Drew Carey
speaker
276 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Drew Carey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Man. So I used to be an evangelical Christian. Oh, wow. But I remember feeling like I just got saved by Jesus.
That's the only feeling I can relate it to. Like I was floating. I was in such a flow state. I think your listeners are probably familiar with the flow state.
You've heard of it. And if you haven't, there's whole books on it. YouTube videos, if you're not into reading, but it happens to you when you game, you get a flow state.
If you're really into the game or when you're driving with the radio on or off, you really get in a flow state when you're anything where you have hyper concentration, where you look up and you're like, Oh my God, it's been an hour already. I thought I just sat down. That's a flow state. And I was in such a state of flow. I might as well have floated out there and floated over.
And it was like a dream state the whole time. So I'd rehearsed that set. When I walked out, Jim McCauley, RIP, he was the guy that booked the comics. And he was the guy that if you were in a comedy club and you knew Jim McCauley was in the audience, you'd be like, oh my God, you're up right away. Yeah, because he can make or break you by putting you on The Tonight Show or not.
Back then it was like just very few gatekeepers. And if you got past those gatekeepers, you were in. And if you didn't,
Yeah, there's no podcast to go on. There's no YouTube channel you can start. There's no third tier like this podcast. Now there's like many avenues. Back then there was just the one and then just the two when Letterman started.
Then after you got famous from those, then you could have an HBO special.
Or a Showtime special. And that was it. Now you could make your own special, put it on YouTube, get a YouTube following, and then you're set.
Nothing like that. You had to go through the gatekeepers. Always a gatekeeper.
So Jim McCauley was the biggest gatekeeper in the country. And he said, hey, Drew, you're on next. Ready to go backstage? I had my notes, my set list that I hadn't barely glanced at. And I was going to look over it one more time before I went on. And it was on the top page of my notebook. It wasn't a separate sheet.
I just had my notebook and I would fold over the top like a lined Oxford line notebook. And he walks me backstage and he goes, well, have a good time. And I go, am I next? And he goes, yeah. And I go, well, I guess I don't need this. And I tossed it.
You didn't have a chance to look at it before it went out. And the next thing you know, it's Johnny introducing me, the curtains open, and I float out on stage. And I'm in a flow state. It's going great. I'm like electric inside. I feel like I'm on another planet. It's going so well where I'm not associated with reality. And then I get called over just like in my dream the night before.
I had like a vision of exactly how it would go. I was working at a club in Chicago, Funny Bone in Chicago at the time, and Schomburg. And I got a call like, hey, Macaulay called. He wants to do the Tonight Show. And the club owner was really excited because that's extra money on the weekend when I come back from that. And just to have a comic there that just got his first Tonight Show.
And he was a good friend of mine anyway. And I was like, what? Well, I need Friday night off. So Thursday night, I got the call Wednesday. And Thursday night, I told the audience I'm doing the Tonight Show. I did my set. And I go, that was my Tonight Show set. So let me just figure out the rest of this. Because you already heard my closer. Wow. And I flew out there.
But the night before, I was laying in bed. And I could not sleep. I kept imagining in real time I was doing this set because that set's pre-approved. So you have to do that set. So I'm doing this set in my head in real time, seeing the stage through my real eyes because I'd already been there.
Another friend of mine suggested while I was in town, suggested I go to the Tonight Show and just be backstage. And when the show was over, just go out and look around so I'm not as nervous. Some of the best advice I ever got. So I knew what the stage looked like, so I could imagine the whole thing. And then Johnny calls me over at the end of my night dream.
All in real time, like it's really happening.
It was word for word. It wasn't like I was matching moments. Like it was 10 minutes, the whole sequence, or eight minutes, the whole sequence was time. I got up, walked around the hotel. Went back to bed, couldn't get out. Only slept on the plane on the way out from Chicago to L.A. And it happened just like I envisioned. It was a supernatural moment to me.
Tons of people. My friend Fred Stoller, really funny comic character actor. If you saw his face, you'd go, I know just who he is. Really cool guy. He's written a bunch of books. He wrote one book called, I think it's called Five Minutes to Kill. It's when he did HBO Young Comedians, or maybe it's Ten Minutes to Kill.
Showing 41–60 of 276 · page 3 of 14
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