banning pistols?

Well, I think it was just an.

Attempt to curb voted on.

Well, they voted for the government, and the government did know, obviously some people aren't too happy about it. One thing about Canada is like, the gun culture is different up there. More people are. I think I'm going to get in trouble with the people that are handgun enthusiasts in Canada, but it's just not as common up there. It's more about hunting and hunting rifles. But there are probably a lot of people that are pretty upset about it for sure. But they're not actually taking away people's rifles or anything like that.

One of the exemptions is individuals train, compete, or coach in a handgun shooting discipline that is on the program of International Olympic Committee or the International Para Olympic Committee. Looks like someone's going to have to become a shooter. Yeah, I'm personally not competing shooting.

That's why I have to have this gun. I like my lever action rifle. I like my shotgun. I think I might hunt turkeys this year. I'd like to do that with a lot of turkeys on the property. I don't necessarily feel like I need a handgun. It's a different kind of.

I don't necessarily feel that anybody should tell me that I can't have a handgun. Especially not the government. Especially not the government that's already done some really shady shit like what they did with the truck drivers.

Right? Well, I'm from Ottawa too, so the trucker rally was interesting.

Dude, they fucking took away their bank accounts. They closed people's and froze people's bank accounts that just donated money.

Yeah. Is that coffee?

Yes.

You know what, first of all, the trucker rally was interesting because I'm from Ottawa, so I grew up the parliament hill. I'm sure you saw it on the news. Like, the parliament buildings is basically our congress and our senate combined, essentially the House of Commons. And the know downtown Ottawa is like Washington DC, right? That's our Washington DC. I grew up there. I grew up skateboarding on the parliament buildings front steps. I did a radio show. This is something about the freedoms of Canada that I think is interesting. Okay. When I was a kid, I did a college radio show and it was midnight till two in the morning. And I would say during the show, okay, after the show, everybody show up on Parliament Hill, bring a soccer ball, let's go play soccer. And then we'd show up there with pizzas and we'd play soccer on the front lawn of the canadian government till four in the morning. Every half hour. The bell would go bing, bing. The RCMP cops would come. They'd shine their lights out on the field. It was super positive. Right. I love Ottawa. It's an amazing city. And I understand that everybody has the right to express their dissent.

Right. And I think Trudeau probably did overstep with some of his reaction to that, with some of the things he said specifically, but there was also this element of not only was the city shut down, there's people that live downtown. So those horns were these air horns. There's babies sleeping. It's like really like a neighborhood. Right. So it's kind of funny in a way, the difference between Canadians and Americans. Sometimes I'm both. Right. I'm a dual citizen fence rider. No, I just love both countries. I've lived here for 20 years. But what, you know, what is sort of a comparable thing, I'd think was, you know, what, you know, in the United States, they. On January, was it January 6, they did more than freeze those people's bank accounts. Right. They threw them all in jail. Right?

They threw a lot of them in jail.

Yeah. So I'd say it's like a comparison. Comparable thing. I guess that's the thing. I just kind of.

No, that's different.

Feel is it's like. Hold on. Sort of comparison.

Hold on. First of all, it's different because they entered into the capitol building.

Right.

You're not supposed to do that. A lot of people broke glass, smashed windows. They did a lot of shit. Also, it's not comparable because it seems like they were instigated in some way, at least partially, by people in the audience that wanted them to go in there. Now, whether those people were federal agents or whether those people are antifa, whether those people are democratic operatives that want to turn this into chaos because it's a great way to attack Donald Trump, whatever it was. There definitely was people that were instigating people to get into the building. There's video recordings of it. There's also weird instances of cops opening gates, letting people in. The fact that it was severely under policed when they had the George Floyd protest, the Black Lives Matter protest, they had way more cops there for that than they did for this crazy thing where the dude is denying the election and his rabid fans are going to show up and you're not prepared for this. The whole thing seems like if I was going to make a playbook, if I was going to instigate a bunch of dumb asses to go do something really stupid because it'll make their leader look like a fascist and Hitler, that's how I would do it.

So you have that, too. It's not as simple as the trucker protest was a legitimate protest where a bunch of people were like, why are you telling me that I have to take this experimental medication or I can't work? Where is the fucking information? And now, over time, we've seen now that the studies that they did do, they don't have to release them for, like, 75 years. You know about all that, all the paperwork involving the vaccine?

Yeah.

What is the exact ruling of what information they're withholding for 75 years? Let's be real clear on that. But then it's also how many people we know that got injured by it. You're smart to be reluctant to do something that's new, given the history and track record of pharmaceutical drugs in this country.

Absolutely.

Especially when you have a novel new thing. The idea that this is going to be the one that's absolutely innocuous, at.

The very least, you should be able to consider not doing it. Talk about not doing it.

But listen, man, there's no drugs like that. There's no drugs that have a gigantic effect on anything that don't have some people that have horrible adverse reactions to them, even normal shit. People die from tylenol all the time, man. They overdose on it. People die from all kinds of medication. It turns out they have an allergy to. It's like weird shit happens with people, and people are right to be reluctant, but you might be right and you might be wrong, but you're right to express that you don't think the government should be able to tell you what you can and can't do specifically about putting something into your body, or you can't work. That's crazy. So that's that protest. It's a different protest.

Yeah.

The whole vibe behind. It's different.

Absolutely. It is a different subject. For sure.

It's in response to tyranny, FOIA requests. The FDA had previously said that it takes approximately 8 minutes per page to process records for the FOIA request and that it could only review and release 500 pages a month, which is 6000 pages a year. At that rate, it would take 75 years to release all the data. That's crazy.

Yeah.

That's so crazy.

I guess the point I'm trying to make, which is outside of the weeds of it, is when I'm hanging out in Canada, half the people I talk to are so excited for me to come down here. And they were supportive of the truckers, right. It's not some fringe thing in Canada. Maybe the people that actually got in their truck and drove there and camped out there, maybe that was a little bit more of a dedicated protester than the average citizen. But it's just like here you get people fuck Joe Biden. You know what you would probably be amazed to see? I don't know if this is so common in Canada that we just don't even really, I don't even think to mention it. Driving around everywhere in the country, in the city, everywhere. People pick up trucks. Fuck Trudeau flags. It says fuck trudeau. Black flag, white letters, Canada flag on it. People are mad. And so it's not just like everybody in Canada is just down with it now. Enough people are down with it that he got elected, but he might not get elected the next time. And then that'll be just, I hope he doesn't might just be like it is down here.

If he gets elected again. You guys are gluttons for punishment.

Yeah, it could be. It could be the same as here. Biden could get elected again. Trump could get elected. It. I was thinking the other day, I'm almost kind of wondering, this is obviously a stupid idea, but I'm wondering, like maybe wouldn't it almost be better if we just got rid of the elections and just let the Conservatives run it for four years and then just automatically the Liberals run it four years. I can pick a whole million holes in why that wouldn't work and just let it go back and forth. And then people can just be like, okay, let's just all get along. Let them have four years at running the country, do what they do. Let the other side run for four years. It's kind of a pendulum that goes back and forth anyways and then we can kind of get back to just all getting along.

Well, even if that did happen, the same problem would take place. And it's that the people that are embedded that are running the government, the real people behind the curtain, they're always there. They don't get elected.

They're always there.

And those are the people that are actually running the government. So it would be the same horseshit that we're dealing with now. Every four years, some new spokesperson comes and play and they do a bunch of shit that pisses off half the country. And the same thing behind the scenes. The same people are running things.

Yeah. It's so frustrating. And I got to the point where I started to kind of just try to disconnect from the conversation, which sounds. Sometimes I feel bad about it. Because you want to have a social contribution awareness. Yeah, but then you go, man, I just don't feel like talking about the same thing over and over and over.

And over and over and over again. What I was going to say, though, is that, you know, like, the whole system is set up so that one person can't be in control for too long. That's the whole idea about term limits. You got four years, and then you get elected again. You get another four years and then you're fucking done. I'm just saying this. This is not something that I fully support, but there's something to be said for someone staying in there for a long time and getting it right. If they're good at.

Was backfires in.

Any other job, it would backfire with power and control. The problem is we are terrified of having someone like Putin who's in control of Russia for decades.

Right? For sure.

But if you had someone who was good at the job, you would want them to stay on the job. Like, if you had the best CEO of your company, you're making record money and everything's doing great and the products are incredible. You'd want to keep that guy as a CEO. He's obviously killing it. When Steve Jobs is running Apple, he's killing it. You don't want to remove him as.

The CEO, but you know how long it takes to build anything, right?

Right. And how long it takes to get your job right and to figure out who are the right people, who's backstabby, what are the issues, who's trying to climb the political ladder, and they're just thinking about themselves, only they're sociopaths. Figure it out. It takes a long time to fucking work your cabinet out. If you had a president that was a young president that gets in at, like, 38, 40 years old and 20 years of running the country correctly. That's what most of these dictatorships have as a benefit. It's horrible for the people, but the benefit of having one guy run things and just keep it locked up, and this is the right way to do it. We've been doing it this way forever. This is correct.

Yeah. It's interesting that the most important job.

Ever and a new guy gets it, or a new woman ever yet. But someday, every four years.

Yeah. That's crazy. And often trying to undo everything that was done the four years before. So that's what term limits brought in. But then on the flip side, we don't have term limits in Canada, and Trudeau's going to be there for. If you're not a fan of Trudeau, you go, oh, I wish we had term limits. Because he's been there over eight years now. Right, right. That's because he's getting elected, voted out. He might be getting voted out.

It seems like the Canadians are leaning towards getting rid of him. Is that correct?

It's one of those things where it kind of feels like it's almost like 50 50, ultimately, but who knows? I think it definitely feels like it could happen.

Who doesn't want to get rid of him? Who are those people?

A lot of it's regional. You know, we. I knew if we were going to talk about this, I wanted to kind of sort of make this point, because, again, I want Americans to understand what Canada is. It's exactly like here. It's the same people that. The same type of people that like Biden are the people that like Trudeau, like, the people in Canada that vote for Trudeau are the exact same people. They like Biden, too. There's nobody in Canada that likes Trudeau, that also likes Trump. There's also nobody in Canada that likes Pierre poliev, that likes Biden. It's exactly the same. It's the same division. Even on social media, it's the same. Like, you go on social media, you go on TikTok, you got angry conservatives in Canada saying, fuck Trudeau, and we're turning into a communist country. And all of this stuff, like, completely the exact same thing as was. I'm not here, like, try to be a spokesperson for Canada or anything, but they would not want that.

Well, I think that's what scares us the most about Canada, is that Canada is so similar to the United States, but we're seeing your rights erode. There's also weird bills that keep getting passed the c 16 bill, the mandatory pronouns, mandatory use of someone's pronouns. And then there was the fact that you guys don't really have freedom of speech. You have hate laws. You have hate speech laws. And then you also have some weird shit going on with Canada trying to regulate the Internet and with the government trying to regulate podcasts and make podcasts subject to their.

They did try. I did a little research on this in case it came up. They tried. And they haven't put into effect that regulation of the Internet as far as regulating disinformation, that has not been put into effect. And Trudeau actually said he would not put that into effect. It was sort of a subset of. It's sort of like you've got your extreme left wing here, and then you have cooler heads, and they did not actually put that into effect.

Is it still on the table?

Trudeau has said that he would never put that into effect.

Well, I think he's saying that now because he's no.

And so the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Okay, that's kind of like our constitution, I guess. They say we have freedom expression, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly.

The fact that you have elements of your government that would even consider that.

Yeah, but it's like, here it is. It's the same thing. Like, if you don't agree with it, then it's the same thing as fuck Joe Biden. It's the same thing. Fuck. Because it's interesting. I just really want Americans who've never been to Canada to understand that.

Are you working for the Canadian Ministry of.

I would consider it something and travel. You know what I was thinking about in Canada, you don't have to be born in Canada to run for prime minister. You could run for prime minister of Canada and come up and solve all this stuff. I mean, you have to live up there, but it's a nice place. Come on up to Canada. You would win too. That's the thing. That would be amazing. You would win. And you could just imagine if I.

Became prime minister of Canada.

Can you imagine? I was just thinking, do you think.

It'S crazy, Donald Trump being president of the United States? That would be next craziest thing.

That would be the next craziest thing.

More crazy. Almost. More crazy because at least he was, like, hinting about running for president forever if I just, on a whim, just.

Decided to go run for the prime minister of Canada and win because you would win because you have so many fans up there. You really do. And that's why I want.

That's so scary. That is so unqualified to run a country.

Well, I mean, you've got a lot of valid concerns and you feel strongly about things. I think you should run. I would support you. I think that would be amazing.

I want to roll up to the World Economic Forum, high on mushrooms.

See, in Canada, by the way, mushrooms are basically legal in Canada now. Weed is. Here's something. Trudeau again. He did legalize weed. That is one thing that he did.

Congratulations. He did one good thing. It's just he's a weasel. That's the problem. He's what I don't like in leaders. This fake bullshit, fucking nonsensical gaslighting. That shit drives me nuts. It's so creepy. And then using all the inclusive terms to make it seem like everybody else is a piece of shit. And you're an amazing human being, and you're on the right side of progressive movement. It's all just a bullshit act to stay in power. And when you see politicians do it, you know, they just fucking wet their finger and try to figure out which way the wind's blowing and say those things and then act in the interests of whatever money got them into that position in the first place. Whatever machine is behind them, whatever support they get, that's all they're doing. And those types of politicians, that's not the only kind you can have. It's kind of like, yeah, you can have real leaders. They do exist.

It's such a huge sort of thing to wrap your head around. It's capitalism. It's money. It controls everything. I kind of feel just leaving Los Angeles, leaving Hollywood. Right. Kind of has sort of reset a little bit of my. You know this more than anybody else, of course, because we even talked about this, whatever it was 20 years ago on my podcast about how you can democratize media with podcasting and get rid of all this money. Controlling everything. Controlling. And so it's sort of a micro sort of. Or it's a similar thing to just politics in general. Money comes and controls everything. It can be so frustrating, especially now when you can see, know you don't necessarily have to play that game.

It's also the hive mind of Hollywood. You're leaving. There's a thing that happens in that town, in that area where the people that think outside of the norm say it in, like, whispered hush tones. There's a certain ideology that's attached to that city, and it's not logical. It's a kooky, wacky, completely insulated, left wing view of the world, and they enforce it with an iron fist. And if you're not on that team, you don't get booked for things, you don't get picked for things. If you're someone who has conservative leanings or you talk about there's projects you're never going to get, you're never going to be involved with the people. They'll malign you and without knowing you at all, be openly prejudiced about you. So no one does it. So everyone who goes over there who's just like, desperately trying to make it, they're desperately trying to get in movies, they're desperately trying to get a recording deal, whatever it is they're desperately trying to do, the last thing they want to do is do something and talk about something that's going to politically get them at odds with the people that run the studios.

So no one does. Everybody just follows the same sort of wacky ideology that these people take from the universities. They go straight into working as a PA and straight into working for executives and producers, and all of those people are indoctrinated. They're all in this wild ass cult of weirdness. And then you have people that move there to try to make it. And these people are just always going on auditions. They're always like, please choose me, please choose me. And no, they didn't choose me. And so you're trying to be friends to people who choose people. You're trying to get them into parties, trying to introduce them to other people.

You're trying to be around other famous people, getting anxiety.

This person's been chosen. I got to be around the chosen person. We're going to go to the chosen person's party. Maybe we can get chosen so that you get this overwhelming anxiety that fills the fucking city. And then now you have TikTokers and influencers and all these people that are just trying to do anything to get famous and that the reality stars and all that started it all off and the fucking real housewives and all that wacky shit, you get away from that. You're like, oh, there's real people out there. There's real people out. That's a storm of anxiety, just a hurricane of confusion and Zoloft and fucking. And everyone's losing their mind, and everyone's in therapy and everyone's fucking nuts and everyone's trans. It's out of touch. It's just a crazed cult.

Yeah, it's like you start out as a stand up comedian and you are trying to poke holes in the absurdity of the world, and you're saying things that are not being said on stage. And then as you all of a sudden get brought into, and I'm sort of saying every stand up comedian, every outlier, every person that's doing something different, a punk rock know, my goofy show was so out there when I was making it, and I was making it, I was rebelling against in Canada, in my little public access show, I was kind of trying to rebel against what obviously seems like a formulaic, mainstream way of thinking to create art, right? And then you move to Los Angeles because the show got on MTV, I end up moving to Los Angeles. Now you're. I'm talking about myself now all of a sudden being asked to go, know the show, the Tonight Show, Saturday Night Live, and you're on these shows. And I was sort of, sort of a bit of a naive moron, basically, purposefully. So I would go on these shows, try to go nuts, right, and try to do something crazy and just try to sort of almost disrupt the whole format of it, right?

In those first couple of years as a naive person who didn't understand how Hollywood worked. And I had a similar thing to our last appearance here on Jay Leno. I went on Jay Leno. When I had a film coming out, I went on Jay Leno and I came up with this bit, let me roll. Remember they had the bar cart, the J bar. I'll roll it out on stage during the show, and then I'll do a shot of Jaeger with Jay. Doesn't. This is a crazy story. I probably told you this before, but I do a shot of Jaeger with Jay, and Jay doesn't drink. So he said, okay, well, I'll throw it over my shoulder, right? So we go there and I'm with my buddy. Know, I was the buddy who pushes you further into the darkness, right? You got a bad idea. And he pushes you further and makes it even worse.

Use the force.

Yeah. So we're in the green room getting ready. I'm in the green room with my budy, getting ready to go on the show, and he goes, do a shot now before you go on. I'm like, okay, so I do a shot now before I go on, right? Get ready to go on. The bits all approved with the Tonight show. It's a gag. They know I'm doing real jagger, right? But it wasn't planned that I would do a shot before I go on. He goes, do another shot before you go on.

Two shots.

Two shots. Do another one. So now I walk out, I'm three shots in before the show even starts.

Oh, boy, you're hammered.

Well, pretty quickly. Yeah. And then I got out there and I did a shot, and the audience goes crazy and cheers. Right. And so then I do another shot, and so I end up doing way too many shots. And it kind of ended up very similarly to our last conversation here. And it was actually pretty hilarious. It was one of those things where it did get out of control. The next day, the New York Post had my picture and it said dead drunk. It was just like one of those things. And Jay called me at home the next day. Are you okay, man? He really kind of went. But then that was sort of the beginning of me realizing, oh, you can't.

Why Tom Green went on Leno and.

Deliberately got, you know, in hindsight, I go, well, that know, kind of the outrageous kind of young version of me that I was doing on the show. That made perfect sense to do that for a then, you know, the naive kid in me didn't, you know, a lot of people in Hollywood did not understand that and then got mad. And the movie people got mad at you. Well, like the movie studio I was on promoting the movie, and they were like, oh, we don't want you to go any more talk shows for the movie. I'm like, what? It was a joke. I was obviously, it was a joke. And they're not interpreting it as a joke. They're interpreting it as me being kind of out of control. Yeah, exactly. But it was a manufactured out of control. I was out of control, but it was planned confusion. Right. But that kind of subtlety didn't really kind of pass the smell test. So then you start to go, oh, jeez, I better tone it down a little bit. Better tone it down a little bit because you sort of end up falling into that feeling where all of a sudden you're, like you said, going to an audition or driving out to a meeting or being a person that you're not.

Yeah, exactly.

You're hosting a late night talk show, and all of a sudden you're this sort of wearing a tie, this od.

Button down, and trying to make something that they like and fit into their mold and try to get your own little creative shots off within that mold. But no longer are you actually being purely yourself.

Right.

And you can't.

It's not even possible.

And you end up living there for 20 years end up living there for 20 years, and it becomes normal pretty quickly. Right. And then you sort of slowly forget oh, this is just the way it works, I guess, now. And then eventually one day you go, I'm getting out of here. And I got to say, when you moved here, it was a bit of a light bulb, I think for me, too, it was inspiring for me because I sort of realized, oh, look at that, Joe's leaving. Because you're always at the comedy store, all the clubs. It was the scene in LA, and you're thinking, wow, Joe's just going to go do it on his own and just turn his back on this whole infrastructure here. And I was like, yeah, you can do that. You don't have to be here. And it was really inspiring and it inspired a lot of people. And I can tell you again, it's now living in the woods not far from where I grew up. We had a cottage when I was a kid pretty close to where I grew up. They've got these birds there called whipper wills, right?

Whipper will. Whipper will. They make this sound. There's a really unique sounding bird, right? Hank Williams sings about him. And I grew up as a kid hearing those in the woods at know, just at dusk we hear them. And now when I'm going to bed, I hear those and I'm going, oh, I feel like the sounds of my childhood, you're enriched. And the smells of my childhood and even the things, the mosquitoes, the horse flies, and you're like, even the large mouth bass in the lake and the red wing blackbirds and all those sounds and smells and everything, and you feel like yourself again. For 20 years, I'd be like, driving up Laurel Canyon looking at palm trees. And for 20 years, even after 20 years living in the same house, I never felt like I was actually at home. I felt like I was off on some business trip trying to. And I remember saying, even after living there 1520 years, like, what the hell am I doing in Los Angeles? This is crazy. This is a weird place. It's like a weird place. And you feel almost like you have to be there now.

Everything's changed. The Internet, and I think Covid did that for a lot of people, too, because all of a sudden, everybody's locked in their house and you're dealing with people on these Zoom calls, and the Internet's changed. You don't have to be anywhere anymore. We realize we can be wherever we know. You took your entire organization away and it's bigger than ever, and light bulbs start going off and you're like, wow, you know what? That's really cool. I'm going to go home.

Well, when we were living in LA, you're always thinking of yourself as someone who wants to work with the system. You're always thinking of that. Always. I mean, I was on television shows. I did all that stuff, did a couple of movies. You're always working with the system. So no matter what you do, you're working. Even when you put out specials, you're putting out specials, you're meeting with these people, you're working with the system, and you start to think that that's what you do, that's the business that you're. But it's not. What you do is what you do.

That's what you do.

What you do is what you do. And you could do what you do wherever you want to do it, especially once you get good enough at it that you have an audience and you're supposed to take a chance. You're not supposed to keep living your life by these bizarre tyrants and their rules and regulations about the way and the way they behave and the way they fucking. It's so ridiculous. It's such a bizarre place to be. And when you realize that, you don't need that anymore. And comedians today realize they don't need that anymore, all they need is a TikTok account or a YouTube account, an Instagram account, a Twitter account, and some good content. And if you get on podcasts, people will check you out, they'll try you out. And there's a gigantic organic network of comedians. We're all friends with each other, and we all get on each other's podcasts and we all trust each other. If I tell you this guy's really funny, go see him. I'm telling you the truth. I would not ever lie, and I wouldn't have them on if I didn't think they were funny, if I didn't like them, they weren't nice people.

I'm not interested. So there's this beautiful organic thing, and that's the real network now. That's the real network. It's an organic network. There's no contracts. Every comic that I know that has contracts with other comics, they start doing things together. It always goes, mean, maybe it can not go south once or twice. I mean, maybe there's some great people that have figured out, I mean, Tom Segrers seems like he's figured out how to do it with your mom's house, but that's like almost it. Everybody else that I know that gets involved with deals and just fucking just help each other.

Just help each other.

Organically.

That was what I really loved about hanging at the mothership the last two nights is the energy there is different. Like, for the comedy club, just in the, in the green room, you felt it. You can tell that you've created an energy there that is supportive, right. All the comics are just hanging out in the green room smoking cigarettes, and everyone's talking and just, it's super chill. I did sometimes find that it wasn't always like that. When you're at a comedy club and other people, comedians are sometimes a little more, feel a little more competitive with each other, and there's a little bit so stupid.

It's so stupid. Any competition that you have with other comedians is inspiration. That's all you should look at it. If someone's doing really well and you're like, wow, I wish I was doing that well. Great. That's inspiration to work harder. That's inspiration to go write more, do more sets, reevaluate your material, go over it better, do something, write more, have some life experiences that you could translate into your act. Work harder. You should just be inspired, and if that person is a good person, you should be happy for them, and that's what we can all do. This idea that we're all in competition with each other is just stupid. It's not good for anybody.

I was stoked to get to see your work in progress. Your new hour that you're working on, that was incredible.

Thank you.

Yeah, that was really fun. You got such a great place to watch the show there, too. I mean, first of all, fat man room. Little fat man. Little boy. Awesome. I mean, I just love the way you've set up for the comics where you can go out and sit on that balcony up there and just watch the show. It was just really amazing to watch you working out your new shit. It's fucking awesome. And I enjoyed our conversation because I've watched a lot of your interviews with comedians here, and I saw your interview with Louis, and you were talking about writing and saw your interview with Bill Burr. You're talking about writing, and there's this thing where a lot of comics don't write, and we were talking about this a little bit the other day, but I love the process of hearing how the process works for you because I kind of do a mixture of things, too. I like to go sit at a computer and type stuff up, but I've always found it hard to like, this is a question I kind of have for you, because when you go right, you work it out on stage and you got your idea, you got your premise, you got your punchlines, you got your bit, and you're working it on stage.

And then I found it really inspiring, actually, because first of all, I love the way it works with stand up. Like when you showed up at the green room, you're about to go on stage and you're, like, focused. You're focused and you're going through your notes and you're focused. And I'm like, I can tell you're focused. Right. Then you go out, you kill it. You come back in and you see that adrenaline rush, and then you're just relaxed and it's just that release. Right?

Yeah.

And then we were just talking about writing, and you said you're going to go home, and actually, yeah. I don't know if you want people to know this is too far into the. Behind the curtain or whatever.

No, it's okay.

You got to go home and write after. I just think that's so cool. You know, while it's fresh, you go home and actually type up some stuff.

That's when I've been doing some of my best writing. There's like a two hour window that I have where I'm still jazzed from being on stage.

Right.

And you're still kind of thinking in that mindset and don't let yourself relax too much. Kind of stay in that mindset.

Right.

And then as long as I'm not up too late, where I get tired, then I'm forcing it. But if I can get home at a reasonable time and I've got a lot of energy, I get my best writing in. I get some of my best ideas because I'm already thinking, like comedy.

Yeah, you just had it. You have the exact words, rhythm in your head. And that, I thought was a bit of a light bulb for me. That's inspiring because I often find it's like, you know, when you write something down or when you do the set and you maybe write it down after, and then you don't go get to writing it, and then you never remember what the rhythm was later. What the hell was it? I said, again, I know it was way funnier than what I'm writing. Right. That's.

That's why recordings are so important.

Yeah.

Just put your phone on the, know, voice recording, just. Just to get a reference.

Yeah, I was talking, Louis Ck had a conversation with him about this, and it was pretty interesting because I like to drink, but I really have cut back drinking in the last. I quit drinking like, three days ago. No, but stand up, I wasn't doing stand up when I was doing my tv show. I'd done it when I was a kid. I stopped, I did my tv show, started again, like, 1314 years ago, was drinking a lot. Like, I like to drink like everybody likes to drink. And I go on the road. And I started realizing, man, even if I go drinking Friday night after the show, my Saturday night shows aren't as good as they could have been because I'm kind of like carrying a little bit this alcohol around in me from the night before. I quickly realized the beginning was like, I'll have a beer on stage, right? Then I go, oh, I better not have a beer on stage. I'll wait till after the show to have a drink. So then after the show, Friday night on the road, it's fun. You're in Cleveland.

Let's go.

Let's party. We're in Cleveland. So you have a few too many drinks after the show Friday night. Of course, I was younger too, right? I was, my can handle it a little more too than when you're 52. But then every year that went by, it was like, oh, those Saturday night shows are getting a little harder to get through. And it was just one too many Saturdays, just lying in my hotel room, just waiting for the show to start, hungover, going, oh, my God. And then dreading and being on stage. So then I decided I was going to quit drinking when I'm doing stand up. So I'm not drinking this weekend until maybe Sunday night. Maybe I'll have a drink Sunday night. Maybe even Saturday night. I could do a hungover show Sunday. Got to have a little fun.

Listen, I got a solution for you. Iv drips.

Yeah.

Oh, it's a game changer, so I can keep drinking.

You bring that right on stage with you. The iv I'm just getting, you don't bring the iv.

The next day, get a high dose vitamin iv.

Well, the thing that I've been enjoying about kind of scheduling it where it's like, I don't drink for a couple of days before a weekend like this from doing five shows is like, I find, and this is what I was talking about with Louie about where I had know we're not close friends, but I had an opportunity to have a conversation with him about this once. And it was pretty cool because the way his mind thinks is know analytical about this type of specific everything comedy, right? And I was telling him, I was saying I stopped drinking before I go on stage because I feel like there was this period where I didn't have a drink for a couple of weeks. And when I was doing crowd work, I was just coming up with stuff that I would never. When you have a great set of crowd work and you get up. I came up with this intricate story that I told, and it was clear my mind was operating in a different level than it would have been had I just had a few beers the night before, even. Right. And then he said something I'd never really even occurred to me before, which is when you're working on a set, if you have a little bit of booze in your system, even from the night before, and you're up there working on a set, you don't remember the stuff that happened on stage as well either.

So then when you go home, you don't really even recall. And that's the biggest, you know, the big part of repetition, getting up and doing these sets over and over again, and you remember everything and build on it and build on it. And if you're not retaining that information. Right. I'm really laying off the sauce. And I was excited to hear that we were going to do this show on the day of my. I'm doing two shows tonight at the mothership with fat man. And I was kind of excited because I knew I wasn't going to drink on this show.

So you knew you weren't going to repeat?

Yeah, I knew I was not. I was going, I'm not going to do what I did last time. And so I kind of came.

I'm not trying to encourage you to drink, but I know. I'm trying to encourage you that if you do wind up drinking too much and you feel hungover, you don't have to just tolerate that.

No, I like that, too.

Yeah. Get an iv drip.

There's iv drip.

Yeah. If you're in town, I'll connect you.

To the lady that does. That just seems like such an extreme. It's like, you know, you're drinking too much. You know, you're drinking too much. When you're, like, you're in a hospital bed with an iv drug, you know.

You'Re being smart about your partying.

Yeah.

Or you're not in a hospital bed.

Yeah.

You're just sitting down. It takes 20 minutes.

The reason I told you about the reason why I wanted to come down here sooner and just kind of come check out and hang at the club, I was super stoked. I'm actually getting to headline the club this weekend. That was even more than I was expecting. I just wanted to come down and see you and congratulate you on the club. And the reason it's taken me so long is I had a fucked up thing that happened after I moved to the farm. Basically immediately after I moved to the farm and everything was going great, I had a major injury that I told you about. I didn't get into too much detail about it, but I had a major injury in Costa Rica. I went down there for a vacation and there was a big bonfire on the beach and everyone was having fun. I went to bed in the hotel. I wake up, I decide to go back to the bonfire. A few hours later, it's like two in the morning. At this point, the fire has gotten a lot smaller. I pick up a piece of driftwood off this beach and this remote beach, right?

I go up to throw the driftwood on the fire. And the reason the fire had gotten smaller is the people that had been at the fire put out the fire by burying it in sand. And they'd buried this huge bodh fire that was about the size of this room in sand. And so now there was just a little fire with sand covering hot coals about 4ft leading up to it. And I'm walking up to the thing barefoot in bathing suit and a t shirt with a piece of driftwood, and my foot goes into the sand, into these hot coals. Immediate realization, I fall back. If I'd fallen forward, I mean, my face would be burnt. I ended up immediately realizing what had happened. Third degree burns on both feet, the top and bottom of my right foot, and, strangely, the top of my left foot, not the bottom, thankfully. And the nerves were completely burned off my feet. So after the initial shock of it, I wasn't in pain, which was the weirdest thing. And I looked down and there's a couple of people came to my sort of assistance and we're putting water on it.

Not feeling anything. I'll get graphic because it's crazy, but the skin is just falling off my feet.

Oh, my God.

I get help back to my room. I'm not wanting this to be. It's the first day I got there. This really ruined my vacation. I'm not feeling pain because the nerves are gone. So I'm literally, like, trying to clean it up with some nail clippers, chopping the little bit, the burnt flesh off and.

Do you have photos?

I do, yeah.

Of this? Like, when it looked like that.

Not online?

No. On your phone?

I have not even.

I need to see. That sounds insane.

I haven't even talked about it online. This is the first I've talked about it online. Yeah.

I never knew that you were.

I didn't want to talk about it. I just didn't. It was crazy. I ended up spending two weeks in the hospital in Costa Rica and then was medevac'd on an air ambulance with Charlie.

Whoa, Charlie. You were there for the whole ride?

Yeah. With Charlie? Yeah.

Did the nurses take Charlie to go potty?

So I had some friends who came down who were coming down anyways, and they took Charlie.

Oh, Charlie.

They looked after Charlie for two weeks while I. So I got driven to the San Jose hospital. Hi, Charlie. What's up? And she was worried.

She's adorable, man. She's such a sweet dog.

Yeah.

I know the people that are seeing her out now, like, oh, she's kind of freaked out, but normally she's not freaked out at.

Yeah, yeah, she's super sweet.

She runs up to everybody and wagging her.

As I got to this hospital, there's a surgeon from Columbia who worked there. It's a great hospital. Thankfully. Came out, he said, looked at my foot, said, we're taking you immediately into surgery. And they did skin grafts off my leg. And they took skin grafts like the size of a football off my right leg and stapled 60 staples to staple the skin into my foot. And then I come up out of surgery, and the doctor says to me, which I think he was trying to make me feel better, but he said, well, the good news is you'll probably be able to live a normal life. He says to me, it's the first thing he says to me, oh, my God. And I can't move. I had morphine going into my back. Couldn't feel anything below my waist. I thought I was paralyzed. They told me you wouldn't be able to feel anything below my waist while I came out of it. And then I'd spend two weeks in a hospital bed, and I was not able to get out of the hospital bed for two weeks. This is debatably too much information, but it's interesting.

You get very constipated from all the medicine that's going into you, and you end up not being able to go to the bathroom for about a week, but then you ultimately have to go, and you can't get out of bed because your foot has to remain elevated.

Oh, boy. So this is where you drop a log in a bucket.

You got to drop a log in a diaper.

Oh, jeez. And then someone's got to clean your butts.

And then these costa rican nurses come in and clean your butt. It was just a really interesting moment of clarity for me where you realize you're humbled as a human being, and you realize, oh, I've lost all ability to look after myself, and you just kind of end up having to just kind of go with it. And to my honest with, I still think about that sometimes. It wasn't the worst thing in the world. No, I'm just kidding. But they were very nice. The nurses were very nice.

Very sweet of them to take care of you. So you can't put any weight on your foot because the bottom of your foot, is that skin graft as well.

Or just the top? So then for the next. Yeah, exactly. And it was very delicate, the skin graft for the first. No.

Was the bottom skin grafted as well?

Yeah. Really? All around? Very.

The bottom of your foot, like the sole of your foot was skin grafted. That's crazy, because I would think, how do they skin graft that?

Right?

Does your footprint come back in the same way? The ridges.

The dermal ridges? Yeah. But it's not perfect, though. It's interesting. It was a World War II doctor who invented the way of taking these skin grafts, actually, they did it for burn victims in the war, and they invented some really, I don't know the word for it, but some tool that actually takes a micro thin layer of skin. So micro. I don't really have a scar on my leg anymore. It's amazing. It's almost like less than paper thin layers of skin. They take them off strips like this, and then they staple it into your foot to hold it on there. And then that's left on there for about, I think it was just about two weeks, actually. And then at the end of the two weeks in Costa Rica, I had to go under three general anesthetic surgeries in Costa Rica in a central american hospital by myself, by the way. My mom wanted to fly down. My dad wanted to fly down. I was like, you know what? I'm just sitting here, know, half out of just. So I just spent two weeks in there, and there was a second surgery where they go in and they checked it.

They had to go in and check it. And so I had to go under general just to take the bandages off because it's painful. And then the third general one was to go in and take the staples out and then medevac back to Toronto to Sunnybrook Burn Center, Sunnybrook Hospital Burn center, where I spent another ten days, and then for the next, essentially six months, Joe, I would have to go to a doctor three times a week to have my bandages changed because it's like, oozing.

Six months?

Yeah, it was about three times a week for the first two months and then it was like twice a week and then it was once a week. And they're also monitoring it for infection. Right. Because if you get an infection, then they have to amputate your foot. So it was basically six months of me just worried about losing my foot. You're saying, am I going to have one testicle and 1ft? Is this what's going on with me? So they didn't have to amputate my foot, fortunately. But it was pretty scary. Shit.

Holy shit, dude.

Anyways, and then it was kind of like limping for the next year and then now I'm kind of still a little wobbly, but it's pretty good. I actually found some photos of this and pulled them up because I thought you might ask when I told you about this.

Of course.

Now, the thing about this is, what's crazy is this is like, actually when it had healed, that's after it healed. This is maybe two months after I was back in Canada at this point. I have some better ones. Let's see. This is sort of healing up this. That's my mom. My mom at the healing up at the hospital. But, yeah.

Damn, son, you got fucked up.

Yeah, but it could have been worse, right? It could have been worse.

Yeah, you're alive, you're here.

Could have been worse. And you get this sense of. Almost like a sense of gratitude you get afterwards because you're like, I'm alive, I'm here. I still got my foot. And it's so strange how that happens because it's happened to me twice now in my life because I had testicular cancer when I was on MTV. And that's why I stopped the show. And I'd go to the hospital, they'd roommate took my right testicle, I still got the left one. Every things fine. And there's this moment where you're like, in both occasions, there's this moment where you're sort of traumatized by what's happening and angry about it and then it sort of almost instantly flips. It must be some sort of human self preservation kind of thing that's built into our way. Our minds work where you're now grateful that it's not worse. Oh, it's healing. I still have my foot. This is a learning experience. I'm not going to do that again.

Do you think that's wired into people. I think the opposite. I think that's a learned skill. I think that's something that you recognize as an intelligent person. Like, you know what? I should be thankful for what I have all the time, and we all should. It's really hard to be. You get so accustomed to the way your life is that you can't imagine if you were severely impaired, if something horrible happened.

It's like after I had cancer, sometimes it comes into my mind, like a little bit of a light bulb or a wave. Like, I'll think to myself if I'm having a slightly bad day, you know what I mean? And I don't, for whatever reason, it happens. Just sometimes when I'm out doing normal errands and I'm having a slightly bad day, I'm going to the gas station pumping gas or something. And then I think to myself, oh, man, at least I'm not in the hospital right now dealing with some crazy existential life and death thing. And so, yeah, maybe it is a learned thing because of what I've been through with that, because the same thing happened after I burned my foot. As soon as you're quickly, you go from, I can't believe this has happened. I'm angry. I've just ruined my vacation. I might lose my foot. This is horrible to. Okay, how are we going to get better? How are we going to make sure that I do everything to change the bandages on time and your whole life changes, right? I'm not thinking about all the things that I'm normally stressed about, whether it's work or relationships or whatever, things that are just normal, standard things that you're pissed off about.

And all of a sudden, you're just not even thinking about that anymore. I'm just thinking about making sure I don't get an infection on my foot. And you're sort of treating it like a military operation, trying to save your foot or trying to make sure that you make the right choices in your cancer treatment. And then when you come out of it, this is true, it's possibly a learned thing, you come out of it and you realize, oh, all that shit that I'm normally worried about doesn't matter compared to what I just went through. And then you can kind of maybe learn from that. And then as time passes, you slip back into the same routine. You start stressing out about the same things again. But then every once in a while, it pops into your head and go, at least I'm not dealing with, the foot's healed, and I'm outside right now, and everything's good. I'm walking, I'm talking, I'm alive. So gratitude.

Gratitude. It's also people need to experience a certain amount of discomfort.

In order to.

Appreciate not having that. It's just the way we're wired. For whatever reason, I choose voluntary discomfort. I do shit like cold plunges and saunas and hard workouts, and I think it's a viable strategy. I think it really works. I think if you can force yourself to do difficult things, like a difficult workout, a difficult yoga class, cold plunges, saunas, that kind of shit, your regular life will be less stressful.

Yeah.

You'll be able to deal with. These were seemingly high stress situations. They will seem less stressful because you're doing voluntary stress all the time, and you prepare yourself for difficult things. When you don't prepare yourself for difficult things, you can get caught up in just traffic being something that blows your mind, you can't handle anymore.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I see you doing those cold plunges, and I haven't done that yet, but people do that in lakes and stuff near me.

Awesome.

I want to do that.

Get a sauna, put it right by your lake.

Yeah, I want to do that. I want to get.

That lake's cold as fuck in the winter.

Yeah, I was playing hockey on it a few weeks ago. Yeah. Just out there shooting some pucks in the net so I can pluck and skate again. I did the first year I didn't skate.

Get yourself one of them little wood powered saunas.

Yeah.

You could use it with firewood. You don't have to have anything. Electricity rigged up out there. They make a bunch of those.

You can get.

Throw some wood in there. Get that bitch. Hot as fuck. Get a chainsaw, cut a hole in the ice.

Yeah.

Make sure you don't drown.

I am going to do that because I'm not sure how. I mean, I haven't done a cold plunge. I can tell you that. I do like the cold. Like, we sort of touched on that earlier. When you just go outside into. Sometimes Canadians complain about the cold who live in the city, but when you live in the country, it's different. The city winter sucks because they put salt on the roads and you're basically running from your house to your car. But in the country, when you go outside and nature and you walk into the woods, there's no bugs, there's no mud, everything's frozen. You can go places you can't go in the summer. In the winter, you can walk across lakes, you can walk, like, across huge lakes to islands that are over there with warm bath and Canada goose jacket on.

Walking across lakes that I don't like.

Oh, yeah. I kind of was thinking to myself, I was going to say it's sort of like a cold plunge, except it's just, you just go outside as a cold plunge. Sometimes it's like you do get a dopamine rush, right, just from being outside. I've actually noticed that in warmer climates, sometimes I'm a bit more lethargic. But when the winter comes, it's like, okay, go outside. It's like you feel it. You feel that.

Well, Letterman used to always have a studio really cold. You want people to be warm and.

Yeah, a little cold or a little keeps the comedy fresh.

But there's something about walking across a lake that is just, like, at any moment now. Let's get you a break.

Oh, no.

Well, because, you know, I know you can't. I went ice fishing last year.

Yeah, I get it now. People make mistakes all the time. They go. They wait too long, and it's a spring, and they drive the truck out on it and it goes through the ice. But if you're properly advised by people that know what they're doing, like the people that some of my friends out there do a lot of ice fishing, they tell you, okay, the other thing you can do is, like, when I was playing hockey on the lake this year, you just stay close to the shore. So you go, okay, well, if I fall through, it's only 2ft deep or 3ft deep here, so you won't actually be sucked away under the ice, but walking across in the middle. Yeah, you have a little bit more dangerous out in the middle there.

But you've seen the video of the russian woman who jumps into the river.

Oh, yeah.

So horrible.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

They cut a hole in the ice, and she doesn't realize it's a raging river underneath it, and she just gets sucked under.

And I heard that just happened recently in the states, too. A woman's dog or something went in after.

Oh, God damn it. That's fucking terrifying. The idea of being trapped under the ice.

There's another one of a guy who. They cut two holes, and they try to swim from one to the other, and the ice is clear. And you see him under there. You see him get disoriented, and then you see him trying to find his way back to the other hole. And then he does eventually find his way. But there's this sort of moment of panic where his friends are up on top and they're banging on the ice and they're trying to say, no, no, this way, this way. You can see his body panicking. You can see him sort of feeling.

And when you panic, you lose oxygen. Your heart rate goes up. It's like, not good. Not easy to keep.

There's the guy. There it is right there.

I don't want to see this, man. Stop it, Jamie.

I remember the first time I saw the concept of falling through the ice in the winter was that. Remember that movie never cry Wolf? You ever seen that movie? That was a good movie. Look at this. Yeah. And this is real. They're trying to say, this way, this way. And then he goes back, all the way back. He goes all the way. Yeah, the music even makes it.

What is he doing?

Yeah, they had a rope. He found the rope.

Is he going to make it?

Yeah, he ends up making it, but, yeah, there you go. So I think you want a cold plunge in the lake closer to shore, bro.

Fuck what that is. Whatever that is. Fuck what that is. Jesus, he was so close, right?

Yeah.

He was like a foot away from the hole and he couldn't tell. That's nuts, man.

You ever see that movie never cry wolf from the. About a guy that goes up to the Arctic to study wolves, and then he ends up befriending them. And Brian Dennehy plays the evil trapper.

And it was one of that movie.

Yeah, it was a great movie. It was based on this canadian novel, Farley Moet novel called never cry Wolf. Yeah.

Did the wolves really make friends with him in real life? So he goes up the novel. It's a novel.

It's a true story. He goes up to. About a scientist who goes up to study these wolves, and it's just sort of man versus nature kind of story. We ended up becoming a Disney movie, but he ends up running out of food. His food gets dropped off in the wrong place or something like that. So he ends up sort of seeing the wolves eating mice. So then he ends up. The big scene probably inspired some of my work later in life. He starts eating mice off crackers and stuff like that. And it was a big, oh, gross out. So he needs the mice off the crackers. But then he ends up falling through the ice at one point walking across a lake. And there's a scene like that. And it's one of those back in the 80s pre CGI movies where you just sort of remember you had to come up with actual scenes where something relatable and shocking happens that you can actually really grips you.

Yeah.

Then Brian Dennehy shows up and, well. Kills the wolves. Kills the wolves. And it's very sad. And that's the end of the movie, so you don't have to watch it anymore.

Well, at one point in time, people did have to have become friends with wolves because that's where dogs came from. So when wolves came around the campfires, there must have been some curious wolves, and there must have been some generous hunters who threw them a bone or threw them some meat. And that's how dogs got made. The bitch ass wolves. Like, oh, I'm happy to be your friend. I really want to hunt deer.

Yeah, why not? They're cooking some nice wooly mammoth steaks here. I think that smells better than the leaves we're eating.

Incredible.

Yeah.

Especially with a wolf nose. I'll get up.

Oh, my God.

So we've made friends with them, and that's where Charlie comes from.

Charlie comes from a was. Yeah. I've watched some of your episodes where you talk about wolves, because I'm really finding myself interested. This is. I hear them at night. Like, at, like, not every night, but what's up, Charlie? You hear them howling and she goes crazy. So in the house at night, you.

Hear them because they'll eat her.

And so she'll hear them from in the house at night. I don't hear them, but all of a sudden, this happens three times a week. She starts running around the house barking, barking, barking. And then we go out in the porch and you hear them howling in the distance. This summer, and I know this happened to you. I had chickens. I got chickens. I got chickens in June as well. I had six chickens and eggs. I'm getting eggs from my chickens, and I've eaten a lot of eggs now, eating a lot of eggs. And they free range. Right. So it's not fenced in. Right. But the woods are sort of. There's a pond, and their woods are on the other side of the pond, and it's kind of a pasture on one side. So, debatably, the wolves and the coyotes don't come right up to near the barns where the chickens are. Right. So I let them free range. So in the morning, I get up and I let the chickens out, and then they spend the day walking around on the lawn and the grass and sort of more closer to the house area.

And this was great. All summer, it was great. I named them loretta, patsy, shania, Dolly, june and Anne. They're my girls. Gave them all female country singers names. And then I bonded with them in a way. Like, they're kind of sweet, actually.

Would take.

Sometimes I'd bring one in the house and hang out with it and play piano with it. And it was like, it's getting weird, but you could tell it was interested in the music. Like, there's an intelligence there that's no. I mean, I know chickens aren't known for being the most intelligent thing in the world, but you would see their wheels turning listening to the music. I kind of become attached to these chickens. I get a bit more comfortable with having them free range. They free ranged all summer, and they're great because they're eating all the bugs, and they're getting all the insects and stuff on the property around the house. So I drive into town one day, so I'm gone for 2 hours, and I come back, and I'm coming up the driveway, and it's just feathers, feathers, feathers, feathers, feathers. And there was one survivor, loretta survived. She was sort of. Funnily enough, there was one chicken that didn't hang out with other chickens all the time. And this one, loretta, I named her Loretta, and she was probably just somewhere else, but the spy just got killed by the coyotes, and I saw them on my security cameras, came right up to the house.

The thing is, you realize, and I realize this even more after talking to the wolf expert. They were watching the house from the woods, and they saw me leave, and they knew that there was nobody there. And they chose their moment. The wolves or the. I think it might have been coyotes that did the Chickens. They waited. Like, they waited for me. They knew my truck. They knew there was nobody there. And they said, one good thing to do if you leave is to play talk radio. Maybe they'll hear that. So they were watching, and they came, and they got five of them all at once, and chickens were gone. There was just feathers everywhere. It almost looked like a bomb had hit the chicken. It was like just a big circle of feathers, and there's five circles of feathers.

It's weird to come upon, right?

And so then I have this one chicken left, and this is actually kind of sad, too. It's funny, like, I literally cried because I was, like, so upset. And then my neighbors, who are farmers or buddies of mine, came over, and they were like, oh, look at the chicken feathers everywhere. And I. So is this normal for me to be crying about this? And I said, do farmers cry? They go, not over their dead. Like, I'm like a city guy here crying over my dead so then I got two more chickens to keep Loretta company. And this is kind of breaking news. As of yesterday, these two new chickens came and they hung out with Loretta for the next since, I don't know, August. And then, well, this is a downer. But yesterday I got a call and the two chickens killed Loretta, the one that was from the different flock.

Really?

They pecked her to death last night or two nights ago. In the middle of the night. Yeah, that's a downer. But anyway, so now you're like, okay, so I got these two chickens. Fucking murderer chickens. And I'm planning to get more chickens in the spring, so I'm going to get rid of the two chickens.

Yeah, you have to start from scratch.

Start from scratch. Because I can't keep these new chickens around.

They're fucking murderers.

Yeah, that's crazy. And they're like, hi, I'm your friend. Like, no, you're not.

You killed my other friend.

Exactly. And they were friends for the. Well, they were all together for the last.

You know what you're supposed to do.

I know. Yeah.

Put them in the oven.

Yeah. It's not like I'm going to rehome them. Hey, would you like these two murderers?

You don't want to rehabilitate them either.

Put them on the grill. Yeah, I was told you hang them upside down, just hold them upside down for a while, and they kind of black out, and then you can.

Don't you want to get revenge for Loretta?

It's a strange. Well, you know what? Here's an interesting thing about revenge, because I've been thinking about. Well, I was thinking about revenge with the coyotes. And so here's the thing. That's a very sort of odd thing. I love the coyotes. I love the wolves. Like, I love them. I love hearing them at night and I love seeing them. And I've photographed them. I've had many moments where I've been engaged in a standoff with them. I've filmed it. And so I kind of was really mad for a minute, and then I thought, well, you know what? I think I like the coyotes more than the chickens, to be honest with you. So I'm just going to kind of figure out a way to kind of control the situation. But also, watching your show with. I forget who it was, but it was an expert in this area and talking to people. Apparently, if you try to. Again, this is all theory, but apparently, if you try to completely control the population of coyotes, it just makes more coyotes. Yeah.

Stan Flores. Yeah, he wrote a book called Coyote America.

That's right. He was one talking about that where the coyote, actually the female coyote has more pups. Yeah, but that was what I was.

Talking about earlier, where they were prosecuted by the, or persecuted by the gray wolves. Because gray wolves and coyotes don't mix. So when the gray wolves would kill the coyotes, the coyotes would expand their range and then they would repopulate new areas where the gray wolves weren't. And the way they would find out how many coyotes are around, they call.

Out to each other. That's right. It was on the show that I.

Heard that when someone is not responding, the female starts to panic and have more pups.

Yeah, that's pretty wild. And that's why they spread all across.

During the whole country. They're in every city in the United States of America.

They're in the cities. Yep.

Yeah, they're everywhere. Every single state has coyotes. Yeah, it's pretty nuts, but I love them too. I think they're awesome. I definitely wanted to kill them after they killed my chickens. Yeah, but that's also, it's like I'm not in the country either, bitch. I'm in a fucking suburb. This is ridiculous, right?

Yeah.

You don't want little small wolves in the know, but they're everywhere in LA. Coyotes are downtown. They're everywhere. They're all over the place. In Los Angeles, they're just little wolves.

Yeah, I remember they used to come up to my place at the place in LA that we did the web show. Coyotes were a lot of coyotes around. I saw bobcat on that street once.

Those are cool. Those are cool to see, right?

Yeah, I was pretty stupid actually, when I was there because I first saw the coyotes and I had this idea. Oh, I like the coyotes. And when I go grocery shopping, I'd buy some chicken gizzards and I'd throw them on the hillside. And then they really started coming around, so I stopped doing that.

Yeah, duh. You can't feed coyotes. I'm sure a lot of people in Hollywood do, though. I'm sure they feed deer. I'm sure they feed coyotes. Yeah, I know people in my neighborhood feed deer. People love having deer around. Yeah, I know a guy's got, not in my neighborhood, but he's got like 20 pieces of 20 acres of land and he's got at least two feeders. So like at every day at 05:00 p.m. He could look out of his window and see deer because they're there to get fed.

Yeah, it's beautiful. You been hunting lately?

Not lately. No.

Planning on going out again or come to Canada? Come hunt in Canada.

I've been there before.

I've wanted to.

Your government seriously worries.

Come, come up.

It really does.

Run for prime minister. Let's change. Come up. Run for prime minister. You can do. It'd be amazing. It'd be amazing.

How do you say his name again?

Poliev. Poliev.

Poliev. Pierre Poliev.

Sorry Pierre, but no. The people would love to have you up there. Not everybody, but a lot of people would love to have you up there. You know what?

People with blue hair up there, they don't want nothing to do with me.

Yeah, no, but I mean, I think I want you to know that you are loved by so many up there. And then it's people. Canadians.

They're awesome. I've always said Canada has 20% less douchebags.

Yeah, it's just very similar to what it's like here with the division. It's the same division, same issues, same bullshit.

Stop it. It's not just the same divisions and the same bullshit. That's true too, but that's also a ploy that's being used to separate ourselves.

Why?

They enact more control. And that's what's scary. That's what's scary. It's like the underlying mechanism. What's actually happening behind the scenes? Well, they're trying to clamp down and control the population. That's scary. They're trying to clamp down and control the information the population gets. That's fucking scary.

Yeah, because that doesn't ever come back.

Once they get that power, they don't give it back to the people. Never happens. So you got to fight to stop that from happening. You can't let them decide what you can and can't do because they're just people.

I mean there would be outrage in Canada if your show got banned, if got blocked. Because people. Everybody watches your just. It's like here, everybody watches your show. Everybody loves your show. It would be political. It would be political suicide.

It could happen though. It could happen. Especially if there's some new Covid type thing happens. And I have contrary experts on, I have people on that are like Robert Malone, the guy that they maligned and said it was a conspiracy theorist and that he wasn't a qualified expert to talk about the subject. Even though he's vaccine injured himself. Even though he owns nine patents on the creation of mrna vaccine technology. I mean he's a legitimate scientist that worked on that technology.

I think the canadian public values, freedom of expression and speech.

Right. But the canadian government doesn't. That's the problem.

Again, they haven't passed that law.

But the thing is, if they do, and there's calls to do it right now in America, there's also calls to do it from the World Health Organization to try to put a kibosh on any information that doesn't jive with what they're saying. In the case of another situation, another pandemic or another. I mean, Google released that thing where they were saying that they had some new regulations that would be put in place in cases of a special event or anything of extreme social or political, some thing where they're going to be able to stop air quotes, misinformation. That's fucking terrifying because oftentimes that information turns out to be correct.

I love your approach to it and your stand up, your new stand up. It's hilarious. I won't say it, obviously, but it's hilarious because it's very self reflective too. And I just thought it was just amazing because I won't say it. I don't want to say it because obviously you got your show coming up. But I thought it was even people that may think they disagree with you on some subjects probably are going to really find it quite pointed the way you address the issue in your stand up set. I thought it was awesome. It was hilarious. Yeah.

Thank you.

Thanks. Amazing.

Well, it's obviously something on everybody's mind. We're in a weird, pivotal moment where technology and our awareness of corruption is all meeting in this battleground in the middle of the fucking field, like Braveheart. Like, that's what's scary. What's scary is these two things are colliding, and I don't know which one's going to win because we could turn into a dictatorship. We could, we could turn into something that's closer to a dictatorship and then something that's closer still and continue to go down that line, especially if there's some need to clamp down on society because something happened, whether it's a solar flare or whether it's a terrorist attack or whether it's just flat out war. That's all they would need. All they would need is some reason why they need to completely clamp down on your ability to express yourself, platform's ability to distribute information that's contrary to what they're saying. Any of those things, anything that they can do to stop that, to put a clamp down on people, disrupting the narrative that they're trying to distribute.

It's wild. That Covid was essentially one of the catalysts that got me to leave the city. And it started with the van. I got the van, and I'm out in the remote desert, and I'm loving it out there. And it was my bug out van. I mean, I probably could have survived in that van with a solar power battery system and my food. I freeze dried meals, ready to eat, camping food, boil water and pour it in the bag, and it's lasagna. This is amazing. I could have probably spent months out there without even having to go anywhere. And you start to go, hey, this is kind of cool. Like, I'm self sufficient out here. I've got 26 gallons.

Get lonely.

Well, I would drive out to a cool place for three or four days, and then I'd go to another location.

So you'd go and hang with people?

No, I wasn't. I was just doing this sort of isolation. I was really actually kind of getting into videography again. I shot this video in Sony, a seven s three, but I've started getting back into cameras.

Right, but you weren't around any people. Well, when you went to cool places, did you go hang around people?

No, I was just alone. Yeah. And it was just Charlie and I, we made this sort, know.

How long did you go without being around any people?

Well, because then I would go.

Because when you came here, the last.

Time you did the podcast, I had.

The distinct impression of a man who just got rescued from an island. Yeah, it was Tom Hanks. You had the fucking volleyball.

Yeah, it was like that.

You seem a little mad.

It was somewhat of a creative experiment as mixed with real paranoia as well, because I think sometimes, like I said, I got testicular cancer. How the fuck did that happen to me? So I'm just like, okay, everything bad. If this is happening, it's going to be bad, so it's going to be bad to me.

So how long did you go without being in contact with any other people?

Well, so I still had my house in LA, so I hadn't sold my house yet, so I had this van. So I would drive out in the desert for a couple of weeks and basically go on a camping trip, and then I'd go back home.

Were you around people when you were back home?

So it was still that people would come over, we'd hang out outside. It was that kind of whole thing for the first few weeks, or whatever. Was it? Remember, it was a couple of months, cover your mouth.

And then you'd all run outside hold your breath.

Yeah, kind of just hang outside for a couple of months, go to the dog park and see people there and stuff like that. It was that initial stage where. You weren't in LA then. No. So it was wild.

I was in LA.

Were you in LA at the beginning of. Right, because I did. Came on your show in LA when it was. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And the second time I came on your show was. Remember how they were like.

You're avoiding the question.

Remember how there were military helicopters going over.

You're avoiding my question. How long did you go without being around people?

Maybe a couple of months or something like that.

How many months?

A couple is two, a few is three or more. Maybe it was three. Yeah.

You sure it wasn't more?

Well, then I started doing the van thing, so there was nobody where I was going anyway, so I had an excuse.

Right. I was on a camping, still being with no people. How long were you with no people then?

Yeah, I mean, it was a few months for sure, but I wasn't told.

How many months do you think you spent of that year without being around people?

Well, first of all, one thing that's interesting about it, as I happened to be single.

Are you a lawyer? The way you're answering these questions are like a goddamn lawyer.

Well, it is a bit embarrassing, I guess, to think that I was.

No.

Isolated, but I also found it kind of fun.

Right, but how long?

It was about three or four months or something like that.

But then the van. Around people then, too? No, but that was isolation, too.

Yeah, but that was more like I was enjoying going out into nature by myself.

But you were still by yourself with no people for how long?

But I'd go for a couple of weeks and I'd go back to LA and I'd be in LA and you'd be around people? I'd recharge a bit. I'd be around people a little bit, and then I'd go back out again. And then as things died down as they did, I started being around people like everybody else.

I couldn't imagine going months without being around people.

Well, the thing that was weird about it was I'm not married, I was single. I didn't have a girlfriend at the time, so I actually.

No responsibility. True freedom.

That's what made it weird, was I could imagine if I had a girlfriend at the time. We just said, okay, we're going to isolate together, and now you're just with your significant other here. I was, okay, I'm going to isolate, and I don't have a significant other at the time. So it was like actually the first time where I've ever had this sort of self imposed or whatever. Maybe it was imposed on us. I took it as an opportunity to be by myself and go out and make videos in the desert and go to these really crazy remote places. And I would seek out places where there wasn't going to be other vans and other people. But when you were out in the desert, a lot of times you'd go to somewhere and there'd be other people out in their vans. You'd hang out and have beers with people out in the desert and hang out, and then you'd go think of a more remote place. And I started discovering some amazing places, like the rabbit hole you go down when you Covid aside, isolation aside, just going out into the american southwest in a campervan that's self sufficient is pretty wild.

The stuff that's out mean. I think I probably talked about Chaco Canyon the last time I was here because I think I'd just gone there. In New Mexico, which is pueblo, native american ruins of. It's essentially like a stone ruins of a city that was built in the year 875. 875. And it's like Machu Picchu level type city that they didn't even discover until the 1950s because it was buried. And it's in this beautiful. It's on the navajo nation reserve on the navajo land. And you feel this sort of. I felt sort of somewhat shocked, I guess, that there's all this stuff out there that you don't really hear. Talked about constantly. Like I hear about Machu Picchu, somebody brings that up once a week. Nobody's ever brought up.

Who are you talking to? Brings up Machu Picchu once a week?

I don't know. It comes up a lot. People talk. It was probably you, I think you talk about pyramids.

I rarely talk about the pyramid, you.

Know, talk about the pyramids a lot. Right. Talk about the pyramids.

Machu Picchu is pretty crazy.

Talking about ancient cultures that have built these incredible structures. Right. And right here in New Mexico, just up the road from here, like eleven hour drive from here, right. Just outside of Albuquerque, Navajo Nation. It's a huge canyon, completely empty, no one there. And so it's this realization that there was a civilization there that was. And they've studied this place quite extensively, in fact. Mike Judge, you know, from Beavis and Butthead.

Sure.

His father, Mike Judge, grew up in New Mexico. I found this out after the fact. So I started looking up information about Chaco Canyon to try to learn a bit more about it. And his father, James Judge is his name, was one of the predominant researchers of this particular archeological site. Right.

Oh, wow.

And so he wrote this book about it and he spent his life diving into details.

Yeah, that's fucking cool.

Yeah. So I spent a day there and.

There was no one there with you?

I was there with Charlie.

Yeah, just you and Charlie?

Just me and Charlie. And shot. I shot video. There's video on my YouTube channel too. I was doing all this for my YouTube channel. I was really getting to the filmmaking side of know I had my drone. I was going out and filming stuff in all these.

Isn't it crazy? You're just allowed to walk around there?

Yeah, it's wild. And see the bottom left? See that sort of structure there? So that was a five story building at one point. And you can go walking through there and there's wood that they've used as beams that's still, like, within the. Within the petrified wood or whatever. It's within the stone and it's wood from the year 875 to 100. The people left there in 1100 because of a drought. Like they were gone before Columbus. Right. See the wood there? That's from eight, you know, between 875 and 1175. Whenever that was particularly built, this area, they've done all these studies of this area, so they know they found macaw feathers. Speaking of my old pal Rex, they found macaw feathers there. Now, macaws are from. The furthest north is Yucatan peninsula, Mexico. So they knew that people were coming from Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico Peninsula, Mexico, up here to trade with them. And they found evidence of all these different things that sort of indicated that people were coming from as far north as Canada, as far south as South America to come to this area. And that whole Chaco canyon area, once you get in there, is like this.

Not to get all voodoo about it, but when people talk about Sedona and there's the energy there, you feel this sort of. And it may be just because it's so beautiful and it's so quiet and it's this natural kind of amphitheater where it's silent and the wind is deadened and you're just all alone and you're walking through this structure. I share the fascination that you have for the pyramids. I want to go there someday. I think it would be one of them. If I could snap my fingers right now and just be somewhere, it would be the pyramids. I'd like to go the pyramids someday. I've never been there. So here's me walking through it with my camera. And so you're walking through this by yourself and you're just going like, wow, there was all this stuff going on here. And apparently they've determined this was like a meeting place for people from all over North America that would kind of come here and share information. They actually believe that there know, sort of almost like a festival type atmosphere that would happen there where people would come and trade and share information and all this stuff.

Are there similar native american construction sites like this?

Yeah. So then you go down this rabbit hole and you realize that they're all over the place. So then there's many of them. There's these ones called the cliff dwellings, which are. This one here is actually later. That's post colombian. This one, this was a Spanish probably. I think this one's built around 1500.

This was a similar construction.

Yeah, exactly. It's amazing, right? When you look at it, like, oh, they were building stuff in 800 before Europeans had come here using the same kind of building techniques as that. And it's weird when you're there and you're touching it and it's, like, solid and you're going, wow, that's actually. So they've got these cliff dwellings. There's lots of them where they've built into the cliffs of Colorado. Yeah, those are cliff dwellings. I went to one of those ones. There's one that's called the Gila or Gila National Forest. New Mexico. Yeah, it's up on the border. It's up in New Mexico, I think. Yeah. And that's a wild story there because it's a national park.

Wow.

So you go walk around there and that one. There are a couple of people walking around. They drive down. There's people walking.

Did they dig these caves or. These caves always exist?

They're natural caves that they've kind of sort of utilized. They built the walls up around the bottom of it. Yeah.

They've done something to it. Right.

And so this place is wild. And the stories you pick up when you go to these places, because then you go down the rabbit hole, you start reading about it and you go, wow, I never knew about this. No American had ever been there until the mid 18 hundreds because it was Apache territory. And if you went there, the Apache would kill you before 18, whatever it was. I forget the date, but it was like in the 17 hundreds, early 18 hundreds. Look at the writings and this place. I haven't been to this place yet, but I want to go here. Yeah, you talk about, like, when you start thinking about ufos and stuff, you look at some of these petroglyphs and you go, what's that? There's a lot of petroglyphs out there, too. That looks kind of like a spaceship or something. That's honestly the real reason I was out there in the van by myself so long was because I got addicted to it. And that's actually kind of why I ended up moving. I was like, I love being out here alone by myself with my van and my camera so much.

I want to live in the country again. And how'd you find the spot in Canada? I got kind of lucky. I just honestly just started looking on the Internet, just, like, looking at real estate listings, and I just started looking for a farm near my hometown. And I just kept looking and searching every day, and I was lucky that it just kind of fell on my lap right at the right place, right time. My house sold in LA immediately, and I drove back and that place, I put in an offer and I got it. And it's just all worked out. And it all worked out.

And how long you been out there now?

Be coming up on three years in July.

It looks like you're having fun. The videos of you online are very interesting. I'm like, look at Tom Green.

I'm enjoying it.

Living in the woods by himself, it's.

Like, there's a lot to do. That is stuff that falls outside of anything that would fall under the category of what I would consider to be work. Right? But it is work, but it's different work. It's like, I got to feed the chickens or we built a fence this year for the mule and the donkey. So it's this patent rail fence that is made out of cedar. That is literally these 100 year old cedar rail fences that are on the property that have fallen down in the woods and have gone by not used anymore. And we went back with a fence builder, and everybody out there is in the country, a guy whose family is traditional fence builders, whose grandfather built these fences. We went and salvaged all this wood and then built new fences out of them. Oh, that's cool. It's nice to find something to do that is a. You're outside, you're getting exercise.

You feel like you're actually doing something.

You feel like you're doing something. And it's the first time I said this earlier, I'm never going to leave this place. It's the first time I've ever lived somewhere where I know I'm never going to sell it and leave. So every step of my life, like everyone, as you're growing up, you get your first apartment. You're going, how long am I going to be here? Till I move here. How long I be here? So now I'm just kind of like, now I just. In my head, I have like, oh, I'd like to maybe build a log cabin someday on the back woods. So that's sort of one thing I'm kind of thinking about, how I want to build a log cabin. Like, the way the house itself that I'm in was built in 1857, and it's a log house, so you can see the.

Do you have photos of the house?

Yeah, on my YouTube channel.

There's a tour of the house.

There's not a full tour, but I think if you can see some of the logs on the YouTube channel, I did a couple little sort of sample podcasts where you can see the wood in the background. That's fucking dope. This was last week.

A log house from the 18 hundreds of the wood burning stove behind you. That's amazing.

Yeah. And it's interesting. So you start to realize I'm doomsday prepping in the van. Like, oh, I could be self sufficient in this van. Well, and again, it's fun, but it's also kind of very functional. Like, I have unlimited fuel. Okay. Because there's wood falling in the forest forever. Every summer you can go out, and I've got a wood splitter, right? It's a gas powered wood splitter. And you chainsaw up the logs, you drop them in, the wood splitter, splits them, and it's sort of efficient way of getting firewood, basically, so they'll never run out of wood out there. The House has actually got propane sort of furnace as well. So it runs on propane. And the propane truck comes every. There's no natural gas or anything running into the house to heat it. So you have a propane truck comes every couple of months and fills up this propane tank in the winter. But if shit shit hits the fan and the propane truck doesn't show up, I can still heat the house fully with wood. There's two wood stoves.

Do you have solar?

I have solar. There's a solar system that was there, actually, but it doesn't actually. Not actually connected to the house, but it's connected to the grid, and it's actually selling energy back to the power company.

But not to you.

Not to me. No.

What kind of scam is that?

Well, it's paying me. It pays me.

Pays you to not be self sufficient, to not be connected.

Well, if shit hits the fan, I can unhook it and plug it into the lights. Yeah, I could. And I actually know I have lots of solar though, outside of that system. The van has solar panels on the roof and there's.

That's for electronics.

It's for electronics, yeah. You can't really use solar for heat. I've learned all this from the van. So I work with these guys who've been really cool. Battleborn batteries they're called. And they make these batteries, lithium batteries, right. They make them for boats. They make them for now off grid houses. And so I have like a couple of bunkies, like one I built and one that we kind of set up. It's like a prefabricated building that we put back in the woods with a wood stove in it. And this trailer that I have solar panels on, that butterfly out that I can take anywhere on the property which has these battleborn batteries in it. It's constantly charging. So I do have some solar and the barn as well. So the barn I have and these guys helped me set this up. It's really cool. I jokingly say the podcast that I'm going to do in the barn is going to be. I'm sure it isn't, but I'm saying it's the first solar powered barn cast. Okay. Might be, maybe, I don't know if there's one because the Barn has no power running to it. It's off grid, but it's 200 yards from the house.

But we've up in the loft got this battery lithium battery array, solar panels that charge the batteries. And then up in there I can run all my cameras, lights.

Oh wow.

Everything.

Don't the batteries degrade on those things like solar panels?

So lithium batteries have a really good life to them, but they eventually degrade. Yeah, it might be ten years or something like that. I'm not sure. But that's the lithium batteries as kind of newer tech. That was the thing that kind of when Covid happened, I want to get a van and go in the desert. So then I figured out who was making these vans and then I found out about the battery systems and I was like, oh, you just have a regular plug in the van. You can plug in your camera and charge your camera batteries. You can run your laptop, you can charge your phone indefinitely. And spending so many years of my life running around making goofy videos when we were doing the Tom green show and stuff. You'd go on the road and then you have to go back to the hotel at night to charge your camera batteries. Right. The idea that you can go into the middle of desert and just film indefinitely and charge your camera batteries because the sun is recharging these batteries constantly. It was dope. I built a recording studio in the van. I was making music and beats out there and just kind of getting into it.

How long did it take before you felt comfortable around people again?

I was ready to get around people again, pretty much. It's funny, after I came on the show last time and we talked about this, there's a general perception in the world all of a sudden that I was living in my van, okay? Which I wasn't actually living.

I might have been responsible for that perception.

No, it was hilarious, people, oh, I heard you're living in a van now. People would say to me, I'm like, no, I'm not living in a van. I'm going camping and making videos in the desert.

But you were living in a van.

Yeah.

You just had the ability to live in a very nice house.

Exactly.

I wasn't actually like, you're a loser.

No. It was funny, though. Sometimes you think you are and you go, am I a loser? But people would sort of say it to me like they're sad. Like they were sad. Oh, I heard you're living in a van.

Most people don't live in a van on.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it was kind of like the Chris Farley sketch. I'm living in the van down by the river. And it was funny. Mean again, the power of social media and the size of your know, it permeated out there pretty big. That pretty much everybody I meet thinks I'm living in a van down by the river now.

Well, that's like how we describe Hans Kim. Hans Kim used to be living in a van. Like, look at him. Know. No one goes know Tom green to living in a van unless things have gone horribly wrong. Except you. You did it on purpose.

And it was really driven by the fact that this power system allows me to go make videos in weird places and stay like these places. Chocolate canyon. It's not easy to get there. I mean, it's easy enough. I mean, it's two and a half hours out of maybe. No, maybe it was more than that. Out of Albuquerque. I forget the distance, but it was quite the drive. And you're driving through. It's not on a direct route to anything. And then once you get to the perimeter of it. Really bad dirt road that you got to go down. It's not maintained properly. I suspect that in some ways it almost feels suspicious that. Do they want to keep people out of here for some reason? Why is this not talked about more? I mean, I sort of discussed this a little bit on the video. It seems strange that it's not more celebrated by our society that there's stuff out there like that. It's incredible and amazing and beautiful.

It doesn't have a good publicist. That's all it is.

Yeah.

Because there's certain things that have. Like Machu Picchu is a great publicist.

Yeah. I think it forces people to confront the idea that what happened to the native Americans in this country, too, and in North America and Canada, we weren't that nice to them, were we? So it makes us have to think about what happened.

But you were just saying that that place was abandoned in the eleven hundreds.

Yeah, exactly.

That has nothing to do with.

Sure. But just in general, just talking about pre european. Not now. Right. But I think there was probably a period of time when they were settling Europeans. Not just America. Canada, too. Right. Settling North America, where they didn't really want to acknowledge that there was civilization here before. It was more like they were.

Eminent domain. Yeah. They were trying to claim it. Yeah, for sure. I think there's definitely that. There's a guilt attached to the way people feel about Native Americans and also just the understanding of what a reservation is. You pushed them into this area. That sucks. And forced them to live there. And all of their traditional land is gone. It's all been absorbed by these people that just got here a couple of hundred years ago, which is nuts. It's so hard to imagine how different this place we're sitting in right now was just 200 years ago.

Yeah.

I mean, they find these all over the place. A friend of mine has.

Oh, man.

A ranch out.

Oh, wow.

That's a real Comanche arrowhead. That's a big one, too. That's probably something they used to shoot a large animal with.

Wow.

That's probably elk. They had elk out here. They used to have elk. Were in, like, most states. They had always a lot of deer out here. A lot of different animals. But that's a big ass arrow.

Yeah. See, and it's like.

Because there's some small ones, too, that they find. Just find real tiny ones they might have used for, like, small game birds and things like that. But that's a big fucker.

See, personally, the second I touched this, I felt sort of a sense of kind of shivers.

Wild, right?

Yeah, I feel like. And maybe it's my mind just thinking about the history of it. But people talk about energy, and I was like, is it. I used to hear people say when they go to Sedona, the energy there is amazing. And I'm like, what are you talking about? The energy. Right. But then when you go to these places, is it because you're just alone and you're relaxed and you're thinking about it so much, but it's like you touch this and you go, you think somebody actually carved this? Somebody made this. And then they survived with this, like, however many thousand years ago or whatever, and you go, whoa, that's incredible.

They mapped that thing and made it sharp. And they did all these crazy techniques that they had learned how to make these fucking things. And then they hunted with it. And these people lived here forever. Until these Europeans just came in like a wave of locusts.

Yeah. The battery system allows you the van and the self sufficiency of it. Because normally, if you drove there, let's say you drive 6 hours to get somewhere. Right?

Right.

And then the sun's going down and there's no hotels nearby, and so you got to camp in a tent or something. So then it's, like, not comfortable, and.

You'Re in your van.

Yeah. So now you can drive there and stay for a while. And then it's like you just have.

To make sure you have gas and water.

Yeah. It's a different experience. Because now you're waking up to the sunrise over that and making coffee by yourself.

Thank God you didn't run into, like, the Manson family or something out there.

I had a few moments of wacky people. I had a few moments of. I don't know if they were wacky people. But your mind starts telling you that you got to be careful. There was a moment out in the desert where I was all alone out there in a truck. This was on the mexican border, actually. And trucks coming from Mexico towards me. And there's signs out in the desert. When you get to this. This was actually on the Arizona Mexico border. This place called the Cabiza Prietta Wilderness area, which is a decommissioned section of the former Barry F. Goldwater Air force based test range. Where they would test bombs in World War II. Right. And it's, like, really beautiful. Like the cactuses you want. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I bet you that's a good one, too. I'm sure you wouldn't be smoking some wisher sweets or something like that. It's not a century, Sam. Or Phillies. Blunt. What are they?

It's a company called foundation cigars. They actually made us our own cigar. It's got a Jre logo on it.

Nice.

They're really good, though. I was skeptical like this company, but it's actually my man Nick from foundation. Really? No cigars. And the whole deal goes down to Nigeria.

Lighter as well?

Yes, sir. You know how it works. Push down on that black thing.

Yeah. There you go. Okay.

So what was the most sketchy of encounters while you're out there doing that van? Life.

Well, you got it.

You're lit. What was the sketchiest?

There was never anything where I actually was in danger. But there was the feeling of being in danger. Well, actually, it might have been in danger. It was definitely a feeling of being in danger.

So the van is coming up to you?

Yeah, it was like a truck.

Truck. You're in the van.

And I could write it off in my head if I'm trying to be positive. They were hunters, but they didn't necessarily look like hunters to me. They were not in hunting gear, but they all had guns. But they were rifles. They weren't like assault rifles. They were hunting rifles. And so they could have been hunting. There was four guys and they were.

Openly brandishing their rifles.

No, they were sitting, all four of them. This is what was weird. Four of them. They were probably hunters. You're probably going hunting. But they were sitting like this and they were sitting like this, and their rifles were standing. They were holding their rifles like that. So I kind of assumed that they were going around looking for a deer or something like that. But when you're all alone out there and you see a truck coming towards you and there's no one around, no one's going to hear anything, you get a little nervous. So I did get in the van, and I locked the door, and I'm in the van, I'm looking out of the van, and they pulled up by the van and they're looking at my van, and I see the guns in the van and I'm like, okay.

Are they speaking Spanish?

Well, they were, whatever, 50ft, 100ft away.

Just any words at all?

No, I was locked in the van, hiding. I was hiding in the van. Just turned 50 years old.

So they never got close to you?

No. Then they drove away. But there's a sort of 5 minutes of watching the truck get closer. And so you go to the Cabiza Prieta wilderness area, and it's along the Arizona Mexico border and you know what the border is? It's. There's a lot of human trafficking and drug smuggling going on there as well as immigration going on there and people coming across the border illegally and all this stuff. And so there was actually a sign when you drive in there that says, danger, human smuggling, drug smuggling, do not travel alone. Okay. So I still go because I'm with Charlie. Right. So I'm cool. But the sign, I got a picture of the signs. It was kind of interesting.

But it's also that sign on your instagram probably is.

Yeah, for sure it is. Yeah. If you scroll back to. Scroll back to whatever that was three years ago. Yeah, danger, human smuggling, drug smuggling, do not travel alone. Right. So I, of course, stupidly go out there and I'm camping out there for a week, but then you haven't seen anybody for five days and you're out there making videos and making ambient music, drinking beer. I have a fridge in there. I had a nice fridge in the van too. So I got beer, I got some whiskey. I'm just having a good time out there making music by myself and streaming. Not always, but sometimes you'd have, like, Internet, so you'd stream that was sort of a connection with the world. Streaming live from the middle of fucking nowhere. The world's so crazy now. And making beats in the middle of nowhere. That was this moment where you're going like, oh, maybe I shouldn't be here by myself. That moment was actually what kind of actually tell the story when I do stand up. So I'm trying not to make it a bit here because sometimes I don't want to do my bit, but I do kind of incorporate it into my stand up sometimes because I tell stories about this stuff.

But I ended up. It was what sort of spawned. I mean, I went back, that's. I went back to LA and I bought a gun the next day. I hadn't owned a gun since I was 21 years old. I had a 22 when I was like 20 or 24 years old, I had 22. Hadn't owned a gun the whole time I was in LA. But I was going out in the desert by myself, feeling vulnerable by myself out there.

Yeah.

So I went back to LA and.

I went to especially see four dudes with rifles.

Yeah. And so then I went back. Yeah, there it is.

Caution. Illegal entry. Drug smuggling activities are common within the refuge. Be aware of your surroundings, not travel alone or approach suspicious people or activities. Holy shit.

Yeah. Us Fish and Wildlife Service. This is probably department of the Interior. It's probably Bureau of Land Management land is a lot of the land out there too.

That's scary.

And you realize how big it, you know, it's one know, you hear this close to the cities where there's sapping going, but when you go to these remote areas, right. And you're just. Yeah, that's it. That was it. That was the week I was there. That was right when that happened.

There's just nothing out there.

So I went back to Burbank, went down to guns plus and picked up a 357 Magnum and a Benelli Monte feltro silver shotgun and got my hunting license and went quail hunting.

Why would you get a 357 Magnum? Six shots.

I got the seven shot. Oh, yeah. Because I thought that would be better to have one more. No, honestly, I honestly didn't really actually think about it. No, I did think about it. I didn't honestly think that I would ever have to use it, to be honest with you. I just like that gun. I just think it's a beautiful looking gun.

Well, it's better to have that gun than no gun.

Yeah. And I also thought, honestly though, I actually have another answer to you because I was going to lots of place with bears, and so I figured it would be good protection for bears too, because I was going up into the places in New Mexico where there's bears and I go hiking by myself, and you don't want to lug a shotgun around with you all the time. So I'd sometimes bring that in Arizona and stuff.

That's smart.

But also it's honestly just kind of. I don't know, it's just beautiful gun.

It is.

Yes.

It's classic.

Yeah, I love that gun.

Something about a revolver too.

Yeah.

Watch that wheel spin. Old timey style.

Yeah, absolutely. And there was sort of a sense of being out there on the range. I like classic looking guns. Now. I have lever action.

I've been collecting Henry Rifle.

I have a new Henry 22. But I've got a couple of vintage I got just picked up. Like I like getting sort of vintage. I've just five or six rifles and I've just sort of found myself quite interested in it. I've got an old savage 99. It's like the wood, the old gun wood on it. And it just feels like real. And all the newer stuff is more plastic and stuff.

A lot of carbon fiber.

Yeah. So I like them as wood.

You got to get you hunting up there.

I would love to.

Your own food.

I would love to go at some point with somebody that knows what they're doing. I have some friends that really want to take me out next year.

Oh, go with them.

Yeah.

Local guys.

Local guys. Yeah.

I bet you have a shit ton of deer up there.

Dude, there's a lot of deer at my place. Yeah, you can see them on my trail cam video.

With one deer, you eat it for three months.

Yeah. Fill the freezer. Fill the freezer with it.

One deer, you're eating it for months. Shoot elk, six months.

I see your elk on instagram, and I go, man, that looks good.

So much meat. So good, too. So good for you. I give it away. Give away to a lot of my friends.

Yeah, it looks good.

Such a good thing to have.

There's not a lot of elk near me. There are elk, but they're rare. Like, you don't see them in Ontario.

That's moose.

Yeah. I've seen a moose once near my place, but deer all the time. They're everywhere.

Well, listen, Tom Green, I'm super excited that you're at the comedy club, the comedy mothership, this weekend.

Honor to be there, man.

Always good to hang out with you and talk to you, and I can't thank you enough, because being on your show in 2007 really was a big part of the inspiration to do this. You were a pioneer, man. You had figured it out before anybody. You had a full Internet talk show running from your house. And when you had me as a guest on, it changed the course of my life because it really did. Because it really was like, I remember light bulbs just going off, man. Like, why don't I do this? I didn't have the money to do this.

You do now.

Laptop. It was like, the idea came out of you, man.

Well, I just think it's the coolest thing that you shout that out and say that to me, because I appreciate it, because when you came to do the show, I was stoked that you were coming. Do the show. I'm doing my little web show. And you came up and did the show.

We had done a couple of things already, right? Like, we did that celebrity pool show. Remember that?

Yeah, that was just kind of one of those.

That was fun.

Yeah, that was fun. Yeah.

And we did a bunch of stuff. I'd always seen you around, but there it is.

Yeah, bro.

It's like 2007. We were drinking beer. I was like, this guy's got it nailed. We're on the Internet. This is incredible. I was so happy. I was like, this is how to do it. Look how bad the video was back then. The kid is drinking with us online.

You know what's fun about that is that's Skype. We're taking calls on Skype. And so I had some real good guys working for me. I had my Jamie there. He was like, really?

You never had a Jamie, bitch.

Yeah, we were trying to build stuff.

You guys had a whole server room. I remember walking to your server room going, this is crazy. I feel like I'm at some big corporation where all these lights are going off, and I'm like, tom, this is wild.

So there's a microwave antenna on the roof of the house. So that was the way we were able to stream because back then, you had to get, like, bonded t one lines or something like that, which were expensive, right? I had a little bit of monetization. Not much.

But you were working with a company out of Denver.

Yeah, they were kind of the first people that I saw streaming, so I was like, how's that work? So I called them, and then. So we had a little, like, a very small budget, but enough to get those of. I'm not sure, actually. I don't know. I'm not sure. But they were interesting guys, and so I basically started with them, and then I went off on my own.

Well, listen, I'm glad you're going to do another one because you're a very compelling and interesting person, and you always have a really good perspective, and you've led a fucking wild ass life, and I appreciate you.

Thank you.

Thanks for being here, brother.

Thanks. Thank you.

And I think the shows are all sold out this weekend. Tough shit, motherfuckers. But sometimes, even if the club does sell out, we have a sign. Like a neon sign. There's tickets available. Now. What happens is sometimes people can't make it. Babysitter cancels. Who knows? But every now and then, even on sold out shows, there's tickets available. So if you go to the box office, maybe get lucky. Okay. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Tom Green. You're the fucking man. Oh, Instagram, what is it? Is it just Tom Green?

Yeah.

Tom green live.

Yeah. Go check out my YouTube channel. YouTube slash Tom Green put a lot of stuff up on there now, which is kind of a little. And then Tom Green on Instagram, Tom Green live on Twitter and x and all the spots. TikTok. I'm shooting a special, actually, I'm shooting a special for Amazon prime stand up special.

Where are you doing that at?

Well, I'm going to shoot it in Ottawa, but I'm also doing a tour in April, so I'm going to be in Cleveland. I'm going to be in Lexington, Kentucky, Louisville, Detroit, all over Michigan, helium in Philly, and a lot of the spots. So you can go check out my tour. And I'm going to film the whole tour, too. And I'm going to kind of cut.

It together into a bunch of nice.

Stand up, beautiful montage. So. Yeah, thanks.

I'm excited. I'm excited to see you this weekend. Okay, that's it.

Goodbye. Thank you.