[SPEAKER_01]: Hello and welcome to another edition of Turn Out of Punk.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm your host, Demi Neighborham, and today on the show, my god, I can't believe I'm saying this Larry Charles is here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Larry is someone that I've been a big fan of as you'll hear me kind of gush about in a second on the show.
[SPEAKER_01]: for many, many years, but someone I never thought I'd get a chance to sit down and talk to like this and this kind of context.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when I, to be honest, until I read his book and kind of dug into stuff a little bit deeper, didn't even realize he was that much of a punk.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I would all too, front of the show, my co-host slash Nemesis on the show at times.
[SPEAKER_01]: The great Chris Estrada for being the guy who kind of bridged the communication between Larry and I, and not directly, of course, Chris would never do something that nice for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: But through Larry being a fan of Chris and then seeing some clips that I posted on TikTok and anyway.
[SPEAKER_01]: Here we are, I implore you, go out there and watch, I'm sure you've seen a lot of stuff Larry Charles has made, but go and watch his Larry Charles's dangerous world of comedy.
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like that might be one of the most important things he's done.
[SPEAKER_01]: Also read his book, because I think it puts a lot of his work into context, like we talk about it, like this is a very thoughtful person.
[SPEAKER_01]: A very compassionate person so when I have a lot of respect for and once again, you're in me, gosh, about him in a second, I do a lot of gushing on this episode, I'm going to warn you in advance.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I feel like it's because I got a lot of respect for Larry and as you know, if you listen to the show a lot, I got a lot of respect for people.
[SPEAKER_01]: that keep those journeys that they are on personally going as they get older and I feel like Larry is someone who is definitely kept going on that journey.
[SPEAKER_01]: He talks about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He talks about trying to find compassion and trying to be a compassionate person and times in his life or maybe that wasn't always the case and making sure that's something that going forward.
[SPEAKER_01]: He always bears in mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like he's a very down-to-earth person.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can hear in a second.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm not going
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, check out Larry's on Instagram and he's on, uh, TikTok.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's where actually we met on TikTok, but, uh, check out some of the stuff he posts on there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Check out some of the other appearances he's done.
[SPEAKER_01]: read that book also don't forget to watch Larry Charles's dangerous world of comedy on Netflix as I say like it really feel like if you've watched you know Borat and Bruno and some of the stuff he did religious lists and all these sorts of things like I feel like
[SPEAKER_01]: all that stuff and sort of his journey is really summed up in that book and in the series and I feel like, yeah, I feel like I'm rambling, you're gonna be rambling with Larry in a second spoiler.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't get to all my questions.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's go on forever.
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, sit back, relax, enjoy Larry Charles, unturned, out, upunk.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I am beyond good to have you here, Larry, thank you so much for coming on the show.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, man.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's great to be here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I kind of sat down to do the research when you agreed to come on and it just like, obviously, you know, I know the breadth and the scope of your work, but just like how much of your work informs
[SPEAKER_01]: Not even just my sense of humor, but my world at look.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just like, wow, this guy has really had a Mackey belly in hand knowingly in my life.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's good.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I'm glad that I was able to warp some minds.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was certainly my goal as a warp mine myself.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well it's funny because I like I listen to your book and I feel like there's a lot of stuff I want to talk to that comes in the book and I'm going to avoid making and repeat the stories from it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But to me you feel like an outsider like that's something that really comes across and that's something that I've always felt like and especially as I've like dip my big toe into making entertainment, it's not a world set up for the outsider to succeed in.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's true, but I think both of us, probably if we were to list people that we admire in our past, that sort of had influence over us, many of those people fall into that category.
[SPEAKER_00]: One way or another, there's only different kinds of outsiders.
[SPEAKER_00]: that I think that art really, the progress of art, the radicalization of art, the transgression of art really has been done by the outsiders.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're joining, if you're part of a group,
[SPEAKER_00]: You're immediately, your, your edges of being kind of softened because you're having to interact and get along and, you know, I think being alone in your pursuit keeps keeps that edge very sharp.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's why I think your work speaks to me because it's, it's for the outsiders, but it finds a way to, to be able to be consumed by the people that are just part of the mainstream.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, and that's really an accident.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's shocking to me that people are interested in me, or interested in my work, low all these many years.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's like a crazy sort of phenomena that I couldn't have possibly predicted that the things that I thought about, the weird things that I thought were funny or scary or whatever,
[SPEAKER_00]: actually has some resonance, because that certainly wasn't really my goal.
[SPEAKER_00]: My goal is what do I think is funny?
[SPEAKER_00]: What do I think is cool?
[SPEAKER_00]: What am I capable of even expressing, you know, in my limited way?
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet it has some resonance, which I think goes to this idea of the outsider being really more connected than they realize on some level.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, we're going to get to the outside, the inside, and hopefully all sides of this, but I got to start it off the way they all start off, which is Larry, how'd you get in a punk?
[SPEAKER_01]: Which I remember the first time he ever came across the genre.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you know, as I grew up in the 70s really, so in the late 60s and the 70s, and this is pre punk, but I grew up in a really tough neighborhood, like a Lord of the Flies kind of neighborhood and in Brooklyn,
[SPEAKER_00]: and people were, it was a lot of macho posturing like a jade, like the yard in a jail, you know, in a pedotentiary.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there was a lot of violence and there was something in that aggression that sort of scared me and also attracted me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so my friends and I were very into
[SPEAKER_00]: what was the hard music at that time, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: So you talking about Led Zeppelin or you're talking about like even the almond brothers or you know anything that was like loud the who we all love the who you know especially in those early days before it started to get a little pretentious with quadraphinias much as I love quadraphinias but in one was just thrashing
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and we all love that kind of thrashing music, but there was really no name for a hard rock or, you know, it was even before the name heavy metal before like black Sabbath even, you know, and then about again, I was a kind of a loner and I was an outsider and, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: I got tired of my friends in Brooklyn because their world was very small.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had this yearning, this kind of yearning, I don't know where it came from, to seek out other realms, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I started reading things like cream,
[SPEAKER_00]: or maximum rocket roll, and the village voice would then also on weekends they would have these ads, endless ads for clubs in New York City in Manhattan, which was a long subway ride for me, but you could get into like, you know, places like CBGBs was just starting out and everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for like three bucks or something, you can see a bunch of bands and I heard some of this music on certain like underground radio stations.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I would go myself, I would get on the train, you know, and I would take the train from Brooklyn all the way into Lower Manhattan.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would go to a place like CBGBs.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I didn't have much money, but I had enough to get in, and I would stand in the back, and I would see all these bands that I could never have conceived of, you know, like the talking heads, or, you know, the remains, especially.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Blondy was there, and just a whole bunch of,
[SPEAKER_00]: A very hard core punk music is playing there and also like kind of avant-garde weird noise music, you know, and all the stuff it was like it was a cultural epiphany for me, you know, and I started getting into it a reading more about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I became very into Lester bangs and cream magazine and our Meltzer Richard Meltzer, you know, and they sort of were like kind of explaining it from me in a way also, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that was my, it was like that really opened my mind to like, well, with these transgressive thoughts I have, other people are having them and expressing themselves and finding art within that.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I also stumbled into in Manhattan.
[SPEAKER_00]: At that time you could go to these revival movie theaters and see all these crazy movies that were not at all like Hollywood product that maybe the main one being John Waters pink flamingos and You know, it was like my mind was blown, you know, so can I might allow to curse oh God yeah
[SPEAKER_00]: So I mean, you know, somebody was eating, you know, a transvestite was eating dog shit in a movie, you know, and it was hilarious also.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, and I also love that juxtaposition between the horror and the shock in the humor, you know, and I got to what I just would go to the movies.
[SPEAKER_00]: all the time in Manhattan to see these very transgressive type of movies.
[SPEAKER_00]: Kenneth Anger was another one, an underground filmmaker.
[SPEAKER_00]: All these experimental movies, solo by Pasalini, you know, and it was like, wow, I cannot weekend by Godard, you know, they would just be playing on like one night and maybe sometimes in a double feature with something else.
[SPEAKER_00]: And all this stuff was filling my head, filling my head.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I didn't know what to do with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I knew I could feel instinctively that it was kind of, it was forcing me to evolve out of the environment that I was in.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's such an amazing time period, obviously not being there from a distance, historically, and geographically looking at it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But like that period in New York, where you're saying,
[SPEAKER_01]: low art and high art quote unquote in every sector smashed up right beside each other.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's such a unique feature to New York.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, Roger Moray from Ignossic from when he was on said it was like it's almost a facet of the way people have to live in New York because there's not enough space.
[SPEAKER_01]: So everyone smashed up together.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, yeah, you can either get along or not, you know, you know, even just taking the
[SPEAKER_00]: almost like a punk rock, like a mosh pit, you know, it would be so crowded.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's hard to describe.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was so crowded.
[SPEAKER_00]: People was so crowded for like two hours from, because my, my stop in Brooklyn was like the last stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if I want to go to like midtown, it was like a solid two hour ride of everybody just crush together and people fighting for seats.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was like it was really like kind of an endurance test, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think there's no way you can sort of survive that without it affecting you in some way, influencing you.
[SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned Meltzer there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you ever see his band Vaam when you moved out to LA?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think I ever saw them lie.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I got out to LA, I did start going like, I got out to LA like in 77, which was a get a fertile time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I lived on a street called Cherokee.
[SPEAKER_00]: and on off of Hollywood Boulevard.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, Darby Crash and the germs lived on that street.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I was around that a lot.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would go to blackies and madam Wongs and all these kind of places.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had a friend who collected 45s and we would listen to a lot of music, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I never, I don't think I ever saw a farm, but I was like, just the idea that VOM existed really excited me, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's funny when you talk to people that saw them because they seem like they were genuinely hated by a lot of the pumps.
[SPEAKER_00]: which I think was kind of his goal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was like, you know, he wasn't quite a GG Allen, but he was looking to alienate as many people as he could with the music.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, I found that it's hard, you know, I remember taking a girl, I lived in Florida for a short time, when my parents got divorced, and I met this girl and I wanted to take her out,
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was very lonely, I was completely by myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I asked her out and she said, yes, and we went to a movie and I took her to see female trouble.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she never spoke to me again.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I got so into John Waters.
[SPEAKER_00]: I actually started car responding with him, which I still do to this day.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I've talked to him in person, even.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I understand this kind of idea of even comedy that I did.
[SPEAKER_00]: Initially, in those days in the 70s, the mid to late 70s, was kind of like Andy Kaufman Esk anti-comedy, where you were trying to push the audience that the laugh wasn't the ultimate goal.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ultimate goal was reaction.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know and Richard Meltzer was great that way and Andy Kaufman was great that way and again I was lucky enough to be like around that world whether it was music or comedy and that really kind of influenced me And still has an influence on me to this day, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I find it fascinating like that that archetype that you kind of bring up And I think Andy Kaufman is
[SPEAKER_01]: It's probably like the most fully realized version of this thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: But like someone who's willing to be the pariah for the heart.
[SPEAKER_01]: And
[SPEAKER_00]: like when he sabotages that fried famously friday's and right so it's not even like he's pulling one over on the audience he's actually going against his co-worker like he's willing to be hated to make this happen yes yeah he was he was a fearless guy you know i was there and uh... when we did that and only few of the writers knew that that was going to happen or nobody else was really aware of it
[SPEAKER_00]: And he didn't think, you know, when I look back on it, I think, you know, he's kind of a savant in a way.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had his thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I've worked with a few people that I would consider geniuses or savants kind of like it's a very thin line.
[SPEAKER_00]: like a Bob Dylan or Larry David for that matter, who were who had their vision of how things were going to be, how they were going to do it, and they were willing, I mean, Larry David used to get up on stage if he didn't like the look of the audience.
[SPEAKER_00]: If he just didn't like that vibe, he would go, I have to get it, and he would walk off the stage, or I've seen him spit
[SPEAKER_00]: at people, you know, on the stage like a Johnny Rottenwood or Joe Strummer did on Fridays, you know, there was a lot of people, that was a very kind of legitimate genre at that time, which was alienating the audience, or testing, or experimenting with comedy in a way that was happening already in music and art and other movies and other places as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think like the the most extreme example of this in all popular culture is Gigi Allen and yes, like willing to just just give yourself over to the worst parts of your personality in the name of performance.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, Gigi Allen was in a class by himself, for sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, again, in fact, the guy that started directing Borat, Todd Phillips, had made the documentary on Gigi Allen, and that's how, you know, I never saw Gigi Allen live, which I regretted, but I was kind of relieved also, I guess I'm level two.
[SPEAKER_01]: He would have been relieved if you had gone to that show all over the stage, I think, too.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was kind of like the ultimate statement of I don't care about you.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's funny because entertainment and art is so much about getting people to like you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here in that period of time, you saw a lot of artists going, no, I don't want you to like me in order for us to grow together.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want you to hate me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to alienate you.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to distress you and disturb you.
[SPEAKER_00]: GGL was great at it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Eddie Coffman was fantastic.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, he thrived on the booing.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, he thrived on the booing when he did the wrestling with the ladies and all that kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a very punk comedian and so much so that really nobody and Gigi Allen, you could almost put it at the same category.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were so kind of weirdly courageous in being willing to face that abuse.
[SPEAKER_00]: And give the abuse that no one really followed their path, you know, they were singular, and when they were done, and both of them, of course, unfortunately died early, nobody came along to really pick up that mantle.
[SPEAKER_00]: and continue it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you don't see many people sitting on stage.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't see many people like flinging their feces, you know, and you don't see anybody doing the anti-calpentry type of stuff either.
[SPEAKER_00]: Really, it was stuff that was almost like an unclassifiable, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I feel like it almost served its purpose of showing us what the limit is, like if you sabotage,
[SPEAKER_01]: something like you will bring the whole thing down.
[SPEAKER_01]: And like obviously any coffins, tragic passing is different than Gigi Allen's.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, ultimately kind of self-inflicted passing, but yes, I feel like that's kind of what has to happen, or because like like you mentioned with Larry David and that sort of famous stand-up thing where he would go out there and walk away.
[SPEAKER_01]: Ultimately, all this comes down to insecurity.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like the reason that drives us to the stage, right, is like that empty void.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I say, this is a lead singer in a band with a massive empty void, and we're just trying to fill it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we put up these self-defense and you can
[SPEAKER_01]: you either, it eventually will consume you, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I think you really get to that, you know, and not spoil the book, but you talk about this in other places, but with the documentary with Larry David, like, you can really feel like, oh, this guy despite all this accomplishment, like that insecurity never really goes away and we're always dealing with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's also that desire for love and acceptance.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I've seen many comedians.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Larry David has gotten to that place in his life where he was so insecure that when he sought the love on stage like through getting laughs and he didn't get it, he would immediately turn on the audience, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: But today he's a more relaxed person.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's had success.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's had so much acceptance.
[SPEAKER_00]: that would almost be foolish of him to not be more sort of a magnanimous about it now, you know, and you wonder how what would what GGL would be doing today, or what Andy Kauffin would be doing today in that in that context, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and I think that's part of what makes these people able to be revered, and like saying we bill Hicks, too, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is because, yeah, we never saw what that second act was going to
[SPEAKER_00]: Another person that falls into that category that I was again turned on to in the 70s after he was already dead was Lenny Bruce.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lenny Bruce was somebody that once I got turned on to Lenny Bruce, he also blew my minds.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like having watched the comedians that were around at that time, and of course George Carl in a richer prior did sort of pick up that mantle from him.
[SPEAKER_00]: But other than George Carlin and Richard Prior, who were going to places that note what the comedian went to, there was still that kind of middle of the road, middle-class kind of comedy going on.
[SPEAKER_00]: People wanted laughs, you know, George Carlin and Richard Prior were able to actually push people and be transgressive and get laughs.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was part of their genius, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's interesting with comedy too, because I think,
[SPEAKER_01]: It appreciates differently than any other art form that we have because ultimately it is the the Vanguard of culture and pushes these limits, but because of that, unless you are like a richer prior or a Lenny Bruce like a genius, you kind of will get swallowed up a little bit by time as people go back to the assess and look at stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it has a short, it can have a short shelf life.
[SPEAKER_00]: It can get dated very, very easily.
[SPEAKER_00]: And look, even some of Richard Pryer and Lynne Bruce and George Carlen stuff, early stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: has not aged as well, but that's the nature of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the kind of the journalistic nature of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're really talking to the times, and they weren't really necessarily thinking, like some artists do about legacy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Legacy was not, and it is legacy's kind of an illusion and kind of silly in a lot of ways, and they weren't really that concerned with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: They really wanted to speak to what was going on in the moment, in order to do that, they risked
[SPEAKER_00]: the kind of the long lasting impact or stuff like that too, you know, and that's kind of a worthwhile risk, I think.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, and this is like where I kind of, you know, I don't want to.
[SPEAKER_01]: Think that I'm just blowing smoke up your ass right now when I say this, but like I fall I fall asleep now I've got four kids and it's just you know a lot of stuff on my mind so I find like having something in the background to fall asleep to and I one point I was trying to fall asleep to sign fell and there were a bunch of episodes that would come on and I couldn't do it because it's still.
[SPEAKER_01]: maybe get up and watch it, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I eventually settled on the office.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I find like that goes to show because I did think that was funny at one point.
[SPEAKER_01]: But now I find it allows me to sleep in a way that these episodes.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm saying your episodes in particular, as I went back and researched this episode, I'm like, holy shit, the opera, like these are all your episodes.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's something about it that is timeless, that and something about Seinfeld in general that doesn't feel as dated as stuff, even more kind of contemporary to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that's, I think, again, inadvertently that is true.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, again, we didn't have any sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: We didn't have any, and maybe this was the key.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a very, again, a singular set of circumstances.
[SPEAKER_00]: We had no sense of how to do a sitcom.
[SPEAKER_00]: We had no sense that the show was going to survive.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we really literally just did, we decided, we'll do what's funny to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember Larry saying to me, and I think I'd talk about on the book, look, we'll do 13 episodes, we'll make a little bit of money.
[SPEAKER_00]: The show'll get canceled, we'll move on, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he used to cry when the show got picked up because he didn't want to write it anymore, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we were losing in the ratings.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a show called Jake and the Fatman.
[SPEAKER_00]: which was a bad detector show, and we would lose in the rating.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there was a confluence of events that kept that show on the air.
[SPEAKER_00]: But because it did stay on the air, the audience, and this was organic to use that far too often used word, but the audience found that show.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it was allowed to sort of grow.
[SPEAKER_00]: Today, the audience might find the show, but there's no tolerance for patients for it, and the show will be canceled very quickly.
[SPEAKER_00]: That show was able to find its kind of feet as it went along.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we got more and more sort of outrageous and courageous as we went along.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, at least while I was there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we didn't know what we were doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: which was kind of like the brilliance of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we didn't know how to make a sitcom.
[SPEAKER_00]: We didn't know how to write a sitcom.
[SPEAKER_00]: None of us had really done a sitcom.
[SPEAKER_00]: And by breaking all those rules, it was liberating, I think, to the audience.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was an honesty.
[SPEAKER_00]: and a darkness to sign fell that shows like the office, which are, you know, expertly written and well polished and had the writer's room with 15 people sitting in there trying to pitch jokes.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's how most shows are done.
[SPEAKER_00]: We didn't have any of those things.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we were just all groping, groping, groping for ideas and trying to put something together and make scripts.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in a way,
[SPEAKER_00]: all of those kind of left turns when we should have been turning right led us to the audience that was seeking that at that time as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like, and I do have great love for Jake in the Fatman because I had seen the trip.
[SPEAKER_01]: episodes.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I figured LA was a magic place where you just see celebrities all over the place.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Only celebrity I saw was the fat man and I shared an elevator with him at the Westwood Marquis when I was a kid.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was not as big as I got eventually, but maybe that was a turning point for me too.
[SPEAKER_01]: That would be good.
[SPEAKER_01]: I jumped way ahead and I'd love to go back and talk to you a little bit more about growing up in New York.
[SPEAKER_01]: Go ahead and go ahead and talk about some of the beat writers and stuff at that time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Were you aware of the fugs at all and that kind of stuff though?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's funny you said that I was just thinking about this the other day.
[SPEAKER_00]: My friend, Neil Lipschitz, who I grew up with and became an editor of the Wall Street Journal actually.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he was the editor of the NYU School newspaper and as that, in that job, he would get assignments to go see certain things.
[SPEAKER_00]: with divine.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we saw it was a play playing off Broadway.
[SPEAKER_00]: We remember going to see that sitting in the first or second row and there was divine right in front of me and we got to he got to interview her and I got to sit there and listen.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another person we went to his house was truly cup-for-berg.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, yeah, and he had, I had never been in an apartment like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was a classic quintessential Manhattan apartment, like a tiny little place with, you know, a books up to the ceiling and piled everywhere and records and, you know, and we sat with Tully,
[SPEAKER_00]: and smoke pot and hung out with him while my friend Neil interviewed him.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was very aware of the fogs.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, they were like a big influence on me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought they were so cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was really into that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely, yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel they're like one of the forgotten bands of sort of protopunk.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's a good point and because like I feel like a lot of the other stuff like the Stooge is like there was a sense of humor to it and the MC five there's a sense of humor But not in the same way that there's a self-awareness in that humor like there is with the folks Yeah, the folks are very much a product of New York also I think like the Stooge is are so Detroit You know, and but the folks were part of that that was such an eclectic as we were talking about a few minutes ago
[SPEAKER_00]: cultural mecca at that time that really they were drawing on everything that was going on around them in New York at that time which was in such a transition in New York had a kind of purity and even LA when I got out to LA in the 70s had a sort it was still like a pre-corporate kind of place and
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember people going, well, you know, there's no good restaurants and I'm like, I didn't have the money to ever eat in a good restaurant in New York or LA or any place, you know, and I like that sort of quaintness of LA at that time.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I was looking for the daily planet building.
[SPEAKER_00]: That to me was everything, you know, when I saw, and I realized when they said it was city hall, my mind was blown, you know, and I loved that kind of
[SPEAKER_00]: that older fifties film war sort of vibe of LA, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: But New York was like that also, those versions of New York in LA really hardly existed anymore, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they were like a place where you still have the space, you would give them the space in your outside and inside your minds.
[SPEAKER_00]: to create, again, outsider type of art.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, UCowski was there at that time.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was just a lot of like, a lot of people who would not probably be able to reach that kind of audience today, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was very lucky, very fortunate.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's interesting, like I think one of the things that I find fascinating about punk, and this kind of continues as a theme, probably to this day.
[SPEAKER_01]: is punk has the seeds of its own destruction sewn in because it's going to ultimately gentrify the area that it takes up in the space and you see this happening obviously with the lorry side and everything with punk and art and all this stuff that it kind of brings to it and you still see it like the punk like show space will open up and then a coffee shop will open
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's, you know, it's again, the corporateization of America to some degree.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just talk about this in my wife today.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's like the, you could have the most transgressive art, whether it's music or movies or whatever it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's going to be a group of people who are going to analyze in one way or another, whether this has commercial potential.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they are going to like glum onto it because they watched the sex pistols or the clash of the remains.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, now if that kind of stuff emerges, it's not the audience might discover it, but it's immediately going to be co-opted.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and then you're going to see it, you know, you're going to see it apply to commercial forms and immediately it destroys the true transgression that is a kind of like that may have been the birth, may have been behind its birth, that transgression is immediately kind of co-opted.
[SPEAKER_00]: like corporate America and made into commercials and products and, you know, loses its meaning, everything loses its meaning onto those kind of conditions and that kind of pressure.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's that's another thing that I thought really emerged throughout your book through all these different sort of creative projects that you're involved in.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like this moment where these people, these collaborators that you're working with,
[SPEAKER_01]: kind of gets assumed into the machine a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the transgression is sort of sanded off.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I like, you know, I don't need to talk shit on these people, but I don't like it doesn't seem like you kind of were able to maintain these sort of relationships with them.
[SPEAKER_01]: As they seem to change in granted, I'm getting your side of the story at your book.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the purpose of the film, hit that button.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, my story is the truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just agree.
[SPEAKER_01]: I definitely, because I can see in my own experience
[SPEAKER_01]: Not to say that I was like inside, vice in the same way that you were inside, sign fill, but I knew those guys the whole way up.
[SPEAKER_01]: And to watch that kind of happen with them, and I think that one of the most telling moments for me was when they built that huge new office in New York, but they built it and put out a business a DIY show space.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, have you ever seen Pultergeist?
[SPEAKER_01]: This does not end well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, it was a kind of version of poltergeist.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that happened I think in LA also they built these big headquarters and you know, and then Gavin began it just it started to unravel it started to unravel and that's the problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: is such a seduction, and power, is such a seduction.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's, I don't know if you're familiar with a writer.
[SPEAKER_00]: He committed suicide a few years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of people that we're going to talk about today.
[SPEAKER_00]: Did, a guy named Mark Fisher.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's an English writer.
[SPEAKER_00]: He talked a lot about late stage capitalism and post-capitalism.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he had a thing that he said an aphorism,
[SPEAKER_00]: I use all the time and I give him credit for it, obviously, but it's easier for people to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's where we are today, we, we, I grew up in a pre-capitalist kind of world in a sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: where there was still shopkeepers.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, you wanted this, you had to go to the butcher shop, where the protest stand or whatever it was.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now everything is like a big conglomerate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything is about money and money is thrown into people and even people with pure visions.
[SPEAKER_00]: the money and the power wind up altering that vision and they may not even be aware of it themselves, but before a law and they have drifted very far from what their original goals were and that's the problem with trying to do transgressive work today, transgressive work, I mean perfume companies and clothing companies are making transgressive work now and it's kind of lost its meeting in
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it was interesting to watch the roll out for Marty Supreme.
[SPEAKER_01]: And to me, it was like a really cynical moment where like the marketing budget, this whole thing that the marketing budget has equal to the budget of the movie for it to be successful, was kind of borret, where it didn't even matter at a certain point what the movie was.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, because it was just like, if you can create enough, I'm, you know, I obviously sent you the link that Pro Wrestling TV series.
[SPEAKER_01]: I find Pro Wrestling very honest in the way that it's so duplicitous.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yes, the fakeness is the honesty in a way.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're all in on that.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're all in on it together.
[SPEAKER_01]: 100% and the thing about wrestling is they don't ultimately doesn't matter about the art.
[SPEAKER_01]: The art is secondary to making the money.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's a thing they say in wrestling, like you don't make a dollar once they're in the seat.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you got to get him in the door and that's all that matters.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then anything after that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I feel like like transgressive work, it's it's not necessarily about getting people in the door.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's about trying to get the right people in the door type thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's hard.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, movies are a very tough.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I'm, you know, obviously a big movie buff and movie fan and watch a lot of movies and, and, you know, again, it's almost the cliche, but I will often just to kind of like get a palette cleanser I will go back to with 70s movie.
[SPEAKER_00]: to see, you know, to see, it does that hold up in the light of today's corporate media, you know, the difference between a five-easy pieces or, you know, those kind of blue collar from that period to, like, say, one battle after another, which is a great movie in a lot of ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's got a lot going forward.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very cool movie.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's drawn from Thomas Pension.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's great performances.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's about revolution in a way.
[SPEAKER_00]: But as soon as you start thinking about, well, it costs $180 million to make.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it costs this amount to money to market.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like it loses the power.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's like as soon as you know the took a corporations felt like this is okay, we can support, is it of being like the ones trying to stop something like that?
[SPEAKER_00]: They're the ones encouraging it because they think it's impossible money making, it's the possible money making venture.
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, and that's discouraging, you know, very discouraging, and again, this is something I saw about my wife today.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a great Slavo Zizik, the philosopher, he has a great quote, which is resistanceist surrender, you know, and what he's saying is,
[SPEAKER_00]: Because we were thinking about it, and this is almost like what we've been talking about in this sort of Trump era that we're living in, which may be the last era we live in, you know, in some ways, the protests, the resistance is built into the system.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, they are not afraid of people protesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are not afraid of the consequences of people resisting.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's built into the system and they can absorb it and it kind of makes them stronger in a way, because they don't do anything about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's the no Kings protest which we participated in and we went out there but in the end it was a very inspiring day but that's all it was.
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, we've trumped in fall as a result of anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't seem, you know, the Jeffrey Epstein revelations continue coming, but yet nobody gets arrested.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing changes, you know, all these things, we scream about ice, hurting people and killing people and
[SPEAKER_00]: breaking up families, but they're still out there in the masks doing their thing, and so resistance becomes surrender, resistance becomes part of the equation that keeps the elite in power, and it's like, it becomes very hard to imagine, again, as Mark Fisher said, imagine what the end of capitalism would look like, how do you stop this?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and that's, you know, I think what Punk was talking about in the first place and transgressive art, and now it's like it's very hard to do that without seeing the discorporate interest behind it, you know,
[SPEAKER_01]: You have like this sort of outcry and just a fively so because you do have this platform at that point, but like about jelly roll, not saying anything at the Grammys, but there's also like this thing that like what we should all know this shit is wrong, like that should just be just baked in and then you're like, oh, but there's a whole side of people that see this the complete inverse way and and everything you do.
[SPEAKER_01]: to try and address it, to make, you know, my side ultimately, but this side feel better, plays into them and feeling anger.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like fueling them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I had so many friends during, you know, locked down, going on social media and just fighting with people.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, well, Elon's making money, like, I guess it wasn't Elon then, but people are making money off this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, you sound like you're saying, like,
[SPEAKER_01]: it is kind of baked in in that way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Baked in, exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the roll up in the juxtaposition?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sorry, go ahead.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, no, no, you might, please.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was just going to say it's the juxtaposition also.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, yes, people will get up at the gramis or the golden globes or the emis or the Oscars.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they'll make, you know, the win, first of all, it takes winning to even get up and make some kind of statement.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you have to win.
[SPEAKER_00]: So immediately, you're in that position of like,
[SPEAKER_00]: to the system when you're part of it, you're there, you know, you're worrying about what outfit you're wearing, you know, that juxtaposition between making a statement and like fashion and the corporate media, you know, it kind of dilutes whatever statement you're going to make because you're there, you know, and yet if you're not there, you don't exist.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's a, which I understand very well, I've done both, you know, I've been there and I've not been there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I wouldn't go again really quite honestly because of that juxtaposition I find too mind-bending, you know, but the idea of like people stopping and the red carpet and taking pictures and then you know, being part of the system and wanting, desiring,
[SPEAKER_00]: to win you know because that's why you're there and then going up and making a statement it doesn't have a lot of power at that point you know to me it winds up being kind of like a very token statement which again is the government is okay with that you know say whatever you want on stage at the Grammys you want to sell records that's why you're there you know and it's
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll get an ultimately your in a way if you make it enough about your identity as a band you're kind of finding a way to benefit off this thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: two.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's something I, I, I wrestle with this all the time in a band, like, and obviously my band has a very limited platform.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have a swear word for a name.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we are not anything high with what we're trying to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: But at the same time, we do have a little bit of a platform.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I feel obligated to talk about this stuff because I think about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: But at the same time, I don't ever want it to become
[SPEAKER_01]: There's this thing that I talk about all the time when they do that free to back concert in New York and I think Rachel has some machine handed out a free movie assurance and kids turn them inside out and a fry movie and you know you can't
[SPEAKER_01]: the more popular bank gets, the more assholes and people that don't get, they're going to become a man.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's true.
[SPEAKER_00]: The wider you audience, I mean, that happened with Borat, you know, like there was a large, it became such a big hit that there was a large percentage of people who liked it for the wrong reasons, you know, or who didn't really get what it was about, the subversion that was really about.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: Rage against the machine is a group that has, and I know Tom Morello,
[SPEAKER_00]: and I know Brad Wilk and they are very cool guys and they have very much tried to maintain their integrity but it's like you know it's it's a battle that becomes a battle you know just maintaining your integrity in this environment you know while talking to Jason from Green Day yesterday and they just did that Super Bowl thing right right and it's like they were kind of damned if they do damned if they don't like the
[SPEAKER_01]: for the NFL was just booking that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But Green Day had all the obligation to go out there and do something political, but they're not gonna be able to do that because like you're saying, they're part of a system.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you can only stray so far outside of that if you're still part of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean the the only true punk in football turned out to be Colin Kaepernick, you know, and that was very inadvertent, I don't think he intended to to wind up that way, you know, to be ostracized like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's almost crazy what happened to him, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's a place where he did threaten the system enough that he got blackballed, you know, and he got kicked out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And despite the fact that he was a great athlete and could have played for any team, they would not hire him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was the end of his career, really.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, that's that's that's punk rock to me, you know, like he paid the price and never gave him.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, because he's had chances I'm short to give in to stand up and go, while I was young, I was immature, or I really liked to play for this team.
[SPEAKER_00]: He could have done a lot of things to compromise himself, and the NFL would have probably accepted a back because it would be a good story, but he didn't do that and he maintained this integrity.
[SPEAKER_00]: So again, we go back to this idea of maintaining your integrity.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not about the legacy.
[SPEAKER_00]: it's about the integrity in the moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you hold on against all those forces of seduction that want you to be part of the system, you know, very difficult today?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and if you, you're right, like if you did the about face, like the way they would long onto them, in the way they'd long onto all these losers, like if you were to do it, they would just be like, yeah, like there's a lot.
[SPEAKER_01]: waiting for them on the other side.
[SPEAKER_01]: But at the same time to go with what you're saying about to sent being baked into the system, Nike was able to benefit from the fact that they were associated with them and made pay their association with them.
[SPEAKER_01]: but at the same time, they have discount days for law enforcement.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're able to kind of like make it on both sides, right, like into kind of like, it seems cool to be associated with with Kaepernick, but it doesn't really change.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's part, again, like we keep talking about baked into the system.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like that gives them cred, on a certain level that allows them to do these other more heinous things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And not have any consequences, you know, as a result, we feel okay buying Nike because we're seeing Colin Kaepernick, but we are also supporting child labor and all these other things that we're not looking that deeply into, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's impossible to avoid if you want sneakers or sweatpants or whatever, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's interesting because I've got.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I have four kids living with us right now, but we have three kids and then a friend of one of our kids moved in with us, too.
[SPEAKER_01]: But 16, 13 and 10.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the 16 year old's generation is still very much like labels.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, but it's it's very like
[SPEAKER_01]: almost post-label in the sense that they're wearing all black, but they know it's that label or it's pretty black on black on it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But my 13 year old her generation or their generation, I should say, doesn't give a fuck about labels.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was listening to some
[SPEAKER_01]: uh hip-hop podcast the other day and they were talking about how no one gives a fuck about Nike anymore with these younger generation.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're all wearing these $20 Walmart socket issues.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I feel like this is the generation I'm most excited about who have grown up knowing about the insidious nature of capitalism and corporations.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is almost like that post-capitalism kind of generation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that is you're right.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is very exciting.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I have five kids myself and I think my youngest is 22 and he, you know, I think that the issue with your 13 year old or with the 22 year old is yes, I think they have to a large degree rejected.
[SPEAKER_00]: This corporate path to, you know what I mean, but by the same token, are they giving up on having an impact on the society, have they just kind of remove themselves, which is understandable, you know, it's like it's a survival mechanism really when things are so overwhelming.
[SPEAKER_00]: you need to do something to survive and that is one path to survival is just checking out from that world, so as opposed to my older kids who are, you know, my oldest son, it works in Washington, D.C. and he works for Ralph Nader and he's still in the fight, you know, but is it making any difference, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there's like there is this kind of younger generation that I think
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the question is, what if anything, will they or can they do about it, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think the thing with art and my six-year-olds in the same generation as your 22-year-old in this way, there were teenagers in COVID and probably the most depressing moment in the most isolating moment that we had.
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like this younger generation was young enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: to be cognizant of the political stuff that was going on, but didn't lose that sort of key social teenage years being locked away.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's so true.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a very good point to also the impact of COVID on the society and it's particularly young people when you and I were out, you know, maybe without any parental supervision, certainly in my case, I had no parental supervision.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I could go, I would get on that train and go wherever I wanted, you know, and I would stay out as long as I did and my parents really weren't asking and they were
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that the COVID generation was trapped, you know, to some degree, those young people were trapped at home with their parents, which was a very unique dynamic.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the impact of that is still being felt and not being, it hasn't really been analyzed or understood quite yet.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and like I know that I was not at my best as far as being a parent during that time to be around as far as modeling.
[SPEAKER_01]: proper mental hygiene during that period.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I can only imagine what that was like to be a young person witnessing that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like luckily my parents when they were in their mid-life crises, I was not necessarily like you're saying, I was out doing my own shit.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can set a front road seat.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I mean, I'm guilty of the same stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think a lot of parents are, by the way, so don't be too hard on yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it is tough to be a parent, and it is tough to be a human, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I found that period of child raising in my first marriage, to be...
[SPEAKER_00]: an incredibly challenging and difficult time for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I just didn't have any preparation.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't know what to expect.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't something I planned on.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was something that I never fully adjusted to quite honestly, you know, and railed against in a lot of ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my kids certainly saw a lot of that behavior as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that's another constant theme that seems to come up on the show.
[SPEAKER_01]: is how many people are involved with, I think you can broaden it from just punk rock to the ones against the verse of culture in general.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: That had that sort of failing at the family structure.
[SPEAKER_01]: And particularly young males with male influence, not being so great.
[SPEAKER_01]: My dad moved out and kind of like had his rock star years, you know, when I was left with those nights, so great stepfather.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I know you certainly have talked about
[SPEAKER_01]: uh yeah, dealing with a career that didn't work at the way you wanted to.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I feel like maybe that's why so many of us go searching for these kinds of like niche familiar kind of structures that we can kind of find like be a comedy, be it music, be it art, in some sort of way like we can kind of find out, let in this place for what we didn't have at home.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, right, right, and it leaves us with this kind of dichotomy between seedaking love and acceptance and being cynical or contemptuous of it on some level too, which leads to that, you know, that kind of tension and friction that comes out in transgressive art, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I got like so many specific questions for you, Larry, can I transition to some key points to get to?
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course.
[SPEAKER_01]: Dom, I, you worked for Screw Magazine.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so did the first thing I ever had published.
[SPEAKER_00]: I used to live in a basement apartment in Brighton, Beach, Brooklyn.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had these two friends.
[SPEAKER_00]: One was Bob Sackamano.
[SPEAKER_00]: who became famous on Sci-Feld reluctantly and got so angry at me that I used everybody who named, we used a lot of real names on Sci-Feld and everybody whose name we used was thrilled that they got their name used, but he was upset with me and we ultimately went our separate ways after being friends since childhood.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the other person that lived there was a guy who used to read a lot of porno.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I would might go into the bathroom and they'd be porno in there and I'd be looking at the porno.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this was the days of course before computers.
[SPEAKER_00]: So everything was like porno books and porno magazines and peep shows you'd go to 42nd Street and you would check out the porno there.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was like very prevalent.
[SPEAKER_00]: prevalent porno to be a literative about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would look at these magazines and they would always be humor in them.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was always like a humor column of some kind.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would think to myself, and this was I was a teenager.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was like 16, 17 years old, and I think I could do better than this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I could write something funnier than this piece.
[SPEAKER_00]: So for no other reason than to make my friends laugh, we would smoke a joint, I would write a story, we'd smoke a joint, and I'd read the story to my friends in this basement apartment, and they would howl with laughter, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought to myself, why don't, maybe I'll just mail this into screw magazine and see what happens.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I did it and they accepted it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was how I sold my first piece, $100 to screw magazine.
[SPEAKER_00]: My grandmother, who lives in Florida, was so proud that she would bring it down to the canastagames and she would go, look at my grandson did, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: He wrote, he has a piece of article in this magazine.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I had acceptance from my family for that kind of stuff, even, which is great.
[SPEAKER_01]: at the risk of sounding like a pervert historian on this, too.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like we're talking about earlier, but cultures being smashed together at that point.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's also a weird crossover moment for pornography in the wake of death, and like
[SPEAKER_01]: people read screw that weren't necessarily just porno dudes.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was on the newsstand, like time and newsweek.
[SPEAKER_00]: And deep throat, for instance, I was in high school in Florida, and with my friends who were a bunch of weirdos.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, and we went, the world premiere, I'm pretty sure this is true.
[SPEAKER_00]: It may have been like the American premiere, but I think it was the world premiere of Deep Throat took place in Miami, and we went,
[SPEAKER_00]: And we were in the audience for that world premiere of Deep Throat and again watching Deep Throat with the coming and the the blow jobs and all the crazy shit in that movie, you know, there was a regular audience filled in this regular movie theater watching that movie.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there was that crossover moment, you know, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was a
[SPEAKER_00]: part of again, this sort of acceptance of transgression, you know, that ultimately got co-opted as well, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: in a weird way, a guy I worked with, I worked at a video store not unlike kind of Kim's in Toronto here for a while and a guy I worked with Glenn Sultre was actually working on a book about the period of films that kind of immediately sort of follows behind the green door and deep throat, right, like he called it Gorn, but it's almost like this like horror movie porn crossover period.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, right, that's right.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of nudity, a lot of, like, pretty blatant words, sex, but also horror, very graphic horror at the same time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, definitely.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and see, again, on 40s that you could go see these art movies, like the Dard in New York, but on 40s, you can see those kind of gore, porno, gore movies,
[SPEAKER_01]: Very very popular and and those were fun to go see actually because they were like sort of You know, they broke all those rules also, you know Yeah, it's like long jeans silver playing alongside fan with the paradise playing alongside I don't know some musical like not the family season of musical, but like it it was that moment where Every all the walls were breaking down I guess
[SPEAKER_00]: The Phantom of the Paradise, I saw tripping in Manhattan and we took acid and I saw a lot of movies tripping in those days.
[SPEAKER_00]: We would drop acid and Brooklyn by the time we got to Manhattan, we would tripping and we would go see these, you know, El Topo and movies like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we saw
[SPEAKER_00]: a friend of mine we went to see fathom of the paradise and when the movie was over of course i was still tripping and i went to the bathroom and the guy we in finley who played the phantom
[SPEAKER_00]: walked into the bathroom while I was tripping, peeing at the urinal, and it was like, what are the most mind-blowing experiences I ever had?
[SPEAKER_00]: So yes, and that was an extreme movie, also.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're very violent, that was early diploma, that's the way he was.
[SPEAKER_00]: Before he started doing more commercially acceptable type of projects, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: that's my favorite movie of all time down the paradise and tastic movie amazing one of a kind movie that would have melted my brain yes it was a me a brain melting movie it really was yeah years ago for my old i did a music video tv show up here and uh the film festival came to town and we'd always get past the interview people and there's no one i'd necessarily want interview but Paul Williams came on that documentary right
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I go down there and I was running a little hot.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm the first to admit it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But we finished the interview and he pulls me aside.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was a great interview and he's like, if you ever decide to get sober, give me a call.
[SPEAKER_01]: And but I was I was straight at back then I since start smoking pot, but I was good stone cool super right as funny.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, again, Paul Williams reputation.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was kind of cool that he wound up in that movie, you know, because his reputation couldn't have been any more straight.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wrote for the Carpenters and people like that, you know, and there he is playing an evil like devilish kind of character in Fathman of power.
[SPEAKER_00]: I swan, you know, I
[SPEAKER_01]: I watched that movie a thousand times.
[SPEAKER_01]: I tried to make my kids watch it and realize very quickly that you might not translate to the generation.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you should, if you haven't, the pommas are early stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: That kind of like is the, like there's a movie called I mom, a movie called Greetings.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a couple of movies where he was really, even though he's put into the same category of Scorsese and Spielberg and Lucas, he was really kind of operating in a very different realm until he started having like his hitchcocky in type of hits like sisters and the dressed to kill and those kind of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: but he has a whole bunch of movies that predate that that are very much more radical.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's I that's why I loved about fan of the paradise because you write it does kind of match the two errors like as he's leaving this and I guess it's post-sisters that he did fan of the paradise too, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean that's so I'm not sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if it's like your right sisters is much more conventional and very very hitchcopy.
[SPEAKER_01]: You do have that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's the better use of split screen and fan of the paradise when he's crawling on the floor.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my god.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's easy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a far more intense movie than it almost needed to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it winds up being a very, very intense movie.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he made.
[SPEAKER_00]: intense movies, and that's one of the reasons that I was probably a bigger fan of his than any of those other filmmakers, those young American filmmakers at that time because he did deliver these very intense kind of obsession.
[SPEAKER_00]: Was that that was another one?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think yeah Cliff Robertson and Genevieve Bishol.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, he was really in his own realm there for a while.
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you body double?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I love body double.
[SPEAKER_01]: I, my, the day my mom introduced him to my stepfather.
[SPEAKER_01]: He took us the video store and rented body double.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I watched body double with my mom and my soon to be stepfather.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was a terrible experience as a young person.
[SPEAKER_01]: Very well.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know what?
[SPEAKER_00]: It reminds me of my mother.
[SPEAKER_00]: My divorce mother was dating the man who eventually became my stepfather and we were in Florida and they asked, they were going to go to the movies and they was like, what movie should we go see?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had seen this movie by John Adelson, who directed Rocky.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ultimately and but he his original his first movie or at least is one of his early movies was a movie called Cry Uncle Which goes right to what we're talking about a second ago It's start Alan Garfield who was a big 70s actor who I wind up firing on Sign-filled many years later.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a whole other thing But he was he plays a private detective and it's kind of a poor no comedy
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a lot of hardcore sex in it and it was very funny also and it was John Abelson who eventually went on to a very commercial career, the karate kid and all this kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember my mother and my step by soon to be stepfather coming home and just looking at me so angrily, you know, it's like, what the hell are you thinking, recommending this movie, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I said, you know, I thought it was good, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, yeah, that was that time when that's kind of moves.
[SPEAKER_00]: Body double was a very, I really liked body double also.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember even the Frankie and the Frankie goes to Hollywood, music video, which they take a long time to let that play out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, the Bernard Herman music, he would just oppose, he was almost like a collageist in a way, juxtaposing all these different elements.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was very interesting stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, never really thought of him that way, but like with the Hitchcock influence and all the other influences, it's very much like that sort of Tarantino post modern post video.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, Clark kind of approach to making movies.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wasn't as interested as Tarantino was, I think, in audience satisfaction.
[SPEAKER_00]: You see, he's still from that era.
[SPEAKER_00]: where, again, we talk about this punk rock aesthetic, he was willing to alienate the audience.
[SPEAKER_00]: People die at the end of his movies.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's not necessarily happy endings, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was kind of like a very anti-commercial kind of stance.
[SPEAKER_00]: How he got away with it, how the people that gave them the money allowed him to do that, I don't know, but that's the way it was, but even Scorsese and Mean Streets,
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, they die there, you know, and so there was a lot more of that kind of thing Whereas in pulp fiction, you do have Travolta gets killed, but Bruce Willas lives, you know, And there is an exhilaration to, and a kind of a satisfaction to the fact that, oh wow, the hero essentially does live in that movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're 100% right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's like the distinction I guess between DePaul Moe who's still coming at it from that sort of post French new wave, uh, like American.
[SPEAKER_01]: on like golden eight, you know, 70s, easy ride to raging bull period.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Where it's quinturentino's coming from the video store clerk where it's like, oh, did you like it?
[SPEAKER_01]: As you're getting the movie back.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you're really dealing with that sort of fan reaction on a very, and I say this as someone who worked in a lot of video stores, like you, you really know what people think of the movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: To follow your story, I made,
[SPEAKER_01]: and the piano teacher came out and it had a very romantic looking cover so I wrote in my best penmanship the perfect date movie and Charles from
[SPEAKER_01]: the band, Broken Social Scene, him and his wife came in, and his wife was very pregnant at this point.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she's like, which one of you motherfuckers wrote the perfect date movie on this thing?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I said me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she's like, I broke your fucking tape.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she smashed the tape.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you could still break it, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: it was a bootleg tape because that movie was not released in Canada go figure so huh wow interesting yeah we used to have we had state censorship here in a lot of ways and it was well that's first surprising yeah yeah like a lot of uh gatebook stores would deal with their shit getting seized all the time by right right back then and yeah
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that was the thing about New York, you know, everything was kind of, it was, it was lawless, you know, it was really lawless and to to my benefit, you know, to people like me who were like looking to
[SPEAKER_00]: be exp- you know, I'm coming from Kansas essentially in Brooklyn, and I'm here in the Emerald City, you know, and everything was available, you know, anything was available on down any street, you know, and that was a really, really fertile time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you mentioned Canada and one of your early collaborators on projects was Elaine Pope.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Who says it was a rock musician, sure, and rough trade, I think the name of the band was absolutely I heard she is Carol Pope is to like kind of like once again sort of an uncredited protopunk like high school confidential like a lot of their music very rocky horror picture show
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I've informed glam rock, but did you ever see them play?
[SPEAKER_01]: Did they ever make it down to New York when you guys?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I don't think I've ever seen them play.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, but I met Carol, maybe a couple of times, she came to visit Elaine when we were doing the TV show together, and I was very close to Elaine, Elaine's the godmother of one of my kids, in fact, although we don't really talk that much now, but not for any reason other than just drift, you know, but Elaine was
[SPEAKER_00]: She was from Canada, all that stuff was very exotic, you know, um, so I love that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, um, my dad did the first ever Pepsi commercial with rock and roll with rough trade.
[SPEAKER_01]: doing it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it was a good one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, Canada also, of course, you know, the, from the 70s on Canadian, Canadian humor really kind of moved into the states and between SETV and cyanide live really kind of created a sensibility too.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe part of the restrictions of Canada created that kind of level of humor as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, 100%.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like obviously, SUTV, you know, and kids in the hall being exceptions, but there's not a lot of great and you probably know better than me, but there's not a lot of great Canadian comedy TV, but just an unbelievable amount of great Canadian comedians.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I feel like there's the brain drain.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you see it with Nathan Field, or you see it with all these people that can't find it up here, but obviously can they have talents that can translate in the US?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's interesting, that's interesting, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because again, still where do you go?
[SPEAKER_00]: If the states were still the place where you could possibly even being from Brooklyn, being from Brooklyn was like being from Canada and a lot of ways also.
[SPEAKER_00]: from the center of things, and sometimes you just had like I made the decision to just go out to California, eventually, without knowing what I was going to do, how I was going to do it, how I would accomplish it, who I would talk to.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it was very much, it was the wild west, you know, and but I wanted to sort of be in the middle of things, you know, and I got in that flavor of it from downtown New York that made me want to like be in the action, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was, you know, the New York and LA were places where they were still action, you know, without restrictions.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was exciting, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think for Canadians, I'm sure it was the same feeling.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you want action, you know, if you want to test test your metal, you know, this, you had to sort of cross that border, even if it was a mental border, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: I also think that in like you say, being in Brooklyn, you kind of felt like
[SPEAKER_01]: so the Canada to New York.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I think that outsider perspective allows you to see the humor and stuff that maybe you can't always see when you're on the inside of something.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, even in Brooklyn itself, I would hang out with my friend Neil who I was talking about, whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'd be very detached.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we were observers.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I wasn't, I didn't want to get involved in the violence, you know, but I was kind of, you know, it's like that duality of like wanting to kind of experience it without getting my ass kicked.
[SPEAKER_00]: And sometimes and that worked out a lot of the time, but sometimes it didn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: I got caught up in fights and you know gang wars and got got my ass kicked quite a bit, but I also learned how to talk my way out of trouble.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that became a talent that I was able to apply to something like Borat or we were constantly dealing with angry people and police.
[SPEAKER_00]: And and I would have to step forward and be the spokesman for our little crew and I was able to usually kind of bullshit my way out of trouble, you know, so we were able to sort of get back in the van and drive away, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wonder like.
[SPEAKER_01]: going back to this art being kind of trauma response like I wonder if you look at all the great art that came in New York if it's almost like unprescribed art therapy for people at a certain level like be a humor or be a punk or hip hop or graffiti like
[SPEAKER_01]: people are dealing with this sort of threat of violence in that city at that time, which is almost romanticized how kind of talked about it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, it's real, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like you're saying, like everyone I know from New York up until the 90s talks about how they were like mugged or jumped or sometimes you should happen to them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, some of my friends were, with the aggressors and the predators, you know, and so, but I, I couldn't relate to, you know, victimizing people.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't, I didn't like I had a good conscience, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: And I used to jump into things and break things up.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I tried to do the right thing a lot of the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I would also be risking my own ass sometimes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was kind of like, you know, at a certain point, you just get tired of that, like that violence is very much a kind of pervasive level of life, especially at that time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And although they see that there were no guns, you know, it's like I dread to think what would have happened if guns were available.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody had guns, you had sticks, you had chains, you had fists, you had rocks, you know, anything knives, some people actually had knives, but even that was pretty rare.
[SPEAKER_00]: So people didn't get too badly hurt, generally speaking.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, once guns became, once guns got introduced into the mix,
[SPEAKER_00]: then things change because the same anger and temper and the same psychotic group of people that were a small minority but very powerful minority.
[SPEAKER_00]: Once those people got guns, things started to get really out of control.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like you totally understand like you're saying, like no one gets seriously hurt but the idea, the reality is everyone's going to get hurt and you're, and it could happen at any time and you certainly talk about this in the book and
[SPEAKER_01]: the series that you did looking at comedy around the world and how the dangers like you see the people that live with this kind of threat of violence, this kind of like trauma, like violence just becomes part of the vocabulary and like, yeah, it's very- Well, the threat is a key word because fear drives a lot of it, you know, it's like the fear of the violence
[SPEAKER_00]: was maybe sometimes worse than the actual violence.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fact that there was an unpredictability to that violence and that you could be preyed upon at any time, you could turn a corner and walk into a bunch of people who don't have any motivation, it's not like they hate you or they know you, they just want to hurt.
[SPEAKER_00]: They want to hurt something.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you could be in the wrong place at the wrong time and be that object.
[SPEAKER_00]: that they want to hurt.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the fear of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the idea of not being, you had to learn how to be aware of your surroundings.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that winds up being like a kind of a good trait in a way, even though it's born out of fear.
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, so it's again, we talk a lot today about duality, you know, that the idea of developing awareness, street smarts or street sense, that was valuable to your survival, but having to walk around with that anxiety also affected you, you know, an impact to you and and doesn't to adulthood, do you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like it, and that's the,
[SPEAKER_01]: again, you talk about this in the series, but like that's where comedy comes in, that's where culture comes in, that's where life during wartime kind of ways of of this stuff being used to cope.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I feel like yeah, I feel like comedy is such an interesting thing because we certainly seen in America.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've witnessed this in Canada with with my friends like
[SPEAKER_01]: how it's been used to radicalize people.
[SPEAKER_01]: But like in your series, you also see that it's like, it's also an necessity to help people cope.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: Black comedy is a therapeutic tool.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether it's in hospitals, amongst the doctors who are facing that death all the time, you know, whether it's in the army, you know, or whether it's in the streets,
[SPEAKER_00]: making fun of things, laughing at things was a way to diffuse the anxiety and the fear and sort of get some kind of control over the situation and yourself, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was very important, I mean, but again, we were talking about things that I was exposed to in a very young age.
[SPEAKER_00]: I used to walk down Brighton Beach Avenue back in the 60s when I was in elementary school,
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was a voracious reader, and I had a quarter, and I went into a use bookstore, and just because I liked the cover, I bought a book called Cash 22.
[SPEAKER_00]: And cash 22 was about World War II.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was hilariously funny about death and dismemberment and all these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it kind of like, wow, I've laughed at these things privately because it's like not right to be laughing at it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here's a book that basically made it okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's like, well, you could laugh at these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is acceptable.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, this is a therapeutic way of dealing with the fear and the threat of violence and the reality of violence also.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was, again, a book that sort of changed my whole way of thinking because it suddenly was like, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: to have these dark thoughts, which again, religion and society and all these things sort of tried to have you suppress, but it's inside of you and if you don't find the way to express it, it's worse.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so here I finally found, here's an author, an American from Brooklyn, a Jewish author who was actually in World War II and had these experiences and it kind of gave me
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the series is one of some of the most important work that you did because for me personally because it allowed me like it was laughing with people and it brought you into the world and understood their comedy and even like Dix when you did Dix the musical Josh Sharp who was just on the show right like does making those works where you're kind of like
[SPEAKER_01]: embedded in the thing and understanding the thing from that side of it, change the way you look at, say something like Bruno or religiousist.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, do you kind of have a different perspective on that?
[SPEAKER_01]: And like, would you, if those projects were presented today, would you would change what you approach them now?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think so.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, dangerous comedy, particularly,
[SPEAKER_00]: I think a word that we haven't talked about that is much more a word that is part of my reality today is compassion, you know, I think that I wasn't a very, I think I wanted to be compassionate as a kid, but I couldn't afford to be, you know, and maybe I tried my best, but I didn't try very hard.
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, and that was my survival tool, but as an adult, the things you learn is a kid to survive sometimes work against you as an adult.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I eventually developed kind of a compassion for people and dangerous comedy, and I traveled around the world with Sasha, and I did commercials and all these different things, and I would see people suffering.
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, there's a lot of suffering in the world and people in war torn places like Somalia or Iraq and to see those people finding humor in their situation, it's one thing in Brooklyn, it's one thing amongst middle-class kids, it's one thing, you know, in all the situations in the states where we have it so easy on a certain level, but seeing people literally have their friends
[SPEAKER_00]: or comedians that were assassinated because of something that they said, or are people suffering or hurt wounded, you know, children, in Palestine, things like that, it was impossible for me, and I didn't go into it really thinking that's what the impact was going to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I developed a kind of a deep sense of compassion also.
[SPEAKER_00]: and an aberration and inspiration from people trying to find humor in those situations, you know, and that definitely, I wouldn't say changed me, but it expanded me, you know, so for me to go back to a borat or a Bruno, which had very noble aspirations on many levels, and was very funny, also, and
[SPEAKER_00]: And sometimes we were only interested in being funny at any cost, but it would be hard for me today to be the predator in those situations where we were taking advantage of people and targeting people and marking people and trying, even white supremacists and really nasty bad people, I would have much more
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, much more sort of ambivalence about it, I think.
[SPEAKER_00]: And ambivalence wouldn't really help me with a movie like Warhat.
[SPEAKER_00]: You had to be full bore.
[SPEAKER_00]: You had to totally get it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You'd be into it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it would change the way those projects were.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it might change my interpretation of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like I feel like much in the way we talked about G. G. Allen or
[SPEAKER_01]: There can't be another Borat and there shouldn't be another Borat because we've established that line and we know that that parameter is for this thing and like you're saying it isn't a really important movie for For a lot of reasons and obviously like I might watch it differently now than I've watched it the first time yeah I thought to me
[SPEAKER_01]: movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: And now from your book, I get a little more context for what actually was going on.
[SPEAKER_01]: He kind of like throw up his hands and walked away.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm like, this movie is going to be fucking nuts.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the fact that you stepped in, like the guy who made the GGL in documentary couldn't hang couldn't hang, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's true.
[SPEAKER_01]: With the way everything played out, you have a different take on his involvement in that movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like you saw where that conflict would have come from now.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a lot of respect for Todd, and I will tell you that, and I talk about the book a little bit, but I started off working on Borat, feeling very negative towards Todd, because I was basically propagandized about Todd's behavior, and
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, how he was impossible to deal with and he intimidated Sasha and he would make Sasha cry.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and I was like, but that fucking asshole, you know, like I won't make him cry.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to make sure he gives the best performance and all that kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: But as I did three movies, as those three movies with Sasha that I did,
[SPEAKER_00]: progressed.
[SPEAKER_00]: I started seeing that dark side of Sasha, you know, and I started to appreciate a lot more of what Todd went through, so that by the end of the dictator, you know, which covers it covers like about I guess, you know, eight years of something that period of those three movies.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had a lot more respect and compassion for what Todd went through and a lot less for what Sasha went through, you know, so I did a whole turnaround there, you know, I related to Todd as the filmmaker and because how difficult those movies are hard to make.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you, again, they draw on every part of you, even just physically, you know, I was in situations.
[SPEAKER_00]: I never, you know, they talk about chairs and stuff like there were no chairs, you know, you will like laying in a corner hiding all the time with a little monitor to watch what was going on and whispering into a little microphone to the cameraman.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I appreciated on all those
[SPEAKER_00]: what Todd must have gone through.
[SPEAKER_00]: And also, you know, just Sasha's behavior shifting what he finally was like feeling his oats and let a lot of his darkness and anxiety kind of play out.
[SPEAKER_00]: in the world, treating people badly and things like that that I did not appreciate.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that had a lot of impact on dangerous comedy also, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to kind of have a different, I wanted to go into real places and take those same risks, but I didn't want to hurt people.
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, and I didn't want to take advantage of people.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to be straight and honest.
[SPEAKER_00]: Could I do something interesting and be completely straight and honest?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is who I am.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is who you are.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's see if we can talk, you know, and see what comes of it, you know, and I had that life-changing experience because of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like I feel if dangerous comedy had come out when vice was still riding high on vice.
[SPEAKER_01]: The importance of that show would have been so immense.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I feel like it's still a very important show.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think people that see it immediately can get it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I just feel like the time when it came out was the beginning of sort of for me as a note side or the darker periods of comedy that we've been and people's tastes.
[SPEAKER_01]: and kind of an all-time low, and I feel like it was too smart for the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Vice was the, what was the name of the dude's, who was in charge of Vice?
[SPEAKER_00]: Eddie Meredi, Sirus, not Eddie, the other guy, Shane, Shane, Shane, Shane, and Vice.
[SPEAKER_00]: where one of the main inspirations for dangerous comedy because Shane went to Liberia during the Civil War and interviewed General Buttonaked.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I watched that
[SPEAKER_00]: at home and I was like holy shit man, this guy is in a fucking war zone during a war talking to a guy who's admitted being accountable, you know, and it's shot really dark because they had no choice, this is what I had to look like.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, for some weird reason, because this is who I am, I was like, I want to do that, you know, that's what I want to do, you know, and so I kept that in the back of my mind until I finally was able to have the leverage to get to get to get the interest comedy made and I did go to Liberia and talk to Colonel but naked also.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, uh, just to give you a little behind the scenes on the making of that, and you get into this with religious religious as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: As we all know, on air talent, they play it in front of the camera a little bit better.
[SPEAKER_01]: My, the guy who discovered my band for like, like kind of brought us into the vice-fold Andy Kapper was the director of that and the producer.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't know if you have this experience, but General Bucknaked had his phone number, and would call and text him four years after with pitches and also some ideas to take this further.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, I didn't have any contact with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't really have, you know, that's the thing when I'm done, whether it's Bob Dylan or kind of general button naked, I generally am done, you know, it's like, this is part of the outside or thing, you know, it's like, I'm not really looking to make friends, you know, I'm looking to get something on film.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's one of a kind.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then move on, you know, like Shane or Shane, the western star, you know, or Samurai, the book is called Comedy Samurai, but I move on, you know, to the next thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so no, I didn't have any, now maybe one of the producers might have, you know, that's possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: I haven't asked them about that actually, but that's very possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, so yeah, it does happen, but I, I know I had very little, once I was done with people, there are some people that I still kind of stay connected to on Instagram, uh, from, from that time, but not, but not him.
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_01]: It really got reinforced by your book when you're talking about working with Bob Dylan.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, and I want, like you do, kind of say that like he doesn't really have friends.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like seems like being Bob Dylan is a full-time job.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, do you think he's happy?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because it doesn't seem like he's happy throughout this experience you have working with them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you know, I don't think, and this is, I guess, I'm sort of a similar in a way, and I would put Larry David in this category also.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know the happiness is the goal.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I don't know that Bob Dylan is even thinking about happiness.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I accept as a momentary
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, epiphany that exists in a temporary kind of way and then back into the real world and you know the idea I think Larry David I remember when the show finally got really successful and people would say to him, are you happy now?
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you happy?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and he'd go, no, I'm still me, you know, I mean,
[SPEAKER_00]: I am not happy, you know, but, and people would think he was, they would resent that in a way, but I sort of understood that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think for Bob, it's not really about happiness, you know, I think it's about some kind of truth, you know, that he's seeking, and he's, he's been relegated to this kind of sage role in the society of seeking truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you're seeking truth,
[SPEAKER_00]: you're seeing and feeling the suffering and it's hard to like be happy, you know, to like to exal that out and be happy except in moments, you know, and you look for those moments because you deserve those moments, you need those moments, you know, with your children or wherever it may come,
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, with your wives and girlfriends and people who are, you love, you know, those places we might find happiness.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I wouldn't be surprised if he has happy moments, but I would not describe him as a happy person.
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's, it's weird because, you know, I think with you and like, obviously, you've done well for yourself, but like, it doesn't necessarily feel like financial gain is necessarily the motto.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's why, you know, you walk away from these projects and you talk about this a lot in the book, but for these guys that are in these perpetual money making that the heart of this perpetual money making machine.
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess there's like an addiction to it where you don't stop like I've got friends at a big time actors and then I'll see them do a fucking commercial and it's like What do you need it for yeah, you can say no right like you can't spend it forever and like I don't know what their personal expenses are like but like at a certain point If it's not fun and if it's not making you happy and you have enough money to go out there and just like
[SPEAKER_01]: change everyone you meet's life for like a week and a half.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I guess and I think maybe that's where you're like you're talking about this capitalism resistance is baked in kind of thing where yeah where and I know I'm brutalizing the quote now I'm sorry.
[SPEAKER_01]: No that's okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: But where these guys can't stop and they just like are like this is what I do and there's all
[SPEAKER_00]: I think Bob is different in my mind from anybody that I've ever met, and in the sense that his decision making doesn't seem to have any motivation at all except instinct.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that instinct could take him
[SPEAKER_00]: and he's made a lot of money.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, there's no doubt that he has been incredibly successful, but he's been publicly humiliated and he has failed and he has sought out Christianity and Judaism and, you know, he's done victorious secret commercials and you know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like there's no logic.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not like a career path, you know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: And by the same token, he's made choices that have been incredibly lucrative, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he almost, like, he's like a separate conversation in a way from all this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because he predates this capitalist world that we live in.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's part of it, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: And he needs, I think he needs to be on stage these days.
[SPEAKER_00]: doing whatever it is that he does, you know, and I think that that is sub, and again, he doesn't get like there's a lot of comedians and I've known a lot of them, great comedians who love being a musician too, who love being on stage because they get the love.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and the love, I think keeps them alive.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think if there's something chemical that happens when you get that kind of love from an audience of mass audience, that kind of is healthy for you on some level, if you can handle it and reach that level.
[SPEAKER_00]: But for him, he's more like Miles Davis.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wants to have his back turn to the audience.
[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't want to acknowledge them.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's doing so, it's for himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's pure instinct.
[SPEAKER_00]: He taught me to trust your instincts and don't question them, even if they're wrong, that's all you have is that instinct, you know, and so he's like in a different category in a way for me, when I look at all the people in my life who've been very successful, you know, I look at there, there's always a little more calculation involved.
[SPEAKER_00]: But for him, I never saw any calculation like I should be doing this because it might be popular.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's never made that equation as far as I could see it, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you're talking about earlier about how this point in your life.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's all about compassion and empathy.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, like that's also some that comes across in the book.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like you're on this quest.
[SPEAKER_01]: You never overtly say it, but like that's really clear from the work you're doing now and the people you're working with and the way you approach this thing and I feel like there's a certain moment where you have to in order to succeed or to keep climbing or something you kind of have to cut yourself off a little bit from that and yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a caveat to this is that I've heard it from secondhand places, but it's from two separate secondhand stories, but this friend of a friend and also another friend of a friend, same guy, was on tour with Bob Dylan, and I guess there was like a signed contract thing that's like you're not going to look him in the eyes and you're not going to talk to him.
[SPEAKER_01]: and he's like three weeks into this tour.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's seen Bob Dylan a bunch on the tour and he's in an elevator with him.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's just the two of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's like, you know what?
[SPEAKER_01]: He seems like a nice guy, fuck it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's like, Mr. Dylan, it's such an amazing honor to be on tour with you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I just can't thank you enough for having me here.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Bob looks at him and then he's fired the next day.
[SPEAKER_01]: And
[SPEAKER_01]: Like you're saying, like he is one of the greatest artists of all time.
[SPEAKER_01]: He obviously had a level of compassion and empathy that allowed him to kind of like touch the human spirit like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But maybe at a certain point, you have to let that go because it would weigh on him every day.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like fuck, I could go out and change a million homeless people's lives or I can do something insane today.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but I got to keep doing making this art for what reason I think he carries that burden in a way in a weird way.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm very sorry to hear about your friend because I've seen him, he always had different when I worked with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had different tactics to keep people at arms like and I had to be very close with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because we wrote together every day and then I directed him so we were actually very close But I would see him when people would approach him, you know, he couldn't even make eye contact He had trouble making eye contact and People go, well, how did you feel?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, what did you feel like when you play at electric and new port and he would go, how did you feel, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: And he would like turn it around like that and people wouldn't know how to answer it by that time he was moving on.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he had to develop, he became such a phenomenon and such a young age.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, that I don't think, you know, he'd never, he's untherapeuticized.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, he has like been sort of creating through this world, you know, in this way, people thought he was the Messiah and he had all the answers.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, that is a burden, you know, that he did not want, but he cannot undo.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so his decision-making really is outside of the general psychological sort of decision-making that most of us have to face, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and I feel like that's, I guess, part of the sort of, you know, go back to,
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, the fan of the paradise, Phelstein deal that you're going to be thinking, right, right, right, you're going to have this ability that's going to bring you to this stage, but then it's also going to be the thing that makes it impossible for you to enjoy it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, he's talked about a kind of a Faustian bargain that he made that allowed him to write those early songs that really built the foundation of who Bob Dylan is, you know, whether it's desolation row or those kind of epic hard-ranging, good-a-fall type of songs that he wrote that that was some kind of bargain with the devil and he can't do it today.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, so I think he is very, he's very aware, you know, and he went through that Christian phase where he talked a lot about the devil actually and he was looking for metaphors maybe in some way to express that.
[SPEAKER_00]: that transaction that he felt that he made to get where he got, you know, and there was ambition there, you know, there was hunger, there was desire and all those things, and yet at the same time, again, he had a very tremendous ambivalence about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I guess that's all right, Amy Kay author.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, it's okay, but I was just gonna say it happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: It actually, like he made this bargain with the devil.
[SPEAKER_00]: It actually lives that, lives that economy now, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: I find, like, from doing this show, and obviously recognizing the economy of scale of the people.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm talking to you first as Bob Dylan in most cases, but I think that's, everyone, especially lead singers of bands.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: I say, there's like,
[SPEAKER_01]: a certain type of brain chemistry and ultimately that empty hole longing that would bring someone onto that stage and make them the perfect person to do this and to need that gratification and to be able to give that to the audience.
[SPEAKER_01]: But then once you achieve it, it's the exact same personality type that makes you the least suited person to be in that position.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and people, there's very few people that reach that Bob level, that Bob Dylan level, and so they're in unprecedented grounds, you know, like, how do I behave as Bob Dylan, you know, and I mean, I mean, you can see it with like somebody like Paul McCartney also trying to he's on some level he wants his legacy and he wants.
[SPEAKER_00]: the fame and he's continues to do it even though he doesn't have to and on the other level he's trying to be like an aweshox I'm just another guy you know it's like this they're all sort of trying to work it out even in their 80s they're still trying to work it out and that will be the story of their lives really is trying to work it out and never really finding as you were talking about the happiness because even though Paul McCartney might seem happy and Bob Dylan
[SPEAKER_00]: You know the Paul McCartney is plagued by demons as well, you know, nobody escapes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I've heard some people that've had interactions with Mick Jagger where it's like, wow, even at that level, you're still still not content insecure in your thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I guess we'll need going, sorry, see you.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I think you see it with comedians as well, who want the respect, want the kind of reputation, they're still looking to top themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's all kinds of self-competition that goes on that you can't really win.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, there is no winning.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is no there, you know, and that is a certain emptiness to that pursuit at a certain point, you know, I think that's also the reassuring part is that to know that none of this is real.
[SPEAKER_01]: and like us as these like creatures like we don't need any of this stuff these are addictions and things that we found that kind of fill these voids in us and and I guess they mean that's why these people keep doing it even though they're not happy it's just because they haven't found that contentment in their cells like they're they're not they haven't been through the right type of therapy
[SPEAKER_01]: to truly be content happy in their own skin.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the reasons that I kind of stepped off of that path was the illusion.
[SPEAKER_00]: I saw the illusion and the delusion so clearly
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, and I had studied a lot of Buddhism again, looking because I was so unsatisfied and dissatisfied and looking for answers and seeking some solace somewhere and Buddhism kind of really showed me the concept of
[SPEAKER_00]: compassion and empathy as we talked about, but also that the life is an illusion to some degree, and we have to shatter that illusion to get to the truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think for a lot of people in maybe Bob's situation or Paul McCartney or Mick Jagger, they've chosen the bubble.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the bubble of illusion, where they're surrounded by people who don't see them as humans, see them as something more, and they want to be seen that way.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not prepared to burst through that bubble and just be who they are.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's something that I've looked at pretty close up because I've been connected to so many successful people.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I've seen them
[SPEAKER_00]: close themselves off in the bubble and lose touch, lose touch with reality because they are now living this illusion instead.
[SPEAKER_00]: And look, these people can live their illusion until they die.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you can get away with it, you know, if you're a Bob Dylan or Paul McCarrney or whoever it is, you know, but there was something to be said for the courage to step through that bubble and put your feet on the ground, be grounded and face reality and face the truth and be
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like, you know, I like I've loved your comedy and I love the work you do, but I think for me hearing you talk about something to me that's just really obvious, like, genocide that are going on, the death of Palestinian people, the death of all, in other places, Congo, we go on, unfortunately, about the death of South Carolina in America right now, too.
[SPEAKER_01]: there's so many people that just don't see it and don't acknowledge it and like you're saying like you know fan with the paradise there's that great scene where there's the orgy and he gets pulled into the orgy like that's what this entertainment industry is like you're saying it's the bubble where who doesn't want to be in the orgy but the reality is it's it's not the real thing that's actually happening and I feel like that's where like to find people and there's other people that I've met obviously that achieve a lot of success in
[SPEAKER_01]: kind of hold onto that reality thing and it goes back to what you're saying like when people are spending $180 million to ultimately satisfy their creative ego, it really makes it hard to realize like oh shit, there's people dying just waking up in the wrong place the wrong time.
[SPEAKER_00]: That money, that money that's being spent on an entertainment ultimately,
[SPEAKER_00]: to win awards could have been spent on so many things that actually could have had an impact.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, there's very few movies today because of all this that we're talking about that have that kind of impact on our audience that when the movie's over,
[SPEAKER_00]: you're blown away and you can't move.
[SPEAKER_00]: That experience is really hard to come by today because it is such a corporate environment that is producing these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's artists but artists that have been sublimated by the corporate environment, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel very lucky in a weird way and I talk about being lucky in the book.
[SPEAKER_00]: but being able to step away from that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I was invited into the bubble, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I stepped in the bubble and I was like, well, this is not the, it was like tripping and going to like a club or something when I was a kid.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was like, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to really be here, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is not me, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had to get back out on the street.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and that's how my life has been.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't want to be in the bubble.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and you pay a price for not being in the bubble, but it's a small price compared to being trapped in the bubble.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like one person, I guess, who famously, and I watched this once again from a distance just through the interviews they did.
[SPEAKER_01]: But also seem to kind of get assumed into a bubble at a certain point is Yi, Kanye West.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_01]: You worked with them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like the moment where he's getting sucked into that world.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've only really empathized and understood this once while I lost my mom a couple years later.
[SPEAKER_01]: But that is such a huge thing to carry as a human being.
[SPEAKER_01]: To then have to go out there and try and make art and make people money and stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: you, one year later, you guys are working on this HBO show.
[SPEAKER_01]: That must have been fucking nuts.
[SPEAKER_00]: His mom was still alive when we did- Oh, I'm sorry.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, I thought you'd be happy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think it's important to mention, because I agree that the losing of his mother
[SPEAKER_00]: was kind of like the grounding, he lost his grounding and spun off after the loss of his mother.
[SPEAKER_00]: His mom was around when we did the pilot and he was a different person, you know, and now again we could talk about his mental emotional issues.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not qualified to decide what was actually wrong
[SPEAKER_00]: But I know that when I knew him, he was a pretty humble guy with a good sense of humor, a very approachable, very relatable, very real, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even though we had an entourage, they were all real too, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he was getting successful.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was around the time when Jesus walks and high school drop out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he was just starting to get wildly successful.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he was not lost.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, he was very found, really.
[SPEAKER_00]: I admired his groundedness at that time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And his mother really kept, there was no Kardashians.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was none of that stuff going on.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he was a young guy.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was able to indulge himself to some degree because of his success.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he wasn't at all in this different stratosphere.
[SPEAKER_00]: And with all the thoughts that he had that he lost control over, you know, he was very approachable, you know, and we had a very good working relationship.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the show didn't work out, although it's a very cool show actually, a very funny cool show, a great cast, he was funny and all that kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: But once he lost his mother, I think that was the first step to him losing himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and I've seen him recently, or I heard him, or read him recently, kind of recanting a lot of the stuff that he's been saying in the last few years.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, he was somebody too who was like, not only in the bubble, but, you know, he was the golden goose, and a lot of these people are the golden goose for the people around them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they exploit them.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, because they're able to produce the golden eggs and nobody's really whether it's John Belushi, you know, I think about a lot of the people that didn't make it.
[SPEAKER_00]: who were golden gooses, sort of exploited by the people around them, and didn't really think about what this person actually needed as a person, as a human.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, instead they made that bubble harder and harder to escape from.
[SPEAKER_00]: And not that I pity them or, you know, I have much more compassion for those that are suffering in Palestine and places like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I do get
[SPEAKER_01]: uh... that idea being trapped by your own success to some degree you know yeah looking at once again to go back to that sort of familial trauma like he was someone who very clearly loved his mom he talked about interviews and that's like working at much music i would go back and i'd see like his old interviews and some of the favorite interviews musicians have ever done like
[SPEAKER_01]: breaking down the fact that like, yeah, if I wasn't the guy who makes jazzy's beats, he wouldn't be on my record.
[SPEAKER_01]: I couldn't afford him like you pay those people on your records.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like kind of pulling back that curtain and like you're saying, like it's interesting that you say that because I've always felt like he was very self-aware.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you lose your mom and it's like everything he did, you can tell that if there was his mom there who we, the ultimate authority on being like, knock this the fuck off.
[SPEAKER_01]: it would have stopped.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly who she was, too.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, my exposure to her was exactly that.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was the governor on his, on his, in, you know, and I think without her, he didn't have anybody telling him, oh, you know, stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and he starts unravel and just kind of spin out of control, you know, and like once again, this is not to excuse all the horrible things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, definitely not, definitely not.
[SPEAKER_01]: But, and I think, you know, you talk about growing up in Trump village.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have a knowledge of of Trump that few people saw where you know, his dad was a fucking asshole.
[SPEAKER_01]: Terrible.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and like what's that like to grow up with at home?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, as young, horrible Trump, you know, with every being spoiled rotten, but having this terrible dad who makes money by hurting people and teaching you that's okay, you can see how that trauma would inform his worldview and his moral.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely, but even to go one step further with that, to see Trump himself in the
[SPEAKER_00]: who was a joke, and a clown, who had no respect from anybody in her, you know, like the ultimate Neppo baby, you know, accomplished nothing, failed at everything, to see the position he's in today, it's like, you can only scream about it, you know, as John Lennon used to say,
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, what happened to a country that allowed someone like that to become a leader, that he got as far as he got.
[SPEAKER_00]: and has kind of like stumbled and bumbled his way to this position of authority, is that blows by minds, you know, just I can't, of all the things we've talked about today, that's the one thing I cannot reconcile, you know, that that happened and that the world is so much worse off.
[SPEAKER_00]: as a result of it, you know, and you just want to go person to person and shake people by the color and just go don't you understand, you know, it's like Kevin McCarthy and invasion of the body snatchers, you know, I want to like wake people up.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I, but I don't have the, you know, I can't do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I can't reach enough people and change enough minds to do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's
[SPEAKER_01]: Like people, like you talk about in the book, like going these places where they've got sign-filled bootleg CDs beside or DVDs beside my comp.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like people can compartmentalize in a way that, like it allows us to carry on well, death and war is happening right beside us in a way.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: We can cope and rationalize and justify all of this stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I feel like that's definitely what's kind of happened with this Trump thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: To me, Trump, any other place in the world, he doesn't happen.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, he's such a unique product of New York.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: Where he was a joke, everyone knew he was a joke, but he's a public face taking that joke on.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think of Rich Person.
[SPEAKER_01]: You'd like the caught.
[SPEAKER_01]: Koch brothers Koch Koch brothers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the Koch brothers.
[SPEAKER_01]: They, they, you know, they're hiding away.
[SPEAKER_01]: They got money.
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't give a fuck, but that's a lead.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, truly, but that New York thing where it's like, I'm going to be out in that street.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like a Howard Stern.
[SPEAKER_01]: Al Goldstein kind of like yeah, right.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a that's actually a good trajectory you can almost like draw a line from Al Goldstein the Howard Stern to Trump in a way.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true He's the apotheosis of that New York abrasive New York personality you know Yeah, it's
[SPEAKER_00]: It makes the world surreal, for me, having grown up in Trump village to think that I lived, I still live in Trump village, you know, you still are, you know, and never got out of it, you know, it's very weird.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to have to like stop, I think.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my god, Larry, I could talk to you forever.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I didn't even get to ask you about the plasmatics or the jam or oh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: For sure, I love to talk.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you know what, man, please come back.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I have such a good time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm happy to do another interview when you feel like it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll just do a part two, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think you, me and our mutual, well, for me online is a person friend, but I think for you, maybe just online at this point.
[SPEAKER_01]: Chris Astrada would love to come on.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love Chris.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've never met him, but we are we are online friends and and Josh too is great You've had some great you do great interviews.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love the work you do and I feel really lucky to have had a chance to talk to you and meet you So thank you very much