Charley Crockett
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day yeah doing something at the viper room and then trying to come here the next day
The Viper Room is just notorious.
Like, even when you're in the building, it just feels like, ugh.
No, I'd never been through that door either.
Like I said, I've only been there once.
I was there for a comedy show.
There's certain buildings that just have bizarre history.
No, no, it was the Viper Room.
Yeah, it's a fucked up place.
Hey, man, nice to meet you.
pleasure's all mine joe i love your music really yeah yeah yeah well my friend jake turned me on to you your music is like you've lived a life you can't fake that you know what i mean there's something about certain dudes voices and songs you're like all right that guy's done some living you know you can't create that with ai right they're gonna try everybody i mean it's crazy we were uh
I think we're right about there.
There was a new one that just got released today.
Did you hear the new one today?
It's even better than the Google one that was insane that was released last week.
Some new AI engine that does video.
I'll send it to you, Jamie.
It's pretty incredible.
The way they're able to make stuff now where it looks exactly like real human beings.
It doesn't fake even a little bit.
I'll send it to you, Jamie.
It's called ByteDance.
So is that the China one?
This is their new AI.
So this is all fake, all fake people, all done by computers, indistinguishable.
You know, it's like very strange.
You got to click on it.
I mean, what the fuck, man?
We are living in the weirdest time ever, Charlie Crockett.
Oh, man, you're right.
This is the weirdest time ever to be alive because we're so close to not being able to tell what's real and what's fake.
I mean, we're essentially right there with video, and then eventually it's going to move into some sort of perception.
It's going to be feel.
You're going to be able to put a helmet on and go into some bizarre world.
and you can't stop it you can't stop it it's coming it's coming it's in the people that are working on it in america like we have to because china's working on i'm like okay i guess that's just what we're doing space race even if it's just a show yeah it's essentially the manhattan project for artificial intelligence there's a race around the world
You know, I don't think so either.
I gained a lot of friends too, though.
I gained a lot of... Listen, man, I've talked to scientists that don't want to talk about it publicly.
Well, Bart Sabrell, he's this researcher that's been doing these documentaries on the moon landing, and he's been saying it's fake since like…
I met him sometime in the early 2000s, I believe.
And he put out this documentary called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon.
And he's got a great quote.
And he says, there's not a single thing that's not easier, faster, and cheaper to reproduce today from 1969 except the moon landing.
And everybody would go, oh, but they spent so much money.
Why would they spend the money on that again?
Why would they spend money on all the things they spend money on?
What are you talking about?
It doesn't make any sense.
The moon has trillions of dollars in rare minerals on it.
There's all sorts of shit on the moon that would be very beneficial to society.
And it was always going to be that we're going to have a base on the moon and we're going to use that to go to other places.
I mean, if you look at just the way they filmed it,
Like when you watched it on television, the people that watched it on television, it was the first time ever where there was a news thing where the news stations, the networks didn't have a direct feed.
What they had was they filmed the moon landing, they showed it on a projection screen, and then the networks pointed their camera at the projection screen.
That's why it looks so shitty.
Hey, Jamie, can you tell Jeff to bring in some coffee?
Oh, Jamie will find out what it is when he gets back.
It seems like a stupid thing to say, but I don't think it is.
And then after COVID, realizing how much stuff they can lie about, how much stuff the government can hide, how much stuff that people will just accept as being true despite all the evidence to the contrary, how much experts will go along with things, how easy it is to keep a secret.
It's not that hard to keep a secret, especially a secret that is essentially set up to let us think certainly.
Is that what you're into?
I would like to try the original Coca-Cola with cocaine in it.
The original version of it?
We'll find that out.
That's real great for headaches.
I mean, more lies, right?
Well, they wanted us to be dominant militarily over Russia.
I mean, sort of, kind of.
I mean, we definitely are dominant over, you know, militarily.
We definitely were back then, essentially.
But I mean, like, what is the difference between that and doctors prescribing Oxycontin?
Sears Roebuck once sold heroin.
Must have been a wild time back then.
Two needles, two vitals of heroin, only $1.50.
Less than $50 adjusted for inflation.
This is the 19th century.
Are you sure it wasn't AI?
Because there's a lot of those.
I thought Keanu Reeves really wasn't a new Dracula movie.
possibly fake what was the other question we had oh bare hair one yeah man they've been you know they've been tricking people for a long fucking time you know if they can make money they'll trick you yeah back then they were probably being tricked themselves people didn't really understand what was addictive and what wasn't you know doctors used to recommend cigarettes for people with emphysema you got asthma yeah you need cigarettes yeah they were drinking
Well, you know who drinks Coca-Cola?
Floyd Mayweather, after training, would drink Coca-Cola.
And there's actually some science to that.
Like having sugar, like right after a really hard workout, actually replenishes glucose in the body.
It's probably not a bad idea.
There's better versions of electrolytes, you know.
Electrolytes are good for you.
It's just, it's got a lot of shit in it.
Corn syrup and... There you go.
Historical romantic comedy drama.
Tasked with creating a false moon landing.
I never even heard of it.
Oh, I think it's still... How do you have a movie with Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson and you never heard of it?
There's too many goddamn movies.
Bro, you know what I saw last night?
Yeah, there's a lot of those, man.
There's a lot of those.
I mean, there's almost nothing, Vietnam, Gulf of Tonkin, there's almost nothing from history that's exactly as we're being told.
Right, because it was cheap.
And you drank it, and you knew it wasn't Coke.
Yeah, they tried new Coke.
Do you remember that?
When I was a kid, God, I think I was in high school, they came up with a new formula of Coca-Cola, somewhere around the 80s, I think.
They tried a new Coke, and everybody's like, what the fuck are you doing?
Why would you get rid of Coke?
Yeah, and then Pepsi is always like for weirdos, people who prefer Pepsi.
Well, you know, Coca-Cola is to this day flavored with cocaine.
That's the secret to the flavor of Coca-Cola.
Coca-Cola, the company that makes Coca-Cola, they are the biggest producers of medical grade cocaine.
So they take the coca leaves, they extract the flavonoids out of the coca leaves, and they extract the cocaine.
So there's no cocaine in Coca-Cola.
But then they take those coca leaves and the flavor goes into Coca-Cola and then the cocaine goes into medical cocaine.
I think they're the only company that's allowed to use coca leaves.
I think they're grandfathered in.
I think that's exactly – is that how it works?
I believe they're grandfathered in.
To this day, that's what they use as I sniff, as I sniffle.
But these are real sniffles, folks.
These are allergy sniffles.
I watched the fucking craziest movie last night, The Substance.
Have you heard of that movie?
That's that new Demi Moore movie?
One of the most insane movies I've ever seen in my life.
It's about this lady who's getting older, and someone approaches her with this new experimental drug that allows you to live as a young person for seven days, and then you have to switch back to the old person for seven days.
I don't want to spoil it for anybody, but...
Like, like I left, I was like, I got to watch something stupid on YouTube for a couple hours before I go to bed because I'm, I'm weirded out by this movie.
This is a sensory overload times ten.
I mean, it's fucking insane.
It's an insane movie.
I mean, it really grips you.
It's very entertaining.
But just, good lord.
Well, I grew up with a lot of gambling addicts, so for that movie, that movie, like, really hit home for me.
I was like, oh, God, gee, like...
Is that what his name is?
A bunch of gambling addicts?
Oh, yeah, the music business.
Yeah, well, there he is.
He's great in that movie, too.
You know, I never knew he could act dramatically, you know?
I mean, he's always been great in comedies, but he's incredible in that movie.
No, I never saw that.
But Uncut Gems, the gambling aspect of it, like that sickness.
The gambling sickness is a wild sickness.
Oh, Riverboat gamblers.
Those are the craziest.
So you liked the fact that he was a degenerate.
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if you go to expressvpn.com slash rogan or tap the banner if you're watching on youtube you can get your four free months by scanning the qr code on screen or clicking the link in the description for some people that's that's their juice man that's that's what keeps them going in life just that next bet you know i grew up around a lot of pool halls and um you know when i was in my early 20s
And I was just around so many people that just lived for gambling.
They would go straight from off-track betting right to the pool hall, and they'd bet on anything.
They'd bet on two raindrops coming down a window pane.
They'd bet on roaches.
They'd bet on anything.
You name it, they'd flip a coin.
I saw dudes flip a coin for thousands of dollars.
A guy would win a tournament.
This is like a famous thing in pool.
Guys would win a tournament, win $10,000, flip a coin, lose the whole thing.
And you had to have heart.
That was part of the culture.
You had to be willing to bet.
Yeah, the only way it's fun is if money's constantly flowing.
So if someone's trying to be conservative, someone's trying to save the money, they called them a nit.
Like, you're a nit.
They didn't like you.
Nobody likes a nit.
Those are the guys that get shunned by the pool hall.
They're a bad action.
Where'd you grow up?
Well, all over the place, really.
Where were those pool halls?
I moved to New York when I was in my 20s, my early 20s, like 23.
And that's when I got indoctrinated into pool culture.
Yeah, it was just the most fun group of degenerates and weirdos and outcasts.
And, you know, as a comedian, I never felt like I fit in in normal society.
You know, and then I'm around those dudes.
I'm like, oh, OK, you guys are just like me.
You don't fit in either.
You're a bunch of fucking weirdos.
There's always been a relationship like that.
Like Oliver Anthony was at the Mothership this weekend.
And it was the first music act we've ever had performed there.
Yeah, you could perform there, too, if you ever want to, man.
6th Street is just such a fucking wild place.
To have it right there is perfect.
And to have it at the Old Ritz, yeah, it's amazing.
So, you know, it was great.
Yeah, we bought the old Ritz.
We have to keep the Ritz sign because it's one of those historical buildings.
It's got so much history.
In the tunnel on the way to the stage, there's a big picture of Stevie Ray Vaughan on the stage in 1983.
He's the only dude who can play Voodoo Child.
Doesn't make me sick.
You know, other than Hendrix?
I mean, I'm sure other people can do it.
I've never heard it.
There's certain songs.
There's certain songs that you can't fuck with.
Although I did see, one time I saw Honey Honey and Gary Clark Jr.
play Midnight Rider.
And I didn't think anybody else could play Midnight Rider.
And to hear Gary's song with Midnight Rider with that, you know, like Gary's signature sound.
Yeah, that signature guitar sound.
Oh, yeah, I'm friends with Gary.
I've seen him a bunch of times.
Man, I remember... Oh, I gave something to him, and I got it for you, too.
This is a real, genuine, woolly mammoth guitar pick that is made out of woolly mammoth tusk.
Damn, that is something fierce, bud.
That is 10,000-plus years old.
And then that's a shout out to my friend John Reeves from the Boneyard in Alaska.
I got a buddy of mine who has this spot in Alaska where they just pull all kinds of crazy mastodon, woolly mammoth, fucking cave bear, all kinds of skulls, all kinds of wild shit out of this one piece of property where a lot of animals died.
And he's taken a lot of the woolly mammoth.
That's where I got this too.
This is a tooth that was carved.
into a piece of art with a mammoth in it.
Yeah, so that guitar pick is yours, brother.
Any cool guys that play guitar, give them one of them picks.
You learned with your fingers?
And you just started messing around with it?
That's great advice.
When you play, people will believe you.
So you'd been playing about four or five years back then?
What was the trouble with the law?
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Do you ever wonder how things could have gone?
Because things turned out great.
Like, look, you're a popular music artist now.
How did you avoid it?
That's probably good.
Maybe it's a survival instinct too.
You had a role model.
It's very difficult to find in your personal life.
You have to find it in other ways.
You have to find it people online or people in the world.
Where the only way you can get there is hard work.
Right, you can't think that you're a victim.
Yeah, you can't think that it's not your fault.
You got to take responsibility.
That's hard for people to accept when they know they've been victimized.
When they know they've been dealt a shitty hand of cards, you can just kind of wallow in it.
That's a trap that'll fuck you up.
It'll fuck up everybody around you, too.
Yeah, but it's a mindset thing.
It's like you can think your way out of that.
You have to have an example, though.
Either you have to be your own example or you have to find an example of someone else who thought their way out of it.
But it's like the way I describe a lot of things.
It's like when you get something that's good combined with a bunch of people that want to make money off that something that's good.
Whether it's medicine or whether it's music or even in comedy, you get the same thing.
You get a bunch of people that just think they can make money off you.
And you have new shit all the time.
attempt people going up at like the open mics and like trying out their routine you know that always terrified me it terrifies me still when i watch open mics i watch open mics and i watch someone bombing i gotta leave the room because i i fear that it's contagious
If I was on the road and I didn't get to pick my opening acts, like if I was working at a club and they had some local act in Florida or something like that and the guy was fucking terrible, I would literally have to not listen.
I'd have to leave the room and just sort of time when I was going to go on stage so I could go on stage with a fresh mindset.
I couldn't think that this audience had been poisoned by this guy's shitty comedy.
You know what I mean?
It's terrible, and it's like you think that nothing could be funny.
He's hypnotized them into this mediocre state of mind.
Like, I can't listen.
Well, you know, people, it's tolerable if the guy's into it.
You know, he could be into his own music and you're like, I'm not into it, but he's into it.
At least he's like doing his song.
If you're not into, if you're doing comedy and the audience is not into it, you're fucked.
You're like really fucked.
You have to engage those people.
You got to be connected to those people.
And you can't fake it.
Like you can't even be saying the words perfectly and not be thinking about it.
You have to be thinking about what you're saying.
They're little animals.
They know if you're faking it.
And you just got to lock in, man.
And you got to learn how to lock in.
It takes about 10 years.
It takes 10 years of eating shit.
Just fucking bombing and traveling around and opening up for people and barely getting by.
I think it's probably almost everything.
I listened to him today.
I'm like, Jesus, stop talking.
Well, he just went the COVID vaccine stuff.
He was out of his fucking mind.
He wanted people to be isolated and quarantined and taken away from society if they weren't willing to take this fucking experimental shit.
Well, he's old, right?
And old people, unfortunately, also, he's an academic.
So academics tend to trust experts in whatever field they're in.
And if he doesn't have an understanding, he has a deep understanding of how compromised people are politically by money.
And he's written some brilliant work on essentially the way the media is compromised and the way politics are compromised.
I don't think he applied that same skepticism towards the pharmaceutical industrial complex.
Well, people have their blind spots.
And they trust experts.
And if he, you know, he's got experts that are academics and you trust them and.
And also he's old, and old people get real scared of diseases.
They get real scared because they know how fucking vulnerable they are.
All the people that I knew that were old had the craziest reaction to COVID.
Even my own parents tried to talk them through some of this stuff.
They didn't want to hear it.
They only wanted to listen to doctors.
They're like, I don't think this is what they're telling you.
And they're incentivized.
That's what's really crazy.
When I found that out, that means I learned so much during the pandemic about the medical industry where I just thought they were there to...
I didn't even realize that hospitals are privately owned.
I thought these were things set up by the government to make sure that people can get healed.
I thought it was all about making people better.
you know religious organization right church yeah not crazy it's crazy yeah it's crazy and they're just fucking shuffling people in and out trying to prescribe them as many things and they're financially incentivized to prescribe things and then they have extreme overhead because they have liability insurance they have student loan debt and they have you know a high overhead to keep their practice running and
My buddy Everlast has one of those.
Yeah, he can go like this.
So it's made out of a cow?
So you have to get another operation?
So they're going through an artery.
And then what do they have to do to it?
Yeah, because you'll be freaking out.
You'll be thinking, what if this person falls asleep?
Yeah, there's a lot of them.
Especially the late night drives.
Late night drives are scary.
That highway starts hypnotizing you.
Well, you've got to think, if you're driving buses all through the night, there's a high likelihood you're on amphetamines.
For the business, it's probably the best way to stay awake.
Yeah, and then obviously that shit's very addictive, and you need it.
This band has to get to Cincinnati.
They got to get to Cincinnati.
It's an eight-hour drive.
There's only one way to do it.
We got to drive through the night.
Does this give you a greater appreciation for life, the value of life, like knowing you almost lost it?
Everybody feels invulnerable when you're young.
Especially if you're young and you live in that wild, you know, transient, moving around, no roots.
There's something romantic about that too, right?
A lot of people are prisoners to that their whole life because the only value they place is in how much stuff they're able to acquire.
That's the only value that they see in life.
They look at numbers on a ledger.
So they look at numbers in their bank account and they look at the stuff they're willing to acquire or that they're able to acquire.
And that's their only measure of success in this life.
What did it used to be?
But so many people, they, they, they forego all that.
They'll throw everything out the window just for the numbers for numbers.
And they, they think they're successful.
You give up your attention.
Your attention's very, very valuable.
Your data and your attention.
Yeah, your privacy.
Well, it's so easy for people to be completely disconnected from other people now.
You know, you don't have to interact.
You know, and that's part of it.
And if they don't have to pay people, they can maximize their profits.
And then it becomes a very impersonal experience.
It's a scary fucking movie.
Well, I think all the dystopian movies about the future, they undersold it.
It's going to get real weird real soon.
And because automation is not just going to apply to self-checkout.
It's going to apply to everything.
All that truck driving shit, that's all gone.
That's going to be gone.
It's all going to be self-driving trucks.
And they're going to be more efficient, less accidents, safer.
And so how did Waylon get it so that he could do whatever he wanted?
Well, country music has always been connected to authenticity, right?
And that's the reason why you keep the loyal fans.
Because people know that it's real.
Whether it's Coulter Wall or whoever it is, it's authentic.
You hear it and you go, this is not mass produced.
This is not a bunch of executives sitting around looking at a focus group trying to figure out what's going to hit.
Jamie turned me on to him when I heard Kate McKinnon the first time.
No, Jamie this Jamie.
He texted me and he's like, you're going to love this guy.
He sent me that song.
I was like, holy shit.
When I found out he was 21 when he made that song, I was like, you've got to be kidding me.
That sounds like a 60-year-old chain smoker.
He won't do podcasts.
I tried to get him in.
Sent me a bunch of records.
Sent me some cool shit.
Said sorry, but no.
But, I mean, that's probably better.
I mean, he wants to just be as authentic as possible.
The dude spends time actually working on a ranch.
Well, it's in his music, clearly.
You know, I mean, that guy screams authenticity.
Well, that's the thing that when you're talking about these hip-hop artists and pop artists, that's what they feel.
All artists, even someone who's a pop artist, what do they want to be?
They want something that resonates with people.
They want something that really connects with people.
And if they think the vehicle to doing that is a hip-hop song, they'll take that route.
But then they'll hear something like Kate McKinnon, and they'll be like, God damn, that's what I really want to do.
Yeah, it's got to be real.
It's got to be, you know, there's something, just like I was talking about with comedy, like they have to know that you're really thinking that.
It's something in music too.
They have to know that this is, and they like when you write your own shit too, you know?
You know that it's coming from someone's mind and their soul.
It's coming from their life experience.
It's who they are as a human being.
This is a true expression of their being, and that's what makes people loyal.
Well, they want to be it, but they don't know how to get there, and they don't know how to do it, and they've never lived it, and they've been paying attention to all the polls and the focus groups, and they've been listening to the executives, and they've been taking the advances, and
driving the Mercedes, they're doing all the shit that leads you down the wrong path.
And then one day you realize, like, fuck, it's not what I want, you know?
It's interesting, because it's like, you know, there's always going to be these examples of something that pops through that's real, that people gravitate towards, and then there's always going to be these people trying to capitalize on it and make money off of it and trying to figure out how to recreate it in an inauthentic way.
that's the one thing that might save us from this ai yeah exactly because ai is going to create a bunch of really catchy songs you know but it's never going to create an oliver anthony song it's never going to create hard times you know it's never going to create some of your it's not it's not going to it's got to come from a real human being and there's a thing that people are always going to want you know you're always going to want something that you know a real human being made there's something in it you know that's why this building's filled with art
I love looking at something that somebody made.
It came from their soul.
It came from whoever they are as a human.
They laid it down, whether it's music or whether it's art, comedy, whatever it is.
It's like that's coming from a human being.
And we're always going to want to be connected to that.
I stole it from Jimmy.
When we first started doing it.
Well, it's obvious.
I had to give it up.
Well, I had to give it up.
It's like, but, you know.
I used to listen to Jimmy all the time on the way to the comedy store.
It was like Jimmy and Led Zeppelin.
I'd listen to A Whole Lotta Love and If Six Was Nine.
I'd listen to that all the time on the way down Laurel Canyon.
Well, my friend Phil Hartman, when he was a kid, he used to work at the whiskey.
He was like a grip.
And it was his job.
The speakers were precariously placed on the edge of the stage.
And Jimmy performed there.
And it was his job to stand there and make sure that Jimmy didn't kick over the speaker into the audience.
So he stood right there while Hendrix played right above him.
And the way he talked about it, man, it was just, to him, it was like this magical moment.
Because I think he was a teenager at the time.
No, he was just working for the club.
You know, he was just a guy that was hired to work there.
You know, just a kid.
And he was basically literally just there to make sure the speaker doesn't fall into the ground.
And, you know, Jimmy was playing right above him.
And he said it was incredible.
He said it was just like this magical moment.
Because Jimmy live... You know, there's something about...
Seeing someone live, you know, like I was talking about when I saw Gary play Midnight Rider, there's something live.
And I was with my oldest daughter and we were at this downtown L.A.
club and it was like a Monday or Tuesday night.
It was a weeknight and it was a midnight show.
It was like a real late night show.
And it was sponsored by an alcohol company.
I wish I could remember the company.
But they put together this very small show.
And it was just, it was a total impromptu session.
And Suzanne, my friend Suzanne Santo, who's the lead singer of Honey Honey at the time, she's incredibly talented.
She was singing it and she didn't know the exact words.
So she had to get the words off of her phone.
So she's singing Midnight Rider off her phone and Gary's in the background.
And I recorded it on my phone.
See if you can find it, Jamie.
Oh, that's a... Jamie, see if you can find Midnight Rider on my Instagram.
I know it's on there.
I want to play that part because it was fucking insane.
It was just one of those magical moments where you see someone perform live.
There's just something about... You get a lot of it.
See how she's looking at her phone?
She had to read the lyrics off her phone.
She had to because she didn't know exactly the lyrics.
That's with comedy, too, man.
I mean, Bill Hicks, who's one of the greatest of all time.
The scene was hot, man.
It was hot because of him.
It was hot because of him and Kennison.
Met him once real briefly.
Didn't even get a chance to talk to him.
But I saw him perform live a few times before he died.
Yeah, saw Kennison a few times live.
I saw Kennison live before he died too, but he had already passed his prime.
Kenison passed his prime real quick because he's a cautionary tale because of the partying.
He was the fucking man.
Well, that party scene in L.A.
at the time was the cocaine party scene.
It was a different party scene.
Mark Maron said that he hung out with Kenison and they did so much coke that he had voices in his head for a fucking year afterwards.
You know, like hearing voices in his fucking head for a year before they stopped talking to him.
Yeah, they were doing cocaine, man.
Yeah, he was doing it everywhere.
But Kinnison became almost like a caricature of himself.
It became sort of captured by this... the perception, by this character that they had created.
And Kinnison is what birthed Hicks.
You know, Hicks was...
Hicks was a great comic, but he was one of the outlaws.
It was Kennison and Hicks that sort of defined the Texas style.
And when we were living in... At the time, I was living in New York, and there was really two places in the country.
There was L.A., where you wanted to go to get on TV.
Everybody wanted to go get a fucking sitcom.
They all wanted to be Jerry Seinfeld.
And New York, which was like the club comics.
That was like the Dave Attels and these guys that would like, you know, the...
The guys would do the clubs, and they were thought of as like the real pure comics.
And then there was this new scene, this new scene out of Houston, this new scene out of the Laugh Stop in River Oaks.
And I remember the first time I ever worked there, man, you could feel it in the building.
You could feel that they had been there.
They were both gone.
By the time I had worked there, they were both dead.
But you could feel it in the building, man.
You could feel it in the comics, the open mic scene.
You could feel they were pure.
There was a Texas quality to the way they were doing comedy.
It was a fuck you, fuck you.
That's what I like.
No one knew what he was.
They didn't know what he was.
The first time I ever saw him, he bombed.
He bombed except for the comedians.
Well, he was the first comic really that had a message.
You know, he had like a, there was a social commentary to his, like a dark poetry to his comedy.
And so many people tried to emulate it that at the,
Yeah, there's always going to be someone like that that sets the standard.
Quit trying to be Hicks.
Yeah, quit trying to be Hicks.
Yeah, no, it was genius.
Well, when I first saw him, he went on in Boston.
And it was at Nick's Comedy Stop.
And the guy who went on before him was this... He was a nice guy, but he was a hack.
He was just like cops and donuts, normal shit, stupid jokes.
But the stupid jokes were working.
It was cartoon characters smoking pot.
What would happen if Daffy Duck smoked a joint with Donald Duck?
Watered down Dangerfield.
But it was getting people to laugh.
And then Hicks went on stage and immediately started bombing.
Immediately he opened up with saying that he's tired of performing and tired of going up and...
telling people a bunch of shit you couldn't possibly think up on your own.
But the comics were dying, and there was like 300 people in the room.
By the time he was done performing, there was 50.
There was 50, and there was maybe me and my friend Greg Fitzsimmons were in the back of the room just dying laughing, and maybe 10 comics.
We had all come to see Hicks because we had heard about him.
And then I saw him a month later at the Comedy Connection and he fucking murdered.
The Comedy Connection was this little tiny club.
It was like 150 seats, real low ceilings.
This is when I was first starting.
So this is like 1988.
And it was before he had really popped.
I had heard about him from the Rodney Dangerfield HBO special.
So Rodney Dangerfield had these young comedian specials.
Rodney was the best at like –
introducing the world to talented comedians and he had these rodney dangerfield young comedian specials where he'd have on like robert schimmel and lenny clark and andrew dice clay and that's where kinnison emerged and hicks hicks was one of them too and i remember i'd seen hicks on that so i went to see him live and like i said the first time he bombed the second time he fucking murdered it was tiffany meeting jimmy hendrix at the mall he was doing this bit by
A bit about Tiffany playing at the mall and Jimi Hendrix shows up.
It was this fucking just genius bit.
It was so funny, man.
Because I don't think he ever put that on anything.
It might be on an album somewhere.
But it was back when there was all this like pop mall comedy or pop mall music.
And he fucking hated it, you know, and it was and he was just rallying.
Rallying against corporatism.
Austin has a great comedy scene right now.
And it's really just emerged from the pandemic.
Well, we all moved here to start it.
We didn't even move here to start it.
We moved here to just keep doing what we were doing in L.A.
And in 2020, we were all like we were all without a country.
You know, we were living in L.A.
and the comedy store was shut down for a fucking year and a half.
It was so shut down, and I knew, I'm one of those dudes, it's just like, I've never had faith in systems and government, and I'm like, these motherfuckers are gonna keep us shut down.
They're gonna keep, and I came to Texas, and Ron White was already here.
So Ron White, who's a very good friend of mine, and Gary, I knew Gary from LA.
He used to hang out at the Comedy Store too, and that's why I became friends with him, and he moved here.
I think 2017 or 2018, and I talked to him on the phone.
I'm like, why'd you go back to Austin?
He's like, man, I can't fuck with those people in L.A.
It's just like I'm tired of it, man.
He goes, I love Texas.
It's just real, and it's like I need to go back home.
And I was like, wow, that sounds right.
And then when I talked to Ron, and Ron's the same way.
Ron's a Texas boy too.
And he was like, I just don't want to do this anymore.
He goes, it's great.
It's the middle of the fucking country.
I can fly anywhere.
Fucking food's good.
And so I knew when I came here.
That's all you needed to know.
I was like, at the very least, Ron's here.
And Ron's a good friend.
and then when we came here we could perform live in i first started doing shows outside me and dave chappelle started doing shows at stubs and we were doing outside shows where we had to test the whole crowd everybody had to get tested so everybody had to show up like two hours in advance we tested everybody for cover they had to wear a mask outside it was so stupid the whole thing was so ridiculous but we were hanging out in the back getting drunk smoking weed and it was like it was like normal it was like normal times
And it was like this cultural thing.
We were the only ones doing comedy.
And everybody just started coming here, man.
They all just started coming here.
And then we started doing shows inside at the Vulcan Gas Company, which is a music club that's on 6th Street.
So we started performing there.
And Nick, the guy who's the owner, is just a wild dude.
He's like, fuck it.
Let's just do shows.
And we started doing shows in November of 2020.
And it just felt like we were baby killers.
We were killing grandma.
We were out there just spreading diseases.
We were super spreaders.
We had developed some strong antibodies.
I never got sick off of 6th Street.
I got sick in Florida.
Yeah, except the bullets.
And there's a lot of that going on there, too.
So we started doing shows there live, and then comics started moving.
Man, they started moving in droves.
They started all moving to Texas because they could do shows here.
I didn't know that.
Without doing shows, we just all felt lost.
And then by the time 2021 rolled around, there was like 15, 16 world-class comics living in Austin.
And then I was like, fuck it.
And Ron talked me into it.
He's like, you got to get a fucking club.
because you know he knew i got a bunch of money from the spotify deal so i was like all right let's fucking do it and so then in 2022 or three i guess we opened up and it's just been gangbusters ever since and now it's like this is the hub of comedy in the country which makes it the hub of comedy in the known universe it's all here in texas it's all at that club i like that well that's really cool man props to you for pulling that off
Well, I mean, I think I pulled it off, but I think everybody pulled it off.
And it's a great place, and it's all walks of life, man.
Everybody likes to use that term, inclusive and diversity.
Well, our scene is diverse and inclusive, but everybody's great.
It's only diverse because they just happen to be.
Everybody's fucking diverse.
They're all different, weird people.
And we didn't seek that out.
It was just what happened.
It was just who's good, who's good, who's really all about this, who really wants to live this life, who really wants to just do comedy.
And we set it up where we have two nights of open mic nights and, you know, we've got Kill Tony on Monday nights.
All the amateurs get a chance to be seen in front of the whole world and the biggest live comedy show in the world on YouTube.
And it just became this hub, man.
And now it's just fucking every night it's sold out.
It's just it's a vibrant, wild scene.
And now on Sixth Street, there's five full time clubs within two blocks of my club.
The scene is insane.
I mean, it's the best scene in the country.
It's like there's never been a scene like this before that just emerged.
And we had to hit every green light.
Like, the comedy store had to be closed down.
So I hired everybody that was working at the comedy store.
Before we even had a club, I said...
I'm going to pay you full time.
You get all insurance, all that shit.
Just come move to Austin.
We'll call on you in like a year.
It's going to take like a year to build this place.
But meanwhile, you'll get paid.
You'll be able to just like live here, set your roots, get established.
It's a beautiful place to live.
Everybody fucking loved it.
And then when we opened, we hit the ground running.
We opened up one night.
We did a couple of test shows.
Like, let's try the venues, make sure everything works good.
And then we was like, fuck it, let's stay open.
And we just stayed open.
And before you know it, it was seven nights a week.
And then it was just, it's been almost three years now.
We're talking about doing it in other places now.
We just don't want to water it down.
We've talked about doing it in some other city and trying to figure out what the next one would be.
But it would have to be a city that has a real group of talent.
You have to have talent.
Every comedy community, the only way it works is you have to have a lot of great comics that live in that town.
It's the only way it works.
And then we feed off of each other.
There's no lone wolves in comedy.
Comedy, it's only iron sharpens iron.
There's no best comic in the world living in Pittsburgh.
doesn't exist, like they all live where they all, they're not in competition, but in cooperation with each other.
Like we're all inspired by each other.
You have to have that.
And so we had to have like every green light.
The comedy store had to be shut down for a solid year and a half.
All those people had to be unemployed.
I had to have all this money from Spotify.
I had to be in a place like Texas that allows you to open up and have a show indoors when everything in California was closed.
They wouldn't even let you do outdoor shows.
We weren't even allowed to do shows.
We tried to do shows in the parking lot at the Comedy Store, and they wouldn't allow us.
70% of all the restaurants went under.
I mean, it was fucking madness.
Yeah, that's crazy.
So we had hit every green light, and we had to have all these people that were willing to take a chance.
All the Tom Seguras and Tim Dillons and Tony Hinchcliffs and Duncan Trussells, all these great comics.
It just was like, fuck it.
Brian Simpson and Tony Inchcliffe and all these guys just said, fuck it.
Let's take a chance.
Like, I don't want to live like this.
I want to live where I can't do comedy.
It's like we're just like junkies with no fix, you know?
It's not a compliment.
Isn't that hilarious?
Do you think, man, like synchronicity, that like fate is a real thing?
Because just think about how all that lined up.
I feel like sometimes, I mean, it's a very egocentric thing to think.
You know, the things are meant to be.
Like there's a plan for you.
it's silly but it also isn't you know fate seems to somehow or another be a real thing and sometimes the way things synchronize and the way things line up you're like man this seems like it's meant to be i think there's certain things that just seem like they're meant to be and i feel like if you're on the right frequency and you're following the right path
Those doors open, and these things do happen, and they happen when they're supposed to happen.
They happen at the right time for the right reasons.
I believe completely in fate.
Especially real struggle.
Like, real struggle is not knowing if it's going to work out.
You're not going to love that.
That's what I mean.
I would have never known that.
It's a natural inclination that people have when they want to be authentic to imitate authenticity.
That's the thing is you've got to find your own path.
There's something about street performing that is, there's no net.
You're performing for people that are involuntary.
Right, but if you're good, if you're good, it means a lot.
You ever see the video of Biggie when he's performing?
He's 17 on a street corner in Brooklyn.
Can we see it just for fun?
Yeah, pull that up.
That fucking video is like you watch him, this kid.
Yeah, standing on a street corner.
Yeah, that's the one.
Oh, he was so clever.
There was comedy in his lyrics.
It's just undeniable.
It's the most authentic form of performance ever.
That's not your audience.
They don't know you.
You have to earn it.
You have to break through.
You have to break through.
Well, you're killing it.
But that's the only way you make Charlie Crockett.
Your story is important for people to hear because it's the only way you make someone like you.
You don't make someone like you in a mall.
You don't make someone like you with a bunch of executives making these decisions based on what they think is going to be popular.
It's not their fault.
we need to understand the business if you're in the business if you don't understand it you'll be taken over by it there's no doubt even if they got you on top yeah and then you have to have autonomy you have to have you have to this personal sense of self or you could avoid the influence you have to be able to just stick to your guns and that's the hard part right because then they dangle that carrot in front of you man that carrot is juicy especially if you've been out in the street
Well, I got lucky in that I got on television so early and I didn't want to be on television.
It wasn't something that I wanted.
But they offered me so much money to be on TV.
But I kept growing and doing my comedy at the comedy store.
And that was the most important thing that I just kept doing comedy.
And then the money was just like, fuck you money.
So it's like, because I had the fuck you money, I could kind of be myself.
And there was a lot of temptation.
I remember the producers of Fear Factor were like, what are you doing?
Because some of my comedy was just out there.
This will get you in trouble.
This is not network television comedy.
I was like, well, then I won't do network television anymore.
Once I had a certain amount in the bank, I was like...
All right, this is more money than I ever thought I'd ever have in my whole fucking life.
I never thought I'd ever be wealthy.
And then all of a sudden I have money.
So if you have fuck you money and you don't say fuck you, what's the point?
No one's going to say fuck you then.
If you're going to be a prisoner to that money, like everybody says, man, have I had all that money?
Afraid to be yourself.
That's the only time you can really do it.
It's like the universe gives you this gift.
The gift is the gift of freedom and you have to choose to either accept it and take it and run with it or be captured by it and then want more and more and more forever.
Forever, and there's no end.
You know, we were talking about my friend Brian has this friend who's worth $3 billion, and he feels poor because his friend is worth $80 billion.
You know how crazy that is?
Think how crazy that is.
Like this guy is just constantly chasing to keep up with his friend who's worth $80 billion.
Man, that's how it works.
Because he's got three.
Yep, that's how it works.
You could get trapped, and then, you know.
Yeah, you've got to hit show.
You want to hit movie.
You've got to hit movie.
I want to have a Grammy.
I want to start singing.
You start getting crazy.
You chase that demon, that demon of success that just lures you deeper and deeper into hell.
And the next thing you know, you don't even know who you are.
No one knows who you are.
And if you don't know who you are, they'll decide.
They'll decide who you are.
They'll sell you as a thing.
That's what's crazy.
I have a friend who's a billionaire who desperately wants to be famous.
Because that's the thing they don't have, right?
Kind of, but then it turns on you.
Yeah, it turns on you.
Yeah, to be the rich guy.
Yeah, you don't want that.
Yeah, it's a harsh world because there's no sympathy for you.
You know, you're the wealthy oligarch.
They got you under that eye of Sauron.
They're trying to find all your flaws.
Everybody's got them.
Well, you know, the eye of Horus is essentially the pineal gland where the seat of the soul, where the brain produces dimethyltryptamine.
That's the eye of Horus.
Have you ever seen the image of the eye of Horus next to the pineal gland?
The pineal gland is a gland that's in the center of your brain.
It's essentially the third eye.
In reptiles, it actually has a retina and a lens or a cornea and a lens.
Now they believe that DMT is actually produced by the entire brain.
It's also produced by the liver and the lungs, but it's like the most spiritual of all the psychedelics.
And they believe that the Egyptians had some sort of, you know, there's so little understood about truly ancient Egypt.
Look what it looks like.
I mean, the eye of Horus essentially is a diagram of the pineal gland.
which is kind of crazy.
It's kind of crazy when you see it that way.
Because they knew things, and we don't know what they knew.
We don't understand how they built the pyramids.
We don't understand how old they are.
There's so much speculation about the true age of that civilization.
I mean, there's this group of scientists that believe that there's structures under the pyramids that go two kilometers deep into the earth.
And there's a lot of controversy about that.
I heard about that.
these guys are they've multiple readings of these things and they're pretty sure that they're accurate and they've been accurate with other things like other temples that are underground that are 50 feet underground they've mapped those things out with the same technology so there's a precedent to it these people knew things and we don't understand how they knew it or what they knew and we don't know if the people that lived in ancient egypt that we considered ancient egypt like
We don't know if they found those structures or if those people built those structures.
There's so much weirdness with Egypt because the construction is so beyond anything else that exists anywhere on earth.
And especially when you're dealing with 4,500 plus years ago.
4,500 years ago is the conventional estimations.
But there's a lot of these heretic archaeologists that think, no, this is a lot older than that.
I mean, there's a king's list that goes back 30,000 plus years.
Yeah, I mean, it sounds nuts to people that want to have this conventional dating of the dawn of civilization being about 6,000 years ago.
There's a lot of evidence that that's not accurate.
And I think the most profound evidence is just the vastness of the Egyptian empire and just the vastness of the construction, the way they were able to bring these stones from 500 miles away through the mountains that are 80 tons.
How did they cut them perfectly?
How did they put them –
120 feet in the air and put them in the ceiling like what what the was going on then what the was going on with people were supposedly just getting out of hunter and gathering i mean this is like the emergence like a couple thousand years earlier we're supposed to be like using stone tools and throwing them at animals and now you have these people that build this immense structure that's
perfectly aligned, a true north, south, east, and west, has 2,300,000 stones in it.
It's aligned with Orion stars, the stars in the Orion belt?
Yeah, it's basically a certainty.
And the more we explore in the known universe, the more we understand that it's much more likely that this is not an anomaly, that there's many, many planets out there.
Maybe an infinite number that have life.
So who knows what's going on with those Egyptians?
Yeah, who fucking knows?
Well, we don't know how long ago they did this.
There's just so much speculation.
Well, all the sub-Saharan area.
That's where they believe that Atlantis was.
I mean, there's this thing called the Reshot structure that there's, again, these heretic archaeologists believe was the site of Atlantis.
I mean, the South Saharan, the Sub-Saharan Africa was a rich rainforest thousands of years ago.
There's whale bones.
They find whale bones in the Saharan desert.
It's fucking madness, man.
The history of Earth is so confusing.
Like Graham Hancock says it best, we're a species with amnesia, you know?
And that's what's wild about all this ancient shit.
We don't remember anything.
Well, we definitely don't remember shit from 20,000 years ago.
It's all just speculation.
And, you know, and people have been in this form, you know, the form of homo sapiens now for 300 plus thousand years.
Like who knows how long and who knows where they learn this stuff from.
I mean, who knows if they learn this stuff from visitors?
I mean, if we did get visited 20,000, 30,000 years ago, what evidence would be left?
And are we being visited now?
Well, we're about to find out because if this shit keeps popping off with Israel and Iran and they start going nuclear, that was the great hope of the people that really believe in aliens is that what they're watching over us is to make sure we don't fuck everything up, that we're so close to emerging as a type one civilization.
We're so close to getting out of this barbaric
territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons.
We're so close to passing this stage that we're in right now as long as we don't fuck it up.
And who knows how many times people might have fucked it up in the past.
That might be what we're looking at when we're looking at ancient Egypt.
There might be the remnants.
And there's also natural disasters.
You know what I mean?
It could be our greatest natural disaster.
Type... What'd you say?
Type 1 civilization.
What does that mean?
There's type one, type two and type three civilizations.
And I remember who was the one who formulated this.
It might have been Sagan.
Jamie, pull it up so I don't fuck this up.
But it's essentially our here it is.
Type 1 civilization, known as a planetary civilization, defined by our Kardashev scale as the one that's harnessed and controls all available energy on its planet.
This includes utilizing all forms of energy from sources like solar, wind, geothermal, and potentially even harnessing nuclear fusion.
A type one civilization is also characterized by a global technologically advanced society with a high degree of interconnectedness and the ability to manage planetary scale resources and weather.
So we're on the way to that.
And AI in best case scenario helps us achieve that.
We're probably a lot closer to that than we think.
Type 2 civilization is stellar, meaning we populate other planets.
Type 3 is galactic.
We populate the cosmos and we explore the cosmos.
We're on our way to that.
If we used to live in caves and now we fly in hypersonic jets, this is what's coming.
And it's whether or not we fuck it up along the way.
We should probably end on that.
Charlie Crockett, you're the man.
I appreciate you, brother.
Thank you very much for being here, man.
It's been a lot of fun.
Yeah, thanks a lot.
Thank you very much, man.
Tell everybody where they can find all your shit.
Do you have a social media?
Yeah, but you don't got to do all that.
That's all they need to know.