Joy, a Podcast. Hosted by Craig FergusonMeet Matt Walsh, an American comedian and actor. He is best known for his role as Mike McLintock in Veep and for being one of the founding members of the Upright Citizens Brigade. Listen to Craig and Matt discuss Hollywood, improv, family and much more. Matt is one of the best out there. EnJOY!
The Craig Ferguson Fancy Rascal Stand Up Tour continues throughout twenty twenty four. For a full list of dates and tickets, go to the Craig Ferguson Show dot com slash tour. See you out there, the Greig Ferguson show dot com slash Tour. My name is Craig Ferguson. The name of this podcast is Joy. I talk to interest in people about what brings them happiness. My guest on the podcast today is one of the founder members of the Upright Citizens Brigade, which is a very important force in American comedy and theater. He's a very funny guy. You probably know. I don't know if you know how deep a thinker he is, but you're about to find out here he comes. You live in la at full time? Yeah? Yeah, I don't anymore?
You know, I didn't. Where did you go?
How about a magical fairyland called Scotland? Oh? And I live there a lot and I'm in New York.
Oh really?
Yeah? Yeah?
Do you have family? I don't know your life kids?
Yeah? Yeah, I have two kids. Your family, I do have three, three kids?
Yeah.
Yeah, you're even poorer than me.
I'm thirty three percent more prolific at having sex.
I think is what that? Well, I don't know. Have far a part of your kids team fourteen and twelve, so every two years we had sex. Oh my god, that's amazing. My boys are ten years apart. And I tell people Scottish people are like those big orchids in the jungle that once every ten years ago and everything within a two Biradius gets pregnant. Like even if you're it doesn't matter if your barren to get within a Scotsman in his ten year cycle and he'll go offemen. Oh my god, I didn't have it, polland polland I'm sorry. You're you're an improvvisational man. You know you're your word picture.
You said a Scottish man. So I just yea linked the two.
We don't make Poland, well that's what we do in Scotland, okay, because it contains less sin. Semen has sin, whereas Poland is with my sin.
Can I ask you questions about Scottish people. Yeah, so here's a stereotype. My stereotype.
Okay.
I find that my time in I spent like a year in Europe going to school and traveling, and then I went backpacking for another year. Right, I'll ask you a bit this later on. You need to know I found that and this is a stereotype. And I do not judge people by stereotypes. But the Scottish people I was around when they drank, they got really mean. Yeah, they're angry and there's an angry undercurrent. And is that a Truish stereotype or what would you what would explain? This is an experience from like, last time was there for any serious amount of time was ninety nineteen ninety.
So I think that's fair. I think that's a fair kind of thing, because what happens is, I mean to be fair at Schoolish people. I have noticed that quite a lot of people get mean. That's true too, you know that is true too, except like the Irish get kind of mean when they're drinking, fighting fighting, Yeah, the Scottish get surly, surly, surly and unpleasant and kind of bitchy.
Yeah.
The Welsh, though, the Welsh just go crazy. They just just go crazy, like I'm going to jump off this, They jump off insane, They're crazy. And the Angli shirt case kind of half in the bag all the time, really there's absolutely.
Yeah, and like the like a Russian stereotype of a drunk, like a vodka soaked Russian guy would just be like noncommunicative, mean faced.
I feel like I've I've been around a bit of that too.
Yeah.
I've done a lot of drinking in various places, and I'd say the best drinking for me? Where is the best drinking? Maybe maybe Australia.
Most celebratory or the least.
Yeah, they were just like, let's get drunk, all right, now we're drunk, let's go over here.
And these are stereotypes, but I love it because in Scandinavia they have their own kind of alcoholism too.
Yeah. But it's dark, dark, Yeah, it's dark and sad. We are very sad. Yeah, very said.
This alcohol is really expensive over there, is it? Because it's taxed so highly?
Oh that's why they're so sad.
I remember being over there and somebody had a bottle of vuka and I'm like, hey, the beers for you? The buck is like really yeah, because it was they spent They spent a lot of money on it because the taxes are like one hundred percent or whatever.
Oh my god, this is again eighty nine so like, I stopped drinking in ninety two, so all my drinking stories are based pre nineteen ninety two as well. Yeah, do you still drink? I drink a little bit, right, Not really, you don't. You don't look like someone who drinks a lot. My drinking days are well behind. Yeah, well you got three kids, and you know, although I have to say, doesn't stop everybody having kids. And so wait, your kids are what did you say? Sixteen sixteen, fourteen twelve? Wow?
And also my wife doesn't drink at all. She quit drinking like before we met. She's good for her sober. Yeah yeah, sober too, Yeah yeah, I mean it just had to be. So if your partner isn't drinking, there's no real reason.
To like, well, it's funny, I'm too crazy. You get this this in your relationship with your wife. But I get it with my wife because she drinks and I don't. But she'll drink and she'll go so like, she'll have a glass of wine and I'll watch her drinking it. Even though I've been sober thirty two years. She's drinking a glass of wine and I'll watch it, and then she say I and then she won't finish it, and I'll say, well, it's still finished, and she'll say, well I had enough. I mean you had enough. You're not in hospital or jail. Have you had enough? And then she's like I was beginning to feel it, and I'm like, yeah, beginning to feel it is the start of fucking drinking. It's not the end of drinking. It's the start at the beginning. But it's she's got a whole different approach you a little more like that.
Like no, I had my no No, I had my days where like I needed to pull the plane up a little bit, like when I was a younger man, and I've had like times where I'm like I didn't eat and then I just spun out and you know, passed out. Let's say, but I have never had like the gene, let's say, or like the the hit of crack that just I couldn't turn it off. I never had that, right, But it's ancial hazard in comedy.
Not yet, you haven't had it yet. Yeah, I've seen guys who think they skated and then later on in life. Oh yeah, so.
It's like a dark turn. If it all came down or a.
Really good thing happened. This is what I've noticed it something really amazing was like, you you make an unbelievable movie that's a vanity project and something you really care about, and it goes ballistic, and yeah, that's when i'd look out for it. That's when people go crazy.
Could you start coasting? Or if I won the lottery, that's probably when.
Well you look at stories of people who win the Lowry it ruined there, like he's crazy. Yeah, it does. You're right, So you're right.
More likely that you're right. That's the situation where I would probably.
So that's what I'm warning you against unreasonably large successes in the fure. That's why I've kept my career about the middling, middling, sort of middle of the road. Oh that was pretty good, And then that said, no more than that, no more than that, for safety.
I am not in danger of the huge meteoric success.
Well, it's also like, yeah, I mean, like you're from Chicago. You've been around a lot of beer drinking and that kind of thing. You've grown up around it, right.
Yeah, and I never liked hard liquor, Like I never took to the harder stuff necessarily.
Yeah, I don't know if I ever liked it.
I just it worked. Yeah, marijuana was much more common.
I think for me. Did you do you still smoke the marijuana. I'm feel popular to marijuana, right yeah, yeah, yeah, I.
Like but you never were in it in the late nineties or early nineties when you were still drinking.
No, when I stopped drinking, I stopped everything. Yeah yeah, yeah, but the marijuan even when I was and I didn't really like marijuana. Yeah, I just hash hash hash was around yea a lot of hash. I smoked a little. Yeah, yeah, but really I liked cocaine. And I'll tell you for why. It felt like a felt like a full on class A drug and it was like a vitamin that helped you drink more. So I do that, but unfortunately the spectacular side effects of you know, illness and death. Yeah, I felt and shame, you know.
And I tried in my life, I have tried it and it didn't work for me for whatever we thank god, Yeah, because I was willing to try it, but I also was with I saw it here in LA when I land. I moved to New York in ninety six. Then I came to LA and O four oh five and the crew I was running with in oh four oh five, was before I met my wife, right, and I'd just come out of like a break up in New York, and I'm like, I'm coming to LA. The guys I was with were into cocaine, cigarettes and cocaine, and I picked up cigarettes, but I ever cared about cocaine. And their cocaine use was They're gonna do it all night and they're gonna play video games. It wasn't like go to the dance floor, girl, get a fight or pick up women. It was we're gonna play video games and keep the coke going.
And any of these guys still alive.
A couple of quit, A couple of them have gotten in serious trouble.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can't stay at the crazy party forever. Now, let's take you back a little bit of Chicago, because you like, you're one of the founders of UCB, Right, you started it? Who'd you started with?
Matt Beser, Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts.
Right, so that you and there's how many of ucb's other night upright pound the table and sound that is the song. Guy's hating this, No, No, I think it's good. It sounds like you're like, you're eating donuts, we're rolling do heavy.
So here's my favorite cookie crack. We're gonna make this wall where Yeah that looks delicious, Okay, Amy, Yeah, go ahead. So there's the four of them. There's four of them. There's four upright, citizen brigades. Is that I'm aware of?
Is that right?
Is that the four of us?
Yes, but there's four to theaters.
No, we don't. We're not involved in any way. We stepped away from it like three years ago. Yeah, I had no idea. It kind of tanked during COVID and the theaters were.
In trouble, and of course, yeah.
It was hard to keep going.
So do you sell it to Jeff Bezos? Is that what I wish we would have?
We sold it to some predatory, really smart businessman.
Yeah, So did they keep the Because there's kind of an ethos with UCB. I always thought that there was a did you guys have a manifesto or something? I mean, I know it was improvisational, but we kind of had, like I think you're speaking to the cult aspect of it. We were sort of do it yourself. Landed in New York Open to theater in ninety eight, and it was kind of like, you know, do it yourself, edgy, cheap theater five bucks a ticket.
That was sort of the cult of it all. And a lot of people who connected with us early on have gone on to become performers, you know, Rob Riggle, Paul Cheer, Aubrey Plaza, all these people who came through and discovered us as young people have gone on to careers and they got their stage time on that stage and they learned the craft.
So that's but it was all improvisational theater, right.
Sketch the theaters were. We had a curriculum. We wrote a book. The three of us wrote a book that me, Matt and Ian wrote a book that took like seven years that codified our take on improv, and then our teachers would work off of that curriculum.
So can you boil down a little bit for me? I'm not trying to boil down the whole book, but what is your take on improv?
What is lately my take on improv is shut your mouth, okay, And what that means is listen, relinquish your idea and build off of somebody else's. That would be the advice if you want to be a good collaborative art player.
You want to be a late night host. That's how it did. Yeah.
No, you guys have to fill time, no one. You have to avoid awkward pauses. You can't have like a dead moment.
Oh contrere my French friend. I you ran it ran with the awkward pause. That was one of my signature bits, and late night was the awkward pause. I would even say to people, would you care for an awkward pause? And they would do it. We would do awkward pause, which which then developed in to smell my finger awkward pause, which I have to say probably wouldn't fly as well now as it did back then, but you know, things change so peculiar. It's funny. Well it was it was about I think it was. I was talking to someone. They do an awkward pause, and they held their hand to their face and their finger was just under their nose and they went like that, and I think it might have been I think it was Julie Louis Dreyfus or something like that, and she smelled. I said, did you smell on your finger? And then it became something like that. I mean, we're just thinking around funny, but I always rather admired the work of improvisational artists because I felt like it was it was more exciting to watch as an audience member. But I think what happened, I don't know if you if you agree with this. I think a lot of people started doing it who perhaps hadn't received enough information about how to do it or were schooled in it properly, and it got a kind of bad reputation. True, I think stand ups are saying.
By the way, well, I think it's I've always hated watching bad improv because it's like there's nothing worse, because you're sort of stuck.
I don't know if you group the shingles. Shingles is a low one. I've never had shingles. Jesus, it's bad.
I think in a theater seat perhaps how about that?
Yeah? OK, right, but fair enough? Yeah?
Like or bad? I guess it applies to bad, like bad stand up. There's nothing like if you're if a comic's on for a half hour and five minutes and you're like, this is not going to be good.
Yeah, there's nothing worse. So I always feel it might being facious as well. I get really uncomfortable, do you know what I mean? I was like, christ, I don't want any of this on me. I don't like to see any stand ups just in case.
No, I don't watch a lot of improv either, because I get stressed by it. I haven't hot it in years. It's it's very stressful.
Did you do you think you'd ever go back to it? I mean you, are you done with it? Now? Is?
I do a show like once a month here in La where we get like a have you ever written.
A book yet? I've written three? I'll have you on.
We get a guest author, all right, they read excerpts from their book, and then we do scenes off of that material.
Great, I've read I've written two biographical books and one work of literary fiction. Yeah all right, yeah, I'll get your car's best selling author my friend for real.
Yeah see, I'm in a everyone's in their own bubble. Congratulations on that.
The Craig Ferguson Fancy Rascal Stand Up Tour continues throughout the United States in twenty twenty four. For a full list of dates and tickets, go to the Craig fergusonshow dot Com slash Tour. See you out there. Did you ever run in any any real trouble with anything, because improvs fast. You don't of trying to censor yourself about an area that you're going in. We did a lot of aggressive stuff early on.
I remember one show I told the audience I lost to bet with one of the guys in the show and I had to eat a can of dog food. So I wrapped a can of corn beef hash with a generic label that was a believable dog food label, and I would just come on stage and eat corn beef hash. But it was so revolting to watch someone it looked like someone was eating dog food, and that was sort of offending people.
Just gross. Yeah, it is, to what.
End, it's not really good. And then the other part of one we did a prank where during the show we announced the audience there's an ambulance trying to get into the parking lot next door, there's a red Honda Civic blocking the entrance. Please move your car, fittures, And then we would come back and say, please move your car. A man has had a heart attack and they can't get the vehicle in to get him out of the thing. And then at the end of the show we would say the man died thanks a lot for moving your car, whoever you are, and it's like, that's not comedy.
No, that's just it's kind of a performance.
Performance thing, And I think we thought they would get I think I'd like to believe that we thought, of course, we wouldn't shame an audience for not moving their car, because how could we be certain that that person was in this roof anyway? And also they could get a stretcher around, they could lift a man through parked cars. Like we assumed that they knew we were joking, but they didn't. So I can't assume that the audience is bright. I don't think it's.
Always a nice surprise when they are. Yeah, but I don't know if you can. So let me say, so, you grew up in Chicago, right, so it's working class family. Yeah, pretty much. There was a thing.
My dad was a salesman, so he made it. We moved to the suburbs, so then we had like a middle class life. When I hit like ten or twelve, something like, that was Chicago, it was called first it was Downers Grove, and then we moved to Darien and Westmont, okay, southwest suburbs of Chicago.
All right, that's kind of nice, right lovely. And but you're I mean you're one of seven kids. Yeah, so Catholic, Catholic, very Irish Catholic. Yeah, definitely, yeah, no doubt about it. That was easy. Yeah. And are you still a Catholic? Are still a Catholic? Explain what that means? Well? Are you observant? Do you go to Mass? Do? I got?
I might go to church on a Christmas now and then, but no, I don't really. But I did baptis baptize my kids and they currently go to a Catholic high school. I think I baptize them because.
My parents like, you should baptize them, all right, I'll baptize. Yeah, no, I get it.
And then uh so we'll see. That's about most of the Catholicism that they've been given. My wife's not.
So right, so you're not quite deeply into the biscuit turning into Jesus or.
We haven't done that yet. Part of me thinks, like just to make them work for something, Like part of me thinks like, I'll give you fifteen hundred dollar if you go through Communion and Confirmation and I learn all that Catechism, just to like force them to run through a gauntlet of religiosity and learn a little bit about the New Testament.
I don't know. I have mixed feelings about it myself because I have two boys and I never the oldest one is twenty three. If I tell me to do something that you tell me, yeah, but I never never made them through it. They seem to kind of form their own opinions anyway. So you never put you grew up Catholic. No, I grew up a Church of Scotland Protestant, Okay, so kind of like, yeah, it's just the kind of flip side of Catholicism. Really, it's guilt without any good artwork. It's just a lot of guilt and whitewash rather than guilt. And you know, great pictures. I was always fascinated when you go to the churches, Catholic churches and you see Jesus, you know, all the different Jesus is and he's in a lot of pain. And I remember going around churches in Italy and seeing that. I think, and for artwork, I mean, just stunning. But then when you go out to the you know, the countryside, and you see the crap artwork, Yeah, they go wait is that is that Jesus. I thought it was a bear claim and of fance, and it was like it's like really bad, bad crucifixion scenes and like badly done and you're like, oh no that and suddenly it kind of loses its magic a little bit for me.
Yeah, it's similar to the way people paint like Kobe on the side of a garage here in La Clark Gable. They're not quite great representations. I remember when the woman painted like a she h it was like a leaky it was like a fresco that had leaked, and she went in night and did her fix it.
Yeah. It's so terrible, Yeah, but hilarious.
Hilarious.
Yeah, I know, And I wonder if that's no part of God's plan too. Sure, you know, if I was a Jesuit, I'd say that's part of Gold's plan. I'd also be irish if I was a Jesuit. But there you go, the advocates for God. So you're in Chicago and you're fairly normal, middle class, middle class life. So how come you end up getting drawn it into the grease paint in the roar of the crowd and all that kind of stuff. Is there any show beads in your family.
My dad was like a salesman storyteller, and he always told jokes like he held cord in the classic tavern style, like all right, gather around her joke, and so he would hold cord at the table. And I always loved one. I always remember. I feel like I just had a knack for remembering jokes, like since I was a kid. The minute somebody started, I'm like, I know the punch, like because I cared about him. I guess the power of them perhaps right, like you the attention and yeah, and the attention it afforded you.
Yeah.
And then I also loved my dad would laugh at his joke before the punchline, which just was so endearing. Yeah, And I think I was one of the only ones in the family who would laugh before the joke like him, because I thought that was funny too.
I think. But it's also it's indicative of a sense of joy about it as well, because you know, if I if I have a joke and I know it's going to make people laugh and I know it's funny, it can sometimes make me laugh because I know it's coming and I kind of yeah, you know, and I very unprofessionally, can't get it out that happens.
Yeah, So I think that drew me to it. And I think just like being from a very like my mom's the best, my dad was the best, very loved and solid family, there was just this acceptance of like, this is what you're going to do, and it was just sort of all wrote. So I think I was in rebellion to that, Like there was just like there was no choice. You're gonna go to church, you're gonna go to college, you're gonna get a business job. It just it wasn't even preach, but it just seemed like everyone was doing that.
And I feel like.
I had a brother who kind of flirts with acting still, but everybody else is like interesting, smart people, successful in the best way. Like I don't think our lives are any better or worse, they're just different choices. So I think in some ways, accepting the status quo is what I was probably rebelling against. And then you're going to maybe because I wasn't going to be good at business. I'm not that smart, I'm not that organized, so I probably had to find something else.
Yeah, I guess. I mean it's pretty organized to start a theater company though, isn't it Yeah?
But it is it is, And also the like it's it was our clubhouse. We started it out of need because when we landed in New York, everybody was hostile about rent, like you can't keep your props here. It's like four hundred dollars a night and you got to get your own lighting guys. So it was really like surviving. And then once we started teaching classes, we needed a clubhouse to store our prompts and to teach our classes.
So it's pretty.
Simple, simple business model.
But I think how come you went from Chicago to New York? Though? Come? I mean, because Chicago is a pretty good reputation for improvisational comedy, and you know you could just stay and be there, couldn't you. I think our goal was to be on a sketch show. Like we moved.
We had done probably a showcase in La La is like a showcase town back then in New York at a theater following, so we just like we had done a couple live shows in Chicago. I was touring with Second City at the time, and you can wait in line there, and that's another way to achieve success, because Lord Michaels comes through their talent scouts come through there and if you wait in line, you might it on main stage and that's a high visibility platform. But we wanted to stay together as a group, like Python or Kids in the Hall. That was our dream, our voice, our unified voice. So we decided New York had a potential to build a following. So that's why we moved to New York. We gave ourselves six months. We started doing improv separate, like we had sketch shows that we had rehearsed, and we started doing this free show on Sunday Night, which kind of fed our other shows, and people saw us doing this thing called long form, which is there's sort of like what whose line does, where all the rules are set out, like we're gonna do a scene, we're gonna say pods and we're gonna give you a new film style or give us an accent to speak in so you kind of know. And then long form is like give us one word, or he's going to tell a story and we're going to unpack those details and do open improv. We were doing we were sort of taking like Marco Polo brought Noodles back from the Orient. We were taking a kind of improv that nobody had seen in New York fortunately, right, So they were like, how do we do this? So we started teaching.
People how to do it. It went from there folkloreically. Okay, so, but that must have been tough because you are a big Chicago sports fan, right. I am a Chicago sport all right, so you're like a big Bears fan.
I'm a Bears fan, and I'm sort of a pretty decent Bulls fan, not a baseball guy Hawks fan.
It's like that, it's weird. Baseball is the one that I connect with as an immigrant American. Yeah, it's weirdest thing.
Do you go to games?
I've been a few games, but I mean I'm not a huge sports fan anyway, but I mean i've been. Here's how corporate my life became. When I was doing Late night I've been I think three NFL games. They were all super Bowls. Yeah you know what I mean. It's like, well, you got to say yes to that, Yeah you got to go. But I wasn't going because I was Although I will say this, I watched the last super Bowl, the one that we just I just kind of kind of loved it. Yeah, you know, it was the Swifties versus Silicon Valley and it really played and it was you know, it was a fantastic game.
It was a fantastically was right.
I'm not wrong because I'm not a football fan, but I thought, this is a highly entertaining.
Game, super competitive. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was a great super Bowl. I agree with you.
Yeah, I mean it seems to me what I go from all American sports, and baseball falls into this too, is that there seems to be it's a little competitive for fans to retain stats. Like you if you're not a real you're not a real fan unless you know like who hit the ball in nineteen forty eight, that you know that that's baseball.
Well, it's really stat driven. I feel like, right, more than any sport. I think that's the intellectual sport.
But also baseball has this and just what I love is the most American thing I ever heard. It's why I became an American baseball almost I think two reasons. One, when I was thirteen, I went to I came to America for the first time. I went to a bowling alley in Long Island, and I tasted root beer over crushed ice, and I thought, oh, whatever the fuck, this is amen, dumb man, and that sounds amazing. Oh it was great. And the other thing is in baseball when I heard the like, you can swing and miss nine times out at ten, you miss fail nine times out of ten, but if you succeed one time in ten at bat, you're a Hall of Famer. And I was like, holy shit, I can fail nine times out of ten in America and I still have a shot at it now. Obviously I don't play baseball, but I felt like the ethos of that exists in the American psyche. If there is such a thing that you can fail and it's just a swing and a miss, that's all it is. There's no shame, there's no nothing. It's a swinging a miss next, And I love that that's not everywhere in the world that that.
Well, it's a failure sport. I agree with you, most of it is failure. But like, what about soccer, Like they have games where it's won nothing and they've been kicking the ball all game.
Yeah, but that's a lot of fuss and funk all happens. But isn't that a failure sport? Too? Like it's a failure sport, but it's not. It's somehow. Look if you if nothing, if you miss nine times out of ten in soccer, you're not a professional soccer player if you. Yeah, you are, because the goalie is I mean, not miss, but not score not score, yeah, score like you. Maybe it's just I wanted to see it that way. But baseball, and maybe that's what it is.
It is a failure sport because I turned my kids onto it and they didn't like it, at least the boys didn't.
And my daughter played roller hockey for a while. It's roller hockey.
It's just like ice hockey, but you're on your skates. It's outdoors here in California. Oh okay, it's fun, full pads, it's fun.
It sounds like it might be quite rough too. Yeah. Yeah, did you play football?
I played football in high school. I did for a little, you know, a couple of years.
I guess you're not a huge man. So are you a quarterback? No?
I was a tight end back then and outside linebacker. So okay, I was average, but I was good enough to play.
Yeah. Yeah, I played a bit of rugby when I was Oh yeah, that's a much rougher sport. It's rough. Yeah, it's rough. And when I go to about fifteen, I was like, I'm not big enough. Yeah, I'm six foot two and a half. Are we two hundred and twenty pounds at the moment? I weighed maybe two hundred pounds back then. Yeah, I'm not small man. No. But but the guys who were shorter than me but were made entirely of gristle, Yes, it's just running you in. But oh my god, like I can't take this. They're made of I don't know what's going on here. Did you get that with football players as well? Like maybe killed?
Well, the size disparity is even crazier in football American because you have linemen that are like six ten and three point fifty and you know, you're whatever, you are, six foot and one ninety, Like it's crazy. So I got pancaked a couple times in high school football, and of course got my bell rung, which is basically I got a concussion. Yeah, I had one of those, yes, and my helmet hurt and my ears were ringing, and you're like, you're okay, just take a knee and get back out there when you're ready. Like so but you, I think you also know how to avoid it, like you can be a coward on the field too.
Oh I'm up for that me too.
I'm not gonna get I didn't get pancaked off, and but I got blindsided a couple times.
But I go, I go, have you ever had the time I got concussion when I was playing rugby? I was so embarrassed because apparently one of the symptoms of a concussion is uncontrollable sobbing and I go, I like, I was like, and they said to you, all right, I'm like, yeah, I'm fine. I just don't know why. They were like, but are you upset? I'm like, no, I'm that put me in like you have to go and see the doctor. Oh thank god they did. Yeah, yeah, it was it's a weird, weird thing.
Well at least you didn't go back in the game or whatever.
That No, but you know, they still don't wear helmets no for that, which I think is crazy. But it's safe.
Sometimes they say it's safer because you don't risk headshots, like true, and it's an NFL. Yeah, they had to change the way people tackle because people use their helmet as like a you know, the pin of a dart or the pin of the arrow.
Yeah, I was just really hurt. People that would be the temptation. Are your kids sporty? Is your wife sporty?
My my wife's a good athlete. I don't know if she was. She was a cheerleader in high school, so like her trajectory was like drama and cheerleading.
How did you guys? Did you meet at work?
We met at a theater in New York called the Upright Citizens Brigade.
The one in the Chelsea.
It was twenty sixth Street. It doesn't exist anymore, but yeah, was a meeting in that one, I think, and you very well could have been.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think I used to.
Was it a basement below the guests? Yeah, yeah, that's it.
Yeah, I used to. Apparently if I was in AA, that was maybe an AA mean that you know what I'm saying.
Yes, sir, I'm glad we opened our doors to you guys.
Well, yeah, it was. It was. I remember always being at the meeting and think, God, I really should come here and see a show. And then by the end of the meeting thing, I think I've seen a show. I think I've had enough for the day.
Yeah, I don't want to come back.
So it was your wife involved in drama?
She was, She was an actor. She did a lot of indies and produced like small movies with She came out of high school and went to drama school here in LA. She grew up in the Northwest, and uh, I think we met when she was still like doing some acting and some producing like Indiana. That not really. She does a little bit of voiceover, but no, and she sort of like takes a lot of the care of the kids and stuff.
Yeah, it's a huge job, especially in LA with the schools. Good god, I know, oh man, I our youngest because we moved to Scotland, our youngest is not going through the LA high school system. And I'm very grateful for that. You avoided all the meetings and targeting which school to go to for the second one from the first one. I know, I did them. All I did.
It is it's like you're going to college every three years. You're like, okay, now the eighth grade tour for the junior you know.
And every teacher in LA. And it started at preschool. I remember, is the this is the really important year this year. I'm like, it's fucking kindergarten. This is where you know the trajectory of its life will begin here. I'm like, oh my god, really, I.
Kind of feel like if you're going to shell money out for private schools, I kind of believe like the early years are the most formative for whatever. But you're right, it is just play and love. Like they get a lot of love at these schools.
Like just you've got your psychology degree, right, I have a psych major. Yeah, right, so that there is a lot of thought that like, and maybe it is the perceived was in the first five years or the most important is that? Right? Would you do you say that isn't that's true? Yeah? Right? Or I believe that's true. Well, then I'm fucked. You didn't go to school, you were like, oh rabbit wild child for the first five years were pretty tricky in my family, really, yeah, I think so, Yeah.
Somehow your coping mechanisms served you.
Like eventually, I think I managed to hook up with a bunch of people who helped me out. Yeah, but I don't know how well I was coping, and I still I still struggle at bit. Yeah, this is an interesting thing. If you go, well, how do you struggle were you weren't going to let.
That one go? Your seasoned interviewer?
You know, I struggle with like, what is the title of this podcast? Joy? Okay?
Finding joy is elusive? Like that's a great title for a podcast. And I feel like I read all these books or you know, spiritualism or religion or I try to like find ways to like challenge myself, and it just it always resets to like I don't know what I'm doing. Despair sneaks in. It's just like there's no easy way and I'm not complaining, it's just disable it is, and that I find that sometimes challenging despair is like putting up your arms and giving up. I don't know that I'm in that mode ever, but it's it's challenging. You know, life can be like certainly career is always challenging in this town. Like you you look at this, and you look at that, and then your lifestyle expects you know, a certain amount of like income, and so you're like, what am I doing and what's coming up next? And you're like, all right, I'll be okay, and those there are those things, and you know.
Yeah, I hear you on it. I mean I was very aware of it when I lived in La. A certain point, I remember sitting down with my business manager and him saying to me, he told me the number the money that I had to make every year in order to not lose money because of how much my life costs. And I was like, I'm fucking that's insane, right, that's insane.
And that's when you packed up and move to Scotland.
It's when the thought process Okay, yeah, I mean it takes a while. Yeah, it took a little time, especially getting out of La, where you know, the myth of La. New York has as it's own legend, whereas you know, there's a party going on and if you're not in New York, you're not at the party. And in La, their legend is you don't mar unless you're in La. But interestingly, La is one of the most provincial towns I've ever been in in my life, because I wouldside the city boundaries of La. I don't think anyone pays much mind to it. But it's because when you land here and you come in and you see all the ads for the different shows that are going on with people you know and don't like getting jobs and you think I don't even heard of that shit, right, but it really matters when you live here, right, It's really interesting. It's a real hotel California. Feel about it this.
Yeah, no, it is like and unfortunately we have three kids, and like I think during COVID, everybody imagine, like where could we live, like you know, like get out see nature, start a new life somewhere else or whatever. And I think we've always, like like everyone did during that time, I feel like, looked at different parts of the world or different lifestyles. We could be farmers in Vermont, or we could go Yeah, we could stay near your parents and start. But it's like our kids have friends and yeah.
Yeah, once you have teenage kids, you can move. And that's why I had the like my oldest boy went to college and my youngest boy was still young enough to move.
Yeah, gap, right, So we just took that gap. Yeah, because the talking about the schooling. The other thing they say is like, you're you're sort of buying a network, aren't you. Like you're you said you you Ford you fortuned into some lads or ladies who helped you out with your like deficit first five or six years of life, let's say, yeah, because and so some ways you're throwing money at the belief that this network of middle class people, let's say, who have aspirations, because I, you're buying your kid that network in theory, sure, and so I remember, like I went to college because my friend at the end of my senior year in high school was like, are you going to college?
I'm like, I don't know. He's like, you should.
Apply, And like I applied in like April and luck and got the one state school that still had a slot. But it was because my friend had that goal. I inherited his goal. I was such like a and my parents were like, he'll probably go to junior college. We weren't even talking about it, like I would have figured it out. But like, I get how you're not necessarily buying the education, but you're buying the values of the pure group that your children are associating with.
Yeah, I think that that's important. That's why you see all these people that go to fancy schools stay together in their whole lives. Yes, you know, I mean, and it's infuriating, but I can see why it happens, and I certainly want to make it happen for my own kids, you know. But you know, when you get that outsider feeling, I don't know if you get it, I mean, but it's the outsider feeling of looking at all these people that know each other from Harvard or before you know. And I used to get it Bretton all the time with Oxford and Cambridge, like fuck, you know, and then you you know, you meet these people, spend time with them, like Eric Idel or Stephen Fryers. They're lovely people. But you know, but I didn't know that. I just saw a door I couldn't get through. You go into psychology as a major, but did you ever think of actually practicing I did.
I worked on a psych ward for This is the show I've never done. Like you know, how you write things or movies or scripts or books all the time.
Yeah.
I spent basically two years working doing grad school, doing comedy at night with my sketch group in like an apartment with like five guys in like a two bedroom. And then during the day I was like an adult mental health worker, part of the nursing staff at a psych ward for twelve to twenty year old teenagers with everything from suicide, eating, disorder, gangbanger court appointed and it was super intense. And I left college thinking I was going to be a counselor of some kind of psychologist. You know, not I wouldn't have gotten through med school, but I could have been a perhaps a psychologist and.
As a culty. You still do you think? You know?
I still am interested in it. Yeah, And I think a lot of like the podcast I listened to or the stuff I find interesting, are in the world of psychology or philosophy.
I think that I'm amazed, not amassed. I'm intrigued by how many particularly comedic performers, stand up comedians, actors who are comedic in their people like you who are in that almost like a hybrid world of stand up and improvisation, and you know, like creators of comedy if you like that, are drawn that are actually philosophical thinkers, deeply philosophical thinkers. Because a lot of dramatic actors I get pretend to be philosophical thinkers and they're not thinkers at all. They're people who say words and play dress up with their friends. But the comedic thing is packed with it. Yeah, And I think that it's because you're trying to decipher the world, and you do you you send it through the filter of your own dysfunction if you like. The dysfunction maybe is the wrong word. It's a judgmental but your own experience. So for example, you're talking about you the spiritual things or the books that you read and stuff like that. I became fascinated recently, and I wonder if this is something you've come across or would be interested in. In the works of the Desert Fathers, have you ever come across that stuff? Fascinating? The birth of Christian monasticism in the second and third century before Constantine two con Christianity.
It's like the Dead Sea Scrolls, the apocryphal sort of No, it's more more to do with the Council of nicea stuff before that.
You're right, So it's it's the Desert Fathers, Desert Fathers, Saint Anthony who lived, you know, it's an Antony that lived in the abandoned fort and then moved to a cave for and battled the demons in the cave for thirty years. He's fascinating.
And what part of the world are we are? We like, we're in Egypt, Egypt.
We're in Egypt. We're We're in Egypt, about fifty sixty miles south of Alexandria and the desert. We're in a town called or a monastery called Skeet and in the surrounding area, and there's people like but there's other people coming in. It's really the birth of the monastic tradition in Christianity. But before the church. This church is still being you know, Christians are still being persecuted by Diocletian and whatever emperor is deciding that, you know, Christians are bad. And so this Christianity, which I was fascinated by because I'm a product of you know, post Reformation Scottish, you know, Protestantism. But when you look at this early Christianity, the Romans thought that the Christians were atheists because they only had one God. That was a problem with the Jews as well, they know one God, that's crazy. And then the idea of the Christians were the first people that like there were desert fathers and mothers, like women had a place in theological thought. You know, I'm not saying that was threatening to the Romans, threatening to a lot of people, because it was. It was a change. Yeah, And but I think what most of what I was drawn to with the early Christian Christian Father's thing in that period was a guy called Origin of Alexandria who was excommunicated five hundred years after he died because he came up with this thing, which I thought was fascinating, and there's a lot of different religions that have this. He said, there can be no physical representation of God, not even in the mind. So God is is is different you can't have now. I think one of the reasons he was excommunicated because you know, if you're the church and you're selling you know, gegos and pictures and you know, and chach because if somebody says you can't have a representation of God, then it's bad for business. You know, you can't really do that. I don't know if that's why. I'm sure there's much more theological reason. But he's just a fascinating a character, and there's a bunch of them.
Is he saying because it's going to be different to everyone there or there is no one conception?
I think what I think what he's saying is that it's like Augustine of Hippo said, is that that God trying to understand the mind of God is like trying to pour the ocean into a cup. To use human sensibility for something like that, you don't have the tools to manifest it. So and also what Origin of Alexandria said, which I thought was sweet but got him in a lot of trouble, is that he believed in a philosophy of total forgiveness, which meant then they said to him, does that mean the devil too? And he said, means everything means the devil to power of total forgiveness, which I think is a challenging concept. But and then you know, and it was interesting because his father, Origin's father was killed by the Romans in a Christian persecution and he became a Christian theologian.
Check that out.
The fascinating people. And I'm probably not doing it just this is a big subject and I'm kind of like dipping it in and out of it in a non formalized, non academic way, but I am fascinated by it. Augustine of Hippo, Evagrius of Pontus, Origin of Alexandria. There, they're just fascinating, fascinating guys and women too. The sayings of the desert mothers and Fathers. If you get there are different publications of it. It's fascinating stuff and very epigrammatic. A lot of it is just like tweets almost.
Yeah, you know, so that's like Marcus Aurelius is almost like exactly right, Yeah, like that book is really interesting, fascinating.
He probably wrote many things, but whatever his apparently not I mean journal, journal that got published and saved and then put out later because it was interesting. It wasn't for publication, No, it was just talking to himself, which is amazing because me talking to myself is like, I don't know, it does not like me, like me, like me, you know, I mean, it's like my diary would not help anybody, I don't think. It's also like.
They were so so much smarter than us, just so like so they knew so much like throughout history, Like there's this arrogance about our modern time. We're so smart, but like we're not. We're so dumb, and we're getting dumber probably, And it's like there was a book I was reading about Lincoln and he was.
Just going to say Lincoln.
Yeah, but he he figured out how to like land surveying. He would like work as a farmer during the day for his dad's farm, and then at night he wanted to become a surveyor. And surveying is all about like math and angles and protracting. And the guy in the book says, you want to understand how smart people were that did this. He's like, just try to solve one problem. And I found the book online. I'm like, I don't even know what this means, like, so it was just like an example of like it's and like you read did you read the Master and Commander series?
Uh? No? I s Russell Crow And that's fantastic book. My wife's read them and she talks about them.
But they get into like how he navigates with the stars or there's like something happens and they're in the ocean. They have to figure out how to fuck to fix it, and it's just what they know. Like the captain of a ship, what he had to know is unbelievable plants and stars and winds and angles, and it's unbelievable.
I think that was interesting about it as well, because like, if you've got Google Maps, you're fine. Yeah, bah, here's the thing. Someone else figured out google Maps. And I think a lot of the problems we are having now is if someone else figures it out and you don't know it to be true, you're just taking it on good faith. If you like, this is the truth, you know this map is the truth. This. So it's gone from revelation, which is, you know, revelation experience, where you believe what the priests or the clergymen are telling you because you have to because they know the truth and you don't. Then it goes to reformation, where you have the right to read all the literature yourself and make up your own mind. But now we've returned to revelation where you just have to believe what you're being told because you don't know for yourself. You haven't broken the code. You haven't.
You know you were being told by the algorithm, not by the clergy exactly. Yeah, it's crazy, Well it is. And how do you deal with recovering so much? How do you deal with social media? And you're youngest, Because I have a daughter who's like kind of on TikTok and she discovered makeup recently.
I'm like, I'm not, I don't like any of this. Yeah, I we struggle with it a bit. I mean, I'm quite. I'm bullish with it about he doesn't have social media accounts, Yes, WhatsApp groups with his friends, yeah, and that's allowed. But you know, as the youngest boy, the oldest boy, how old is he now? My youngest is thirteen.
My daughter's twelve. And she got on TikTok. We took it off and she got on it again. It's like an ongoing.
Yeah, I've been down that road too, and that's yeah, it's it's hard, and you don't want to be you know, I don't. I don't want to be unreasonable about it because I trust my kids and they're good kids.
They are good kids.
But you know, there's back people out there. It's like when I was telling my oldest boy when he was laying to drive, like, I know you can drive, I know you're good. It's not you I'm worried about. Yeah, it's them I'm worried about. It's who's out there, you know.
And it's also about enriching experience. Like you get sort of one mind, so you want to develop that mind to things that are like because you know, if you're if you're in a YouTube wormhole for three hours or a TikTok or Instagram for two hours. You just get like a hangover of like this is nasty. You just feel nasty. It's it's not enriching it. There's no nutrients in it.
I agree, and I have the I don't have any social media. I pretend I're good, you know, I pretend I do. But I pay a company in New York and they put out posts and they pretend they're me. And I'm quite open about it, but it's not me. I'll stand still for the little videos and stuff like that, and I'll say the things, but I'm not there finding out what you think about me. I don't fucking take part in that. Yeah, just in the same way as I don't like if I get heckler, I've got to stop a fucking show and find out why you forget it. And I treat it with great trepidation, not just for my kids, but for me too. I don't think that algorithm is right for the human brain. Like I tried it. I went on that Instagram thing where the little magnifying glass and you just like scroll through different things so you get you know, it's like this search thing or something, and you get like a cat playing with a ball of wool rocket taking off, rocket crashing, war atrocity, cute animals cuddling each other, you know, funny piece of fifty year old stand up old movie tap dance routine, horrible genocideal image like, oh my god, this is not no, you know, and and the maybe half dozen times, if I'm honest, I did it you disappear for like two hours. Yeah, unbelievable. Yeah, I'm like, oh no, it isn't. No. I mean, if y'all can handle it, good for you, but I can't.
And the other it's one hundred percentury. But the other side of that is, like I took great pride in like my son when he had an iPad and he was able to play this game with like like Tom Cruise and the movie where they move a screen like this, because computers are the future, like they have, Yeah, they have to understand computers, and like during COVID they were connected to their friends by facetiming on the iPad. And now my daughter like does homework with her friends on iPad, right, and so it's hard to get the screen out at this point. You're never and she doesn't want a phone yet. She she's cool with like, but she has her iPad after school, and the only thing she wants to do once she's done her homework is get on the get on the iPad out and chat with her friend and then they'll play a dumb game or.
They'll talk about maybe that's better than being at the mall, you know what I mean. It probably is in her room and we know where she is.
But the you know, the perfect parenting would be like go outside and climb a tree, or you know, I would be in.
Some creepy guys up the tree. I mean it's like you'd.
Be making her learn a piano recital or something like I'd be pounding her that way, you know, strictly.
But anyways, I don't know that there is perfect parenting, No there is.
She said, they're good kids, Like, yeah, we really do have good kids, and I'm sure you do too, and that's that's not easy either. So I'm grateful for you know.
And also, I'm not anti technology. I'm cerlling no anti computers, I mean, not even anti AI. I was talking on this very podcast. I was talking to a surgeon who was talking about the AI and how it approaches surgery and how much more accurate robotic surgery can be than human surgeon now, and he was like, I'm one hundred percent for AI. The benefits are way outweigh the scare things about you know, terminator and stuff. He's like, that's not computers aren't interested to take What are they going to do, like steal a beach resort or something that's not Like, there's nothing in it.
For him, there's so much more consistent than human beings they can. Yeah, I agree, but.
It's just this unfettered imagery. I I don't know. I like to choose what I look at. Yeah, and I think sometimes with the social media. I'm not anti you know, technology, but I'm I'm I feel like that stuff. I haven't figured out how I could work with that yet. Well, it's solved in it.
And it's also the muscle of deep thought, like in the way that like I can read really focused when I'm on an airplane. There's something about that fuselage and that hum of the engine. I can get lost in a book. There are very few places in life because I have add and because I'm not super intelligent whatever.
But that's why coke didn't work for you, by the way, probably, I'm sure, Yeah, it was like I was.
Addicted to nicotine gum for many years, which was my cocaine because it acts on the same center. But like deep thought works for me in a in a maybe early morning for a moment, or in a plane, and so I think all that scrolling weakens the deep thought muscle.
I think you're right, and that's what we have to lines for me anyway. I mean I don't. I don't know about how anyone else does, but I can fair enough. You know what. I think we're out of time here to be honest. I think you and me we solved it. Yeah, we know.
Are we irrelevant?
Do we? Some?
Once we started talking about kids, I'm sorry, you.
Know what the thing is about the I don't fucking care. I've reached a point where I'm like, look, nobody made you fucking listen. Well, it's like joy.
You said, what brings your shows about joy? Like you're just searching. I think joy is like simple things, you know, stupid simple things. Laughter. You try to find as much laughter as you can and laughter. This is really cornball. But in that Lincoln book, his laughter was an act of bravery because he struggled with being morose, and he was handling the war and so him telling his he was always telling stories. Even his aides were like, Jesus, I can't be around him. He's always like, tell all right, tell us the story. He was that guy. But it was an act of bravery too, because like you could focus on, yeah, the war and it's we're so screwed, and or you could just try to like entertain and do something light.
And you go, you got to try and get some balance a little bit, yeah, a little bit not easy, Yeah, all right, get the hell out of him
