ship issue is is it's hard you're negotiating against yourself can henry ford can henry ford build a model t could henry ford work the assembly line how would i know how would i know henry ford i don't know let me let me answer the question go ahead henry ford could work the assembly line he invented the model t he knows how to make a model t now he owns the company and he's hiring people right to make the model t is he's still a manufacturer is he still on the assembly line working but hang on for one second answered my question because i remember this argument it was 10 years ago and i got up and said this in public not only to you but to the to the writers guild and i said just because henry ford who owned ford knew how to make a model t didn't mean that he was on the assembly line and deserve to take a credit for making model t's he graduated to owner which means he doesn't get to say he's part of the assembly line that's what i said all right and so it would be the question and it would be the equivalent what's going on that would be the equivalent of henry ford negotiating for the assembly line on behalf of the assembly he would be negotiating against himself okay and that's what john wells was doing he was an owner negotiating here okay that's the point that's the issue it isn't whether he's written a script you show me a script matthew weiner is a writer you don't think matthew weiner is not a writer he writes episode he wrote episodes of mad men plenty of them but he also owned the show so you know show me an episode he wrote okay here but he's not negotiating on behalf of me he's not negotiating on behalf of the rank and file right because he's the owner it's immature whether he's written a script or not but john wells was representing me john wells was representing me i know i know i know how do you represent the rank and file if you're not part of the rank and file it's a legitimate question and i understand i don't know what you want me to say well that's that's what that's what i said that night and you and i had a blow up and i said to you all i innocently said is that you are beating your daughter it's munchausen by proxy you're not giving her the the medication she needs and then you give it to her so you can be the hero i said you're starving her you keep her chained to a radiator i need to call child protective services i said you murdered john bennett ramsey that's all i said and you took it and i appreciate that you said it innocently i said it innocently and you took it out of context you took it the wrong way but you know what i apologize and i hope that my apology so is that why we stop talking well it was a it was a i would say it was a number of things i thought you were acting crazier all the time and and it seemed like all of my conversations with you kind of ended in me being frustrated like you were just sort of spinning out of control and i i i got agita when i would speak with you and i could go you know what i need to speak with delton less and i think it just sort of it became less and less and you know you got busy with your stuff and i got busy with my stuff you know we both had kids and you know we just sort of stopped talking and then you know uh... i didn't see you for a long time and then i remember i saw you at the the four dad's show do you remember that was the first time i saw you in like a really long time and we were at the four dad's show which was who's that milk and dan st paul and tim bidore and some other guy and and when you saw me you started doing this thing you tried to we're doing a bit where you were like flinching every time like i would move like i was going to hit you and i was kind of like don't flatter yourself that like i'm so angry when i see you i'm like gonna punch you like oh my god like i had if i'm thinking about you that much so but let me just say hang on one second you weren't consumed by me no not right now i am now good i don't know yeah i also remember you complained i would call you with nothing to say yeah like i would yeah and now now i would love that now my life is falling apart and like i hear from you and i'm so happy i listen to your podcast just to hear your voice like make believe talking to me and then my name comes up when you're talking to jake or rad or something it's like it's unbelievable i'm so lonely and miserable and my life has you made me you made me you made me laugh so hard and my listeners are going to laugh really hard i'm going to tell them what you did you were you were going through some kind of emotional thing so i call you and i'm saying hang in there this two shall pass you're a great guy you got to treat yourself as well as you treat others you get you need to be kind to yourself you didn't do anything wrong and you said thank you so much and we're we're wrapping up the phone call and you say and do all your amazon shopping you couldn't help yourself no you imitated me yes imitated you i know i'm saying they wrap up a phone call now going for only five dollars a month you can become i think you'll get some solace from the premium content i think that will make you feel bad well i also think you resented my optimism that i'm basically an optimistic person and i don't think you should be right and i think you find that detestable i think you think it's fake um i don't know i don't know if i could say that maybe i'm jealous of it do you believe that there are neural pathways created through optimism john fuel saying who has every reason to be optimistic right i know but he said to me you do a 90 day positive thinking negative thinking cleanse cleanse yourself of negative thinking only think positive for 90 days he says it creates neural pathways here's what i did i i tried it at the beginning of the year i decided to write down all the good things in my life and the more i did that the more good came my way do you believe in that you know i i don't know but i mean i think i should and i think there's no harm in believing and trying it um i guess there's a part of me sometimes that i feel like i'm i'm being false you know what i mean like i'm being fake like i'm just saying these things that i don't believe and it's like i want to be honest with myself and call myself a piece of shit you know what i mean and and not uh you know it like like somehow i will overcome these problems if i can really face you know the truth of them and then overcome them rather than try to deny some you know um deny some truth but i absolutely i think that i need to you know um really believe and i'm trying i always talk about apollo 13 on the show yes there's an opportunity and then that's not the chinese word for crisis is opportunity crisis is opportunity yeah yeah well i mean i'm an absolute crisis now well but the movie apollo 13 ed harris is running mission control and the aquarius is falling apart and he says all right tell me what we have in the way of good like it's all falling apart give me some good information here yeah so i i never forgot that i'm not quoting it precisely i wish i were right i think i think when you focus on the good the universe rewards you and when you focus on the bad it just perpetuates the bad yeah you know it's newtonian things in motion stay in motion when you focus on the good it's that stays in motion when you focus on the bad that stays in motion right and i'm in this place where i just feel like i you know by denying what's going on the bad like on somehow not acknowledging you how much it it hurts but you have to kind of sit in the sadness and also at the same time kind of try to focus on the good but as jake told me the other day he said look you're standing in the bottom of a smoking crater you know the bomb just went off step one he's getting out of the crater so you know i i need to you know not try too hard right now to you know fix everything and all the positive thinking like you're gonna give myself a little bit of space right so you are you know do you mind if i tell the audience that you're the only person in the history of civilization to have somebody fall out of love with you do you mind if i mentioned that no you can go ahead because yeah it's true so you are the only person you're the only man in the history of civilization to discover that a person who you love no longer loves you and that's and you're the only one who ever went through that i feel like you're being sarcastic um it's horrible you know i know it's it's it's horrible my it was my whole conception of myself it's the whole reason i moved you know to massachusetts it's supposed to be all right we'll talk about that well it's okay yeah let's i don't like to do it i don't let's not bomb your audience well here's the thing about this the mission statement of the show i don't want to talk about people's problems i want to talk about how they solve them people's solutions the final solution cycle and no i i don't see any no i know it's no fresh and so raw but i do need your you're absolutely right and i'm gonna um and you're gonna call me every day and give me the pep talk well tell me what you're doing tell me what you're doing that's positive because you're you're fresh the wound is fresh tell me some good news well you know i'm reconnecting i you know i i disconnected from you know people like you and you know i'm fortunate with jake like we can go a really long time without talking and pick up right where we left off but you know people that i was really close to like jonathan groff you know i kind of i moved away from los angeles and i became this kind of homestead guy and a family guy and that became my whole identity so now it's like wait a minute i gotta reconnect and i'm so i'm reaching out and i'm being vulnerable i'm reaching back out to jonathan and to jake and to you and to you know all these people um and i'm and i'm trying to kind of recreate myself and find out you know what is it that i really want who am i outside of you know somebody husband and um you know so that's helpful and i'm i'm i'm rededicating myself to you know creating and you know writing and uh and and you know what you know the grief can be transformative if you let it and i'm gonna hope that this is going to be a tremendous opportunity to grow and i think my relationship with my daughter is going to improve looks like i sort of outsourced my relationship to my daughter to my wife and now now i'm going to really forge a better relationship and so those are those are positive things right yeah and i'm going to learn i'm learning german so that um when i go over there i can actually you know i'll be able to talk to one of your sons who's over there i know when you started doing stand-up when i started doing stand-up and then we'll wrap it up yeah i was in crisis and stand-up saved my life and what i did is i threw myself at the mercy of strangers i said i just went up on stage and you know like crowd surfing when the performer just dives into the audience and they carry him well that's kind of what stand-up is figuratively you throw yourself at the mercy of an audience and they heal you and then you have new friends and you become a different person i think that divorce i think crisis the only way you can survive is by throwing yourself at the mercy of the universe you're a bit of a control freak and i think and and so am i but if you just crowd surf you'll that's how you do it i don't you know i i think isolation is hell and i think not connecting with human beings for me the biggest problem is the fake connection of facebook and yeah the text text messaging a phone conversation is as close to human connection as you possibly can get especially if your pants are down around your ankles and you have a box of Kleenex and some jergens which i do right now but connecting with people through text and facebook you got to get on the phone and talk and you got to see them in person you got to be around you got to be around people well i'm going to a little get together this afternoon with some people who you know are being supportive um yeah that was my problem is that i isolated myself and i put all my chips you know i let my wife be you know my social life my you know i had no identity of my own and there was too much pressure on her she wanted me to you know be my own person but we also look no more problems just solutions let's stop boring your audience that would be a solution right now it would just feel so funny to hear a gunshot yes well that's uh we've been talking with john ross do all your amazon shopping feel the David felvin show what well you know what you have i'm going to give you a compliment what a many but besides being incredibly funny and smart you you have an amazing memory it's just a man you're a great storyteller remember alex and i drove up to do a show in your neck of the woods and alex and i drove home and he could not believe what a great storyteller you were in and your memory always always the attention to detail you can remember things from 30 years ago i'm used to getting worse remind me next time to tell you the rodney dangerfield story about memory it's pretty hilarious from when i worked on hollywood squares that's a great story um i i appreciate the compliment i love you my friend i did and let's buy i love myself too i love you too we've been talking with john ross how do people contact you on facebook or twitter you know i don't do twitter i'm on facebook but i don't really post or anything i like i said i've been isolated i don't know that i'm i'm going to start breaking out on social media anytime soon but um if people are free to contact me on facebook i guess thank you john you'll come back real soon stay on the line for one second well back by popular demand laura house hello laura house hi david for people who have never heard laura house she's an actress a comedy writer and comedian she's written on some of your favorite sitcoms she was one of the stars of an mtv series she's a great stand-up comedian she's in one of my favorite political movies of all time janine from demoine how are you that's so awesome uh i'm good i'm good david that was such a nice intro so you're in love you're in love you're excited about myself are you in love i i am in love yeah i had a big relationship end last summer and i did a lot of work working through that and um then i met someone on the on a dating app two weeks ago but it's like it's this amazing match you met somebody on a dating app isn't that crazy i never thought it would happen to me like you hope it'll happen and then it happens and you're like what yes dating apps women go on dating apps well i i don't think it's just women well i have not finished yet as i understand dating apps women go on dating apps and view the men the same way men view porn they like to flirt with the men but then when it comes to closing the deal and getting the date they run away that has been what i've heard mm-hmm that you like being flirted with but you really don't want to get off the couch and actually go out with a guy i is that the end of your point that's what i've heard um there's probably some people like that but i i in my experience boys and girls go on there and they talk a little and they date that's been i haven't had um so you've had you have friend like your friends have been um blown off well i have i have younger friends who are describing caligula's wet dream but they're young but tell me have you ever been on a dating app before yeah what yes yeah i did um i was married years ago and then um after that i got on a dating app and then um after this big big breakup i got in a dating app yeah you met and does it work yeah it's but i but i think my friend of mine my friend scott gave me the the best advice and i didn't follow it years ago because you what i think is like have you've been to jerry's deli you're the third person who's brought up jerry's deli no past two weeks yes no way okay so i heard jerry's deli closed i did it that's what i heard i can't where all the people gonna go um the one of the valley i guess is still open right oh yeah i yeah i think they still have a bowling alley do they still have yes yes by the bowling alley no they have a bowling alley yes they have a bowling alley pins with a z um no i i think i would feel it if the one of the valley closed but it's so the menu at jerry's deli is like overwhelming so i always feel like you have to be struck like you have to know what you want to eat and then go into the menu and find it that's what i think at jerry's deli so i it's the same with dating apps i think like you like my friend scott was like just no 99.9 percent of the people on there are awful this is the internet and i was like oh like that's and so at first i didn't think so because i i used i would feel bad like you know because based like if you're sitting at a bar and um okay i'll i'll put these in your your terms so you're sitting at uh at a bar and uh um cindy crawford approaches you and strikes up a conversation do you feel good or bad about yourself if who walks up to me cindy crawford she's a married woman i would say get away from me go back go back to a single woman who mr gerber is cindy crawford i'm sorry walks up to a single woman who looks a lot like cindy crawford beautiful walks up to you starts talking how do you feel about yourself i would i would say you should get that mole on your face looked at so okay this example is not going to work i'd come up with somebody else uh natalie portman walks up to you but a single woman who looks a lot like natalie portman walks up to you i would say you are a very attractive jewish woman you and scarlett joe hanson are my two favorite jewish women i would like to take you and scarlett joe hanson back to my apartment from a lot ménage à trois but since you're jewish we'll make it a ménage à deux oh nice thank you um so even though you blow it with her you probably feel pretty good about yourself that this beautiful woman if natalie portman walked up to me can i can i answer that question sure okay somebody sent me a picture of me on the tonight show and j leno is sitting to my left and jennifer gardener is clutching my arm i will post this to my website okay and what was that sound i we're under siege there's an airplane now it's passed and jennifer gardener who i don't know if you know this but she's very attractive it's clutching my arm and i i'm not making this up she is saying you're such a nasty nasty man like flirtatiously mm-hmm and i'm sending out signals of are you blind are you messing with me mm-hmm what do you think you're looking at not granted i was married and i wasn't going to act on it but and i knew that even if i try to act on it there would she would either come to her senses or say i always talk to men this way what why did you miss read these signals so if jennifer gardener or cindy crawford walked up to me and started flirting i immediately would say obviously i miss reading her signals okay so if someone who if a woman who looked like i don't want to be mean let's say looked something like a character ruth buzzy would play walks up to you mm-hmm how do you feel about yourself good or bad well or with your low self-esteem are you like yeah this makes sense yeah that makes sense well let's go back let's go back to your place and hit me with your purse the way you used to hit arty johnson well my point is on uh that i didn't make is on uh dating apps is i if you don't have in mind that 99 of the people are are gross then if 10 like 10 creepy gross people would message me or whatever and then i would i this is like 10 years ago i would think like oh i guess this is what i attract like oh i guess i'm not very appealing or i guess this is my level and you can't go into it you have to like know who you are and what you want and just be like no no no no okay like to look to find that unicorn that you like do you find that you go on a dating app and you see a picture of a guy and that picture informs how you understand all the other pertinent details about the guy like i'm filtering whatever i'm reading through that picture um maybe i guess i i do think the picture thing affects guys different than it does girls that i've been told is no longer true that women can be stimulated by porn that they can be stimulated visually oh yeah no i we've always been told that's not the case you know i i feel like i think it's it's less a matter of you can be stimulated and more a matter of whether that's the priority and i still think for women that's not necessarily the priority and i think it kind of is still the priority for guys if that makes sense women let me tell you something about women women women are women are like cholesterol okay yeah they dare you want them to go down on you they're right and they're murder on your heart and nobody will tell us the truth about cholesterol they say there's good cholesterol there's bad cholesterol but the bad cholesterol may be good and the bad cholesterol might be bad or the good might be good and the bad but we really don't know and we're going to do all these studies and now okay we've absolutely determined that a lot of cholesterol is bad for you but you should eat food that's high in cholesterol because it actually lowers your cholesterol that's what women are because we hear the same things about women that they crazy nonsense they don't care if a man is bald they don't care what a man looks like because but this is but here's the reason and i'll filter this down to one thing because it is case by case like i don't i don't inherently i don't like bald guys but this dude is kind of bald and i'm really i really like this guy so what do you mean you don't what do you mean you don't like bald guys i don't like bald guys who likes bald guys nobody that's why i got hair plugs right what about hair plugs but i don't but like some people are like oh i love bald guys because they were like you know had a an uncle who was bald i don't know what but i didn't grow up around i don't inherently like bald guys what about a bald guy who shaves his head but that's what i mean is like no like across the board i'm gonna say no but this guy is pretty much bald but i like him so it's fine does that make sense how important are looks so that's that's not me being twisty weird whatever that's me going it's other things are a priority for me looks are only important in they're not as a they're important in the sense of like i don't know you at all and there's a certain level of attractiveness i need to think i could be attracted to you but it's not that high and it's more of like who you are in an interesting way like um ultimate guy john goodman is he uh brad pit no he's john goodman what do you mean ultimate guy what do you mean oh the best guy if i could have any guy when you think of like your your fame crush john goodman you're wrong no you're wrong i'm not wrong he doesn't fit the but he's not a he he's overweight he doesn't fit he can't be no he's the guy he's the guy he's the guy so because he's so town he doesn't fit the like ooh hot guy but any woman would want to be with bill Murray but i get bill i get bill Murray i get so it's like so it's like that it's like you know generally if you go hey do you want a big giant fat guy and you're like i i don't know but maybe i you know generally i don't know i mean for me the answer is generally yes but it's like but if you saw john goodman he's a guy like my i like kind of a big fat funny guy but like my last boyfriend who i liked a lot and was with for years was very like lean and athletic so i just put up with it if what are you gonna stop taking care of yourself but it was annoying because he was just kind of vain like i just want like a normal you know like a nice guy with like a dad bod is like fine because it's like there's there's a cost to the person who like looks really good i find there's a like you're they're always late everywhere because they're they change clothes 10 times guys yes i was i don't i don't date women generally the guys are changing clothes 10 times i don't change my clothes 10 times a month i know not you you would be a perfect guy for me i just want a guy who doesn't care what he looks like someone like you david speaking of smell shouldn't dating apps have smell a vision shouldn't you be able to smell a potential date before you go out with him i guess that would be ideal wouldn't it it's all about smell i was interviewing an animal behaviorist last week and she says before she decides whether or not to go out on a second date she will sniff the guy's neck okay i mean is is that straight up smell or is that like a pheromone chemistry i guess the pheromones yeah she's very yeah well that's why like like i here was my experience with dating apps was like some some people like this this last guy we had we had we messaged quite a bit um and here's another reason i think women there's maybe a reputation of um they you know they want to talk to you and flirt and stuff and then they don't want to go out on a date is i had i had many situations of like you're talking to someone talking then they say something weird and gross and then you just stop talking to them so they they ended up being off-putting in some way that maybe men aren't working into that story and then she didn't go out with me sure i asked i told her i like to ask play but like i don't know why she had to be such a bitch about it like that's like she i guess she just wanted to sit on the sofa and not date it's like no like maybe that's why you have the messaging so you can go oh can i you know is something about you office some guys start in with like oh hey sweetie hey baby gross no you don't assume a relationship that doesn't exist or some guys go on too long and that's boring or they you know one guy was like we were talking real real you know pretty good and i was like oh i would meet this guy and then he was like oh my god can i um he was like oh you're a comedian can i go see a show i just think it'd be so cool to know a comedian i was like by like just guys if you talk to them too long they will say something that makes you not want to meet them so how accurate how accurate a barometer is the text messaging um i think it's pretty accurate like because you know if someone's bugging you or like if some like i've had stuff that like maybe something in their texting was like hitting me weird but i was like you know what i don't really know this person and then i met them and then that same thing i was like yeah there's something like passive aggressive about the way they are and that's what i was sensing the messages so i got that what about teasing you oh when guys tease because that i'm not into that but i'm also older older women i think it's not like i i can't believe i'm an older woman and i'm kind of bragging about it right now but it's like i that's that's more of like a younger woman a weighted trick younger women so it's not appealing to annoy women teasingly not not me but there was a time when yes that i only dated guys like that because it felt like banter and it felt like like i wanted guys to like me so much that it it kind of actually like turned up the volume on me wanting this guy to like me which is exactly what the the playbook says for like how to pick up women so it it it sadly like worked on me all the time um because it you know if a guy was teasing i don't know what then you know my reaction internally is like a giggle and like uh oh then i better not do that anymore or whatever it's sad but like a lot of younger women you want validation from men so much that like and then it's also like oh he's kind of cool and aloof and now i want him anymore you know now i want him more or whatever but as as a as an older woman i'm just looking for like a dude to like you know watch tv with till we die so like i just want a nice man like like hard to get or what like i i need a dude who like knows himself and is like loving open i'm interested in you can come out and say it can communicate like i i don't i've had so many bad experiences with because i've mostly just been attracted to like funny charming people and they're the worst they're the worst people that partner with so i like to lay on the couch with my kindle for 12 hours at a stretch oh my god look up at a woman and say so hot to me i like to look up at the woman every four hours and say fetch me a seltzer from the fridge doll uh huh is that unattractive you know what david we're friends so i don't want to flirt with you but to me that's very attractive that would be like the greatest thing to me because i would be yeah because i would be like i would come back with something other than what you asked for and be like why don't you here's this and you can also eat a dick and then we would just laugh and then i would go back to watching law and order and you're on kindle like i would it's kind of a great match mm-hmm but you didn't answer my question are you gonna fetch the seltzer for me i i might because also you've been you've been good and like not bothering me for four hours which i appreciate and then when you wave the seltzer in my face mm-hmm and you get between my eyes and the kindle with the seltzer and i say just put it on the on the table mm-hmm dismissively mm-hmm is that gonna make you if when i when okay if we're a couple and if when i bring you the seltzer it doesn't make you put the kindle down and want to make out with me then it's not gonna work but if you're like oh you brought me the seltzer let's make out for a while then i would be like okay nice but i'm nagging you by by saying put it on the table women like that it's a power thing um i'm playing with yourself is i'm playing with yourself esteem oh yeah yeah see that's not uh yeah again that was great for me as a as a younger lady i would be like oh i guess i should try harder to get this guy's attention because no one's dad really loved them right so i think women were always sort of trying to get dad's attention through you know some dude i i'm gonna say something as as the father of daughters yeah and a divorced man yeah i think my sister had a really great relationship with my father i think that was pretty healthy my father was pretty remarkable mm i know very few women who they always talk about men and their mommy issues i think some of the biggest problems in this world can be traced to women and their unresolved daddy issues oh yeah because i don't think we're gonna get into trouble here but so far i'm on your side um i i don't think like i i guess i wanted to sleep with my mother and kill my father right i i yeah i don't totally understand that well you've never seen my mother other than intellectually oh oh got it got it yeah but women froy the electro complex froy kind of threw up his hands and said i don't know i don't know what they want especially with their fathers is that is that fair to say that yeah i would say if someone made me on a podcast talk about this i would say i so much of my adult moves are to get my dad's attention and i didn't know till later like i you don't know at the time you feel like you're an independent strong woman but a lot of it like it only a cut like yours did i ever tell you the story that i was going to hang on for one second let's pursue this for a second okay are you looking for a man who's like your father no not consciously but unconsciously i was looking for someone i kept dating people who had the same interplay with me as my father which is stupid which is aloof which is aloof like i like guys who like they like me so they're around but also they're kind of not around they're kind of one foot out the door which was like kind of my dad but that's should i mean unless you're mckenzie philips's dad there are certain barriers between the father and the daughter right i guess but i think i you know maybe but like my friend katie for example her dad it was one of those like she was the apple of his eye like his her dad was crazy about her and her sister and not in a gross way in a very sweet way and and love them and and she married someone the nicest guy who was just like her dad but not but and just this great guy and i like always looked at that relationship like oh my god whereas i like oh this guy's kind of funny like my dad this guy's kind of funny and he he kind of likes me but i like i have to really work work for it he doesn't like tell me to leave but he's not really all it like and it was it was only later like it's only after like 20 years of doing that that you know you kind of realize like oh shit like like i basically had to realize like i'm never gonna be loved by my dad the way i wanted to be loved by my dad and i just had to go well that's fine then and like acknowledge it i think for me i for me i had to just be like yeah you're never gonna get that love from your dad like it's over like you had your childhood like you're not gonna get re-loved by your father so it was like oh all right do you travel around the world he did the best he could i travel i've been two places around the world i don't do you want if i ask you a personal question did you ever have i want to use this word an affair in another country in another country no you never had a foreign affair i know i didn't i think americans have a very transactional relationship with love and sex oh yeah no i think um you you scratch my back i'll scratch yours yeah i think we're real weird about it for sure because i also can't i can't overcome my whole culture um but yes we're very much like sex is like a much bigger deal hello yeah i'm listening oh yeah sex is like a much bigger deal and um we had sex what does that mean are you mine forever what's i don't want to make a wrong move here what's going on like no it's a very neurotic kind of needy weird thing for sure and yet we're told there's this whole hookup culture out there where people are having sex with no consequences yeah which is probably the way you're supposed to do it are we i i don't know i mean i to me all i don't have the answers i'm more of like i just had to figure out what made sense for for me like what i'm looking for and then i was really lucky and that i found i i like sort of tuned into what i was looking for and then i i seem to have found it well we'll see you know time will tell how long were you married i was married four and a half years and then my last relationship was longer like six people change oh yeah for sure also people some people change more than others like i think some people are in more like like i'm more prone to change because i'm like a right i'm like an artist i guess one could say like i'm a creative professional creative person so i'm more apt to change and then like some people in some professions and i just assume that that you know that's the same all over and some people are sort of more prone to change than other before we talk about how to hate yourself trump and handmade's tale i'm gonna get back to smell yeah this animal behavior oops like he's hitting the miss verdaline she's a professor we had around i think last week she said that since women have been on the birth control pill it has altered their smell their ability to smell and when they go off the birth control pill they smell differently and they're attracted to different types of men in other words when women are on the birth control pill they are attracted to the wrong men i that's fascinating and once they get off it then they are attracted to genetically the right men the men that can provide them with the right chromosomes and dna to make the right kind of child oh wow what a um terrible side effect i'm not joking around no i i i believe you and it seems like a terrible side effect that totally makes sense okay tell me about how to hate yourself don't you want to know what this guy does he's a professional jazz trumpeter the guy you're going at with yes is this la la land yes i'm an actress he's a jazz i love jazz well of course you do you're boring he's a jet he's a jazz yeah he is where does he play he plays um he plays all over he plays in lots of uh he's in several bands and um he's um uh he's in the band oingo boingo maybe you've heard of them are you kidding me no he has a regular gig downtown on a fancy restaurant rooftop once a week and yeah he really is like i'm in love he's traveled all over the world playing jazz trumpet and trumpet is like incredibly difficult to play and yeah he's really neat is he a good kisser yeah i've been jesus yeah his whole his his whole umberture yeah it all every most of his focus of his entire life has been put right in that area yeah it's very impressive hmm yeah he's uh great nice nice guy yeah so and because because he plays the hang on hang on let me take i gotta i got one for one second yeah hang on let me take a sip of coffee okay here we go he plays the trumpet so he's always horny oh boy you can have that you can have that one thank you let's call him right now i would date a jazz trumpeter no it's really cool because it's something i don't know anything about it i never had any interest in it but it's this sophisticated you know it's this man with this sophisticated culture you know that he's developed about himself he's really also just it yeah just a nice seems like a good guy again what are you thumping there there's some thumping sound going i don't know what it that is i'm sorry i touched the cord you've got to calm down do you talk that way to on go boingo man no i don't and what does on go boingo mean i get i get himself sir if he asked and calls me would you say baby doll if he calls me doll i bring him liquids do you know what i i've never called a woman babe sugar honey i guess that's it it doesn't suit you no it doesn't sarge i call women sorry no that's good like and yeah lieutenant lieutenant how to hate yourself that's anything military pretty sexy Colonel if you're feeling feeling it hey captain tell me about all the sexy nicknames no way talking about they're just laying there all the all the military fun nicknames uh i miss long a long-term relationship just because you know all the inside jokes and oh gosh yeah and although things you're not supposed to say that you get to say because you both agree this isn't the thing you're supposed to say so you say it oh it's so funny um yeah i um yeah i'd like to have that but that's what i want to have well if you went out with me i might treat you to an orgasm in which i scream at the top of my lungs i wish you were your sister i of all things i would be i don't have a sister so i would just i could probably handle that better than most i might be like wait you're who's who did you say your sister how about this making love to you and i go name name laura thank you but that's like i have good self-esteem so i wouldn't be like oh he didn't know my name i'd be like well this dementia's really joking around so tell me about like felt immense dementia is really on fire today are you funny when you're having sex yeah it turns out it turns out i am but in my last relationship boy he would just get mad if you would just be like that's not good could you just stop doing that it's not i was like oh like god forbid you're like playful you know or whatever and so i i found that's something i really have to have i'm very by the way i'm a very joke coming here we here it's here comes the joke i'm very generous during love making i i'm very i always say to the woman first here would you like to have the belt around your neck first before i put the belt around my neck mm-hmm where was the joke oh it was the okay i see i see what it was a oh the belt thing was the belt yeah yeah yeah no i get it now how was your memorial day today is memorial day uh good i don't i don't do a lot for memorial day i'll be honest um so it's fine i'm having what i think of as a pretty much a regular monday i went to my sisters last night and to open presents yes and they had they had fireworks for memorial memorial dave for memorial era of memorial day for they had fireworks i uh it doesn't thrill me i thought this is what it's like in syria every day right how your your sister's house just the sound of the fireworks oh god very militaristic and i thought what are we with trump it's just scary i think so many things are like but you're a big supporter you love avonka you you always talk about how she speaks for you and also what i appreciate is is melania staying out of the way do you know what i mean like give him some room to work good for her like she knows she would just be in the way and she's like i'll just live in another state it's fine does she have her own behind them does she have that's what a woman is supposed to do does she have her own agency and i don't mean modeling i mean does she have any freedom could she leave him or she trapped it's so hard to say i i maybe there's like if we can boil this down to two points of view which obviously there's more of the look here's here's the real truth of that family and the trump administration in that situation here's here's what it's really like like i'll take what it looks like and i'll tell you what's really happening and then there are like the pundits and stuff who are like i know this is there's nothing is it's exactly what it looks like like it's exactly some people are like this is exact he does not know what he's doing there is not a plan this it is exactly what it looks like i think it is i think it's exactly what it looks like yeah i'm asking you about malania yeah but that's what i mean is like i personally am and so i'm perplexed by everything about this man and everything around him so i i don't know i mean i thought i i've been wrong about everything like i thought uh if anyone would maybe um break what do they call it break out when you break away break ranks um it would be tiffany like what did she got to lose like she he treats her like shit anyway anyway and like you would get so much money in book deals or whatever you wouldn't need your dad's whatever he can give you so um which is another you know i would have to assume daddy issues are really at work in the women around this this dude she's got she's going to georgetown law school she's getting right into the thick of it i guess but i mean it because she's the one that's sort of almost publicly kind of out outstid by by that like like part of it but not really part of it and she doesn't seem that into it you know she's not like but you know toe in the party line like her sister so it just to me like i was hoping tiffany would be like you know what he's a real piece of shit or whatever but like no and then malania like i i don't because it's like could she could she leave and and be free yes but but could she do that mentally i don't know like like okay i wanted to be divorced for here's my only exact similarity that i can think of i my marriage when i was married it it did not work like from the beginning i was like oh no like he was like we should go live with my mom like all these insane things were said that i was like what like that i just didn't i didn't think a person would say or do or want so i was completely unprepared for who this person really was and he just thought life was done now that we were married like that was the end not like the beginning and i asked literally i asked the priest who married us for an annulment and he was like oh you know it's just hard in the beginning i complained to my mom oh it's tough in the beginning i wanted out and i stayed because like how maybe it is hard in the beginning maybe i i do just have to put maybe is fine maybe i would like i stayed for so many then my mom was diagnosed with cancer and then i had this other thing to deal with and then but like after my mom died um one year later one year and one day after my mom died i woke up and i was like i can just go and i did but it had never honestly i am i am smart i went to college i read pretty good but it had never actually occurred to me oh i can just go until that moment was the you know like um that was the the only way i could actually do it was when it actually you know sort of occurred to me so i i feel like melania is probably in so deep into something or other i don't know that it that she's thinking about leaving is there anything attractive that she doesn't seem like it is there anything that she would find attractive to about donald trump i i think that you can convince yourself to fall in love with somebody i'm reading the biography of prince charles and he said he thought diana was cute enough i could fall in love with her i could make myself fall in love with her is there anything a woman could do to make themselves fall in love with donald trump yeah i i think so i mean i think there i have been in the presence of a powerful rich ugly mean man i was i was a little turned on and there's and there's another woman who who worked for the same guy who talked about like primally it was so because she didn't like him but primally she was like drawn to him because he's so alpha and i was like yeah i i get it so like there is something about the presence of the bad guy girl yeah and a bad guy and a really confident guy and um also um are women capable of being attracted to a sociopath when they when the yeah when they know he's a sociopath that when they're surprised i think so because i you have you well i've i've had relationships where only later i realized i was uh like it only made sense to me when i realized i was being gas gaslighted um but otherwise like i'm a cape you've met me i you think i'm smart enough but like i was being gaslighted by this guy like i want to believe it so i'm believing it and you know even though a lot of this action doesn't really support that he cares about me that much like but he says he does so okay like i i think absolutely you also depends on like the holes in your soul you know that you that you're born with or that you had as a kid you know like like for example this rich powerful dude the people who seem to work around him a lot it just seemed to fit some thing they came with like it didn't seem to be like something they figured out it seemed to be like no no this is a thing i can deal you know my dad yelled a lot or you know whatever it was that it it it their prickliness filled in some gaps for them or you know was familiar or something in some way they could deal so yeah i i think you can be also people say when you talk to him when i'm one he's very charming so i are you talking about trump trump yeah so that's like a problem like that's kind of why i you know another word for charming is manipulative and like i've i used to just want to be with a charming guy and just have fun great banter all the time and now i'm like ugh they're just they're just lying they're terrible people charming well isn't something like one out of four humans are sociopaths is that true i think it's something like that i would figure one out of four people are sociopaths and one out of four people are charming i would assume they're the same people probably right because they're figuring one out of four regular people are sociopaths you got to figure the much higher for politicians right politicians actor anybody who like makes their living to the degree that people like them yeah that's a crazy person that you don't want to be with i think women change i think they have i think they have seasons to their life i think they have seasons to their month yes i don't think men change i think they get tired that i that's very interesting i agree i agree with you so far i am the same person i was i'm the same person i was when i was 16 i'm just tired really i think so i i think the energy less willing to put up with stuff less willing to bend or that sort of thing i have the same drive the same anxiety the same neuroses the same nagging doubts but they're all tired okay so that voice that voice that used to go you're nothing you're nothing you're nothing now goes you're nothing it's time you're nothing you're nothing but you know you're nothing you're gonna be nothing when you wake up yeah yeah the voice that's that's my how to hate yourself show is about that voice i never thought of it it gets tired as you get tired that's tell me about the how you how to hate yourself show what it was that the improv sold out you're doing them once a month it looks like it yeah um two years ago i did how to hate yourself as a solo show and it was just like my stories um i kind of do like two things of like me as me telling stories and then i book i sort of bookended it with like me as like almost like a like a send up of a motivational speaker or whatever of um you know like but i'm teaching you how to hate yourself with like great tips you know like like notice people who are better than you like just you know like stuff stuff people can really use what is the format of the show if i were to go to the improv and see it looks like a stand-up show so the the format of the show is i i come out i um sort of instill people with the philosophy i don't really do like a big character but it's the idea of like you know that little voice inside of doubt and shame and you've done all this stuff to get rid of it but it comes back why does it come back because that voice is right so let's just embrace it and like and then i i give some talks about like you know i found some great ways to hate you know um great techniques that can help you hate yourself like some people for example are like stuff is going well and they're like well how can i hate myself because things are going pretty good for me right now and i'm like oh no there's always a way you can hate yourself for example you just lost 10 pounds and you feel really good about it wasn't 20 now you can feel bad like double what you don't have double what you don't have oh i just there's always something to compare it to or um you know if you see a tesla you should feel bad you don't have a tesla they're better than you like there's if you're so if you're george cloney how can you feel bad right how can you hate yourself of your george cloney well you're not bill gates your wife is your your wife is taller than you are there's always something and my mind is particularly gifted at finding it so i can help you i can help anyone hate themselves so um i do a thing and then i like tell a story or do a bit or you know or whatever about how to hate yourself and then i introduce people in comics and storytellers so people some people do more or less stand up under the topic of how to hate yourself like stories or when it's come up or whatever and some people like tell a big story that might be saddened parts or whatever like tony cameen is a great comedian and he does not tell stories and he was like i don't know if this is funny at all but of course it is he's great um but he told this story of like just being a kid and his dad made him play baseball and it was terrible and you know like his he he faked a bike accident to like get a girl's attention and like catch up on to look like blood and this whole thing to like and like wrecked his bike like in her car and then she just ran in the house without even paying attention and then he he went and like knocked on the door and then then started his her mom was like oh come on you had an accident oh no yeah come in come in um and then she was like i saw everything i saw everything and he's like so like there's i just think everybody has you know this fucked up voice in their head um so yeah so self loathing self loathing self loathing is self loathing patriotic isn't that the american way aren't we supposed to hate ourselves so we consume to fill that void that's interesting because the message is so like proud to be an american but yes the the reality of being an american is you should always be buying something to feel better it's not enough to just be an american right right now i always say i don't hate myself i hate others but then other people say well you hate others because you hate yourself and i say no i'm pretty sure i just hate you yeah i think that's fair greg barron went up and talked about that he was like i don't know if i hate myself i definitely hate other people and that was fun too so it's but so by the end of it and people you know i have storytellers and comics and and sometimes singers and stuff and by the end of the night it's neat because and then i do you know i host the show so like by the end of the night it's it's a little deeper than than stand up but also it's been really funny and instead of just to me self loathing is like when you don't identify that it's a voice doing this thing you're just like oh i legitimately hate i hate myself how many comedians hate themselves oh i gotta say a hundred percent probably i think i think i think that when i started doing comedy i hated myself but over time i the audience and my then wife healed me i think if you can get enough love thrown your way you can be humanized yeah i i think so too but also you said you didn't change but now you just said you went from hating yourself to to to not hating yourself which is a big change yeah i i think the audience i think they help you it's sad that you need an audience but they do know that's a it's a very extreme thing to need people to applaud till you feel better it is it's it's when anybody's been like oh you do stand up that's so brave i'm like is it it's it seems much more like a needy mental illness but yeah yeah and i'm doing it in a way i'm gonna piss you people off i'm gonna say horrible things like you know my father killed 70 japanese during world war two he never talked about it because it was inside an internment camp in california i mean like a horrible horrible like now now do you love me why don't you love me i just said my father killed 75 i mean it's really sick i mean i can remember being on the road and doing jokes about tenting the fetus's head when i was making love to my pregnant wife and going why didn't that joke work why don't they love me and my friend my friend going because you just talked about poking your child in the head with your penis most normal people think that's offensive and i'm going but but it's not true it's not true it doesn't matter you were thinking that it's so valid um i saw you on stage in you know we go back to your being on the road and you were in austin but i saw you on stage and i remember like you so you're doing pretty good it was just like a regular it was a wednesday or thursday just like a right it wasn't like a big weekend night and um so you know an okay crowd but like it was going good for like like a half hour and then you you said something like you're i forget the joke exactly but how you're um you know you're like your kid makes art with you know string or macaroni or whatever you know some shitty kid art and you're like but when i make a tie out of human hair i'm the bad guy i forgot that something like that right i i i forgot that i can't remember something about there's no joke let me make a tie out of human hair and you're like like but i can't do that i know yeah something like my kid comes home and goes mommy i made a sculpture of abraham lincoln out of macaroni and everybody goes oh look how cute and beautiful that is but i come home with a tie made out of human hair and i'm sick yes now you said something like that and there was like a and you and you addressed it because i was sitting there learning from you and louis black and all the comics and like and that's all i cared about and can learn some great ones and uh and you were like you've been here i understand if this was the first joke i told you've been here for half hour enjoying laughing but suddenly you go oh he must have really done that like what's wrong with you you were like and i was like that's so great like you can buy into the of course i'm making all this up it's just funny weird wrong things to say and then suddenly you're like oh you shouldn't make a tie out of human hair that's that's not good that's not the proper thing a human does people remind me of jokes that i've done on stage and they're always the jokes that never work and and they're the ones that make me laugh the hardest oh i there is a joke that i did in vegas one night the court somebody reminded me of this joke and i tried this joke three times that it never worked it's me in vegas and i said you know i went to the mustang ranch or the bunny land ranch and i grabbed a prostitute by the neck started squeezing and said let me let me know when i get to three hundred dollars what's the only thing that's funny about that is that i told that like a fancy casino oh my god thinking well i certainly they know that i would never do that right but i'm i'm playing a character who's mentally ill the difference between luis black and andy kindler and me is you can go to luis black and say well this joke didn't work they didn't get it i don't know or they weren't smart enough and you can say to andy kindler it was too esoteric with me you can say usually it didn't work because they got it and they think you're an idiot like why would you tell that joke they they got it they usually when a joke doesn't work i know that they got it but they don't want to give it up for a guy squeezing a prostitute's neck and saying let me know when i get to three hundred dollars yeah i i i didn't even understand any of that because to me it's like you know you're in a comedy show like he's not a guy sitting to you on a next you're on a plane just telling you what he did last night like it's a comedy show you have a microphone in your hand yeah but but also i love comedy and like people who go to comedy shows are most likely a you know casual comedy goers you know like sure i like comedy you know it's it's not their number one thing they like so they're not like you build up like such an immune system to comedy that you need more and more wrong you know i just realized you don't i just you know i just we have to wrap it up but you know what i just realized about myself in talking to you what they're they're these husbands who are happily married they have kids they're active in the church they have a great job they carpool they mow the lawn and then every Tuesday night at three in the morning they sneak out go to the bus station and do something horrible to a runaway and then they come home oh okay and i think that's who i am with my comedy i'm on the right page when it comes to politics morality i don't gamble i don't drink i don't do drugs i don't chase women i don't cheat i don't lie i pay my taxes i'm a good decent hard working honest human being every week or two i'll go on my show or greg fit Simmons and say yeah i put my hands around a prostitute's neck and said stop me when i get to 300 bucks and then i get on with my life it's my one little thing that's your thing i i i'm a terrible i can only enable you i can only enable you with it because i'm like good for you i say i say it's okay to say horrible things don't do horrible things laura house how do people follow you this was so much fun this very good this was a good this was a good lazy memorial day conversation and this was this was good but you learned about yourself uh huh um yeah uh twitter i'm laura house i am i'm laura house laura house dot com is the website and um there's videos and stuff on there it's fun spend the day spend the day at laura house dot com great stay on the line we're gonna wrap it up thank you laura coming up mark hershawn the host of succotash this is the david feldman radio network joining us from beautiful saucelito how should i describe you you say you're a renaissance man without the black plague you truly you truly are a renaissance man there's so much that you do you're a cartoonist you are a screenwriter you've written the movies santa jr and monster makers for the hallmark channel you write for split cider huffington post you have succotash which is a comedy sound cot sound cast sound cast easy for you to say you're a branding expert there's so much that you do you are a master of of none you're a master of two dominican slaves you're jack of all trades and you live in saucelito yeah and you just came back from dan st paul's annual memorial day barbecue yeah exactly i saw a lot of our old friends who did you see i saw larry bubbles brown hey buddy yeah i saw bob sarlott wow i saw steven pearl steven pearl we just had him on the show yes i know it was a very good episode actually i enjoyed that um and then yeah some other folks that aren't actually work in comics uh like tom soyer we talk about tom soyer all the time on this show i'm sure you do i'm sure you do he actually has a really good trump impression by the way he was always a good impression tom soyer started cobs yes and was one of the early gatekeepers of the san francisco comedy scene as were you i can remember you booking the punchline before you went off and became a writer and performer remember you would come in from seattle to audition talent do you remember this i i do i actually i started out working in san francisco for fox productions and then uh we needed a club manager in seattle at the company underground so i went back up there um but i would yeah i would come down occasionally to look at uh guys that i'd say yeah well let's bring him up he's he's good or she's funny let's bring her up swannies swannies swannies swannies that's right that was the sports bar on street level and then we were downstairs in the basement i thought the holy city zoo was the most insane comedy club in the world until i played swannies that literally the inmates were running the asylum at swannies is that correct is that a fair statement i believe that it was it was uh yeah swannies is i think it's still around they've moved locations but at the time jim swanson who was the uh the titular owner i think he had people that actually had money behind him was like a triple a ball player as part of the mariner's uh farm system and uh never really made it into into the majors but decided to open up a sports bar spitting distance from the kingdom and uh i think everyone who worked for him was like some sort of baseball reject or something but whenever the there was a game it would be overflowing with his friends who played major league baseball yeah yeah yeah yeah and umpires and there all those other kind of hangers on but i thought one of the best play things about having a comedy club downstairs was every time we had like a heckler or somebody who was getting out of hand i could just go upstairs and get any number of giant hulking dudes to just come down and literally one night they actually lifted a guy up with his chair and just carried him out of the room one of my favorite places to play and there was a condo that was had a one of those spiral spiral staircases and i was dating my then ex-wife or assumed but i was dating my soon-to-be ex-wife i was opening for john fox the comedian oh i got a john fox story for you well there are a million john fox stories but yes no john fox was a great comedian we lost to me passed away yeah he was built for the road he was yeah so if science was gonna build a comedian for the road it would have been john fox there are great stories about him and one night i'm trying to convince my soon-to-be ex-wife who i was dating at the time that i was not a degenerate she came with me to seattle ah okay and i was sharing the condo with john fox and my woman was sleeping with me and the door they were there were pounding on the door all night john i need to see you john john i love you john all week and then saturday night sam kinnison is in town playing i think the paramount one of the big theaters yeah yeah he comes by to our show afterwards with seca there was a porn star named seca if i remember yeah yeah yeah and then sam brought seca up to the condo to have tea with john fox at four in the morning they were tea they're having high tea at four in the morning i don't know what they were doing and i was upstairs in my bedroom trying to convince my soon-to-be ex-wife i this is not my lifestyle i swear to you i swear anyway it was the most insane club on the planet tell me your john fox story yeah so john is headlining this was before your particular story he's headlining the club and he'd spent the weekend out on lake washington getting completely sourced and he's like wearing like a polo shirt and some cutoffs or some shorts and he just says look i gotta go back to the condo and you know grab a quick nap before the show i said okay well we're gonna start pretty soon because that's okay just give me a call like 10 minutes before i gotta be on because the condo was like a block away right so all right so i say you know what he was pretty out of it i'm gonna call 20 minutes before so i start calling go i get a busy signal you know back then that's what would happen when you would call a landline there was no call waiting i go okay well at least he's awake he's on the phone so i go okay great so another five minutes goes by i give him a call still busy i go okay now this is worrying me because he's got to go on in 15 minutes so uh i tell my assistant manager i'll be right back and i run down to the comedy condo and which is i was living in in the time at the time along with the comics so i'd keys so i go in and i find him stretched out on his bed still completely closed but with the phone receiver in his outstretched hand so off the hook which is why it was busy and i wake him up and go john john he goes so he said i said to call me and i pointed to the phone in his hand they go and what was going to happen and he goes oh and he throws the phone down and we are running down and he literally gets into the club the moment he's introduced wow and of course like we said he's built for comedy he didn't miss a trick no he had an act he was it was built like a tank the act he would go up on stage holding a glass of bourbon and he would sip the bourbon and extend his pinky every time he took a sip he would extend his pinky and i marveled at him i thought his act i always wanted that kind of act where it could just go anywhere yeah he was a great conic when did he pass away you know i think it was a couple of years ago now was i think he had pancreatic cancer i believe um yeah it was just amazing he just he went pretty quickly after he'd uh uh been diagnosed i think yeah now i want to talk to you about your movies for the hallmark channel and you're teaching improv and you do yeah cartoon you really are a renaissance man it's truly remarkable how much you do tell me about suckatash your podcast okay uh it's been going for six years i called the i was calling it the comedy podcast podcast the the initial thrust of the show was to play clips of other people's comedy podcast to just promote podcasts in general six years ago it was not the floodgates that it is now and i said you know it'd be great if there's someone who could promote some of these things you know some of these are kind of obscure and some of them are comics i know but they're not getting any kind of you know traction um and so that's what i started out doing and it was uh i think i'm sort of uh you know beloved by podcasters because i will play clips from their show right right but about a year and a half ago i got tired of sort of calling things podcasts because i mean that's what they are but the podcast name came from apple right because of their ipod and it occurred to me when they announced that they were discontinuing making ipods by that name that why are we still calling them podcasts you know if they changed the name of radio to something else would we still be listening to the radio uh so i decided i start calling them sound casts which who knows whether that will ever catch on but it's interesting because i just interviewed um a guy who has a show that's only available in audible you know audible dot com and their and their app they're not they're literally not available on itunes and they don't call the show's podcast they don't really have a generic name for it all it's just called his show which is the genius dialogues a guy named bob garfield pretty well known journalist um but anyway so that's why i've decided to call this the comedy sound cast sound cast and i i also do interviews you've been on the show before you're a past guest um and uh i alternate i have pot i have sound casts that are suck attached clips and i have sound cast that are suck attached chats just to differentiate the two why is it called suck attached it because it's a mishmash of people's shows and clips you know it's it's not a it's not my own format in terms of hey here's what my show is going to be and here's the bits i'm going to do it's here's a mixed bag collection of different comedy shows and some of them are dramas in terms of they're like a it's sort of like when you started doing your show it was it was more like an old radio show and it was very different from doing an interview show like you do now or it was four guys sitting around a basement in cleveland you know shooting the crap about something so it was this whole different collection of things so that's where suck attached came from you listen to podcasts specifically comedy podcasts that's what i feature on the show that's what i write about on splitsider.com uh the reviews that i do for huffington post i've begun to branch out a bit because it's amazing how expansive the world of sound casting has become i don't know if you're aware of some of these amazing dramas that people are doing now and just amazing journalist shows that people are doing now it's gone far beyond what it started out as 15 years ago what are some shows that i should be listening to um there are shows that are like just sort of uh condensed eight-part series shows like news shows like you know people are fairly familiar with serial you know the show uh so there's a lot that became a template for a number of different kinds of journalists from this american life right that's right it's been off from that uh where they you know followed this murder this cold case basically i mean it was a guy was convicted for the murder it's like why is this even a case and it's it's now resulted in the case the fact that the guy has gotten a new trial because the evidence was very flimsy and i if it wasn't for the publicity generated by that show i don't think that ever would have happened so its effects are being felt kind of far and wide there's an interesting show uh london or britain has a lot of interesting comedy shows there's one called my dad wrote a porno and it's a guy whose whose father wrote this this pornographic novel and he found it hilarious and he reads a chapter per episode to two of his friends who just do nothing but snipe it how bad the writing is it's horrible and and there's been like these amazing celebrities who listen to the show they love the show uh people like um elijah wood was a guest on the show just because he likes listening to how horrible it is well it's a show about wood why not have elijah ah see yeah see what i am horrible at how do people find podcasts uh very good question um i think there's the few that rise to the top i like i mean when when something like cereal became popular all of a sudden everybody was writing about it so people found out about it um i like to think things like the av club and splitsider.com and things like that where we're reviewing shows i think that starts to help bring it to the fore um comedians that have been doing podcasts or soundcasts talk them up when they're doing their shows and you know if you look at mark maren he was able to basically resuscitate a career that wasn't doing that well i think do largely to the popularity of of his show yeah i was with him the summer before he launched his podcast and he was doing his one-man show in montreal we were walking around montreal this i think was 2009 or 2010 yeah and he was in bad shape financially his one-man show was fantastic but he said you know i'm going to do this podcast thing and i condescendingly said yeah i think you'll enjoy it i have one and it took off why do you think mark's podcast gained such traction i think it was probably double pronged that it was he was willing to kind of open a vein on the microphone and talk about his life and i think people to some extent uh or another maybe got a little would have gotten a little tired of just that but he also began to have on an amazing array of guests you know it started with friends and comics and people that he either knew or he admired and it has become for better or worse it's become a little bit more like a commercial talk show you know i mean he's got guests on that he clearly doesn't really know but a you know a pr agent will say hey let's get you on maren's podcast and then i think the corner really got turned not that it wasn't popular or begin with but when he had obama on his show a couple of years ago i think you ask how do people find podcasts i think things like that when a when an event like that happens that suddenly spikes interest and people go hey how do i hear that thing how do i find out about that thing and so when you get on itunes and you go here's how i download it you suddenly realize wait a minute there's hundreds of shows on here this is not just one guy this is a whole array of things not just comedy either there's all the there's you know a figure i i keep banding around it's probably grown since i started using it but there are 300 000 podcasts out there which is an amazing amount of stuff to get through and the great thing about succotash is you're filtering it and if you listen to succotash you can kind of pick a la carte right yeah it's a it's a bit like a whitman sampler of comedy podcasts i try to keep it fresh i will occasionally you know repeat playing a show because somebody had somebody good on or said something funny or oftentimes if they mention succotash i will play a clip from their show mentioning my show but it is a way for people to to kind of get a feel for what's out there because i try to find the newer things that are out there like i just reviewed andy kindler he's got a new the thought spiral yes the thought spiral so i reviewed that for split setter this week and i'm going to clip it in my next show and so that's brand new and people go you know they know him because he's he's a guest on a lot of people's podcasts including this one and so now he's trying to do his own or he is doing his own when i say try he's doing his own and so it's nice to be able to tell people about that and i think i i know from a perspective of working with comedians i know they appreciate having the attention without having to go out of their way to to get you to do it you know to mention them uh you were there at the beginning of the comedy boom in san francisco i was i was does the podcasting boom remind you of the stand-up boom it really does uh i mean there's similarities it's not obviously a beat-for-beat element but it is it's interesting because you know i think rick ricky gervais had one of the first podcasts that was out there and in a way it's almost like each wave of comedy is touched off by sort of the dying embers of the wave that preceded it right i mean we had like a a whole kind of nightclub comic playboy club kind of comedian thing that was in the fifties into the sixties i mean george carlin came out of there and then began to develop his own style and move away from the establishment comedian and kind of just as that was beginning to fade whatever happened in like the early seventies i mean part of it's probably political with with watergate and that sort of thing but it seemed to touch off that next wave that started in the seventies and then that that really kind of caught fire moving into the eighties and we had this huge comedy boom that lasted into the early nineties and it began to sort of simmer down again it became kind of diluted and a lot of the the number one big comic draws we're getting television shows and moving out of the clubs and then once again i mean i'm not as hooked into comedy today as i was back then but it seems like there's a lot of live stand-up happening again so it's almost like again the the uh the blaze is being sort of brought up and podcasting has become the same thing there's a lot of comedians that now are having trouble getting booked on the road because they're old and it's harder to get those slots there's not as many clubs willing to pay the kind of money a headliner should get paid but comics still want to work they still are developing material and so they found their way into podcasting um and that's just the comedy end of it like i said it's this wide array of topics now so everybody's finding a way and i i was sort of a student of radio back in the day i started out in doing radio in the late seven why don't we start with what you haven't done i think that might be easier i've never made pretzels oh by the way i'm saving the best for last folks i'm gonna tell you a job that he has that uh will blow your mind yeah so radio is when radio started you know everyone had a radio station because it didn't take much they were in their basement their stations maybe went a block and a half and everybody had one this was like in the 20s and then the FCC sort of came into existence and began sort of turning the airwaves into real estate and so you didn't need a license at first not at all not at all but then these these legitimate i'm using air quotes legitimate stations started to come about and they were saying hey there's the there's a bunch of little stations in our town that are blocking out our signal and so all of a sudden they started pushing their muscle around all those little stations started to kind of disappear but to me that's what podcasting is now and i think we're beginning to see corporate america beginning to move into the territory like i said audible.com is now a place where they operate opposite you know apart from itunes they don't need itunes they're doing their own thing whether it lasts or not remains to be there is this model with audible that's a good question they're spending a lot of money to get stuff out there and i guess it'll all turn out whether you know uh commercials are going to be the thing that saved them because they're not causing they're not charging a subscription to listen to the show so it's all going to be based on sponsorship. When and where do people listen to podcasts the with radio as i understood it at least during the 80s and 90s if you capture the morning you capture your listener so everything is drive time get them from six till ten with podcasts do we know where and how and when people are listening it's a great question i think it's an individualized medium you know it's uh you know when people talked on the radio as announcers they would go okay folks and now i know it's a lot of podcasters they make it more personal like i'm just talking to you you've got earbuds in your face and i am talking just to you i'm not talking to a whole bunch of people and so i think the listening habits are as varied as people themselves i listen when i when i hike in the morning that's usually when i listen to the ones i'm going to be reviewing i listen in the car i've listened to my car radio in five years i just you know i bluetooth through the car speakers so i can listen to exactly what i want to listen to when i want to listen to it and i do listen during drive time because that's when i'm in the car so more and more people are going to be listening to podcasts in the next 10 years and i think it's safe to say that more and more aging baby boomers are going to finally figure out what a podcast is i i think so i my mother hasn't heard my show yet well she's not a baby boomer no she's not but uh she's she's on the cusp of the previous generation and you know they're making cars now more bluetooth friendly so it's much easier to get the content from your smartphone into the speakers in the car so i think you're right i think it's just going to continue to increase with um the ability to make listening that much easier yeah i find it really interesting and satisfying because television is the brass ring that's what everybody wants and yet you know i do greg fit simons podcast and every time i do it it's like i was just on the tonight show for some reason the reaction is i've got lawsuits death threats subpoenas i mean it's because audio connects with people in a way that nothing else does i always say it's pre-literate before we had reading we had people talking into your ear yeah yep and i think in fact i think the last time i reviewed greg's podcast was when you were on and you were about to undergo a a civil hearing of sorts yeah and uh it wasn't so civil but i mentioned if i you know is it a show i would have listened to if i didn't have earbuds to make it a very sort of private experience for me uh because you guys you know you guys had no restrictions on your language you had no restrictions on the subject matter and i was i mean i was literally running in the dark in the hills of mill valley laughing my ass off and i just i i'm sure i look quite insane if anybody had seen me but i don't think i would have done that if this was a medium where you've got the speakers on and you got it cranked up and you got the car windows down that's not the show for that because you're afraid somebody might hear it someone might hear it it might be inappropriate uh for any number of reasons but it's a very it can be a very personal experience which i think sets it apart from almost any kind of media we have had up to this time i agree i've been saying that podcasting is not a means it's an end in and of itself interesting because you know netflix is an end in and of itself and it changes the way you watch television you know this is hack me to say this but you binge watch an entire series in two days now yeah yeah which changes your among other things a screen writer so when you write a series the arc is completely different now yeah oh yeah you're writing a 12 part movie you're a branding expert that is true what is a branding expert uh it's somebody who really knows how to get a calf down on the ground and tie it off and then get that hot iron and just like you know exactly where to put it in what is branding mean and what is it branding i i i'm bearing the lead years ago i couldn't do it but you invited me up to san francisco for a naming ceremony you are the ilia kazan of the 21st century because you name names you are hired by companies to come up with names now i think you created the name guina motrin i was involved in the guina motrin now that now some of this is is sort of legally sticky right because i work for i was going to motrin yeah i see oh my god you should have come to that session i wish you had what is guina motrin it's a lubricant let's just say that okay a female lubricant um but uh yeah i mean i i work i work for a company now uh called land or associates in an international branding company i'm a senior manager of naming and verbal verbal identity uh what that means is i create names and also all the words that go around names like taglines and all the other elements of messaging that come with a brand right what you're going to read about it in the press and that sort of thing okay so what what does branding mean branding is the identification of a product or service or company uh by which it is identified so coca cola is a name for a beverage and it's also the company that produces the beverage and there's a logo that's part of the brand yes very much part of the brand there's a logo there's a there's a an advertising campaign there's as i said there's messaging so when people are uh that are in the the company are talking about it they have a a template for how they're going to talk about that particular brand so everybody has the same message going when you do that mean well when you give the information to an ad agency you want the the brand has a certain identity to it it has a certain it speaks with a certain voice and you want that voice to be consistent it's sugar water that gives you diabetes and makes your kid fat and rots their teeth those are the things you want to come up with the euphemisms for it's a it's a delightful refreshing beverage but i'm not in the advertising business i don't have to worry about that but i but so so branding is saying this is coca cola i would assume you associate red they have beads of condensation yeah yes yes and it's your thirst though those are parts of the element of it it's also you know they they have their catchphrases you know ever since you know we're going to teach the world to sing back back in those days i don't know how how coca cola was going to do that yeah but what does that have to do with being addicted to sugar and caffeine which is what coca cola makes its money off it's it's the idea that you want this in your lifestyle this this this in this case of coca cola this beverage fits my lifestyle i want to be refreshed i want to feel lively i like the taste of sugary water okay so i'm curious about this i think i'm immune to branding however late at night i'm traveling i'm on the road we stop at a denny's and i see something on the menu and it plants the picture of the food plants a taste in my mouth so that when the actual food arrives my sense memory can pull from the picture to compensate for the lack of taste in the actual food i'm eating and is that is that what branding is partially but you do enjoy that moons over my hammy i mean admit it and if it's your if it's your birthday it's free so why wouldn't you go so it's branding literally burning an image into your brain convincing you you're getting something that's non-existent that's that's more advertising branding is that is giving you a identification for a particular product when you go to denny's they don't want you to think oh this is almost like i'm at cocos or i'm at some other 24-hour restaurant joint no cocos gives me the runs denny's makes me vomit i know the difference that's right but they want you to you know they want that that image of what they are whatever that is to you they want that implanted indelibly so nobody else can sort of trod on their brand it's why coca-cola it's why clean you know kleenex fights so hard to keep people from calling tissue kleenex they don't want generic facial tissue to be called kleenex they're trying to protect their brand i mean there's there's a litany of of brands that have lost their branding power over the years that started out as a brand name and became a generic escalator used to be a brand name aspirin used to be a brand name and over the years they got diluted because everyone just referred to every headache remedy as aspirin and after a while they could no longer protect it because that's how it became generically known so companies spend thousands millions of dollars every year to try and protect that brand because are you allowed to tell me some of the names that you've come up with i am i am now some of them i will say i helped to come up with because i was working for one company or another at the time and i was part of a team before you give me the names two things hagan das is made up right that's not a word totally invented far vignugan i think that's actually got its roots in actual german quite frankly but it doesn't i think they brought it out to kind of mean this this spirit of volkswagen but i think it actually has a meaning but i don't speak german so isn't there a japanese car that's a made up japanese name oh there's a lot of made up names accuracy made up name um but i'm not sure which one you're referring to but there's there's there's some great naming stories like that you know like um when coca-cola going back to coca-cola when they they went to china they wanted people to pronounce coca-cola but there's no letters in the chinese alphabet that do that so what they do is that what's called a transliteration where they get words in chinese that sound like coca-cola and put them together so that's what they did and it turns out that the transliteration when you actually find out what the translation means means bite the wax tadpole seriously seriously that's serious so it shouldn't be in china dunco pp in this that's actually the transliteration for pepsi don't go pee pee in my coke i you know there's an age range of people who the minute you say coca-cola to me in china i'm immediately trying to figure out the pee pee in the coke joke but you have to be at a certain age to even to get that so what are some of the names that you've come up with uh the the blackberry name the original blackberry you named the blackberry i did i did uh i was working for a company called lexicon at the time and uh it was part of a massive naming program that we did for a company called research in motion in waterloo canada now i have a question for you yeah since the blackberry is always hanging from the back of your pants why wasn't it called the dingleberry you really people always put it in their back pocket no but you know sometimes i miss i missed the moment i couldn't come up with that one i always kicked in myself so you came up with the name blackberry yeah and how did you arrive at that are there such things as a blackberry there aren't but it's funny you say that because that is exactly the main reason why that became the name because uh and this rarely happens in fact it's never happened before or since but when we were initially being briefed by the company on this product and there was no telephone part of it it was just a it was about the size of a pager the original device and it was used to retrieve your desktop emails from your computer at the office when you're out of the office so you could kind of read what had come in and they put this little tiny keyboard onto a basically a little tiny pager so it was the little round black plastic keys and they're passing these prototypes around when we're being briefed on the product and i just i said it looks like a high-tech version of a blackberry because that's what it looked like to me and the guy from from the company in canada said wow that's really a cool idea i said what do you mean he says well there's no such thing in nature as a blackberry and we said yeah yeah there is and we literally showed him a picture in a picture dictionary of a blackberry uh and he says well he says i have never encountered this word before he says we have something called a loganberry where i'm from that's very similar but i've never heard that so anyway so okay it's just casual observation interesting idea we go on to develop literally hundreds and hundreds of names and do legal screening to make sure names are available and we do consumer research to see what people like and in the end there was a dozen names and the blackberry was one of them and the ceo at the time of research in motion had the exact same reaction he'd been brought up in waterloo canada he too had never heard the term blackberry so to him it was just this captivating idea that there were there was this high tech kind of berry that was black and never been seen before an apple is a fruit apple is a fruit and part of the reason blackberry was also something they liked was people were sort of getting even back then this was like in the late nineties they were getting sort of overwhelmed with emails and it was becoming this almost repulsive thing they didn't want to have to check their email so the idea that this fruit sound had this sort of more natural feeling and things like that we found out in consumer research that was very appealing to people that they weren't dealing with technology they were dealing with something more natural now blackberry is making a comeback right as i understand it well first of all they you know they renamed research in motion years later they called the company blackberry and then i think if i remember correctly and i don't really follow them but i think they sold off a lot of their business to a company in china to do a lot of their software and some of their hardware licensing and i think that's what's making a comeback is it's being sort of reborn in some different sort of forms and styles and coming from the east or something i'm not exactly sure but i think you're right i think there's a comeback of sorts in the works what other names did you come up with i worked on the team that did swiffer i love swiffer who doesn't love swiffer that's what i ask who doesn't you came up with the name swiffer i it again it was a naming session with a lot of people but the idea was the interesting idea was the folks at proctor and gamble they they insisted the word mop had to be in the name and we said why is that they said well no one will know what this device is for unless you tell them it's a mop and in the same sort of session they had us watch all these videos of people using the prototype these these homemakers and to a person they also this is so much better than mopping it's so fast it's so quick and we said why do you want to call your device a mop when clearly people don't like mops or mopping and so we took that idea of it being fast uh and i said well let's let's look at swift but swift is actually has that t at the end it slows it down so let's put two f's in there instead of the t so we have swift uh and then the er was added to make it more of an action word like a you know like a verb like almost like a person like a swiffer uh and that's that's how it was born um i meant i make it sound easy but it takes hours of like churning through words and ideas and reference materials and videos of people using the thing to start to get the feel of what's really appealing about this new technology to somebody did you know that they were a part of the pun clean up with a swiffer no not at the time what did you think it was because you know janine garofalo and i were talking about swiffer nothing brings me more pleasure than listening to music and using my swiffer i can do that i just i have ocd but i i did you had no idea how great that invention was do we know who invented the swiffer i it was somebody in the proctor and gamble laboratories i i it's a you know somebody faceless the guy named dusty do we so there's no hero there's no swiffer hero there's no hall of fame for people not that i not that i know you know i've i've met some of the the science folks at p and g over the years and nobody was sort of trotted out and here's the guy who so maybe it was a team thing i mean like you know post-its from 3m which i had nothing to do with the name by the way but post-its was a was an invention that was invented by two people 10 years apart at 3m uh this guy had invent was working on adhesives at 3m and thought he had this like a super glue kind of adhesive and it turned out it didn't hold anything it was horrible it was horrible it wouldn't stick together for two seconds they were called damn it's yeah so so he shelved his his glue and 10 years later a guy was looking for something else uh that was going to he wanted to make note paper that would stick as as notes for literally his his church choir uh so as a it wasn't even an official product it was just hey i found this really crappy glue and if i put it on this paper i can remove the paper later on and that became post-its and when you work for these companies and you invent these things i know that mike nestsmiths from the monkeys his mother invented liquid paper we know that's right yes but for the most part we don't know who invented these things and do they get rich because they invented it or they are just you know it's it kind of depends you know the we were talking about the ipod we'll go full circle here uh because there was a guy um and i'm going to forget his name in the moment unfortunately but he had you're supposed to be good with names i know and yet i cannot remember um but he had invented the the um one of the best mp3 players music players in the market and he took it to steve jobs at apple and steve jobs that gave him the idea for the ipod so he basically bought this guy's invention lock stock and barrel and gave him a job as a vice president in the company but basically took his technology and then improved on it and turned it into what we know is the ipod um and uh so yeah he's he's known i that is not part of the steve jobs legacy because it's not oh yeah most of most we all think he's this thomas alva edison but what we don't realize about thomas alva edison and steve jobs is they were businessmen who were buying up other people's inventions yeah and uh the gooey came from part what's it called um xerox park xerox park right yeah that's where they found the mouse yeah the mouse yeah um but it's interesting i the movie the fly with jeffrey goldblum i think is a great sort of parable about that because he was a guy who was a businessman who didn't know how the teleporter he was making worked he just hired the right people he just didn't like flying because he got air sick so so he hired a bunch of people to make a teleporter um one more name one more name one more name how about um uh let's see try to think of something that's impressive enough um how about crackle the sony sir the website sony's sony's network and website yeah it's a great name you came up with crackle i name crowd there was a there was a small company in sausalito called grouper which was they were trying to be a youtube kind of showing grouper although you know the name of a really ugly fish they thought it would be a people bringing their friends in to watch their videos having groups of people and sony was looking to have their own youtube but they didn't want to go to the trouble of setting up all the technology so they found grouper and bought it but they said we're only going to buy it if you change the name because we can't tell people that we acquired a company called grouper and so the president of grouper had met me through a mutual friend and hired me to help him with a new name so developed the name crackle for him and he got paid a lot of money a lot of money so before you go yes sir this has been fascinating this is one of the great things about the david feldman show you never know where the interview is going to go i knew that we were going to get to the names i knew we were going to get there folks kind of amazing if you were to give me a name if i was going to say to you get rid of david feldman could you could you do some research and tell me what name i should use well you know where i'm going to go and you know it's because you've paid the brand no real measured equity since you yourself developed it but there's still a lot of mileage left in feldow the clown oh my god and oh my god you were there you were there at the beginning of that i was there at the beginning of it and uh you made me know i just realized you made my life miserable you son of a bitch you booked me as feldow the clown you i remember i got my first i just remembered you gave me a hard time because i was trying to break free of feldow the clown and you insisted that i'm under contract i had to show up at the punchline in my clown suit yes because that was the brand we'd hired and you know john fox not the comedian john fox but the booker john fox he will forever remain in my heart i'll tell you why i was going up against you you were booking the punchline and you said do not show up without the clown suit if you are not wearing the clown suit don't bother coming and i put on a blazer and a shirt and i showed up and there was tension in the air people a lot of people showed up to see whether or not feldow the clown was going to wear his suit and john fox not the comedian the producer who was your boss yes i walk into the dressing room and john fox is standing there and he says to me that's a great clown suit have a great show tonight that's and i just went i almost broke down and cried like he gave me he gave me my manhood yes you got your life back i got my life back how is john do you ever um you know what i've treated email messages with him i think he's actually i think he's now running the comedy underground in seattle it seems like he's up i see his facebook posts occasionally and i think he's spending a lot of time up there so it's kind of funny that he's up there doing what i used to do right 35 years ago the comedy scene in san francisco as i understand it here in new york as i understand it yes there is the throckmorton in mill valley that's a tuesday night show you know but it is not the same scene it was when we were starting out now my question to you is this when we were starting out if we were to look at that scene would we call it a scene or were we so desperate for stage time and willing to go anywhere in other words there's probably still a scene but we're not privy to it because we can't dirty our hands playing laundry mat anymore right isn't that basically what it is i i think that's partially true but i think it was a scene in that there was a very clear hierarchy back when we were doing this because there was the holy city zoo and there was the other cafe and those were shows were or clubs where you could go and hang out and do sets but then there was there was cobs that was a little further up the ladder and then there was the punchline that was sort of like well if you're going to get hired and you want to get hired as a headliner if you can get into the punchline uh if you can even get in as a middle it would be a great thing and then there was the outline clubs in the outer bay area let alone the one let's not even talk about the one-nighters so i think it really was a scene uh you know i remember comics always talking about they could you know they could work pretty solidly year-round just going from gig to gig sometimes playing four or five sets a night some of which they were getting paid for some of which they weren't they could go and do a weekend walnut creek or they could do a weekend sunny veil or they could do some time in san jose so i think if you can legitimately say you you were earning a living in san francisco or in the bay area without having to leave i think that probably denotes a scene and i don't think that exists anymore i don't think so you'd be hard-pressed to kind of scrape together a true living i mean just let talk to our friend larry bubbles brown trying to do just shows in the bay area i think you have to go beyond the city limits to to really try and pull down some some dollars enough to live off and whose fault is that i blame myself good thank you i was going to say that whose fault is it i blame the audiences as well yes yes comedy became just too accessible i think with television and everything else so it became why do i need to go to a club when i can just sit in the comfort of my home and watch the exact same comic well yeah uh what they're not what what they're not seeing are the people that haven't been able to make it to tv yet and i think there's a richness in that level of comedy that as bad as some of it is there's some of it that's so genius those tv watching people will never see they will never appreciate some of those people that work so hard to bring such an original vision to the stage that the television industry said this is not for us bob rubens bob rubens a great example right i think people who listen to podcasts know that most television stinks i think that's why they're listening to podcasts and i think that's why comedy audiences also appreciate podcasts i think so too but then there's the there's this phenomenon i kind of think it's a new phenomenon at least when i was starting out this wasn't true when i was starting at all you had to do was be funny and then suddenly you had to be famous or maybe i wanted to be famous the fame certainly helped bring people in and i think it's also what helped kind of tear down that wave of comedy we were talking about that ended in the early 90s because you know the you know the people that were getting on karson and then after that letterman and doing a seven-minute set they had a whole act so if you went to go see them at the comedy underground or you saw them at punchline or or in new york somewhere you saw a show you saw 45 minutes to an hour and a half of fairly solid comedy and then once those people started moving up the ladder into television and the people down below them got bumped up to headliner they could do a seven-minute set on on you know the letterman show but they couldn't hold their their water trying to do a 45 minute set they didn't have the stuff and so the audience felt cheated and so the club owner started papering the room giving out free passes uh rick overton called those people pass holes and they went and the club owners just wanted to make the money off the drinks they didn't care that the free audience didn't have an appreciation for what they were watching on stage at that point and so what happened was david feldman had kids and moved to hollywood in the early 90s thinking well stand up as an avocation now yes and then people like patin oswald did what mortzall did i just read the mortzall biography oh how is it i'm not ready it's fantastic fan i want to get the author on the on the show fan it sated my obsession with mort because mort was everything i wanted to be and they you know he just covers everything and but you know i so i went off to los angeles and did stand up but i didn't work the road but there were guys like patin who said the hell with the clubs and then he found jazz clubs and rock and roll places and nurtured his own audience much the same way mortzall did with jazz clubs because he didn't want to play where shecky jacky was playing in the 50s and the 60s yeah and he found his audience exactly yeah uh and like mark maren did with with the podcast quite frankly he could do that material that wasn't working on stage for him uh and just talk and people began to listen you know i had jeremiah tower the great chef on the show and he is responsible for shea pennies and berkeley yeah stars in san francisco and revolutionize the way we eat and he left san francisco and i asked him do you hate san francisco why don't you stay there i said are you aware of the phenomenon of people who lived and work in san francisco and then leave and then get really angry at san francisco he kind of acknowledged it but wasn't willing to go there explain the phenomenon or maybe you think it doesn't exist of people who like me were nurtured pampered taken care of by san francisco married got their kids their manhood in san francisco and then they have to leave and they really resent san francisco that is an actual phenomenon right um i i've certainly heard it from people i i kept gravitating back here after i left but the resentment comes i have a theory as to where the resentment comes from okay i'd be curious to hear it because i i'm not as aware of it as as you get to live in san francisco ah there we go why do you get to stay in san francisco and i'm killing myself in now manhattan although i don't have what it takes to live in san francisco because lifestyle comes first in san francisco right well that's true that's why i live in marin because i i can't afford to live in san francisco either i don't have marin but marin happiness comes first then comes work right yeah that's well kind of yes i'll i'll accept that does that now you're a workaholic you do everything well a little yeah yeah do you sometimes feel that maybe san francisco doesn't have the desperate work ethic that you would find in new york or la i would definitely agree with that except in the sort of silicon valley high tech world that's that's where the work ethic is everywhere everything else it isn't it's it's much more of a sort of laid-back thing um i never liked when i am writing i prefer writing in la because there's a lot of people writing in la there's an energy in la when you go to starbucks here in san francisco people are just drinking coffee when you go to starbucks in la people are writing damn it people are happy in san francisco they can be they certainly can be they seem well they certainly seem self-satisfied i don't know if that counts as happiness i remember being a miserable beaten dog and i moved to san francisco and i healed just the air the people it's a very gentle place but yeah the weather isn't pleasant but it can only give you so much if you're looking for something right i think so i think so i mean if i was going to remain solidly a screenwriter i would have stayed in la because you can't you can't work up here you can't you know you've got to go to meetings and you've got to you know be able to you know write with other people and you you can do it at a distance but it's very difficult unless you have a you know huge reputation or a huge fortune socked away you you've got to be where the action is so you're right i think there is that idea that man i'd love to be able to do that up here but i can't i've you know i mentioned rick overton earlier i always say rick why he loves it up here i said why don't you move up and he always goes that's not where the cameras are plugged in pal yeah i mean you do get last-minute calls yeah to do things i uh yeah i always thought i could i had a fantasy of staying in san francisco but uh yeah god i always you know i blah blah i could just remember being in la we would drive up to san francisco the family and you get out of the car and suddenly you could breathe yeah it was shocking the the air the sea air is san francisco is the perfect antidote to la it is just the exact number of miles you need to be far away from la and yeah for for for years i was able to afford crappy rent in both cities and i lived like this bi metro lifestyle where i would work in la and then i'd come back up here for a couple of weeks and i just remember driving down the 580 through castro valley and then into the central bay area and the fog kind of comes in you roll the windows down and there's just this feeling of washing los angeles off of yourself and there's something bigger than fame and and fortune but now san francisco as i understand it it's impossible to afford to live there right you know i got people that work in the the branding company i work at there's there's some young people there they're in their 20s and they're living with four or five roommates uh in north beach or wherever because they simply can't afford an apartment by themselves yeah it's it's gotten kind of insane um and again i it's really the high tech community has has caused it the you know the googles and the apples and facebook and all this because they're you know paying a lot of money and they've got free commuter buses to and from the city with wi-fi and uh it's sort of infested the bay area with this idea that you gotta you know you have to have a lot of money to be able to live in the city now and they will furnish that lifestyle for you but not the community they will not pay their fair share of taxes they park their profits overseas and instead of paying their fair share of taxes companies like apple do not pay their fair share of taxes and so they don't have mass transit for the masses they only have buses for the apple and google employees right which use the the municipal bus stops to pick up their employees yeah yeah so it's a very unfair unbalanced situation yeah on that note mark her son is a brilliant man you really are and this was uh i i have to use the word delightful it was i it represented you it was all over the place and fascinating and we covered so many areas as do you you are mark her son a renaissance man without the black plague you are a screenwriter you are a performer you are a podcaster the name of the show is succotash you are a journalist your writings appear in splitsider and the huffington post and you are a namer yes absolutely and you'll come back i'd love to i'd love to are you kidding i love talking to you david uh the few times we we get to run into each other like during the year somewhere i just love having as much time as i can to talk to you because i don't know we just i love conversing with you this was great stay on the line for one second you got it thanks for listening that's our show i just posted a picture of me on the tonight show with jennifer gardener you can take a look at it over david helman show dot com you decide if i i had a chance with jennifer gardener but if you didn't think i had a chance keep it to yourself because i need to believe i did doctor summer's website is grow and know dot org howie kline's website is down with tyranny michael snider can be found over culture blast mark hershawn's weekly roundup of comedy podcasts is called succotash you can find it on itunes and laura house can be found over at laura house dot com for only five dollars a month you gain access to all our premium content by going to david helman show dot com hit the go premium button we accept all major credit cards please do all your amazon shopping via the david helman show website 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