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

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. What's happening, man? Good to see you.

Thank you for having me back.

My pleasure. How many times a day do you get bombarded by the whole Bill Burr thing?

When it gets into the family and people I haven't talked to for 20.

Years, then you have to break character and tell the truth.

No, you know, the thing is, this is what's crazy. Okay? You want the whole setup story? I could be quick. So where I take my podcast is in one of Howie Mandel's buildings, and he has another building in this area. So I was working on something, and I was supposed to go on Howie's show that day, and they said, howie will meet you out in the street or something for whatever reason. So I go out in the street, and the first thing Howie says to me when he sees me, he goes, here comes Bill Burr. And I go, you, too? Like, do you know this story? And he said, no, I don't know about it. And I said, you know what? Heck with it. I'm just going to tell it on your show, so don't ask me anymore. And I went on the show and I told this story about how 10 years ago, my stepmother came to me and said, do you know who Bill Burr is? I never heard of Bill. Didn't know who he was because I don't really consume much popular culture. I had no idea he was a famous comedian.

He could have been the lawnmower guy. Looked up Bill. First thing I saw was like, oh, my God, he looks just like Daddy. When I was 18 years old at an IHOP on my 18th birthday, my father told me, you have a half brother that I sired at the same time as you, whose name is Bill. So suddenly these facts come together of my mother telling me these stories. I talked to my dad subsequently about it, and he was very cagey about it. And when I said, why won't you tell me where this person is or who this person is? He said, I'm trying to protect you. So when my stepmother had told me, it kind of made sense, like, well, if my half brother is the super famous comedian, my dad, in a way wouldn't want me to know because he wouldn't want me to feel like I was number two because Bill's so famous. I know, it sounds crazy, right?

You think that's why he was trying to protect you?

Well, I don't know. So fast forward to how he's saying something on the street. So I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna say something and I swear to God, hand him heart. Last time I was with you in California, I almost pulled you aside after we were on and I was going to tell you the story because I knew you knew Bill, and I was going to back channel, see if there was anything to the story from Bill's side.

Wow.

So imagine, I think six or seven years since we talked on your show.

Yeah.

I don't know, 2018, somebody said to me today. But so anyway, sorry to talk over you, but the point is. So here I am, fast forward. I'm just sick of seeing memes of my face with Bills. And so I just decide on a spur of the moment, you know, so Howie, of course, loves it. But I said on, on Howie's show that first time, I don't think Bill's my half brother. I don't think. I don't think there's anything there other than a. Like an uncanny resemblance. Fast forward the thing comes out, it gets a little bit of social media and then it goes away. And I think, good. And Bill didn't say anything. So I figured Bill was kind of like, whatever it was a mild amusement, you know, he could have made a joke out of the whole thing and he didn't. So then Howie calls me and I'm in LA working recently, and how he's like, we come on the show, Bill's going to be on, and I said, is Bill cool with it? Oh, yeah, no problem. So then I go there and it's like it turns into this thing that you see happening on camera.

It's like, it's weirdness times. It's like a, like a, like a skit, but it's real. And Bill's on me, then Bill's on Howie and it gets just. Okay, So I just told you basically everything I know, okay. I have people I've known for 20, 30 years coming up to me going, what do you think? And I said, I don't, I don't. I don't think we're related. I mean, yeah, there's a resemblance, but I don't think we're related. Well, did you get a DNA test? And I'm like, no, I don't. There's nothing to get a DNA test for. Well, I think he's your brother. So people that know me and I'm telling him, I don't think he's my brother, now they want a DNA test to prove it. That's how much it's Taken on a lifestyle.

Do you think it's just because they want a DNA test? Because it's fun if he's your brother?

No, no, they're convinced.

For real? For real?

Yes. Really for real. I swear to God. I mean, people I'm close to, people that were at my wedding, I'm like, they like, no, you need a DNA test.

Did Bill's dad know? Well, did your dad know Bill's mom?

No, my father wouldn't talk to me about it at all. Okay, some more context.

Okay.

My stepmother, in that same time, 10 years ago, when she told me that she thought Bill Burr was my half brother. Jesus, this guy don't know. I mean, just imagine if I, hey, do you know Joe Polonski? And you look up and it's a famous comedian. That's, you know, I mean, that's. So in that same thing with my stepmother, she told me that she thought my father had sired 12 children.

Whoa.

You know, all over the place. All over the place. He was traveling musician and a whore to his own admittance, so it kind of makes sense. He once told me he'd slept with a thousand women. So 12 out of a thousand. You know what I mean?

Normal odds.

Yeah.

The math, actually pretty good.

Yeah. And so when I went to my father and I told him what my stepmother had said, he got really cagey and wouldn't tell me anything. He promised me that he would write down the names of the illegitimate children on a piece of paper so I could find them after he died.

Oh, my God.

And he died. He's died and there's no paper.

Oh, my God.

So now I got people wanting DNA tests because they're convinced that Bill is my head half brother.

Is Bill willing to do a DNA test?

I think that's ridiculous. You know what I'm saying?

It's like, no, you have to do it.

No, no, that's what I'm saying. I mean, first of all, to Bill's credit, he's been. Everything you saw on camera was his. I think his general irritation on the thing. But he also kind of finds it funny because he's a comedian.

I thought it was a skit. I thought you guys put together a skit. I really did. I thought you got. Because I thought, you know, Bill does a lot of acting. I thought you guys were just fucking around. You like pro wrestling. I thought you guys just decided to control the world.

Let me put it to you this way. Have you ever seen it? And. Well, I'm assuming. But you tell me if I'M wrong. Two guys get in the ring to roll around a bit. Right.

Okay.

They're bros, they're gonna roll around a bit. Emotions kick in and next thing you know, somebody's tapping somebody out.

Right.

Do you ever see that happen?

For sure.

Okay.

Yeah.

So in the heat of that moment with Bill and Howie egging it on, you know, like the emotionality of the thing came out because it's sort of an. It's sort of a weird thing where, like, we're suddenly in the middle of a situation. It's like a meta situation.

Right.

So, yes, on some level we were playing along, but then it starts to become like, wait, this is kind of weird. And then it starts to kick in and then Billy Bush is in there and it just. It took on a life of its own. So what I'm saying is, is there's enough there that people are all over me to come up with more answers. But you see what I'm saying, it's like it's spun out of control into its own thing. Now it's a DNA test problem, which is a bit on its own. Like, we're going to do like a live stream. We'll do it here. Me, you and Bill. You know what I mean?

Well, people would trust you if the two of you got together and just both took a DNA test and found out you were brothers.

I don't think Bill's my half brother, but he looks.

Well, listen, there's a simple way to find out. I'll finance it. How much is a DNA test? How much does a DNA test cost to find out if someone's your sibling? Jamie? Let's find out. It can't be that much money. It's 20, 25.

I'll do it. We'll get it sponsored.

Yes, maybe 23. Andme. But didn't they sell out to somebody? Somebody buy them 200 bucks.

There you go.

I'll pay 200 bucks to find out. Why wouldn't you want to know? If I thought somebody was my half.

Brother, I'd be like, I don't think it's necessary.

I found out Sebastian Manisalco was my half brother, I'd be like, kinda. I could kinda see that. Maybe.

Again, all I know is I don't think. But when I look at him, he looks just like my father.

Right?

He doesn't look. We look similar. Ish. But when I look at him, he's got the same thing as my dad had. I don't know how to. You would know if somebody looked like your dad? Sure. Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's where it's freaky for me.

Yeah.

And you know, if you wanna play the game one step further, you got two world class communicators. People might argue against me calling myself a world class communic, but I've been doing it for over 30 years.

You're a world class God bless.

So it's not too crazy that you'd have one guy go this way and one. You know what I mean?

Not at all. No. Especially when you consider how many different ways you've gone. Like not just Smashing Pumpkins, but pro wrestling. You know, it's like.

And. And now. And now I'm entering your game.

Podcasting this episode is brought to you by Better Help. Being independent is good, but you should never be afraid to ask for help when you need it. After all, we're only human. We can't know everything. That's why it's crucial to have a support system. People you can go to when it gets rough. Think of friends, family members, your partner, hell, even your dog when you're feeling down. Spending time with a furry friend can be a good pick me up. But I get it. Sometimes you don't want to or can't go to them for help. For these moments, try therapy. It can be a good source of support in any area of your life. Whether you're working on personal relationships, job stress, or something else. Therapy can teach you a multitude of different things to help you be your best self. Like how to set boundaries, when to let go of toxic relationships, and what to do when you feel overwhelmed. And even more importantly, you can do it in a safe space. If you think therapy might be a good option for you, a good place to start is BetterHelp. They have a diverse network of therapists and everything is online, which can be very convenient if you need a last minute session.

It's also very easy to switch therapists if it's not working out. Build your support system with better help. Visit betterhelp.com jre to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P.com jre so you're in all kinds of stuff. And you easily could have been a comedian as well.

I don't think I'm that funny.

But you're funny. There's a lot of people that are professional comedians that aren't as funny as you.

I assume you know Carrot Top.

Sure, very well.

Okay, so Carrot Top and I become friends recently.

He's great.

Love him. Total sweetheart.

Sweetheart of a guy and really genuine.

Just a great guy to know.

Yeah.

But as you know, because you do this for a living, suddenly everybody wants to start pitching you bits. So I made the mistake of pitching Carrot Top a bit. I thought I had a good bit for him, and he didn't respond. You know what I mean? And then I texted him like an hour later and said, hey, did you get that bid they sent? He goes, yeah, that's why I didn't respond.

Yeah, people get tired of that. Also, it's like most comics, they want it to be their idea. Like, the whole idea, what you're doing on stage is essentially like, here's the world.

Yeah. It's like somebody telling me how to write a song. I get that.

Right. It's one thing for another. Comics, we give each other tags. Like, if someone says something, I said, you know what else you can add to that? Add this.

Oh, I see.

A buddy of mine was doing this bit on the. The guy who tried to shoot Trump, and we were bantering back and forth, and we came up with, like, the perfect line.

Like, oh, there it is.

But it was already his premise and his bit. Comics add to stuff for each other, for fun. It's like we just. We sort of. You're tossing the ball around in the green room, and then someone will come up with a new line for you. We'll do that. But no one ever says, hey, you should go on stage and talk about this.

Yeah, so that's. I. So I've had a couple professional comedians, Carrot Top preeminent among them, kind of let me know you're not that funny.

It's probably not that you're not that funny. It's. First of all, you sent a text. Premises and texts are terrible.

Oh, right. Okay.

Like, you really have to be.

Tone. Tone is.

Yeah, it's everything. And you really have to be there with the person. And you really have to, like, say it the way you thought it, and then they get it. Because Texas just. Unless it's just genius. Unless it's just, like, rock solid structure. Like, oh, my God, this joke can't fail.

We do have a movie idea that we're working on.

Oh, yeah.

And it's a good one.

What is it?

I can't give it away. I'll tell you privately, but it's a good one.

You and Carrot Top.

Yeah.

Oh, nice.

That he likes.

Okay.

He likes my movie idea.

Yeah. I'm telling you, a lot of it is that comics don't like people coming to them with a Premise. They don't. They only want. And they only want help from other comics generally.

Okay, I get that.

Yeah. It's just one of those things. And even then, it's touchy. Like, I would never help somebody. I don't know. I would never go up to him. Hey, you should say this, like, never, never, never, never, never. It's got to be like your friend. They know you love them. You're fucking around. You can talk. You could say, did you ever try to say that, you know, what you left out, like, you forgot? And they're like, oh, I forgot about that. Yeah, that's a big part of the bit.

Yeah. I never tried stand up. So that's.

You could do it.

It seems terrifying to me.

So singing on stage, you could do it.

It's a lot easier to scream with, you know, 50,000 watts behind your voice, you know, then tell a joke.

Is it. Because you could suck at that. And then it's terrifying, too. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's all hard to do anything at the highest level. It's hard to do.

That's true.

You're doing arena shows. I've watched a lot of people perform in front of arenas singing. It's hard. That's a hard thing to do. Most people freak the fuck out.

Yeah. I don't know. That part doesn't bother me, strangely.

Well, that's why you get it, right.

I feel like I kind of know what I'm doing up there for some reason.

Well, also, I think it's like there's a buildup, right? You start working in small clubs, you make your way to larger places, and then eventually you sell more and more records. Like Smashing Pumpkins is like. They burst on the scene and sort of keep. You guys kept getting more and more popular, so you kind of got accustomed to it.

Yeah, you do normalize to the insanity of standing in front of 10,000 people.

Same as comedy. You normalize.

What's the biggest show you've ever done? Comedy.

25,000.

That's a lot of people.

Yeah, me and Chappelle, we sold out the Tacoma Dome, and we were standing backstage. I'll never forget it. He looked at me, like, right before he goes on stage, he goes, not a lot of motherfuckers get to do this. We were just laughing. How fun. Much fun we were having. 25,000 people was crazy. In the round, too. In the round. Yeah, it was very fun, though. It was very fun.

I actually know Dave from way back in the day.

He's the best.

When he first. First Kind of burst on the scene. We used to hang out a little bit. So I feel like it's cool that I knew him.

Like, what year is this?

Like, like, remember he did, like, a couple things on snl, like, really early on, or he was kind of around tv. It was like when he. The first year he was on television. I don't remember. I'd see him in New York and he was hanging out with some other. Maybe it was because he was hanging out with SNL people. And I'd see him out in New York back as. Gosh, like late 90s.

Yeah.

Early 2000s. And so I knew him when. I don't want to say he was a nobody, but he wasn't famous. He wasn't a known. I'd seen him on tv, but he wasn't like a household name like he is now.

Right, right.

And so it's. So there was this one night where I was out, I did a benefit for Roger Waters and military vets. It was amazing in New York, it was all these guys who were like, single, double and triple amputees playing Pink Floyd music. And so I did concert with the. With Roger. So afterwards, somebody came. So Chappelle's in this hotel, you know, and I hadn't seen him for a few years, and I said, I know him. And you could see people think, like, you don't know him. You know what I mean? So when he came by, it's like, ah, you know, it's like that moment, like, see, motherfuckers, I do know. So. What a great guy, though. Such a.

He's a genuine person. Yeah, he's another sweetheart. Just a sweet, sweet guy. Easy to hang out with. Very fun.

Yeah. I mean, guys with that kind of mind is just. It's just. It blows my mind because they just. I mean, you could. I just. I don't know, I could sit, listen to him for hours.

He's also. He's kind of a legend for what he did, you know, Walked away, left Comedy Central in the height of Chappelle's show, passed up on a $50 million deal, went to Africa, hung out there, and then came back and didn't do standup for 10 years.

I didn't know that. He didn't do stand up for 10 years prior.

He would do stand up occasionally for free.

Okay.

So what he would do is he'd bring, like, a speaker to the park and, like, set up a mic in the park in Seattle and just start doing stand up. And everybody like, holy shit.

Was he making any Money or was he.

Nope. Just living off of his Chappelle's show money. He had a ton of money.

I didn't know that part.

He made millions of dollars from the show. Passed up on 50, but probably remember that.

And you know, it became a big conspiracy thing.

Yes, it became a conspiracy.

He was saying no to the Illuminati. Right.

All that stuff. Those are always funny.

That's some Alex stuff. Right? You know what I mean? You're like, what are you.

That's what happened. I kind of know what happened because the people that were running Comedy Central back then, I had dealt with. It was nice. Folks shouldn't have been running comedy. They shouldn't have been telling comedians what to do. And they wanted.

They were back to telling comedians what to do.

Was this situation where a bunch of non creatives had gotten involved in the process. I'm sure you're familiar. That happens.

This is so dear to my heart.

It's disgusting. It's the worst aspect to show business. You start dealing with money people, and then they start doing something that they're not. Not supposed to be doing, which was like adding, changing, directing, moving ideas, and then you're dealing with literal morons that somehow or another got this job and they're telling you how to do what you're doing, which is what is the best sketch show in the world and still popular. It's as good as any sketch show that's ever existed. And they only did two seasons. So he just decides, I'm just gonna be an artist. I'm just gonna hang out. I'm not gonna make any money. He would do, like, show up at open mic nights. So they'd have open mic nights for, like, musicians, play folk songs. And at the end of that, like, midnight, he would pull up and start talking. And by 15 minutes in his set, everybody had told everybody that Dave Chappelle's there. So then the place is packed.

Yeah.

He did this for like 10 years.

I didn't know that part.

Yeah, he just fucked around. You'd hear about him just showing up places and fucking around.

I love that.

And then somewhere, I think it was like 2000, 13, 14 starts doing stand up again.

Yeah.

And then boom. Yeah, that's. That's really how it all went down.

It's. It's really a testament to his. The power of his talent. Because my wife, who's 32, she loves him. And it's so cool because, like, we went to see him, I think, at Radio City Music hall, and it's so Cool. Because it's like, you know, I'm 57, she's 32. It's like that he can speak to both of us right to the heart. It's really a rare gift. I mean, you got a picture out there. Richard Pryor, who was from Illinois, like myself, and my father loved Richard Pryor. And so because of my father's love, Richard Pryor, I paid a lot of attention to Richard when I was a kid. And he strikes me. He's got that transcendent ability to somehow almost heal the country with his messaging.

Yes.

Ed Murphy had that too, in his own way. But to me, Chappelle is more in the prior mode of, like, somehow he can address issues that are uncomfortable.

Yeah.

And I know a lot of people have issues with what he says, but I ultimately see what he's trying to do is heal things.

Yeah. Very much like Pryor. Whereas Eddie Murphy was just really, really funny. You know, it's just really, really funny. And still to this day, to this day, I'm like, why doesn't that guy come back? He did this one thing when he got the Mark Twain Award, where he did this whole impression of Bill Cosby find to give away one of his awards because he was caught up in the scandal. And so he's doing a Cosby impression, and it's fucking genius. It's dead on. He's doing, like, brilliant stand up. And he hasn't touched stand up in 25, 30 years.

Yeah. I mean, you would think he would just do one victory lap tour if he wanted to.

It would be so. Talk about stadiums. Oh, my God. And I guarantee you that guy would be the best. He was so fucking talented, but just decided it was just too much. I'd rather just do movies.

Yeah.

Which is kind of crazy. But Prior never did, obviously. Prior kept doing.

Has anyone ever tried to pull you in the movie? Movie Orbit.

Yeah. Yeah, I know.

Action Hero or.

Yeah, I'm not interested. I'm not interested.

They only offer me parts like a serial killer, so I always turn it down.

Yeah, there's been a few tempting ones, but no, I don't have that kind of time. And I also don't have the desire to do it. It's not something I enjoyed sitting on.

That set all day. Seems like it's a lot of work.

It's hard. And to be a real good actor, like a really good actor, you know, the. The rehearsing and the. The practicing and the going over the character, it's like, I couldn't do it because I don't have the time. It would require everything I have. Yeah, if you really wanted to do it. Right. If I really wanted to do a role in a movie where I played somebody, I would have to fucking really spend time not doing anything but that, you know?

Yeah.

It's just not. That's not my jam. There's people out there that do it. I'm glad they do it because I love movies.

Yeah.

But I don't want to do it.

Did you watch the Oscars?

I did not.

Me neither.

I never watch award shows. I don't think you should give away awards for art. I think it's silly. I don't get it. I think it's dumb. I think it's all really. Who's making money is the people that are putting it on television. I mean, that's really what it is. It's just a big money grab. They're all just selling advertising and everybody's wearing a tux and it's like.

Well, certainly the public's growing disinterest in awards shows is some indication that people no longer believe in either the integrity of the process or the. Or maybe the intent of the process.

Right. Which integrity in the process and the intent are both compromised. Right. Because there's people that, like, you could kind of guess just by the subject of some movies whether or not they're going to win an award because, you know, people feel obligated to address this very important message.

The guy who won Best Picture I was actually in talks with about five years ago because he had made some really cool movies. Made one on cell phones, I think it was called Tangerine, about prostitutes working the streets in la. And he got two street workers, I believe, and then he cast them. So it was a movie. It wasn't a documentary. It was a really beautiful movie. And then he did that movie called the Florida Project, where he. At the end of the movie, they actually snuck into Disney World and shot stuff and somehow Disney let it go.

Really?

Yeah. But it was kind of about the social milieu around a place like Disney World. Like what goes on outside the gates, people living in motels and kind of perpetual tourist economy, kind of living hand to mouth and kind of using the tourist, the white whale of tourism, to just get enough money because there's always some turnover, you know, whether it's running scams and stuff. So he made a really beautiful movie about that as well. So I was in talks with him for a while about doing something and then it just didn't go anywhere.

Like what Kind of scams.

I can't remember because it's been a few years since. It's just the idea that anywhere there's a tourist economy, there's money to be made.

Right.

You know, there's the guy standing on the corner selling brochures or hustling you into a van to see where the stars live. It was kind of about that.

Right, right, right.

About a cast of characters living in the shadow of this idealistic place.

Right. Just like those Hollywood tour people that you would get in la.

Yeah, yeah.

Those were the weirdest fucking people.

I always get offended when I walked on Hollywood Boulevard and they think, I want to go on it. You know, it's like, I don't know what it is. I feel like I don't want to go on your tour.

You look like a guy.

Totally.

Get on the tour. Just got off the boat.

Yeah.

Just came here from Nebraska.

Totally. Yeah. Like, gee, I wonder where the stars live.

You know, that's such a creepy thing to do. Just drive around and point. That's where Ben Affleck sleeps.

But they've been doing it since the 30s.

Yeah. Forever. Yeah.

I mean, I have some of the old brochures, you know, see where Greta Garba lives and all that stuff.

It's just always been weird. Well, back then it was even weirder because those are the first stars.

Well, back then, I mean, they went way out of their way to turn them into gods. You know, they airbrushed the shit out of every photo and they cover up scandals. There's that one famous scandal where one of the top male stars, maybe it was Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, ran somebody over in a car.

Really?

You know about that?

No.

You might want to look that one up.

I know, the fat.

No, it was a top. A level star. I think he was drunk, ran over somebody in a car, and somebody from the studio went to jail for like, seven years and took the rap.

Whoa.

So that the star could stay out. And the studio paid the guy, like, a stipend to go to jail. It's a very famous story. So some guy did seven years or something.

That's crazy. You know, there's a similar story about that in China with the bodies exhibit, you know.

Oh, yeah? Yeah.

There was a woman who was married to a mayor of one of the cities in China. And this woman who is married to this mayor, the mayor was having an affair with a TV newscaster. And she got the tv. He got the TV newscaster pregnant. And apparently there was a confrontation between the woman and the Wife. And the lady winds up missing. She gets scrubbed from the Internet. I mean, she's scrubbed. There's only like a photo of her on the Internet. And then all of a sudden in the body works exhibit, there's an eight month pregnant woman who they believe is this newscaster. Here's the other part. The woman who's the mayor's wife is also the manager of the local plastination factory where they take the bodies and they emerge them, they immerse them in these solvents and turn them into statues. This woman was the manager of the place that produced the woman with the eight month fetus in her body. And you can still see it like it's on tour. You can go see this lady who was most likely murdered. So then she didn't just kill that lady, she poisoned some British businessman.

So she poisons this guy and she has to go to trial. Well, she doesn't go to trial. Some other woman goes to trial who doesn't look anything like her. Raises her right hand, the whole thing goes to jail. So she probably paid some family off. Some poor family. I'll give you a million dollars. Give up your daughter, she goes to jail, everybody's rich. It's not a bad jail. She's gonna do yoga, play checkers.

Have you heard the ones where like, because there's so much plastic surgery in Asia where guys are suing their wives because they marry someone that they get hot and then the kid comes out and the kid's not very good looking.

Jawline's totally different. Different nose. Yeah, there's a lot of plastic surgery over there in Korea. It's nuts. They do their eyes in this, like, strange.

Somebody told me as much as 75% of the women in South Korea have surgery. Yeah.

Is it really?

Somebody who's Korean told me that. I don't know if that.

Jamie, we need to find this out. This is important information because last time.

I was in Korea, I was like, wow, these women here are really hot. Like, this was like woman after woman after woman. And somebody pulled me aside, said, bro, that's like, that's just all plastic surgery. That's not real.

Wow. As many as up to 50% or higher, maybe. Some people have said a lot of liars. A lot of them ladies are lying about it. Up to 50% or higher. Well, higher could be like 75%.

I like this whole new business of like plastic surgery tourism where it's like cheaper to get on a plane and.

Go to Turkey and get a job.

Yeah. Somebody was recently Trying to talk me to go to South Korea to get some work done on my face. It's like. So, like what?

I guess the idea would be you could go and recover over there. Your neighbors don't have to see you with bandages over your head.

No, I think it's the idea. It's cheap. It's cheaper.

Yeah, cheaper.

Cheaper and better because they can do stuff there that we can't do here yet.

Oh, really? What can they do there that if we can.

Apparently they have some new thing. That's unbelievable.

What is it?

Something it's. They tried to explain it to me. Doesn't make any sense. Some kind of new facelift. That's not a facelift or something. A facelift? Like a non invasive facelift. Oh, it's a relative of mine through marriage, Chinese relative. And he's in that business and knows the Koreans over there in LA and all this. And he was saying, he was saying, in five years this will be the number one thing, so you might as well get to Korea now. The stuff I hear when I'm sitting around the hot pot dinner, you know.

Non invasive face love. Isn't that weird that, like that one of our biggest fears is that your face sags.

Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I don't know how I would feel if I wasn't in the entertainment business. Right? I mean, I mean, you're in a cosmetic business on some level. You know what I mean?

Some level.

I guess I know it's not just.

Your brand being uglier.

I never thought of you as ugly. I'm not. I'm not attracted to men, per se, but I never thought you were unattractive.

Definitely less attractive than I used to be. That's just time and booze and not so much success.

Creates a glow around a man.

It does a little bit of a glow, right? Yeah, a little bit of.

A little swagger.

Well, just age beats us all. You don't win. Nobody wins. Everybody looks worse at 80 than they do at 20. Yeah, just how it goes.

Yeah. I'm 57, so. You kind of look down 57 too. Oh, are you?

Yeah.

When's your birthday?

August.

Okay. I'm older than you. I'm March. But, you know, you look down that, that, that road and you're like, yep. Like, like, am I going to be all right when I get to 80?

You know, very few people are, you know, there's a few people in 80.

You're calling UFC like 9 72. Or like, you know, I don't know what the number would be.

But I'm worried about Bruce Buffer because Bruce. Bruce Buffer, he puts out so much energy. I was telling the guys the other day, one day he's just gonna be in the middle screaming someone's name, and he's just gonna fucking check out, like right in the middle. It's time. Boom. His eyes will roll back, but that's for any performer.

That's the way you go out. You go out on your shield, right?

That would be amazing. I don't want him to die. I love him. But if he did die that way, I'd be like, what a legend. What a legend.

The Buffers, right? Both of them.

Oh, yeah. Isn't it crazy that they didn't know each other until they were like, 30?

I only know he had a brother. I only have.

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I only have one Michael Buffer story if you want to hear it.

Sure.

So I went to see Holyfield Lenox Lewis at Madison Square Garden.

Oh, wow.

And I was hanging out with all the all the cool people at the time. So I'm in the fourth row. And it was infamously a draw. It was almost all English tourists that had come in for the fight, they were booing the national anthem. I mean, it was a pretty riotous atmosphere. And, you know, I don't know anything about fights, but it was a pretty boring fight. And it. Lewis seemed to be a little bit more agile because of youth and all that. Anyway, so right when I, you know, they're in whatever they're doing hbo, they're over there in the corner, they're doing their bit, you know, they mean they're talking before they go to the scorecards, and a guy leans forward, the ref to tell someone in the second row might have been Don King. And I heard him go, it's a draw, right? So I knew it was a draw like 60 seconds before they announced it. And I was with a lot of well known people and I said, run. And they're like, what do you mean? I said, we gotta run, like. And I started grabbing people and we ran out of Madison Square Garden and we're almost totally out the building.

You know, kind of we get to the concourse part and you hear the decision and it's like. And people start like, here comes the riot vibe.

Really.

So somehow we ended up. Because it got.

So was it because the decision was bad?

Well, the English people didn't like that it was a draw.

Oh.

Because Holyfield was on the older side and I don't know, it's not a well renowned fight.

I can't remember it.

It was just a draw. It was a stone cold boring fight. But because it was a draw and all these English people were mad Don King was involved. So it was like all that typical brouhaha that was going on in boxing at the time. Anyway, so because of the suddenly the riotous or potentially riotous situation, the police started, like making people go different ways, like funneling traffic or something. You know, it was almost like they got like code red or something because, like suddenly got really weird. So then we couldn't get out of the building. So somebody was like, somebody recognized somebody in our party. Follow me. And so then next thing we know, you know, we get. We end up like in the VIP backstage part where it's safe and there's, you know, Michael Buffer on a chair. And he wasn't talking to me, but he's talking to somebody and I heard him was going, that's bullshit. Like in that voice. That's all I remember. That's bullshit.

That's so was he talking about the decision was bullshit.

You know, Letterman's card was heavy for Louis.

Wow. 117, 111. Harold Letterman, who's always dead on the money. Harold Letterman was always right. Yeah. So they're saying as it got called, like, this is a travesty.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, again, I'm not a. I mean I'm not a fight aficionado, but I thought Louis was slightly better.

Wow. I forgot about this fight. I completely forgot about this fight. There's so many fights from this era that were incredible. That was an amazing era for heavyweights.

And this is when Don King was still running everything.

Did they have a rematch?

I don't. I honestly don't remember.

You don't think so?

No, I think so. When I type it in, it said two. Let me see. That's bullshit. There's a lot with that great voice.

He's still trucking. He's still trucking. He still announces huge.

I wonder what he like, because you ever get that like, like, like somebody wants you to do their bar mitzvah or anything? You ever get those requests?

No, I get those requests.

Will you come do my bar mitzvah?

Who won this one?

Is that the rematch had to be Lewis, right?

I would imagine similar Letterman card. Similar card. Let's see if they robbed him. Twight. They gave it to him.

Yeah, yeah. Well, they got there, they got their rematch. Now you get this thing like, hey, will you come do my.

Right, right, right.

I wonder what Michael Buffer gets to show up somewhere, you know?

Yeah, it's probably like Saudi Arabia. They have him come over there and.

Introduce someone's half a million. Half a million?

Probably more. Depends, you know, I mean, like, you.

Know, in my business we could become privates.

Right. I saw Stone Temple Pilots. They played Dana White's 40th birthday party.

Yeah.

And there was no one in the room other than UFC employees. And they put on a show like it was a fucking sold out arena. I mean, full blast went. They didn't go through the motions at all. It was a phenomenal show.

That means Dana Paide him.

Yeah, yeah. It was a lot of money. Great band.

I mean, totally. I love, I love those guys.

But they were so professional. It was like, it was so impressive. And because they were so like, powerful on stage, everybody just started paying attention because it kind of broke out in the middle of this party where this birthday party, we're all standing around tables eating food, having fun.

I've done a few things and it's Always a bit awkward.

Yeah.

Which is weird because they're all paid gigs.

Right.

But something about a paid paid gig feels different.

Yeah. There's a lot of entitlement that's attached to, like, someone's paying you to come perform well.

And then you see the guy's wife going, who. Who's this?

Right, there's that. To the people that aren't fans. You're like, oh, no. Yeah, yeah. Those are weird gigs. Because then you. How much? I could have one shitty night for a million dollars.

I mean, I'd like to tell you I haven't been there, but I've been there.

Ron White did one last year in Vegas and he was talking about. He's like, I don't. I didn't want to do it. I kept saying no. And they kept going higher and higher and eventually got to a point where I go, fuck it, I'll do it. And he goes, it wasn't worth it. He goes, it was one of the worst fucking nights of my life. He goes, all the time I'm doing it, I'm thinking, I shouldn't have fucking done this. He said, they didn't laugh. They barely paid attention. It's like, why am I here? But if, like, you're a giant fan. Like, say if you're a giant Ron White fan and you hire Ron White, but you're like, office doesn't give a shit about comedy. And they just want to have fun and drink and. And eat hot dogs.

Yeah. I went to a billionaire thing once with a guy had hired Diana Ross.

Whoa.

Had at least be a million dollar gig for her and maybe 700, 800 people.

Wow.

You know, and you're like, wow. I mean, basically a private concert with Diana Ross. I mean, that's pretty dope.

If you were really into it and people paid attention, it'd probably be fun. Small, intimate.

I've done them where they're fun.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What percentage?

Less than 50. We don't get to be fair or not fair. We don't get asked to do it a lot. I don't think we're on most people's bingo's card for a private event. Yeah, I think. I think my rep precedes me.

You know, it's like a Beyonce thing.

Although, I mean, she does. Have you ever heard some of the numbers that some of those pop people get coming out of Saudi Arabia?

Yeah.

14 mil and nobody calling us for. You know what I mean? I take that phone call.

Well, that's one of those things. If, like, who is that the richest man in India, his son, a birthday. And it was like the most extravagant birthday.

Spent 50.50mil on entertainment alone. Something crazy like that.

God, it's so crazy. That's so much money.

Yeah. I mean, I wish there was a perfect formula before it, but there isn't, because that's what I mean. I mean, we play every time we play, we play, basically get paid.

I think it was a wedding, not a birthday party, right? It was a wedding.

Yeah.

He got like.

And Lennox Lewis was right.

Yeah, Lennox Lewis was the announcer. Yeah. It's just. That's the weird world of extravagant amounts of money. Like, unbelievable amounts of money. Where you want to hire Kanye, Come to your house. Wedding was 100 million. That's where Beyonce. They probably spent over 100 million for Anant's sister Isha's wedding in 2018. The ceremony featured a performance by Beyonce.

I mean, if I'm Beyonce's manager, she's not going over there for less than 20, 25.

Yeah, why not? They have so much money, they won't even notice it. They'll make it back tomorrow in the stock market.

I don't know I'm saying that.

So once you get to that goofy hunt. That was a hundred and how many million? 190. How much that guy. No, I'm sorry. Billion. How much is he worth? 16 billion. 116. Yeah. You're making $20 million every day, probably. It's like rolling in constantly.

I mean, you've. You've met. I mean, you just had a billionaire in here a couple days ago. Yeah, I mean, you've met your share of billionaires. It's always an interesting thing how they. How they. How they spend or don't spend their money.

Mm.

There's no consistent guide for billionaires.

No, I like the Jeff Bezos way. Wear tight shirts, get a yacht, have a hot girlfriend. Let's fucking go. That's what you're supposed to do when you've got $250 billion. You know, it's supposed a fucking weirdo and wear a sweater and go visit Haiti. No, you're supposed to be ballin'go. To the Mediterranean, popping corks with models. Let's go get a million dollar watch.

I'd like to have a billion dollars to make that decision.

Right.

I'm not there yet.

Well, the weirdest one is billionaires that compare themselves to super billionaires and they feel poor. Like, Brian Callan was telling me about his buddy who's worth, I think, $3 billion. And he's like, I really need to fucking up my game. Cause he's friends with a guy who' worth $80 billion, so he feels poor compared to his $80 billion friend.

Boy, I'd like to be poor like that.

The forest for the trees.

Yeah. I don't know.

Yeah.

Not this lifetime, I don't think.

It doesn't seem like fun. It seems like the amount of stress and energy that must be required to acquire that much money.

Yeah. Jimmy Chamberlain of the Pumpkins, the drummer, is friends with Jimmy John, the sub. The sub king. So I know Jimmy John a little bit, and we were at dinner one night in Nashville at a place he owns or with other people, and one of my buddies started pitching him on, like, some kind of money thing. And I just saw his face change because everybody in the world wants to. We're back to pitching ideas, Right?

Of course.

And. And Jimmy John knows this mutual friend, so it's not as rude as it might sound coming out of my mouth. But at some point, he looks at me, goes, tommy, you know how I got that money? I made a lot of fucking sandwiches. That was the way you shut him down. Like, I know what I had to go through to make that money. Like, you just see me as a walking atmosphere.

Yeah. Well, it just changes the dynamic of the friendship now, too. Now he's not going to be able to trust your friend.

Well, nobody trusts. Nobody trusts Tommy.

Tommy's a mess.

Tommy's infamous, actually.

Infamous, yes. Everybody infa dash mess.

I've literally been walking down the street in foreign countries, and strangers will come up to me and say, oh, you know Tommy. He's like. He's just a legendary character in the.

What was he trying to pitch Jimmy.

John on some kind of investment scheme or something? Because my friend Tommy collects billionaires. Oh, boy. I call it. He plays billionaire lotto. He's hoping that when one of them knocks over, they'll leave him, you know, a taste.

How bizarre. He's like a vampire familiar.

Well, what's interesting about Tommy is his uncle was the founder of Hard Rock Cafe. So he grew up in a family with money. So instead of somebody who you figure was poor and aspirational want to hang out with billionaires, he actually came from money, so he knows how to speak the language of wealthy people. And so he's kind of generally welcome in those circles where I, you know, I grew up poor in the suburbs. I don't know how the role in that world. And so, yeah. But, yeah, Tommy, I think he's probably up to about seven or eight billionaires that he counts as friends.

And what does he do for a living?

No one knows.

No one knows.

That's the legend of Tommy.

Really?

Yeah. And in fact, I pitched Tommy once. I'm making a documentary called who the fuck is Tommy Litnick? That's his name, Tommy Litnick. And he doesn't like the idea.

Yeah, I wonder why. It just outed him.

But, I mean, we don't have time for it. But I could make you a list of 50 people that are super famous, like Bono on down, who have pulled me aside and go, what's the deal with Tommy? Right? And just the fact that we're talking about Tommy will really please Tommy, but he'll take umbrage. In fact, I have to tell you a story about my father, too. But he'll take umbrage with the way I'm portraying him.

I'm sure he will.

The story I want to tell you about my father was when I was on your show, I told you a story about how I found a double barreled, sawed off shotgun under my father's bed. It was in a guitar case, Right? Well, my father heard the show about a month after I told the story on your show. And so I get this text from my father when he's still alive, obviously. And he goes, yeah, I heard what you said on Joe's show. And I'm like, you know, you're looking at your phone like, here it comes. You know, Because I thought he was gonna be pissed at me. He goes, there's one thing you left out of the story waiting text. The shotgun wasn't loaded. That's all he wanted me to know. Like, somehow it made it better.

How bizarre. Your father sounds like a fucking character.

He was unbelievable. Unbelievable.

What? What did he play?

Guitar. Great, great, great musician. Really, truly great musician. He's. He's the classic guy that should have made it. It didn't. So when I made it, it made the whole thing really weird.

Oh.

Because he looked at me and said, how did my schlubby kid make it? And I didn't.

Wow.

He must have gotten lucky. He must have done something, because if it didn't work for me, how could it work for him? So that was a weird. A weird thing. But he was talented. I mean, he really was talented.

That's great. Did he. Did you get. Did you feel resentment? Did you get along with him after that?

It was. My father had a lot of issues with drugs. It was always kind of like it can be with addicts. It was like depending on the day, one day he would tell me I was the greatest thing that ever happened to him and I was the number one son and da, da, da. And two weeks later he's telling me he wished I'd never been born and I should have been aborted. So it was a weird, it was weird, it was a weird thing. So that's why, that's why that story is funny to me. Because he didn't mind that I told you about finding a sawed off shotgun. He minded that I implied it was dangerous when he made sure that it wasn't loaded. So it was okay. That's the way his brain worked.

Do you believe him? That it wasn't loaded?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he was. He should have been an arch criminal or something, but he didn't have the nerve.

So he just became a guitarist?

No, he was, he was a drug dealer and he used to run drugs and guns for the mob.

Really?

Oh, he would do stuff like. Melrose park is kind of an infamous city just outside the Chicago city limits where a lot of the mob wise guys lived. And he was friends with the kid of a wise guy and the kid would dabble because he was protected, because his father was a made man. So we go over to that guy's house for hours and just hear these crazy stories about the mob. And my dad would pick up something in a satchel and deliver it, you know, like it was, that's. I was eight years old going through all this shit.

Wow.

Yeah.

What a crazy environment.

Yeah.

So you're eight years old, he's running drugs and guns.

Oh yeah.

Wow. Did you see like a lot of shit?

I saw a lot of stuff, but it was like, you know when, when adults are trying to hide stuff from you, but not really.

Uh huh.

You know, so like for example, they would stay in the basement all night and party, whoever he was with musicians, whatever, right? So come down at night and it'd be coke everywhere and rolled up 20s on black Sabbath mirrors. I was like, 7 10, oh my God. So I had a feeling, call it intuition. I had a feeling that he wanted me to clean up but not the mirrors. And he was. And I was like, what's on the mirror that you know, that you left behind? He was like, oh, that's. Have a cold or something. But yeah, it's good you didn't get rid of it. And they're like, why do you need the rolled up 20? Oh, it's just easier to, you know. So you knew it was bullshit, but, but you're 10, you don't know what coke is. You don't have any concept of what they're doing, but you know something's going on.

And this was constant.

Yeah. And my dad would do stuff. Like, he'd take me to lunch with his mistresses and stuff and introduce them as his friends.

Wow.

So it was all kind of in plain sight weirdness. But, you know, you'd be driving down the street and suddenly you were in a drug deal. And it was.

Whoa.

He told me he was shot at nine times and stabbed three times.

Holy shit.

Yeah. You want to hear it? Was my favorite stories.

Yeah.

So the band had a van. He had a van, and we bought it off him. It was our band van for a while. And then after we were. We didn't need it anymore because we got too big. He wanted to buy it back, so we sold it to him. So one day I went over to his house, and if, you know, if this is the driver's thing, well, right behind the driver's, where the driver's head would be, but in the metal of the car was a bullet hole. So I said, did somebody shoot at you? He goes, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, what happened exactly? He's like, yeah, I was stopped over there on Narragansett, and some guy came up and I thought he needed something, like a dollar or something. So I rolled down the window. As soon as I did, he put a gun through the. Put a gun through the window at my head. And then, you know, I hit the gas and sped off. And so as I went, he tried to shoot me, but then he missed and the bullet went in behind my head and I got away. That's the story he told me at the time.

So years later, the story came back up somehow. He goes, oh, that wasn't the real story. Here's the real story. So, same setup. He's sitting somewhere, but it was a drug deal. He rolls down the window to make the drug deal. Guy puts a gun at his head. He does hit the gas. The guy does try to shoot him, but because my father's mad now, he spins the van around and he tries to run the guy over. And the guy's trucking down the street, and the guy ran into a gas station. So my dad came barreling at the gas station at full speed in this van, and he was going to run the guy over, and he said he reached a point where the guy was going to. If the guy stopped, he would run him over. But the guy leapt a fence and the Only way to kill the guy was to have to run the fence and ram into a house that was next to the gas station. So he hit the. Hit the brakes and didn't run the guy over. So that was the real story. So back to the kid thing.

Excuse me? That's why it's so hard to pin this whole thing down, because there's so much smoke, you know?

Right.

Like he did tell me there was another kid named Bill. That's a real thing. And. And when he told me, when I was 18, he lied and said he didn't know where the kid was. Well, when my stepmother brought up the whole Bill Burr thing later and I asked him, he admitted that he did know where the kid was, but he didn't want to tell me.

What did Bill think about this? Like the possibility that his mother had an affair with your dad?

I don't think Bill gives it any credence. I mean, that's my sense of it, okay?

He just thinks it's bullshit.

I don't know. I don't. Honestly, I don't know what Bill thinks. You know what I mean?

I could see how you would think it'd be possible because your dad was insane. Your dad sounds like a fucking maniac.

I mean, the only way. The only way it would.

A Scorsese movie maniac.

Well, if. Put this way, if a person doesn't believe that somebody is their father, not their real father, that they grew up with, and I do know people who've had. That they grew up with somebody, and they. In fact, it just happened in my family, right, that a cousin of mine found out that her father was not her father, and she's in her 60s because of a DNA test.

Oh, my God.

So it is possible that people can find out later in life. Oh, by the way, that guy that you thought was your dad, he ain't your dad. Here's your real dad.

Right, Right.

So it does happen. But I don't get any sense from Bill that he believes that's possible.

Got it.

So the only way would be possible if. If Bill grew up in some kind of weird lie. You see what I'm saying? And I don't believe that.

Right, Right. Well, I don't know. He's. I don't know how much he's talked about his family, but that's. I just can't imagine a kid coming downstairs and seeing Coco over the mirrors and Black Sabbath albums and people blacked out and empty booze everywhere. Like. Like this is a normal house to have these wild Parties.

Yeah.

And you're looking.

To be fair, I think a lot of people grew up in that atmosphere. I think we just don't hear about it.

Yeah, but not a lot of people grew up with a death is running guns and drugs for the mob.

That's true.

That's true.

That is true.

That's so insane. That's such a crazy way.

Like, we would have conversations. Like, we would have conversations because, you know, as you get older, you start to ask questions, right?

Yeah.

So I'd say, dad, aren't you worried, like, if you get pulled over? You know, because he would carry, like, a lot of fucking weed in the car just for his own personal use. He smoked constantly, like, my whole childhood. Like, I mean, I just remember joint after joint all day at the dinner table, in the car. I'd contact high and the whole thing. So finally, at some point, I said, daddy, aren't you worried about if you get pulled over? And he, like, popped the engine. You know, old cars, you know, when you pop the trunk. What is it called? The hood. The hood. He had figured out some system where you could. If you put. If you put weed in a. In a thing full of whiskey, he said that dogs couldn't pick up on the scent. So there was, like, a compartment in the engine compartment, like, a thing that was full of whiskey. And then he would put a waterproof baggie with the weed in the whiskey. And so that the dog came around the car, it would never, never smell it.

That's hilarious.

So it was like life lessons, you know, from pop.

How many? But dogs can only smell one thing. They're only looking for one thing. When you train a dog, you train a dog either for a bomb or you train him for heroin. You don't train a dog for everything. Like, what do you got, three barks for? Coke. The way they train dogs. It's one thing that they're trained.

All right? They have one.

Yeah. If they're looking for bombs, they're only looking for bombs. They're not going to stop you for weed. Which is, like, the dumbest thing to train a dog for. If you train a dog for weed. I mean.

Well, now.

Yeah, now it's the dumbest, but they still. Do they still have weed dogs? Yeah, yeah. If they smell weed, they'll call the weed dog.

Is weed legal in Texas?

It's not. It's weird. It's decriminalized. There was actually a lawsuit that Ken Paxton tried to stop Dallas from decriminalizing weed, and they just lost in court. So, Dallas, now marijuana is decriminalized for personal use. It's stupid. It should be the whole country. It should be league. Just like whiskey is. Don't do it if you don't want to do it. But, you know, you should probably know what the effects are. And we should probably study what the actual correct dose is per person. Like, we know with drinks. Like, one drink is one drink, right? You know what it is?

Yeah.

You go to the bar, you get a shot of tequila. That's what it is. It's one shot of tequila. Everybody's pretty much. It's standard with weed. You don't know what.

Oh, I see. Yeah.

You don't know what's the right amount? Like, should I take two hits or three hits? You can build up a tolerance. Like your dad, you're smoking weed. Like, if I smoked weed all day long, I'd be a mess. I'd be paranoid and freaked out. I'd be like, everyone wants to get me.

But he was.

He just kept doing it. That's what's even crazier. Weed back then was not weed. Today, it's. You probably could get some weed that's commensurate with weed today. Acapulco Gold or something wacky.

But generally they have all these crazy strains now. Right?

Isn't that now they have scientists, botanists, got involved in the game and they're making super weed.

I noticed one thing because I was in LA for a couple months this winter, and when they first whatever decriminalized in la, it seemed like everywhere you went, everybody was smoking weed. It became like a thing. You couldn't go anywhere without smelling, you know, the telltale smoke. And now it seems to have calmed down. And I think it's almost like now it's like Holland back in the day, where it's, like, so normal. It's no longer a thing to, like, openly smoke weed. Like.

Yeah.

So I think it's gone back to a. Oh, it's not that big a deal. Which I think is probably best, because there was a year there where you would go there and everybody was stoked, owned. You couldn't get service at a restaurant. Like, I mean, it was like people were staring off into space edibles.

Yeah. Well, for sure you're gonna have, like, a normalization period after a while where it's like, weed's normal. It's just like everyone's not drunk all the time. Even though you can get liquor everywhere.

Yeah.

You choose when to imbibe and when not to or not to at all. That's. You're supposed to have choices. You're an adult. You're an adult human being. The analogy I always make is, imagine if it was the three of us in a room, just us three, and we were the only people on Earth. We lived on an island, and Jamie just decided he doesn't want us smoking weed. And so Jamie passed a law and he wants to lock us up if we smoke weed.

Oh, I see.

That's just as ridiculous as 300 million people. And one adult decides that the other 300 million people shouldn't be allowed to smoke weed. Like, do it if you want to do it. Don't do it if you don't want to do it. But you can't. Putting people in a fucking cage for doing something that they want to do that harms no one but you don't want them to do is fucking insane. It's just insane.

I grew up because of my father's life. I mean, I don't know what age I became conscious of my father doing drugs constantly, but let's say it was five years old. So that's 1972. So I've been in weed culture since 1972.

Jesus.

So I always thought it was Vietnam War days. Yeah. And I met all those guys, too. You know, these guys with PTSD and all that stuff.

Wow.

So I guess what I'm after is I never understood what the big deal was. And the only thing that freaks me out are people that are really into weed. Like, you know, I mean, like the 420 crowd.

Yeah.

Like, that's their identity that freaks me out.

Yeah. It's a crutch for some. It's a tool for others. You know, it's a creativity tool for a lot of people. You know, Carl Sagan was one of them. Carl Sagan.

Carl Sagan was a stoner.

Oh, yeah. Huge stoner. He's got one of the best quotes on states of consciousness that are. That are available to people under cannabis that are not available any other time. See if you can find that quote. It's a brilliant quote. Yeah. Carl Sagan, I mean, he kind of had to keep it under wraps a little bit because marijuana was really illegal back then. But he still wanted to talk about it. Sometimes it depends on the person. It's like everything else. There's some people that should not drink. They drink and then their eyes turn to shark eyes. They're gone and they go away. That's it. The illegality of cannabis is outrageous. An impediment to full Utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world. That's not the quote. That's a quote. But the, the other one had to do with states of consciousness that were. That you could achieve.

See, it's a very stoner like thing to say.

Yeah, well, I'm sure he talked about it a bunch, but either way, he was a regular cannabis user. It's supposed to be like everything else, you know, like you could have wine in your house. It doesn't mean you're gonna drink wine all day every day, you know, just. You should not be high all the time.

I just don't want the 420 people need to hear me.

Well, it's like those, those people like the MAGA people or like the fucking Insane Clown Posse people, like, it's just like it becomes their whole thing. That's the thing. Something wrong with going to Insane Clown Posse show. But if you want to be a Juggalo, and that's your whole identity is being a Juggalo.

Juggalo is the whole, you know, it's a whole thing. We've done business because of the nwa. We've done business with the Juggalos.

They seem like fun guys.

They're great. No problem with him, you know, Violent J, as he's known, was in the NWA for a hot second.

Oh, really?

And he's kind of re fired his promotion now. Juggalo, I guess. Jcw, Juggalo Clown Promotions or something. So a lot of my wrestlers wrestle for him too.

Oh, okay. I didn't even know he had a wrestling promotion.

They did back in the day. They used to wrestle. I know they wrestle for WCW and tna. So they were, they were wrestling at the highest level for a while when they were sort of in the 90s times when they were on MTV and all that stuff.

I just love that they have like a carnival of outcasts, you know, they like, all the outcasts have a home in the Juggalos. And they're all like, they have these gatherings of the Juggalos. They look like they're having the best fucking time. Like they're all like minded people all partying together.

Yeah. But it's freaky when people admit secretly being Juggalos. Have you ever had that experience?

They pull you aside.

A friend of mine, former former porn star Sasha Gray, like, sent me a picture of her at like 17 in the Juggalo makeup.

Oh, wow. 17.

And you're like, this is so out There Juggalo makeup.

Do they dress? It's a very specific.

They do very specific makeup.

The Juggles. Do they have different makeup than the Insane Clown Posse or is it the same kind of makeup?

It seems to me there's this. There's this kind of a particular way they do the Juggalo makeup.

Jamie, can you please Google Juggalo makeup? Yeah, I think it's a black and white. I don't know if there's rules, but it's.

Yeah, clown makeup.

What does it look like? Like that guy right there.

Yes, but that's Violent J on the top there. Yeah, that's Violent J there. But, like, they'll do their makeup kind of like how Jay is, is.

Okay, so some of the people in the audience choose to make their face up. I don't see anybody there with face makeup, though, in that picture.

It's hot. It's the summer.

Oh, yeah, there you go. Sweating.

Washed off.

Sweating off.

See like the girl there, that split.

Tongue, that dude in the middle? That's a fucking commitment. That's a commitment for. To never having a real job. Up top. That's a lot. You gotta really hate your parents to split your tongue like that.

How about the guys who split their cock? Have you ever seen that?

Yes.

Who does that?

Do you remember the early days of the Internet? I don't know how much you were on the Internet in the 90s, but there was a page called the Style Project. Do you remember that?

Don't remember that.

It was all like some of the most fucked up thing, things that this dude could find on the Internet and he had a whole website and you would you go to the Style Project, you get like, just insane, fucked up stories about people. And one of them was Body Modification Extreme. And I became friends with the guy who ran the site, who's actually that arm wrestler, Devon Laureate. I think that was his brother or someone he's related to was Shannon Laureate. I became friends with him and he gave me access to his website. And it was like a members only access where you could.

Like, so you got the VIP tier of Split Cox.

Oh, my God. It wasn't just split cocks. It was crazy stuff. Like, some people, they decided that they wanted to get their arm chopped off or their hand chopped off, so they devised a guillotine. It was Body Modification Extreme. So it was all different people doing different things like putting, like horns in their head and splitting their cock and put. And one of them was this horrible story about this guy whose boyfriend turned him into a eunuch wanted him to cut his dick off for him and be a slave and, like, oh, my God. It's like detailing how this guy cut his off. Yeah.

Donnie Fargo, who was a famous wrestler, he was famous for, as a party trick, he would put a nail through his cock.

Ah, that's not nice. You know, I had David Blaine on, and he made me stick an ice pick through his arm. Yeah, he's got this trick that he does. It's not a trick, though. I really stuck an ice pick through his arm. It's like, you can call it a trick, but a lot of things David does is just. It freaks you out because, like, you should, but, you know, you can survive an ice pick through your arm. But I had to back it out because I hit a nerve and he made me reinsert it. And so I reinserted it, and then the original one just started bleeding, and it got, like a little bit of a hematoma started swelling up. We had to get the medics, and we had seals working for us, so.

They checked it out because of all this body talk. My wife loves all sorts of weird body talk, and she wanted me to send you a message because she's literally about to have a baby, like, right now.

Oh, congratulations.

So we were somewhat concerned coming in because it was possible I may not be able to come because of her about to have this baby. So when we were talking last night, I said, please don't have the baby today. You know, I want to be on Joe's show. And she said, you tell Joe that if I start to have the baby, I expect him to give you some of his net checkpoints so you can get home. It's a very, very rich person joke.

That's hilarious. What does that have to do with body modification? Nothing.

Because she loves talking about this type of stuff.

Why does she like talking about that stuff?

I don't know. It's like. But in my family, we didn't talk about anything. Sex, you know, was all just kind of implied.

Oh, I see.

You see what I'm saying? I grew up in a family where nobody hugged, nobody kissed, everyone hated each other, and. And nobody talked about the secrets of life, you know, good or bad, was all kind of in the shadows, you know? I mean, and she grew up in a family where it's like. Because she has five brothers and a sister, so they talk about everything, like, to the point where just like, at dinner, like, you're talking about all this, like, weird body stuff. I don't want to be graphic because it turns me off, you know, but they seem to think it's funny.

When did you learn to hug people and be like, outwardly nice?

It's funny you asked me that. I didn't grow up with my mother. My mother went crazy when I was four and I never lived with her again. And we started to become close again when I was in my 20s. And I remember this one time where I walked through her door and it was that thing where I wanted to hug her because I never really hugged her my whole life. And I just made this decision at 24, like I was gonna hug my mother and give her a kiss on the cheek.

Yeah.

And it was like that was the opening of this other life where people hug and kiss each other. You know what I mean? I mean, obviously I had fool around with girls, but it was only within the context of being romantic. I had no physical affection in my life outside of that. Now my kids are all over me and, you know, I got nine and six year olds, so it's like I'm used to kids like, you know, rugrats climbing all over me. But I didn't grow up in that at all. Like, I had no. The idea of affection was. Was alien. In fact, when I first started chasing girls at 17, 18, you know, girls want to hold your hand or hug you or, you know, in the car. And I was like, it was so freaky to me.

When did you relax?

I'm not sure I ever did.

Well, I gave you a hug when I saw you today. It seemed pretty normal.

No, I'm actually very naturally affectionate person. And it was. It's nice to give you a hug and it's nice to see you and it's nice to love on people that you admire and are your friends. And that's the great stuff of life. But I came very late. You could even see I'm just uncomfortable. And then, you know, our. I'm sure you know Howie Mandel. You must. I mean, Howie with his. I made the mistake of hugging Howie once. And I mean, I mean, you know, I killed his cat, you know.

Yeah, like you tased him. That poor bastard. It used to be you could touch knuckles with them.

He'll touch knuckles. He will. I'm close enough. I'm close enough to Howie to touch knuckles.

He stopped touching knuckles. And then he would do elbows. He would touch elbows and then he got to air elbows. He would just kind of like do that and then put it down.

I am a lead singer, so I do do some of these things.

He's Hanging out with us in the green room at the Comedy Mothership. And then he's going on stage and there's comic before him has the same microphone. They're spitting into it. He's holding onto it.

See, I'm. I'm. I'm. I think I'm secretly a germaphobe, but.

Really? Yeah, secretly. We just talked about it, you know, like, cut this out. How he's like, how.

That's another level.

He talks about it, though. He knows it's a problem. He just can't overcome it for whatever reason. And he manages to sort of, like, have it and still work his way through life. Like, he was fun to hang out with. It's not like he's freaking out about other stuff. Like, he was cool hanging out with. Just talking.

I had him on my podcast and we did talk about it. It hasn't aired yet, but we. We talked about all his. I guess phobias would be the word. Conditions. I mean, there's all these letters, you know, adhd, ocd. Yeah, he's very open about it. To his credit.

Yeah, no, he is. Yeah. He talks about it and it's, you know, it's been a battle for him, but it's just like. It's so odd because he's so personable. Like, you expect that someone like that would be like a recluse. Wouldn't, like, people, like, get away from me, everybody. But he's not. He's, like, super friendly. Super friendly.

Except when he puts you in front of a professional comedian who's kind of irritated that you're there and claiming you're his half brother.

Oh, yeah, that was probably a bad pairing. I feel like both of you are kind of a lot. In a good way. I would have one of you on by themselves. I wouldn't want you and Burr together.

Well, he's. He's such an alpha. I mean, he's. He's just one of those guys. He just can't help it.

Yeah, well, he has to make fun of everything. Too many. What you say? Oh, yeah, that's a great idea. What about this, right? He can't help himself.

Yeah. One point, he looked at me. I actually. I was wearing this coat. He goes, where'd you get that? In, like, a Moroccan bazaar? It's like a regular coat. No, this is a very expensive coat.

It's like a normal coat. I understand that seems normal. Looks a north face or something.

But I'm asking you this in an empathetic way, but because you're a professional Comedian. So maybe it's different, but when a professional comedian puts their death ray on you and wants to make fun of you.

Yeah.

It's a very particular feeling. It's like getting carved up by a chef.

Right.

You know what I mean? Because they're so good at Zorro, you know? It's kind of. It's kind of cool. It's like, wow, I'm being insulted by Bill Burr. You know what I mean? It's like. It's kind of an honor, you know? But at the same time, it's like, it's really fucked up because it's like they know exactly where to poke you.

Also, you can't fire back. You'll get killed.

Right.

If you fight back.

That's what I'm saying.

He's gonna chew you apart. Yeah.

What am I gonna tell him? Like, make a little joke?

Yeah. There's not much you can do other than laugh along with it. It's just. Have fun with it. Just let. Let him make fun of you and have fun.

Yeah.

That's all you can do.

But it feels like a death. Yes. It's like.

Yeah. Especially a guy like Bill, who's a really good.

Who's like the meanest comedian you ever kind of locked horns on you.

The meanest at that kind of stuff. But he's one of my best friends is Tony Hinchcliffe. He's the best at it. He's the fucking. I just found out. I just found one the other day from quite a while ago. I'm gonna send you this because this is, like, young fresh face Tony Hinchcliffe. It's fucking hilarious. And this is just, like, off the cuff. They bring in these dudes and he starts roasting them.

Just random dudes.

Yeah. There's two guys, and they're. They're. They team up and they start talking shit to him, and he just eats them alive. Put your headphones on. This one's hilarious.

All right, here we go.

He's the best roaster on planet earth. Nobody's better than Tony Hinchcliffe. That's why kill Tony so funny. Part of the reason is he's so fast. Did you get it, Jamie? Okay.

Wrestler with the. You got on wrestling shoes.

Foe. You guys are mean.

Jimmy Neutron, Granddaddy right here.

You guys look like a before and after for a product that doesn't work.

What does ADD stand for?

A dose of diabetes.

Okay.

Okay.

I wasn't ready for any of this. Yeah.

Guys are wearing sweatpants and sweat skin.

Have you guys just completely given up On.

Is that you guys? Maybe Doughboy. Not me. I'm out here. Doughboy. Wait, what?

His name?

His name is Doughboy.

Doughboy, Yeah.

I spell it D O, B O. Yeah. I had a feeling you'd misspell it. You guys are two of my favorites. Two chins and asap. Rocky Road. Wow. Wow. Just off the cuff, out of nowhere. And he does that all day long. So he'll do that in the green room. He just turns on people in the green room. It's fucking amazing. We have, like, when we do these shows, like Tuesday or Wednesday night or whenever we're there where everyone's in the. Like, Tuesday and Wednesday nights are a really good night at the club because all the comics that are traveling on the road on the weekend, they come into the club to ha out during the weekday. And so there'd be like eight or nine of us in the green room just talking about each other. And Tony's just cutting up left and right. This one, that one. It's. Oh, it's so much fun. He's the best at it, though. You do not want to fuck with.

You don't want to meet Tony. I'm going to say right now I don't think he's my brother.

He's definitely not your. He doesn't look anything like you. It's a completely different gene line now.

He'll make fun of me for saying I'm not his brother.

So did Bill know that you were going to be there with him, or was it just like how he just decided to put two of you together?

I got the feeling that. That Bill wasn't really given the heads up. Yeah, probably it was a little bit irritating to him.

Bill gets easily irritated, but that's also why he's so funny. Like, he's. He gets mad. Gets mad at everything, you know?

Yes. And my mind doesn't work like that, so it's hard. Like, I would have a better time understanding like a. Like a rocket scientist than a professional comedian, I think.

Really?

Because the professional comedians I've known personally a little bit, like Bobcat Goldthwait and Eric Carrot Top, their minds are so different than the average human mind, I think the way they process information and they're looking for something that. Almost like a meme, it coalesces this whole set of ideas. That's what makes it funny. Right. It works on all these different levels at one time. The great comedians, like Dice, to me is the greatest. And Dice will tell a joke. It works on, like eight different levels. You know, it's like high, low, middle.

Do you know what Dice's best stuff is? People don't understand that. Dice is literally one of the best live performance artists. Just random street artists.

Oh, I watch him. You mean when he just goes up.

To people and pretends that these people wanted a photo with him and they don't know who he is?

It's the face. You want the face, you want the picture.

And he just goes. He's fucking. It's so. It's so uncomfortable to watch. You start pulling your fucking clothes off like, no, don't do this. Like, what are you doing? He's the best at that. And he does that for zero money. He's only doing that for fun. That's it. He's just being an artist. Like, there's no money in it at all. And he spends all this time wandering around the streets, going to bars, at restaurants and just bothering people. Wandering up to people on the street in New York City. They're waiting for the light to turn green. You want the picture?

I just love that he'll just double and triple and quadruple down on the bit. Like, he just won't give it up.

He won't give it up.

Zamuda is the same thing with Tony Clifton. Just the discomfort of it all.

Yeah, well, Dice is the only guy ever in the peak of his fame to try to bomb on purpose and then release it as a 2 CD set.

Is that the night comedy died? Yeah, that. That is so the day the laughter died. The day the laughter died.

Rick Rubin produced it.

Yeah. Yeah.

And Rick, who's a fucking maniac, loved the idea. He loved it. He's like, what a great idea. This is gonna be amazing. Dice is selling out Madison Square Garden, like, more than anybody alive. Like, he's just selling out everything in the height of this. He decides to record on a night where no one knows he's going to be there and bomb no material. There's talk off the top of his head sometimes. Don't even try to be funny.

I've listened to it multiple times and it's one of the funniest things I've ever heard.

It's performance art. It's like him on the street going, you want the picture? You know, and if. Look, if he couldn't kill regular way, I wouldn't respect it. Because there's people that do comedy that pretend they're doing, like, anti comedy because regular comedy is too easy. The problem is they're not good at regular comedy. If you're like Hilarious at regular comedy. And then you say, I'm gonna freak these people out by hitting them with some. He would do this thing at the Comedy Store where he would go on stage and see how long he could not talk.

Yeah, I saw him do it once.

He'll go like, five minutes. Five minutes.

He's doing a.

And no one knows what to do. And people are like nervously laughing, laughing. But he also could fucking kill. Like in the Roddy Dangerfield Special, you know, when he did Dice Rules, like he could destroy an arena filled with people. So it was a choice.

Who's your favorite all time comedian? I'm just curious.

God, I don't think I have an all time favorite. I think Prior probably is the greatest of all time. Not living with Chappelle being the greatest. Living. I think that you have to. You have to give credit to Lenny Bruce, though, because he really started the art form. Because before Lenny Bruce, comedy was just a series of jokes. It was just jokes. And Lenny Bruce came along and all of a sudden he had social commentary, cultural commentary that he turned into humor. The way he described relationships, the way he described marriage, the way he described it was like completely different. It's like, what is this guy doing? And then I think Pryor took that and made it funnier. Pryor took that and that honesty.

I never connected that dot. But it makes sense when you say it.

Yeah, because he was just funnier. Prior was just better at it. But the door was opened up by Lenny. It didn't exist before Lenny. So Lenny comes along in the 50s and you know he's getting arrested all the time in the 60s, like he was getting arrested.

Well, remember that whole thing where he would just go on and read his court transcripts?

Yeah, that was the end.

That must have been really out there.

I mean, I watched the videos of that. I watched.

You seen actual.

Oh, yeah, yeah, I bought it. I bought a VHS tape that was Lenny Bruce on stage. I forget what place it was. I think it was somewhere in San Francisco. And he was just talking. He was reading his court transcripts and talking about the case. And someone in the audiences go, we want Dirty Lenny. And he's like, man, it's not about that, man. It's about. You gotta understand what they're doing here, man. Like anybody go into. Go back into the court case. But it wasn't funny at all. It was just him on stage for a long time just talking about his court cases. But you have to. The thing about comedy is a lot of comedy, like even from the 80s, it doesn't hold up. It doesn't mean that it wasn't funny at the time. It just means the concepts and the culture has shifted so much and they've become so commonplace that it's not shocking or funny anymore. But it was maybe in the 70s or maybe in the 80s, and much more so with Lenny Bruce, because you go back and listen to his stuff and people are dying, laughing, and you don't even find it funny.

Like, it doesn't even make you chuckle. It's hard to laugh at Lenny Bruce's stuff, but it's because we can't put ourself in the context of being alive. Watching this guy perform in 1962, see.

Red Fox, to me, still funny, though.

Still funny.

But, like, his stuff holds.

Yes, his stuff holds.

Moms maybe leave.

Yep, some people. Some people still hold up. You know, Robin Harris still holds up. There's some. Some old school comedians, like from the 70s and the 80s that are just still like, just. You could tell. There was Eddie Murphy. He was special. He was like a special talent like his that still holds up today, but some of the stuff doesn't. And then I think, like, the next big shift, a big change, was Kinison. Kinison was a giant change.

Did you know Kinison?

No. I saw him live a few times.

I was gonna say, I think age wise, it probably doesn't work.

Yeah, no. I was about 21 when I saw him live. I saw him live once when I was 19, when I was a security guard at Great woods center for the Performing Arts in Mansfield, Massachusetts. So I got to see him live there, and then I got to see him live at some. I think it was like some weird place in the middle of nowhere, and it was like half empty. And it was. This was like 88, 89. So by 89, he was kind of falling off because he had just done so much drugs and partied so hard that he was huge in like 86. And then by the time 88 came around, the material kind of dropped off. And then by the time I saw him was like 89 or 90. It wasn't so good anymore. And then he died in, like. Did he die, like, 92? I think he died in 92.

Car crash.

Yeah. Drunk driver, ironically, because he had jokes about drunk driving, but he just. I was always hoping he was going to come out with a new album and it would be. He would be back. You know, he'd be back to the Kinnison of 86. But just the partying, the coke and the Women and the fucking. No time to write. His brother wrote about it. There's a great book called Brother Sam by his brother Bill. His Bill wrote it. Bill wrote about the childhood, about him getting hit by a car and becoming this maniac. He's like the victim of a head injury.

Okay.

And that's what turned him into that fucking maniac.

The childhood preaching is also part of.

The childhood preaching, tent revival preaching. And he brought that kind of energy to comedy, you know, he was a different thing. I remember the first time I saw him, like, oh, wow, that's comedy too. Like, this is crazy. I remember, like thinking like, well, this is a completely different thing. I never thought this was stand up comedy.

Yeah, he felt it was like, to me at the time, it was like he was the rock and roll equivalent of comedy or something.

Yes.

And didn't Guns N Roses take him on tour or something? There was some seem to remember, like, something like that took him on tour.

I think Bon Jovi, too. I think he was hanging out with those guys too. He was just. I think Bon Jovi was one of. In one of his. Because he had a music video called Wild Thing.

Yeah, I remember he was singing.

Yeah. He's kind of trying to be a rock star for a while, but it's a quick fall from grace, man, because in 86, he's one of the best comics that's ever walked the face of the earth. And by 89, he's like a caricature of the guy he was three years ago. And I think it's just. It's really hard to maintain, especially in the 80s when no one was famous. Like, how many famous comedians were there? There were like five, ten at the most. Now there's hundreds. But back then, like, nobody was famous.

So it was all about getting on Carson. That was. That was the thing. Right?

It was about getting HBO special. That was the big thing. Carson was big in the 80s, but for a guy like Kinison, even though he got on Letterman and he had one of the most brilliant sets ever on his Letterman sets. Fantastic. We played it on the show once. It's really good. But I think with Kinison, it was really the HBO special. It was Rodney's. Rodney Dangerfield's Young Comedian Special first. And people got to see him on that. And then he did his own. Our special.

You're right, because when Eddie Murphy did his HBO special, that was when he just like delirious that leather suit.

Yep.

I remember high school. Everybody was like, it was all Norton.

I've been looking at you. And I know you've been looking at me. Yeah, he was. Yeah. I mean, it's like there was only a few back then, though, you know? And then Dice came along, and Dice had a completely different element to it because people wanted to repeat the lines. What's in the bowl, bitch? Oh, the whole crowd would go crazy. It was like they. It was rock and roll. Like, they sang along, you know, Shot through the heart. It was like. It was like rock and roll. Like everybody was singing along. You give love a bad name. The crowd wanted to say that, and the crowd wanted to say Little Boy Blue. Oh, he needed the money.

I tried to talk my wife into seeing if we could hire Dice to do our wedding. She wasn't having it.

Who knows what he would have done.

The vision I had, my wife wanted to do kind of an after party of the wedding. We had it at my house. So the idea was, you know, when. When half the crowd bangs off because it's been a long day, there'll still be a crowd that want to hang out and just party.

And then Dice shows up.

And then Dice shows up at 1am and then takes the ghost, puts the death ray on me, right? She just was not having it.

We used to call it. We used to say Dice had two dices. But my favorite Dice was Mean Dice, because Mean Dice would, like, find a guy in the audience he knew who could take it, who couldn't, who's smiling and laughing along. It'd be like, look at you and just start tearing this fucking poor fool apart. Fun in. Back then, the beautiful thing was the Comedy Store had no audience, so he could go on unannounced. He would show up at, like, you know, midnight on a fucking Monday night or something like that and just torture people for fun. Just for fun. He was only fucking around. He was.

I'm having Bill Burr ptsd. Because that feeling when they put the death rate on you, it really bothered you. No, it didn't bother me. It's just.

It's uncomfortable.

Well, I'm not gonna. What do they always say? Don't. Don't bring a knife to a gunfight.

Right.

What am I gonna say? You know what I mean?

Why was he picking on you?

I think because he was uncomfortable about the whole setup. Because at the end of the day, it's my fault. I'm the one who said something in public, right? So at the end of the day, I do bear the responsibility for initiating this insanity.

It's taken a life of its own.

Because, I mean, I Walk through public now, and people are like, hey, it's Bill Burr's brother. So he's got to be getting it the other way. You're the brother of that weirdo from the Pumpkins, you know, like, I don't know.

We were talking about the other night at the club in the Green Room, and we were convinced it was a bit that you guys were doing together. We were convinced. No one disagreed. No one was like, yeah, I think it's real. Most people were like, nah, I think they were fucking around. I think they. It seemed like they made an agreement.

It's. It's. It's. It's somewhere between a bit and reality. And I think that's where it gets confusing, and that's why I would use the word meta. There's this moment, if you watch it back, where Howie splits and just leaves me and Bill alone. And. And. And Howie's. You know, Howie has a band that plays when he does a show, so. So the gentleman who runs the band starts playing a really sad piano, and Bill just starts riffing. It's just me and him in this room alone. I mean, I don't know Bill at all. And he starts talking about our shared dad. And it gets really weird because on some level, it's like, it's possible, right? Even if it's 1%, it's not a zero, right? So that's where it gets kind of. That's why I say meta. It's like you're looking down a hall of mirrors and you start almost playing with your mind. You're thinking, like, could. It could be possible.

It's also, the two of you guys doing this publicly is very pro wrestling, which is what you love. There's something about.

I brought a wrestler with me today who runs the promotions for the nwa.

But, you know, I'm saying, it's like, there's something about it. It's like, is this kayfabe? You know, is this real? Is this a shoot or is this a work? Like, what is this?

Well, Tommy, you know, Tommy Dreamer.

I know the name.

Tommy jr, Famous ECW wrestler, went on to work for WWE and now works for tna. Tommy's the classic salty veteran. You know, seen it all, done it all, you know, been split in half and the whole thing. So there's nothing Tommy hasn't seen. And, you know, Tommy will say something like, it's all a work. It's all a work. Like, basically, it's the cynical view that everything you see in the world is fake.

Well, if you're A president.

The president is fake. The news is fake. It's all the work. So once you go there, cynically, it's hard to back out of that. So I like the discomfort. The artist in me likes the discomfort.

Yes. That's what I'm getting at.

I really do like the discomfort. I remember watching Andy Kaufman on Saturday Night Live circa 78 or whatever, and it's that idea that you can create a vibration in the room between what's expected and where you're willing to go.

Yeah.

I have this one friend who was a performance artist, and she would do stuff like when she was in college, she would just walk in the cafeteria and take off all her clothes, and she would stick a camera in the corner and just film people's reaction. And it was interesting to watch because one guy would just keep eating his food and. And, no, sell it. Like, I'm just going to eat my salad and just pretend this isn't happening. Like, every human being goes in a different direction with the weirdness.

Right.

So as an artist on a stage, there is this kind of crazy power that you have because depending on what comes out of your mouth next or what you do can affect thousands of people, and then obviously, through a digital medium, even more. So there's something about flirting with the uncomfortable, but what makes it uncomfortable is it's always has a foundation of truth. You know what I'm saying?

Yes, I do know what you're saying. Yeah.

If it didn't have a foundation of truth, it would just be silly.

Right, right, right.

The discomfort comes from, like, oh, there's something you're doing that I recognize in myself, or I know somebody that's like this.

Yeah. Well, it makes it much more interesting if there's a 1% chance that it's true. If I just think you guys are running a sketch, it's kind of funny. But if it might be true, then it gets to that weird place where it's like, this is all right.

Okay. So if I walked out of that room that day after meeting Bill for the first time, and it was a 1% chance. Now that I walk through life, we're up into, like, the 10 percentile in the public's mind.

Yes.

10% of the public is convinced we're brothers. Even if I sat there and told them, no, it's not true.

More now.

Okay.

But that's what I'm saying after this show.

But that's why it's like, when you. When you say it's a bit. Yeah, it's a bit to the extent that you're playing with the idea, yes. Do you know what I mean? It would be like if I sat down and said, you know, I'm sure you remember the last time it was on your show, but, you know, I met you when I was 12, and I told you this whole story about how I met you. Like, Carrot Top in his show tells this whole story about meeting Gallagher when he's a kid. Have you ever heard that?

No.

Gallagher is the Carrot Top's hero.

Sure.

And he even does, like, a thing at the end of his show in tribute to Gallagher. He kind of does a watermelon bit or something like that. But he tells this thing in the show about how meeting Gallagher when He was, like, 14 years old, and Gallagher, like, actually gave him some advice that inspired him to be who he became. But, I mean, for all I know, it's a bit.

Right, right, right.

But he says it with such earnestness, and it does have some. It feels right, but for all I know, it's just another bit.

Everything's a work.

That's what I'm saying. So if I came here. Oh, Joe, I. You know, I met you when I was 12. You were at an airport. You were so nice. You signed an autograph. You know, there's a party that would be like, well, it's like, it's possible. I mean, you know what I mean?

I got a pretty good memory. I'd be like, what happened? Where were we? I never. I never been there.

Sorry. I have this plague that I can't get.

But if you have that. But Tommy's perception that everything's work, the whole world gets really weird.

Well, I think we're there.

Yeah, we definitely are. When it comes to politics and the.

News, I think our whole culture has been turned into, like, where are we?

Right.

Like, you know, that's why I started calling it, like, five, seven years ago, a post truth era.

Right.

I mean, we've all been in that situation where somebody in our inner circle will bring up something that we know from a factually presented basis isn't true. I heard so and so did so and so. And you go, no, that's not true. Let me show you the YouTube clip. You know what I mean? This didn't happen or no. So and so made a left, not a right. But because of what they've heard, they believe it. And you can literally show them something, say, no, no, look. And like, well, that must be AI or edited. It's like once. Once somebody becomes convinced of this culture, it's really hard to unconvince them.

Right.

And so from a performing point of view and somebody who's now also in the podcasting sphere, it's like. It's like, is it better to play into. Into what people want? Like, I really appreciated in Bruce Springsteen's Broadway special, when in the first five minutes of the thing, he basically says, I'm not really Bruce Springsteen. Have you ever seen it?

No.

It's really worth watching. He. In the first five. It's when he did his long Broadway run. You know about that. He did this thing where it was like he would talk and then play songs.

No, I didn't even know he was.

Oh, yeah, it was huge. It was. He went on this massive Broadway run.

Huh.

And HBO did it and put it on as a special. But he literally, in the first five minutes of talking, and it's, you know, it's about 1200 people night, so it's a live audience. And he says, in the first five minutes, by the way, I'm not Bruce Springsteen. Like, I'm. I mean, that's my name. But the Bruce Springsteen, you think he's like, I don't know how to fix a car. I've never been to Factory in my life. Serious?

Yeah.

Now, I knew that as a performer, I could. I knew that what I was watching wasn't real. But people want him to play John Wayne so bad that he. He puts his finger in there and says, okay, you want me to be John Wayne, I'll be John Wayne.

Right, but that's audience capture, right?

Yes, but. But now we're in the business of it. I mean, there's obviously examples, historical antecedents over the last hundred years in media where people would figure it out.

Right.

Charlie Chaplin or something. You know, I mean, like, they wanted him to be the Tramp, so he became the Tramp.

Right.

He wasn't that guy at all.

Right.

He fed into it and obviously connected to something real in him. But he wasn't really a tramp. He was a complete rich Lothario.

Well, you really see it in the Dictator, that movie, the Dictator.

Yeah.

Where he has that insane speech at the end, uniting the world.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, he was out and out socialist.

Basically, and a brilliant guy.

Oh, yeah.

Which is really crazy when you think about how silly his character was. His character was this, like, bumbling, stumbling goof.

So that's what I'm saying. What is more. What is more valuable? What the public wants from you or what is true in the entertainment world? We're used to It, Right?

Yeah.

Like, you could play Joe Rogan, the comedian at the drop of a hat, because you've done it. And Joe Rogan, the UFC announcer, you know, just. I'm not saying it's not who you are, but it's. It's an extenuation. We say in wrestling, you turn the volume up to 11, right? It's still Joe Rogan. I don't see you as being disingenuous. I can't. I can't even think of one time I've ever seen you in any media where I thought that he's not playing. He's not Joe Rogan. You know what I'm saying?

Right.

I've done it. I've played other people. So. But what I'm trying to say is now we're in this thing where, like, everybody's doing it. I mean, everybody. We've all looked at some girl on the Internet and said, that's not how she really looks. And you gotta go through the Instagram and, like, you find the real picture.

Right.

Like, everybody's kind of become comfortable with, like, a filter over everything. So that's what I mean. We're in a post truth world where the impression is becoming more valuable than the reality. That's really, I think, unprecedented.

Yeah, I think so, too. But I also think that authenticity is more valuable now than ever before because it's hard to find.

Well, that would be my argument for why my band has risen back up. Because we're one of the only bands left that sort of represents some ideal that's long abandoned.

Right, right, right. You're not a corporate creation.

No, we never were.

Right.

And we were.

And there's so many of them now. You feel like, you know, like. You ever seen Kinison's bit about the Monkeys?

The band, the Monkeys?

Yeah.

I don't Give me the.

Well, it's a bit about Manson. It was. And then, you know, he does this bit about the Monkees, about they weren't a real fucking band, like, because, you know, they were pieced together by a corporation. The. The Monkeys, like, one of which were great. The Monkeys are great. I'm a believer. They have some great songs, but they were kind of one of the first corporate creations.

But I actually, on my podcast, recently interviewed Mickey Dolenz.

Oh, wow.

And we talk a lot about this very subject. It hasn't aired yet. But he was less interested in the discussion than I was. Because my argument would be is that the Monkeys are actually the template that came our whole lives. The Monkeys were dismissed as an anachronistic thing that went against the integrity of the Beatles. Right. But if you actually look now, Beetles versus Monkeys. The Monkeys are more accurate of what came than the Beatles.

In what way?

Because authenticity is less and less and less important. Those who establish authenticity. And I would include myself amongst that and I would include you in that they're very valuable. But you also know because of your public things that have gone on, you've had to stand there and take a lot of shit. Because just even speaking your own truth is inconvenient in a post truth world. So it's actually more politically expedient to create a character that can navigate this new world. And by the way, change on a dimension.

Right.

Does it make sense the way I'm positive?

Yeah, no, it does make sense.

So my argument would be, from a rock and roll historical point of view is that the Monkeys are actually more relevant now in a particular way. The Beatles are this preeminent band. That's not the argument I'm making. I'm saying is the model of the Monkeys which was always held up for a form of mockery. See, this is what you get when you make plastic music. No, no, we live in the age of plastic music now.

Right.

The Monkeys are the grandfathers of this thing.

Right. It wouldn't even be shocking today if the corporation put together a band. No one would dismiss the. Because a bunch of people, they cast it together with a bunch of good musicians and created a band.

No, I mean, I, I, we used to want Aerosmith.

We used to want Steven Tyler and Joe Perry Young coming up together playing music. That's what we used to want. I used to want the Beatles. They all got together, they formed the band, they played in Hamburg until they tightened it up.

I used to work with the musician and I was, I was in therapy at the time and I was having a lot of problems with the musician. And the musician was from a wealthy family, but he always, he didn't bathe and he wore junky clothes. He wanted people to believe he was somebody that he wasn't.

Right.

You know, I was actually from a poorish family. He was from a rich family pretending to be poor.

Yeah.

And my therapist had the great line about him. He said, he looks like a junkie, he smells like a junkie, but he doesn't have the guts to be a junkie. So if you can, if in this culture you can pick up anything you want and adapt it without the downside of actually becoming it.

Yeah.

Well, you can see why so many People without courage or chops. It puts them in a game. It puts them in this social media that we all sort of have to navigate. So now we're into this place where we're talking to a lot of people who believe that they're furry number 463, because that's all their status comes from their digital online group.

Mm. Yeah.

You know, I'm 57. I got two kids, another one on the way. I work with animal charities and I have a tea house and a wrestling company. And I'm still fighting at 57 with people who want me to be this guy that they believe I am from 30 years ago.

Right.

And no amount of empirical evidence will change their minds.

Right. They're upset with you because you're connected to something that's different than what they want you to be connected to. Like, they don't care what you really are. They don't want you to like pro wrestling.

Sam Kinison's second act should have been get sober, get straight, and go on another hellacious run.

Yeah, I suspect Sam was very mentally ill. I never met him, but I think one of the reasons why he was self medicating so hard was probably that head injury that he got when he was a young kid. Probably really fucked him up because I know quite a few people with some pretty significant head injuries and they're wild and impulsive and aggressive and they do crazy things. Like some of them, like they just go off on benders, they disappear for days. Like, I think it's common with people with severe CTs.

CTD. Because I'm on the board, I'm an honorary on the board of the Concussion Legacy foundation, which I'm sure you know has some tie to UFC too, because, you know, Chris Nowinski, who runs it, is my friend. One of the main things that happens with people who start to get CTE early in life is lack of impulse control. So suddenly you have a 40 year old retired professional athlete who's faster and stronger than 99% of the population who can't control his temper.

Right, right, right.

That's what makes that situation so frightening for the families because they lose the ability to kind of keep it all reined in.

Right, right. That happens a lot with fighters, football players. I'm sure it happens with pro wrestlers. Probably happens with a lot of.

It's getting better. I think the awareness is helping in our organization. We forbid headshots.

That's good.

The classic chair to the head. There's none of that in my world.

Good, good. You don't need it.

Well, for what?

Yeah, the pain of watching people deteriorate is so awful. The pain in their eyes where they just can't navigate life anymore. And every day they have a fucking headache and they're just in hell and they just want to kill themselves. They just can't take it anymore. And it gets to certain point where it sort of accumulates over time where it doesn't get better, it gets worse.

Well, I think also, and I'm not speaking from experiences, but I've heard the stories, you take people who are held up as almost like masculine ideals, that fall isn't just the fall physically, it's the fall of like, I'm not the person, I'm not the hero that you've made me out to be anymore.

Right.

I'm broken and there's nothing I can do to put the pieces back together.

That's a very hard journey for championship fighters when they are the fucking man. They're on top of the world. And then they have to just integrate society and be one of us. When they used to be the Dom, and then they go to the fights, they sit there with a paunch and a little bit of a belly, sit there and watch people doing what they used to do, and they don't know how to make a living outside of fighting. They don't know what to do. Very few of them figure out how to transition into some other stage of life. The thing about athletics is by the time you're 40, you're essentially done. Unless you're a rare Tom Brady type character or Randy Couture, who can compete into their 40s. Yeah, Bernard Hopkins, great example. But at a certain point in time, it's over. And you have to know when it's over. And then what? You put all your eggs in this one basket. Where to be a championship fighter, like a Lennox Lewis or Vander Holyfield, you have to be all in. You can't have like a side gig in a blues band. There's no room for you writing books.

There's no room for you fucking selling things on Etsy.

I know this is a leap of discussion, but that's one of the discussions that's going on internally in my band is I'm 57 and one guy's 56 and one guy's, I think 61. You know, it's like, at what point do you start to dial the thing down? My brain is wired. I'm going to go until I run into a brick wall, right? And they're more like, well, Things are pretty good, you know what I mean? Like, do we have to keep throwing ourselves into the maw of the public? You know, my argument is it'd be like going into a UFC fight and not fighting to win.

Right, Right.

Fighting not to lose. That seems to me far more dangerous. And that's kind of. My argument is, like, in order to be in the arts, you've got it. It's pell mell all in, all in or all out. That's the only gear I know.

Yeah. This is the thing that happens to bands when they get to a point where they never make any new music. Right. And they just tour on the old music.

You're touching on the nerve of my life.

Yeah. How do you navigate that?

I just keep working. I refuse. That's it. In my case, back to my daddy for a second. I watched my dad play songs he didn't want to play. I watched him doing drug deals rather than make money from music. I watched him give up on his talent, his dream, all of it. I watched it destroy my father. And then, if you want to even go further in a kind of a mythical way, my success destroyed him again. So if you've watched that. Well, I was lucky enough to have kids late in life. My first kid came when I was 48, and we're about to have one again. 57. Once my kid came, I was like, this kid is not going to look at me how I looked at my father. Like, shoulda, woulda, coulda.

Yeah.

So I had to get myself up off the couch and, like, get serious again and again. That's that mentality, that killer mentality. Like, I can still go, I'm gonna go. So until somebody stops me, I'm gonna go.

Well, that's what got you to the dance, right?

Well, even doing the podcast, this is. You know, it's. You know, it's this. It looks easy to just sit and talk, but it requires prep and mental focus, and it's. It's a lot harder than I would have thought, you know? And, you know, I got money. I make it sit home. I like being in the game. I like the hustle. I like having to learn things. I like having to.

What do you enjoy about podcasting, and why did you decide to get into it?

The quick story was I did a. I did a podcast based on an album that we put out that was 33 songs, and I did it for iHeartRadio, and they were fine and everything, but when it all finished, I started to kind of enjoy it a bit. And I poked around, as you do, to see if anybody was interested, and it was like crickets. Nobody gave a shit about me being a podcaster, like, at all. And if any kind of response came back, it'd be like, well, if you want to tell stories about the 90s and get other 90s artists on to talk about the 90s, we'd be cool with that. But other than that, we have no use for you. So I just thought, okay, not for me, not meant to be. And then I did Club Random with Bill Maher, and as soon as I was done with the episode and shaking everybody's hands, they said, bill's starting a podcast network. Would you be interested in doing this? And I said, only if I could do whatever I want to do. And they said, tell us what it is. And I pitched them the idea that is the show called Magnificent Others.

Now, I said, I want to talk to whoever I want to talk to about whatever I want to talk about. But here's the reason. And the reason to the heart of your question is, I feel there's a lot of people in this culture that don't get celebrated in the way that I would celebrate them because we become so skewed with influencers and. And people who are famous that don't do shit.

Yeah.

And I think there's a lot of value in American culture that can be celebrated. So you're talking about, like, say, a retired fighter or something. There's a lot we can learn from a retired fighter.

Yeah.

You know, you have a shogun armor out here. You know what I mean? To me, a retired fighter's like, you think I don't want to sit down with a retired shogun and ask them about what it's like to be in there alone?

Right.

Recently interviewed Steve Vai, great guitar player. And I, for some reason, I had this idea of, you know, like, the classic Sergio Leone, two guys at the end of the street with the gun.

Yeah.

So I said to Steve, by who do you fear at the end of, like, who's the faster gun? You know, I mean, that's his right. Not I'm projecting, but I'm saying we all have that moment. Like, who do we not want to be in the Octagon?

When is it Eddie Van Halen?

Who was it for, me or for him?

Steve Vai.

He didn't want to say, really. Well, I think he's a top guy. So why would you want to create heat where there's no need to create heat? I mean, he's at an Elite level.

Right.

I'll tell you what, I wouldn't want to be at the end of the street with him. Steve Vai at the other end of the street, or Yngwie.

Those guys are like insane shredders.

I mean. Yeah. I mean, I'm an amateur, you know, compared to those guys, so I wouldn't want the woo.

There's something about that kind of shredder that's just, like, so stunning.

Freakish.

Yeah.

I mean, you. Do you still train MMA or.

I still do martial arts.

Okay.

So I don't spar, though. I don't get hit in the head anymore.

But there's got to be those times where you see a fighter that just. They just get it.

Yeah.

And it looks easy for them. And you're like, how is that autism? Okay. God bless. But I'm saying that's the way it is for me with other musicians sometimes.

Right.

I'll look at a guy like Steve I. Or Eddie Van Halen, ring Van. Like. Like, how do you do that?

Right. Like, what it must have been like when Hendrix burst onto the scene.

My dad had a story, actually.

Yeah.

He's. He was playing a club in Wisconsin. He never heard of Jimi Hendrix, and Jimi Hendrix was playing the night before. They were playing the same club. So one of his boys said, why don't we go up, watch this new guy, Jimi Hendrix. We'll hang out, we'll play the gig the next night, we'll drive back to Chicago. So imagine my dad's in a club in Wisconsin with like 1,000 people in 1966 or 67, and out walks Jamie Hendrix. My dad said he'd never even heard his music, so it split his mind. And he said it was so shocking the way he played and how masterful he was at it. He said when he got on stage the next night, he felt like he couldn't play the guitar at all.

Wow.

It was like an alien instrument. And Clapton talks about it other. Like, Jimi Hendrix blew Clapton's mind. And whatever. When Roy Albert hall. Whatever it was, it was like, oh, my God, what the hell is happening? Happening.

Yeah.

I think it was Bag of Nails or something was going.

He's like, what am I doing?

And this is when people were spray painting on the walls in. In London. Clapton as God. And here Comes Here shows up this guy who was on the Chitlin Circuit is what they used to call playing for Little Richard and. And the Isley Brothers. I mean, he was just in the backup band.

Yeah.

And he shows up in England Chaz Chandler, the bassist from the Animals, goes, this guy could be a star. Gets him a record deal. He shows up in England, and next thing you know, he's like, hey, Joe is a number one hit, and he's on tv, and it's like. I mean, imagine that.

Wow.

So, yeah, there are those people that's like. It's so shocking. Van Halen was the same way. You. I got to interview him once and sit in his studio for four hours. He would just play the guitar, and you'd just be like, I don't understand how this is possible. You're doing inhuman things. And I know. I know how to do what you do.

Yeah.

And I can't even come close to doing what you're doing. Shocking.

It's always interesting, too, that people have a specific sound. Like you can hear them and you know who's playing the guitar. Like, Steve Ray Vaughan had a sound. Like you could hear him. Like when he was doing Voodoo Child, you're like, oh, that's a Stevie version. Like, he played music.

You play guitar at all?

No.

So the one thing I'll tell you, guitar player to non guitar players, the thing you learned about the great guitar players, it's. It's. It's. It's all in their hands. Everybody focuses on what amp, what guitar, the gear. It's. It's somehow. It's the way they hit the strings. I couldn't even explain it to you. We call it a. I have no idea. Steve Ray Vaughan, for example, he played his strings purposely high. He made it harder to play the guitar, really, and still played at that level. Now, there's a belief with certain guitar players that the higher you put the strings, the more you have to dig out the notes and that so it becomes more emotive. So imagine he's doing it at that level, even hard, he's making it harder to do what he's doing, and he's doing it at that level.

Wow.

Unbelievable. Incredible talent. I mean, shocking. Again, shocking. It's like, where does that come from? Just has it.

We have a photo of him in the tunnel leading up to the stage in my comedy club of him on stage at that club in 1980.

Oh, at the same place.

Yeah, I think it's 88 or 86 somewhere. Somewhere in the 80s, he's on the. Maybe it's 83, but early in the. Sometime in the 80s, and it's like Steve Ray Vaughan on stage at that club. And it's wild. It's just wild to think that he was in this room, you know, because Austin, where he's from, and think about.

This, because he talked about it, there was a point in his life where he was dropping rocks of coke, I think had whiskey and drinking it and rotten his stomach out. And he got sober, like in the last year or so, his life. And he played even better.

Right.

If you listen to the recordings that he made live, particularly in the last year or so of his life, he's playing even better. So that's why I say about Sam Kinison. Imagine if he was able to make that left.

And like I said, though, I think Sam was dealing with something. I think his demons were internal. The Steve Ray Vaughan thing. What's fascinating to me is, well, first of all, he's the only guy that can play Voodoo Child other than Hendrix. Like, if you're like at some upstart and you want to release Voodoo Child today, like, Jesus Christ, like, what are you doing? You're treading on hollowed ground, you know, like, maybe you can do all along the Watchtower. Because that was actually a Dylan song, right? Maybe.

But you know why he, you know, this is my opinion, but you know why he. He plays Voodoo Child so well?

Why?

Because he had studied the same guys that Hendrix had studied. So he's not imitating Hendrix. He's coming from the same wellspring of.

Information, like, who are the guys?

Albert King. Ah, B.B. king. Albert King. You know, it's Muddy Waters. It's understanding the way those guys played. So he's not imitating Jimi Hendrix. He's playing from the same spot.

Have you ever heard of Johnny Thunder?

You mean talking about from the New York Dolls?

No. Johnny Thunder was an artist in the 1960s, and he put out a song called I'm Alive, and I think it was 1969, and it was also covered by another band. But his version is fucking insane. It's so good, you can't believe he didn't make it. Can I play it for you, please? Yeah, right? That's right. His version is the COVID What was the other version of it? Tommy James and the Shondell's their version, but.

Okay.

Johnny Thunder, put the headphones on. Another new commercial I've heard recently. Yeah, well, we started talking about it like a year or so ago. My friend Brian Simpson played it for me. And he goes, you're gonna fucking love this. And he goes, this is a one hit wonder from 1969.

Never heard him. I usually know all this.

Fucking fantastic, right?

Yeah. I don't even know where he's From. I can't even identify where he's from by the.

The fucking song is fantastic. It's so good. It just, it stuns you because you hear something like that and you go, how did he not make it? What hope is there? Imagine if you were around in 1969 and you see that guy up at the Whiskey a Go Go, he gets on stage and plays that song like, holy shit.

But to be fair, I saw those people in the 80s and I saw those people in the 90s, and I couldn't imagine that they weren't gonna make it. And they didn't.

Yeah, isn't that weird?

And that was part of the vibe that my father put on me, which was like, well, how the hell did you get out?

Right. Of course. Well, the fucking resentment must have been astounding. You know when you're, you know, trying and kind of half assing it and your son comes along and all of a sudden he's doing arenas. You're like, what the. This interview from Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan literally almost has what you guys just quoted, like, never heard of it. I can't believe it. Right? We talked about this. Yeah, Bob. What year was this?

1969.

Yeah, isn't that crazy? That's right. We talked about this. Bob Dylan. So he discovered it and was asking Jan Wenner if he'd heard of it. That's so crazy that even Bob Dylan couldn't make it. Huge.

1968. Okay, okay, yeah. Bob Dylan on the radio.

Wow.

Disappeared.

That's fucking incredible, man. Incredible. Do you feel like a guy who make a song that's that good? Oh, my God. All you need is good songwriters, and that guy's gonna be huge. There's a billion dollars in there waiting for you. Dig it out.

But that's, that's kind of what I was saying before is like, it's, it's. It's a curious thing why certain people make it and certain people don't. My father, before he passed away, he told me, you had the one thing that I didn't have, which was the ambition. Like, he wanted it. He said, I didn't really want it. I just wanted it to come to me.

Well, also, I think if you're involved in a life of crime like that, a lot of cocaine, and first of all, there's a lot of bad karma that you have. But also it's like you're too distracted. Like you're too. In that life. You're never going to really be able to go all in on music as an Artist. So you're never going to really be able to reach your full potential, right?

Well, yeah, that's kind of. That's what he was saying. He was admitting to me that he had made some sort of internal decision, that he didn't want to do whatever he had to do to do it. He made certain excuses involving the mob. He did say that back then, and it is a known thing in Chicago that in order to be successful in Chicago, you had to basically sign contracts with the mob.

Right.

You know, there's always been rumors about the band Chicago that there were mob ties with their. With their world.

I'm sure there was a lot of that going on.

Yeah.

It was the whole Hendrix thing. You ever know that conspiracy?

Well, yeah, I've read about that. That gets into other types of complications, and I'm not. I don't have an opinion on it. It's just. It's like saying there's no way to separate the two things at the time, like anybody back then, you know, any clubs at the time, particularly in Chicago, they were all mob connected.

And Los Angeles as well.

Sure. So if you were a comedian or, you know what I mean, an emcee or whatever you were doing, like, here's Lola, the dancer. You know, you were connected. There was a Wyatt guy standing there, and everybody knew they were, because that's how they did their business. Because if you didn't like what Johnny Rocco was doing, you were gonna get in trouble, and you didn't want to get in trouble. And I went to school with a bunch of the mob, wise guys, kids and grandkids.

I worked at a mob club in Connecticut. I did Stand up. And another one in Long island there was, where the guys were connected by the mob. And in Boston as well, in Boston, Knicks Comedy Stop. They would offer to pay you in cocaine or money.

We played a club on Long island once where the crowd was moshing and. And in the middle of the fourth song, the guy on the side of the stage that worked for me was waving like, stop playing in the middle of the song. And I said, fucking stop playing. Got a thousand people out in front of me. And he kind of did one of these. And there were two wise guys standing there with suits on, kind of like, you're going to get in trouble with these guys if you don't stop. And I said, I don't give a fuck. And I kept going. So they waited one more song, and then they came out between songs, on stage with their backs to the audience, and they pulled their coats Open and showed me a gun and said, you better calm the fuck down. Down.

Whoa. Because of the washing?

Yeah, because it was one of. We used to call them brass and fern bars, you know, like the brass bar and the ferns.

Right, right, right.

You know that bar, right? Yeah, we've all been there. And we were playing one of those places for some reason, and the crowd was going apeshit. They were bouncing off the wall. So they were blaming us for the reaction of the crowd. So they wanted us to bring the crowd down. But how do you bring the crowd down? So they literally showed me a gun and said, you better calm the fuck down.

So what did you do?

I just kept going. What, were they gonna kill me on stage?

Jesus Christ. What happened when you got off stage?

They weren't gone, really. I mean, there might have been a problem if somebody had done some real damage or something, but there was no problem. But they definitely threatened me on stage.

How did they know about all this?

This is me, like, 180 pounds and, like, long hair and bad attitude.

That's hilarious.

Now, I don't think they'd ever seen anything like moshing, you know, this is like 92. This is a very, very new phenomenon to the outside world.

But moshing was going on before that.

Oh, yeah, but it's only in the underground clubs is what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. You're in a wise guy's club on Long island with brass rails and ferns.

I dated a girl in the 80s who went to see the Cramps and came home with a concussion. Yeah, from the mosh pit.

Ever Poison Ivy? She was the guitar player for the Cramps.

Oh, right.

So great.

Yeah. Bad music for bad people.

Did you. Did you ever kind of encounter the alternative scene when you were a kid?

Not really, no.

Just not. Not for you. The freaks.

I didn't go to very many. I mean, I went to a few concerts when I was a kid, but not like, I went to Jay Giles Band. I saw George Thorogood.

Not exactly the alternative there.

Yeah, no, I didn't. I never really saw a lot. And then once I started really getting into comedy, I didn't really go to see anybody perform. I was mostly just performing myself. So I never got to see anybody. And I didn't really become friends with band people until I moved to Hollywood. And, you know, then like in the late 90s and 2000s, I met a bunch of band people. And it was always weird, you know, hanging out with them was always odd. It's like oh, that's that guy from that band.

Yeah. It's a lot of, a lot of like, what do you call it when the brain. When the brains don't connect the brain hemispheres. Bipolar. A lot of bipolarity in music musicians. Oh yeah.

Particularly high levels.

My theory is the reason they become musicians is they over develop one side of their brain.

Oh.

You know, you probably get on somebody who knows what they're talking about. But the idea is that if people's their brain hemisphere, and that's why a lot of musicians do coke, is it helps the polarities work, it helps the brain communicate left to right.

Really?

Oh, yeah. It's a known thing that coke really helps that if you have that bipolarity.

Huh. Is that a medication for people that are bipolar? Do they give them Adderall or anything like that?

I don't know. I mean, I mean, I've worked with people who are bipolar and they've talked about their medications and stuff, you know. Huh. And it's still kind of an inexact science. Bipolarity.

It's crazy to think that coke helps fix some things.

I think it helps. I think it helps the. What I've heard is it helps the brain communications. Anybody I've known that's bipolar. As a musician that did coke told me they felt normal. It's the first time in their life they felt normal, that their brain worked normally.

What a terrible thing.

Yeah, it doesn't work right.

Imagine if that's the thing that keeps you together, it's cocaine. I wonder if what coca leaves would do because there's a lot of people, like the high altitude herding populations and you know, like people in Peru, they chew coca leaves just for energy. And apparently it's a very different thing like the chewing of the coca leaves.

Or you can get tea. Coca tea.

Yeah.

I was just in South America, I've.

Had that mate de coca.

Yeah. I feel like you get a little bit of a clarity, but the chewing.

Of the leaves is like, it's so normal for them and it's illegal over here.

Yeah. But back to the theory. The idea is if you have one side of your brain over develop, it makes you good at something that you.

Wouldn'T necessarily be good at and then bad at life.

Yeah, probably.

So you need a handler like Elvis.

If you're meeting a successful musician. They're the, the graduating class of the bipolarity.

Oh, okay. That makes sense.

So there's some functional level of acumen that makes sense.

That makes sense.

That's why through the years, as I've heard people give rumor to any number of famous rock stars. It's like I recognize all the behaviors. Most people treat it like, oh, can you believe so and so did this and made this erratic decision? It's like, no, that's. That's a musician. That's. That's how most of their brains work.

Yeah.

I don't know what it is, and maybe there's a comedic parallel, but it just strikes me that the reason there's such consistent bad behavior with musicians is because their brains don't work right. And I'm sure somebody's gonna get mad at me for saying that, but, I mean, it is a compliment. It makes them good at something that they maybe wouldn't necessarily be good at and maybe. I don't know. I've never been tested. I don't think I'm bipolar.

But yeah, I probably. I would imagine then a lot of, like, motivational speakers would not be awesome band members. You know what I mean? Like, people who are completely dialed in with their life.

Tony Robbins, my new bass player, you.

Know, they get up in the morning and they do their exercise and yoga and eat well. They stare at the sun as it rises. And they got their whole life dialed in. They probably wouldn't be the best band members.

Well, especially like, there's no, there's no good band members. That's the problem.

Well, how do you guys. How do you keep it together for all these years? Like, what's the key to a.

Well, we didn't. That's. That's the thing. I mean, we broke up in 2000 and. And then the drummer and I brought the band back in 2007 and it only lasted two years. And then I soldiered on alone as the only Original Member From 2009 to 2015. And then the drummer came back and then the guitar player, who I didn't talk to for 16, 17 years, came back in. Jesus, 2018. So we've been an intact three quarter unit since 2018.

How come you guys didn't talk for so long?

It's real heat. It was real heat.

Yeah. That sucks.

No, it's all, it's all resolved now. I mean, it's all good. I mean, I mean, I think if you don't talk to somebody for 16, 17 years, there's a beef there that. You know what I mean?

A real one.

Yeah.

But it's interesting to me how people can manage like that. It's always like, as comics, we always look at band members going, imagine if all of your fucking success Depended on this guy showing up, that guy showing up, this guy's girlfriend not getting in the way, this guy's fucking uncle not trying to manage you guys. Like, you have all these fucking people and you're trying to put together songs and you're trying to like, get out. Come on, we got a tour. I don't want to tour. My mom needs me to help her with the fucking business. And. What are you talking about, man? We're in a band. We got it. We have a record deal.

Nodding my head because this is every. This is my Life experience for 35 years.

We as comics, we always talk about, thank God. We're like a one man show. Thank God. All we need is other comics to work with us.

The problem with the band is, is the band members have no idea why it works. We're clueless as to the mystery of why people are attracted to us as a unit. We can certainly conceptualize. Like, I write good songs and I play good guitar, but there's something about bands that creates a kind of a magical. Pete Townsend referred to it as a gang. A gang that you want to be in. That's what makes bands attractive to people. That was his opinion. I don't totally disagree. There's something that goes on in those relationships that's kinetic enough that it sustains past whether or not you have a good song or two.

Right? Yeah. It's all the pieces make the puzzle together. It's not one piece as an individual. All of them together make Led Zeppelin.

Yes, all together. So if you're lucky and in this new world, you got the Stones playing into their 80s, so the economy of music has changed where it's like you're in an elongated state of success that's just totally unprecedented, by the way. There's no. There's no. What's going on with rock bands in their 50s and beyond is there's no prior parallel in 100 plus years of recorded music. There's not even one instance you can point to and say, it worked that way then. So we're all in uncharted territory and there's nobody that can even really advise you. There's always the material thing of like, well, you're gonna make a lot of money. And, you know, you got this IP and the ban, but like the actual sort of the nuts and bolts of how to hang together. So for us it's been really. It's the. I call it the family of the band. There's some sort of pride that's emerged with, like, we've all survived. Our relationships are intact enough for us to get on a stage and somehow it benefits our families individually. So it has allowed us a sort of pride, you know, that it's because it's less about our relationship and more about our relationship with our families.

That's allowed us to have a sweetness between the three of us that we didn't have when we were younger.

Young. Oh, well, that's cool. Well, also probably just growing up and being more mature and appreciative.

You're really going on a limb there with the growing up.

That's your little bit of gratitude.

Perpetual adolescence over here.

Well, that is part of the fun though. I mean, you do wait have to really.

You know, it's funny even when I say something like this, there's already some guy getting ready to go on Reddit, but there is a day you wake up and you look in the mirror like, I'm a rock star. This is cool.

Yeah.

And, and, and there's another day that you wake up and go, you know, I don't have to get off this rock star. Tr I don't want to look at the Stones.

I saw the Stones at Coda at the Circuit of the Americas here in Austin a couple years ago. It was insane. It's insane. I, I was almost like having an out of body experience because you can't believe you're really seeing Mick Jagger, like when he's out there dancing. I swear to God, I felt like I was on a drug. I was like, my friend Bobby and I were hanging. He, he's the one, he owns that place, Circuit of the Americas. And I was standing next to him like, I can't believe they're really here. Like there's certain people that you just get weirded out by being like, Bill Murray was here the other day.

Yeah.

And I even told him. I'm like, I'm weirded out. I'm weirded out that you're here. Like, it's just there's a lot of people that I don't freak. I mean, I've met a lot of people. I don't freak out about too many of them. But Bill Murray I freaked out about, but seeing Mick Jagger just. I didn't even get to meet him. But seeing him on the stage like this, nuts. That's really Mick Jagger.

Yeah, well, the mythical part. See, in his case, the mythical part of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards is integrated. They become the avatar. They're the living example of where it actually works. My argument is against those people where it doesn't work. You know, Larry465 on the Internet who thinks he's lord of, like, you know, D and D or something. You know what I mean? That's where I get kind of like, what is that? I get the other thing, you know, because, you know, whether it's, you know.

What do you mean by Larry Ford?

I'm joking about the guy in the Internet who's. His entire status is based on being in a subculture and achieving some status within the subculture, which doesn't really apply into the outside world.

Oh, like a Reddit forum or something?

Yeah, whatever.

Whatever it is.

Mick Jagger walks into a stadium full of people. They're there to see Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, even though they're 80. And you, who's been around, everybody goes, us, holy shit, There it is.

Yeah. Just the fact that he was alive. Okay.

But it's the myth made real.

Yes.

Have you ever watched those YouTube videos? Like, what was Caesar really like? You know what I mean?

Right, right.

That type of stuff. Like, what was it like to live in those times? Because there's the myth and then there's the reality.

Right.

And then sometimes if you learn about the reality, you're like, wow, that guy was really a badass. Or she was really a badass. Because it's. The thing is real, the mythology is real. It's like it has truth or resonance in it. It's all this other culture that's risen up where we're supposed to pay tribute, and that goes back to the podcast. It's like we're paying tribute to people who haven't done shit. I want to pay tribute to people who've actually done something.

Yes. Well, that's what you like about doing your podcast, then. You just, like finding people that resonate with you that really strike a chord.

Just the other day, I interviewed Susan Olson, who was Cindy Brady. The Brady Bunch. Okay. The Brady Bunch is, you know, as far as the original show, I think it's been over for 50 years, right? I think so. Right. Yeah. Okay. Every interview you look up on YouTube on Susan Olsen, it's like, it's just getting her to regurgitate the same stories. And she did the Brady Bunch when she was like, 7 to 12 years old or something.

Wow.

You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. You're Gilligan for life.

Okay. My thing is. No, you're not Gilligan for life. So that's. That's what. And we had a great chat because I think there's a lot to learn from somebody who went through a Zeitgeist moment at such a young age. Like, how do you navigate past that? What do you do with yourself? Like, how do you pick yourself up off the ground? How do you deal with typecasting? How do you navigate the fact that as you walk through the airport, you're not Susan Olsen, you're Cindy Brady.

Do people still recognize her?

Oh, yeah.

Wow. It was Barbara Eden. I Dream of Jeannie. That was another one.

Yeah.

People get locked into who they are. Al Bundy.

I'm still the rat in the cage guy. I deal with that too, you know.

It's such a good jam. It's such a good jam. That's a great song.

Thank you.

That's on the green room playlist. That fucking song rules, dude.

That was a good one.

Oh, my God. All time.

I didn't get it at the time. I actually had to be talked into it.

Really?

Yeah. We were putting out our double album and it was this big pressure moment 95. And I wanted a different song to be the first song. And the guy from the record company called. Who's now passed away. His name was Phil Cordrero. Lovely guy. And he literally did the thing on the phone. Kid. It's a smash. You gotta trust me. And I trusted him.

Wow.

I thought he was crazy.

Did you think that? That sometimes because you're too close to your own creation. Yeah. Like, you're never gonna get to see how your songs impacted other people the way it impacted that. You know, you're not going to feel that the way they feel it. Like hearing that song for the first time completed. They've never seen you rehearse it. They don't know how you wrote it. They don't know how you guys practiced it. How you around with the lyrics. You did a different way. They just get the first. They get the full version done. They're like, holy. And then it's. It's kind of awful that you don't get to experience that. Like you created it.

Yeah. The only time I've been able to experience that is when I was really high.

Oh, wow.

Like, getting so high that I could hear it as if it was somebody else singing. What really tripped me out about doing a lot of drugs back in the day was I would hear messages in my music that I didn't even know I was putting in there. And at some point, I became conscious of my unconscious ability to put messages inside. Sorry. You look at me like I'm crazy.

No, no, no. It's fascinating.

So imagine I'll try to reset up the scenario.

Okay.

You write a song. You think it's about something. You're sure of it. In fact, you would tell people, sorry, this horrible plague.

I got no worries.

You're convinced that the song that you've written is about your ex girlfriend. And then when you're super high, you listen and you can. You can hear yourself actually singing about something else. So now you have a. You have a conscious understanding of something. Your unconscious is implanted in. In the art. And once I became conscious of the process, I became more aware of how to consciously plant messages in my music. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You just operated on layers. You put stuff in there.

Yes, but I didn't know that I was doing it until I did a lot of drugs. That there was this other voice at work, this subliminal voice.

Can you give me an example?

The conscious mind wants to believe the song is about your ex girlfriend, but what it's really about is about being abandoned by your mother. If you. If you came up to me and said, what's that song about? And I trust you, and I go, oh, it's just about my ex. I believed it. I would believe it, like, 100%. And then I listened to it high on drugs, and I'm like, oh, my God. I'm singing about my mother and I'm weeping. And I had no conscious mind when I wrote the song that was about my mother.

Wow.

And then once I have that kind of agape moment of like, holy shit, then I go back and listen to music sober, and I can totally hear it. And then where it gets really weird is people would come up to me and say that song that reminded me of my relationship with my mother. Thank you. That healed. Like, people would come up and respond to me on the unconscious recognition, not what I thought I wrote the song about that blew my mind, that there was this other person in their layer at work. And I gained a lot more respect for, I guess you would call it, the shamanic aspects of art. I don't know if, you know, read Castanedis, but, you know, do you read Castanedus?

Maybe I did in high school, I think. Yeah.

It was kind of a thing for our generation. Everybody kind of read Castanedus.

Yeah.

And it's still, to this day, debated about whether Castanedis was a real thing. It was a documentary. It was true stories or made up. And did Don Juan, the shaman, was he a real person? Is there really a Don Juan? There's A lot of debate even. I think there's even been New York Times articles written about it, about whether Castanedis whole thing is a fraud and all this stuff. And I think Castanedis may even still be alive.

Really?

That might be one to look up sometime. But anyway, I gained a lot more respect that artists have the ability to communicate at subconscious levels that they're not even aware of. I don't know if that resonates the way I'm explaining it, but it moved something to me, allowed me to be a better artist.

That's fascinating. And also, you can never guess what kind of an impact, especially if you're too close to it, what kind of an impact your work is going to have on someone who's seeing it for the first time. And if there's multiple layers that you're operating on that you're not even totally aware of. And then you put out this thing that has this, like, very complex, layered message in it. And it just makes people go, oh, my God. That's like one of the ultimate expressions of art, right? Like something that just. It. Music does something very strange that no other art form does. It operates like a drug. Like music gives you more energy. When you're on the treadmill, like, if a great song comes on, you're working out, you're like, fuck yeah. Like, you feel it, you know?

Yeah.

There's riffs, there's guitar riffs. I swear to God. Make you stronger. Like tool, Prison, sex. That song makes you just ra. You know, there's like something to it. It gives you energy. It's like a drug there. It's an audio drug. It fires up your synapses in this very strange way.

The best explanation I ever heard that resonated with me was, you know, the entire universe is constructed on waves, light, everything has to do with waves. So music is the closest thing to the foundational aspects of the universe.

That's okay. I know what you're saying.

Yeah, well, that makes sense because it penetrates the cellular.

Right. Well, people that, you know, go on these shamanic journeys. The. The ayahuasca journeys. They play these songs that accompany the ayahuasca journey. They're called ikaros. And when you.

Are they traditional ayahuasca songs?

Yes. And they have, like, this weird beat to them. You listen to them by themselves. You're like, I don't get it. But if you listen to them under the influence, you. The. The psychedelic experience dances to those songs, and it gets guided by those songs, and it's really wild. Like, really wild, like. And then you go, oh, this is like a technology to interface with the psychedelic experience.

But okay, but you're hitting on exactly what I'm saying. I think artists, and I'll exclude myself from the discussion so I don't make somebody mad. Artists have a way of knowing how to do that without anybody teaching them.

Right.

They just know what music beats, chords, melodies, lyrics to use to penetrate. And the successful artists think of it, they do it at scale.

Yeah, well, there's this thing that happens when someone's really in it where you feel it from them while they're performing, and you just get drawn into it. Like, wow. I remember the first time I saw Mr. Jones in me. First time I saw Counting crowd play that song. The way he was, like, dancing around in the living room. Like, that guy is so free. Like, I want to be free like that, you know, I really remember thinking that because it was so real. He was so in the moment while he's singing that song. And I had Adam in here and I asked him about him. Like, what. What is that? Like, you were locked in, man. Like, I remember being a kid, I was probably like 23 or something like that when that song came out. And I was in my apartment in New York watching it, going, going, watching on mtv, going, this guy's just so loose, man. He's so free. And I remember thinking, I want to be able to perform like that. Whatever I do, I want to feel like, how's that? What's that zone that he's in?

Well, part of that is, you know. You know, a lot of shamanic work involves the breath. So think a singer is. Is rhythmically breathing and rhythmically chanting. So that's one thing that most people would not pick up on. There's a ton of expiration of breath, you know, like, what's the Wim Hof? Wim hof. You know that. Yeah, I do that for two hours.

Right.

I mean, I'm totally asphyxiated the entire time. Right. It's not natural to scream your head off for two hours. It just isn't.

Do you have to get in shape to do it? Do you have to get your arms in shape?

I do. I do to a certain extent, yeah.

Do you build up to, like, a concert performance? Like, how do you have.

To a certain extent, yeah. I don't know. I don't know how to explain it. Like, I'm off cycle right now, so if you came to see me play an hour and a half show tomorrow, I could do it. But I probably couldn't talk the next day. But if I do a week of rehearsals and prep up, then I can.

So it's like a muscle, like something.

Yeah. I don't understand it. It's almost like a trained fury. Like, you learn to not go too far. People say, blow your voice out. You have to really know where the line is, by the way, when you're. When you're dealing with a ton of adrenaline. Like, the thing with fighters comes to mind. Like, they'll come in, they'll gas in a minute because they're so jacked.

Right.

Sometimes you see a guy getting rain, they're just like. And they gas in a minute. I know how to see that because of watching wrestlers gas. You know, you learn that. The body language of somebody getting gassed. You know, they kind of start to lose their posture and. Yeah, Goosey, right.

They get loose.

Okay. Same thing for a singer. I mean, you can gas in the front three minutes, and you're dead.

Oh, no.

What are you gonna do?

Yeah.

So you have to almost, like, have a controlled fury. Like, imagine screaming at the top of your lungs, but not totally at the top of your lungs. 87%. Like, there's the magical line.

Well, that's what fighting. It's the same kind of thing. You don't go 100%.

And the Zen of that.

Yeah. Some of the best fighters, they'll punch like, 50, 60%, and that way, they could put volume on you.

So I can't imagine being in there, somebody's on the other side, want to kill you. And being able to be like, I'm gonna just kind of work my way through these.

Well, you have to have serious experience to be able to manage the storm that way. Did you ever have to take vocal lessons to learn how to not blow your throat out?

I did, yeah. I work with a lady. It's a funny story. I worked with a lady at one point. They hooked me up with somebody from the opera.

Oh, perfect.

And she came to my. Well, no, it's actually, she was great, but she came to my house and she said, oh, you sing totally wrong, but here's how to sing right, and you won't blow your voice out. And it was all about the right posture and all this stuff. And the first time I tried to do it, a concert with 4,000 kids going nuts. I tried to do what she taught me, and it didn't work because I just. I. I was in the deep end of the pool, and I. I ended up having to go back to all my old bad habits. So eventually I found a woman who was used to working with rock singers. And she explained to me a bunch of theories about, I think, her memory. I think she said, the human body has 11 folds of tissue in the throat. And if, and if rock singers don't warm up all that tissue, that's how they damage their singing. And she, and she'd also work with Steven Tyler. And she said, the thing about rock singers is you. You guys sing wrong because that's the way you want to sound. It's part of your gimmick, you know?

Right, right.

I'm sure Steven Tyler and myself, we could sing like choir boys if we wanted to, but that's not what attracts people to us. It's the razor's edge and the voice or something. Something. So you have to learn how to warm up to sing like an idiot, basically. And that's the sound that people are attracted to with rock singers. And even the gentleman you played before, I mean, he's totally abusing his voice. That is not proper singing.

Right, right, right, right, right.

And there's, there's, there's, there's physical techniques to create that sound. Like, there's, there's Axl Rose, for example. Like, you know, he sings a very particular way. The way he, he uses his throat in a particular way that makes it. You say that's the axle sound. It's not natural, but it's awesome when he does it. It's kind of the thing.

Yeah. That has got to be really hard to maintain. I saw them play in Athens, Greece, and they did a three hour show like two years ago.

Yeah.

At like. How old is he? 60. 60 something.

I think Axel's about seven years older than me, so.

Yeah. Because I remember welcome to the Jungle was huge. When I was in high school or just out of high school.

89, 88. 89 was it.

Okay. So I graduated in 85. So it was like a couple years after high school. Welcome to the Jungle. I was like, oh, my God, this song. Like, I remember watching the, the music video. Remember when he had that teased up hair back. He had a huge hair. That was the poison hair era.

Yeah, yeah. So singing like that is. It's, it's, it's wrong, but that's what makes it right.

Right. Well, you can't say what's wrong or what's right. It's just like what's sustained.

Trust me, no one can tell you. You're surrounded by a lot of people with a lot of opinions. I was Told when I was very young. That voice you sing with will never sell records, ever. And most people that don't like my music will often cite my voice as the reason they don't like my music. But that's the why that my voice is the reason that people who do like my music like my music.

Right.

It's a weird. It's like a. Like, what do you do with that?

Well, you can't do it for other people.

No, no. But I'm saying I sing the way I sing, and it's like. It's like, don't sing that way. Well, I don't.

That's the whole idea of, like, you can't do it for other people. You can't do it for them. You can't do it the way they want it to. No. There's gonna be people who like it the way you. What? You like it.

Yeah.

You just have to find out what that thing is, and you have to fit. Like, you have to. What. Whatever your internal compass is that guides you towards this particular style, this particular way of expressing yourself. It has to be authentic.

Well, singing against a wall of guitars is a particular skill set. It's like singing against three airline jets at the same time.

Right, right, right.

We have three guitars in our band playing at the same time. So my voice has to cut like a razor through that all of noise.

Voices are. Some voices are so fucking compelling. Like, you listen to them. Like Amy Winehouse. Perfect. You hear her sing once, and you're just like, whoa, there's something about it.

Okay, so back to my argument about the unconscious thing. Certain voices convey an unconscious information.

Yeah.

Tonally, it registers in the public as a certain authority or wisdom or sorrow. Like some basic. Some voices just have so much sorrow in them.

Yeah.

Like, for our generation, when Kurt would sing, and I saw Kurt many times live, it sounded like it was like the literal howl of our generation. It had this great connectivity to what we were experiencing as latchkey kids.

Yes.

You know?

Yes.

I don't want to say tantrum ish, but it had a certain kind of anger. Anger. But it was the anger of disaffection. It wasn't the anger of. Of a hardcore band. Like, you know, screw capitalism.

Right, right, right.

It had a sorrow somehow in it.

Yeah, yeah. And authenticity. Like, Kurt was the master of authenticity. He killed hair bands.

He really did.

He killed hair bands. I remember when I was a kid, Nevermind came out, and I was with a couple of friends of mine, and this guy goes, have you seen this? And he shows me this fucking cassette with a baby on the COVID I go, what is it? He's like, this is Nirvana.

Yeah.

And he plays to me Nirvana for the first time over his house. I was like, holy shit. Like, this is crazy.

Yeah. It was for. For our generation. It was the. It was the door getting kicked open.

Yes.

Everything after just got easier.

But that's the thing. These unique artists that come along and transform the medium. You know, like I said, Lenny Bruce, Pryor Lynn, Kinison. There's a few examples of that in music where someone comes along, like Hendrix or Kurt or even Elvis, someone comes along and everybody's like, what the fuck is going on? The Beatles. What is happening? This is crazy.

What strikes me, and this is a business point, but that's where all the money is. And, and. And yet the music business is not to nurture those talents. In fact, the music business works against those talents. Talents. It's almost like they blow up their business model so it becomes inconvenient.

Well, what do you think the music business nurtures?

Control. They want control. They want. They want. The biggest problem I've seen in the music business is they don't understand why musicians can't be as supple in the business. Part of the equation as a guy who makes cookies or something like, this is what it costs. Here's your quality control. The public wants more chocolate chips. Can't you just put more chocolate chips in there? And none of that is what attracts the public to great artists.

Right.

It's like completely counterintuitive. So they sit there and you just end up as a name on a piece of paper or an inconvenient problem. I mean, I've said this a few times publicly, but it bears repeating. Here is I've been in meetings where they're complaining to me about me.

Like, how so what do they say?

That basically the person that I am in the world is inconvenient to their business. The things I'm saying, the things I'm doing, the music I'm making is inconvenient to the business. And could I temper those things more in the direction that they want?

Like, what particularly were they talking about?

You name it.

Like, give me one example.

It could be anything from, you know, you're too negative to your songs are too weird, to your voice is too weird to your guitars are too loud.

They just want to sell more albums.

Yes. So to them, it's an intellectual thing.

Oh, wow.

Be like Joe. If you could just make more jokes about the economy, you'd sell two stadiums, not just one.

This is what happened with Dave Chappelle while he left the Chappelle Show. Same exact kind of thing, you know, a different version of it.

Yeah, so it's this weird thing where you're sitting there and then you're like. And what I always try to tell them is I didn't get here with that type of thinking. And I do think, and I don't want to name names, but you can. I would say this to your great audience. You can pretty much tell who got to the dance on their own. And somewhere along the way, between the second and the fourth album, decided that the compromise had a bigger yield. And off goes the organic switch and on goes the oh, you want me to be the next door neighbor. Or, you know, romantic movie ballads, whatever.

Yeah. Aerosmith went through that for a while.

But to their credit, and I didn't understand at the time, it was. It was a brilliant move because they'd gone about as far as they could go in the one thing, and they're super influential and. And including on alternative music. And it ended up being a really smart watershed moment for them to do what they did at the time. They were doing SNL skits. You remember Adam Sandler used to come out and he would do the. He would do like. I think it was Adam Sandler. We could do like the seven Aerosmith ballads in a row. And it was like, I'm crying, I'm really crying. You know, they would just play and he'd just sing all those songs like Steven Tyler. But I think looking back, it was really smart what they did.

Well, also, maybe they're allowed to do whatever they want to do. Like, artists changed their whole thing. Like they went from Mama Kin to, you know, some of those ballads, as.

Far as I know, same band. And your hirstute assistant over there, probably check. But I think Aerosmith is the biggest selling American rock band of all time.

Whoa.

So if you're Aerosmith, did they make a wrong turn? My argument would be no, no, it's.

Not a wrong turn. I mean, obviously you're allowed to change what you're interested in too, you know, like, there's a lot of bands that sort of reinvent themselves with almost every album. Like my friend Sturgill Simpson, he sort of reinvents himself with every album. Every album's different. Yeah, like he just gets bored with stuff. Aerosmith's the best selling American hard rock band of all time, having sold more than 150 million records worldwide, including over 85 million records in the United States.

So, yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah. So that's what I'm saying is only. Only the bands can really know what. What the right direction to go in is, because at some point, you know, what seems so obvious to the audience or some guy in an office isn't necessarily what drives the band forward.

Well, then there's weird cases, like David Lee Roth leaves Van Halen, Sammy Hagar takes over, and it becomes.

It got bigger.

Bigger in a totally different way.

But if you talk to the average Van Halen fan, they want to hear the David Lee Roth Van Halen.

Well, especially if you grew up with that. The thing is, like, what you started out with is always what you want to see, right?

But I'm saying there's no. There's no obvious argument of which is superior. You know what I'm saying? One sold more records. One is sort of held more in people's hearts because of a particular generational thing, which would be our generation.

But some people love the Sammy Hagar version better. You know, it's okay. You're allowed to, like, Taylor Swift. Smell sells a lot of tickets. Like, it doesn't. If you're not into it, there's nothing. It doesn't mean it's wrong. I mean, everybody has a weird fort of the way they interface with the world, and some things get in there and really lock on you and like, wow, this is amazing. And you could take the same concert and another person that you like goes to it. They say, this sucks. And you're like, this is fucking amazing. How can you say this sucks?

Well, I think you're about to see that Nickelback and Creed are about to go on a huge run of business.

Really?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Nickelback took a lot of shit.

That's kind of. My point is, is they've survived it. And now here comes the. The inevitable moment of like, oh, yeah, it was really good. And they wrote a lot of.

They had some fucking great songs. That Rockstar song, that's a great song. Like, I was. But it was one of those weird things where they had become like a punchline. And for whatever reason, everybody thought that it was okay to shit on Nickelback and comics would shit on them, and it was like a thing that people would mock the success of Nickelback, Meanwhile, they're selling out arenas every fucking night of the week.

So, yeah, I think history has a way of sorting out the bodies is the way I look at it. Yeah, that's kind of how I feel. I mean, this is selfish for me to say this, but it's kind of how I feel about my musical life at. I think time will tell my story much better than I did.

You seem at peace with that.

I am.

It doesn't seem to bother you at all?

I made my peace with it. I mean, it bothered me when it bothered me because it felt unfair or. Yeah, I felt like I was being sort of made to pay for the sins of the people who are no longer here. Because in. Particularly in Gen X, we've had so many great talents die.

Oh, so you felt like you weren't getting the credit you deserve because you survived?

There was part of that. That's this. Let's call it the simpler version. The more complicated version is Generations move with a collective energy. And by the mid-2000s, the collective energy of Generation X had mostly dissipated in the musical thing. There were bands out playing, but a lot of the lead singers had died, so. So it's hard to sort of stand and carry a flag for something that people feel very sentimental about if there isn't an army around you carrying the same flag. So you start to. People start to put on you this, like, a set of cultural and generational expectations that you don't want. You become. You become the emblem of, like, the living version of what doesn't work, but the other guys or girls aren't there to. To grow old with you and receive the same discernment or criticism.

Oh, wow.

Like, one time, a guy tried to goad me into an argument of comparing myself to one of the top musical people in my generation. I don't want to say who, but you'll understand the flow on this. And they said, can you compare? Who do you think's better? So it was like a real cheese setup. And I said. I said, well, I think they were more talented, but I said, I feel I'm in the conversation. And they said, why are you in the conversation? I said, because I'm alive. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I'm here.

Well, it's also, like, you can't deny that Smashing Pumpkins didn't have some fucking bangers. Like anybody who denies that.

Well, Joe, that's a whole other episode, because the band is probably one of the most misunderstood. I mean, we're probably one of the most misunderstood bands in the history of rock and roll. I mean, that sounds like a wrestling statement, but it's fairly accurate.

What do you think that's from?

I think it has a lot to do with the issues of Gen X. And it has a lot to do with a relationship that I set into motion with the media when I was a very young person playing kind of a funny game, like doing my own, my own version of Andy Kaufman or Bob Zamuda, you understand, Because I thought it was all shitty. So I was just like, I'm just gonna play with this like a toy because I think it's kind of funny. I didn't realize that the coming culture was going to kind of almost be attracted to people who are willing to immolate themselves on the public stage. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Most people who are attracted to fame, they want to run towards the shiny part of it. I was attracted to the non shiny part, which is, okay, I'll light myself on fire and let's see what happens. Or I'll light you on fire and let's see what happens. So it kind of worked in the 90s when everybody was rolling and moving along. Well, here comes Napster. The music business craters, then a bunch of people die, and there you are standing, you know, now at 40 years old, you're supposed to carry some flag for a generation that doesn't even know who it is anymore.

How do you navigate that? Like, did that trouble you at the time? Was it difficult to work as an artist?

Yeah, it's very difficult. The simple version is. And I had some of the top, top people in the music business sit me down one on one in a room and say, just give them what they want.

Jesus.

Your life will be a lot better. You'll make a lot more money. And you could put your head on your pillow at night, not have to think about all these things. And my response every time was that I don't give a fuck. And I used to quote Popeye, I am what I am. I'm here. I'm here because I'm a freak, okay? And I ain't changing for anything.

Good for you.

And part of that goes back to my daddy, okay? I watched a man literally broken by the business. So I'm the last person that's gonna fucking bow down for that shit off.

Well, the beautiful thing is too, you always had an audience, so you didn't have to.

Well, there is that, but, but, but at the end of the day, how can I explain it? Everybody in the music business will tell you your value is, is, is exponentially related to your success. So your, your biggest song is here, and your next biggest song is here. And there's like a pyramid. And as you go down, you, you lose value. Your aging becomes Part of that loss of value. How do you maintain value relevancy? You no longer have the record business that used to exist. You no longer have the structure. I mean, the music business is basically a touring business first now. And everything else is in support of the touring business. We're lucky in that we continue to be a very large touring band. So you're told over and over again, almost in a propagandistic way, that your value is related to what's on a piece of paper. And then somehow I woke up in the middle of it and I thought, no, no, that's actually not my value. And so the minute I started saying no, I know what my real value is. It's that I'm an independent artist who, like a voice in the wilderness, represents something.

And I know it's not for everybody. Trust me, I've got. Been getting that message since I was a little kid, including from my own family. But I know what I represent represents something that's valuable. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I see the consistency of the kind of. Let's call it the communication between myself and somebody who's interested in what I do. And once I started doubling and tripling down the value, my business started going back up.

Wow.

The way I would say it in a crass way is I reasserted my brand. Not the brand I was being handed in in 40 plus brand. You know, you're an oldies band, you're an oldies artist, you play these songs.

Well, you just kept and reinforced your true voice.

Yeah, but I had a literary.

What brought you to the dance in the first place?

It seems silly, but that's what I had to figure out. I had to figure that out on my own because there was nobody telling me that. I mean, you gotta understand. And you're a man of the world, so you know what I'm saying? When you're in a room with somebody who runs the fucking world, in my case, runs the music business.

Yeah.

The guy who can get shit done. The guy who can get you canceled. The guy who can fucking make stuff happen.

Yeah.

And that guy tells you, here's your value. You. It's awfully hard to go back to Chicago, Illinois and convince yourself that he's wrong.

Right? Right.

There's nobody. And who do you talk to about?

Especially if fame is fleeting, it comes and goes. Album sales come and go. And there's a new big thing right now. There's the new thing, and you're not the new thing anymore. Yeah. And then someone's coming along. Listen, you've got to listen to us. We know how you can be back on top.

I don't read comments, but I have a social media person who occasionally relays what she sees.

Oh, boy.

Well, we kind of keep it on the positive. But my favorite comment of the last few years was she started poking around with young fans, 16, 18 year olds who were suddenly seeming to come out of the woodwork and liking the band and me, almost like a cuddly bear or something. They suddenly were attracted to me in a way that the 16 and 18 year olds of the previous generation weren't. So I asked her, I said, why don't you poke around with these people and ask them what's interesting? And my favorite comment, and it became kind of common amongst the feedback that she got was, I like him because other people told me not to like him. But what that says to me, anybody can interpret the way they want. What it said to me is, we need people in the zeitgeist of the culture who don't represent the collective. Yes. There's always room for somebody on the corner saying no. And that goes back to Lenny Bruce. As crazy as all that was, you still need that guy going, no, no, no, no, no. You know what I'm saying? And you can call them whatever, disruptors.

Or whatever authentic voices.

That sounds nicer than disruptor. I like Disruptor because that's, that's what I do.

Well, it does disrupt, but it disrupt because it's an authentic voice, because it bucks the idea of creating some manufactured thing for the market.

I've told many people in the music business, I know that you don't want me in this business, but I'm here and I've made a lot of money and I've made a lot of people a lot of money. Like, what's the problem?

Also, you made great songs. Like, but the idea.

But most people are in the business for the music.

But the idea that somebody wouldn't want you in the business when you've been very successful in the business is just insane. It doesn't even make any sense.

Sense doesn't make sense to me.

Well, that's the weird thing that you guys have to deal with. You deal with like this whole layer of non artistic people that have influence over art.

Having heard you many times do commentary for ufc, what I love about you as a commentator is you take me into the, into the passion of the moment. The feeling of like two warriors are going to enter this thing and only one can emerge. There's a feeling there that's like. And I've been to some of the events. It's like, it has that, like, it's a sort of a life affirming, like, here we are, you know, and you, you know, because you're behind the scenes. The training that went in, the injuries the guy had overcome, or the girl or whatever, or the crazy girlfriend, and they got, you know, the training camp and all of it, and there it is, the Clash. It's no different for the musician. It's like, you know, I sit in a room for a year and make songs with only three, four people hearing them. And I have to believe that I'm going to walk into my version of that octagon and what I'm going to offer is not going to get me killed.

What is it like when you release an album? What is that feeling like?

I just, I just, I don't want to curl up in a ball and just die because here it comes, Here it comes. And sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised. But I've had more negative experiences than positive ones.

But positive from the fans. Is it non fans that are the problem? It's like the people on the outside peering in.

Twenty years ago, I would have given you a different answer. Now it's nobody's the problem. It's ultimately the game is you versus yourself. I don't know if there's any commonality in the fighting world, but. Or the comedic world, yes, it's you versus yourself. It's not the audience's fault. It's not the guy at the radio station or the girl at the, at the, at the arena. It's not nothing to do with them. Because the one thing you do know is if you find that value that, that makes a wheel turn, that prints cash, they don't care who you are. They'll push you right back under the spotlight. So once you can figure that game out, that's the game. The game is you versus you. It's not you versus them. In fact, that's the, that's the suckers game.

So it's you just trying to create the best version of what you have inside your head.

Let's do a simple math and anybody wants to take a. Have a problem with it, I don't care, okay? My band in over 30 years has been in the top 0.1 percentile of touring artists in the world, period. You would think that if you were in that business and you were at that, that elite level, you would think the whole business would rally around you. And try to get you to do more and make more. Not even close to that. There is no system by which you get that kind of support. You are completely on your own.

But is that universal with successfulness?

I think I hear different stories about the top pop artists, but I think that's because they're making so much money. It's like they're like a multinational corporation. Most bands are. Their experiences are similar to ours. You're kind of on your own. You have your team of people and then you walk into the arena with what you got, what you think is going to work. But I hear about the modern pop stars. I mean, I hear stuff that sounds like they're running a Fortune 500 company because they are literally printing cash.

Also, the percentage that the actual artists get versus what they should be getting.

It hurts.

It's crazy.

It hurts.

It's crazy because they do everything. They create the music, they perform the music, and yet they're not making the money. People are coming to see them perform the music, yet they're not making the money. There's some bizarre vampires that have attached themselves to the veins.

That's changing. I think in the next 20 years, you're going to see a very different music business.

In what way?

Peer to peer, ability to create commerce.

Right. And then also the fact that you could release things. So like Oliver Anthony, he put out that rich men north of Richmond and then it's fucking gigantic. Hundred million views on YouTube. It's like. It's crazy.

But like 20 years ago, your success and who you work with would have been unthinkable.

Right, right.

And you're an independent voice. You've built it. I mean, it's yours. Right? So that's what I'm saying. That's coming from music. This is coming from music.

Well, that's good.

Yes. I think ultimately will benefit the fans of the artist and they'll get more of what they want and less of what they don't want.

Hear, hear. All right, let's wrap it up. Thank you, sir. Appreciate you very much. Always fun to talk to you.

Thank you.

Tell everybody what your podcast call where they can get it.

The Magnificent others. You can get it on YouTube.

Thanks, sir. Appreciate you.

Thanks, everyone.

Bye, everybody.

Sa.