 You know, a word I don't like. There's a word that you don't like? Yeah. I do not know. Macabre. Because it sounds like macaw. Every time somebody says macaw, I think they're talking about the bird for a second. And I'm like, why are you talking about a bird, the macaw? I know they're not talking about the bird, but for a second I think they're talking about the bird. And so I think the words are too similar. I don't think macabre accurately describes, accurately conveys what the word is. I think it does. If you look at the etymological origins of the word. No. It needs to be something like... Creepy. That's better. Simply because there's no other word. It just doesn't sound like... Rhymes is creepy. There's no other bird. Macabre. Yeah, something that's macabre. It's a pretty intense word. Yeah. It doesn't sound like an intense word. It sounds like a bird. You know what I'm saying? You agree with me. Josh! Hey, we'll go back to our stupid directions, of course. Do you not like the word carrot because it reminds you of a parrot? Well, there's nothing inherently serious about a carrot. In fact, it could be a flat- Okay, what about love and dove? That's a, love sounds lovey. Lovey-dovey. Yeah. Macabre. Cocky. Oh. Today. The macabre macaw, ooh, written by Edgar Allan Poe. Have you ever been to the Tiki Room? I love the Tiki Room. I love the Tiki Room. Dik dik dik dik dik dik dik dik dik dik dik dik dik dik dik dik. Such a great place to go. Anyways, today we have a little segment. This is called Vir Das Shares The Three Stages of Visiting India. All right. It's been a while since we've had a Vir Das. But this is actually a segment of a podcast of Conan O'Brien's podcast. Ah. Either or not. You know my Conan O'Brien story? Vir Das is our toast, and Conan O'Brien- Twice removed. Conan O'Brien drove next to Rick once. and I were on the road stuck in traffic. I feel someone watching me, I look to my left and in the car directly next to us stopped in traffic and the driver seat alone is Conan O'Brien doing this on the window looking at us. And I said to the kids, God, that's Conan. And we waved at him and he goes, and then the light changes and he drives away. Freak. So you could say he's Rick's toast. Yeah, we are technically, technically a toast. And I'm sure when I see him you'll remember it. Yeah. Vividly. Life changing. He probably does that like, 15 times because he's just a weirdie. Anyways, so here we go. Tell you, of all the places I've been in the world, my brief time in India, and I still believe this, and I don't know how you feel about it, it is the most different culture I've ever been in. I've been to a lot of places, but when you're in India, and I said I was in Jaipur and we were driving to a location and we're going through sort of the heart of the city and people, cars, livestock, everything is moving, but there's no... Orders. There's no... Rules. Realized flow of traffic. Everything was moving in all directions, and I thought it was kind of beautiful. Yeah. Organized chaos. If you surrender to that, you're like, this is so completely different from anything I've experienced on the planet Earth before. And the people are very beautiful and there's... But I remember feeling completely outside my body. The moment you land and then you're driving to the hotel, you're driving around animals on the street and there's six people on a bike. Yeah. And it's amazing. I think let's go through three stages, right? Whenever my friends from abroad come over, because I recognize that it is sensory overload. Yeah. Total sensory overload, yeah. More colors and people and... And smells. And everything that you've experienced on a per capita basis, right? Yeah. They always come in and my friends are always just kind of glazed over the eyes for the first two days because they just never experienced so much in 48 hours. Then I meet them like a week later and they really homesick. I miss peanut butter or some shit like that. And then... And then... Peanut butter is delicious. I miss peanut butter. When you meet them a week later and they're like, I'm never going back. And that's the... You've got to make it past the peanut butter stage. The peanut butter stage. I remember I put a lot of peanut butter in my baseball cap. You did. You had me pack it. And I kept taking my hat... I was going to have to pack clothes because I had to pack all your peanut butter. I've had comedians shop to comedy festivals with peanut butter in their suitcase. Like I had a female comedian... Do they not have peanut butter in the stores at all? I'm sure they do. It's just not a common occurrence. We have a billion people. We're feeding each other. Then she went on to eat every local thing that she could eat in under 10 minutes. I don't think I craved peanut butter while I was there. Yeah. It's interesting because we love doing travel shows. And I really wanted to go to India and do a whole travel show. But... And I would still like to do that. I remember the government was very much like, well, what are you going to do? Well, you know, we go to all these different countries and I am... I don't want to diss the country. I want to go there and meet the people and make comedy with them. I don't want it to be making fun of them. But I did notice that of all of the governments that we encountered, India felt... And I know that you've run up against this. They want a lot of assurances about what we're going to do while we're there. They'd like to see the footage. And I thought, I don't know. It was a different attitude than I had come across before. We did not take permission. You know what that's about? I think we don't have as broad of an audience. It's probably not, Brian. We were emailing, and then I... I mean, the version that I heard could be very, very different. But they said, we're going to think about permissions because he shot something here before without permission. Yes. Which was something that we didn't even think about. But years ago, we did a piece. I mean, we're talking the old late-night show. We did a piece with a writer, Andy Blitz. And it was a really funny idea, which is he's having trouble with his computer. And so he unplugged it and he wraps the cord around it and goes to the airport. And then you see him. It's a very expensive piece. He flies to India. And then he walks through the streets and finds the actual place where the Collins Center is and brings the computer to the person, which we thought was a really clever idea. We were doing this show by the seat of our pants. And of course, and I don't think it was insulting at all, but they just went and they didn't do the proper paperwork. And apparently, so then we were, I think 15 or 20 years later, saying, hey, we'd love to come and do something that we think is really respectful and fun about India. And they said, you didn't fill out the paperwork last time. And you need to be penalized. And they've left paperwork we were talking about. And then, of course, we talked to Andy Blitz. And he's like, oh yeah, I didn't fill out anything. Yeah, man. You can't expect. Who needs to do that? Yeah. You can't expect us to fix your computers and then not have good memories. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Just once, I want to see like an American call in Indian tech place. And he'd be like, I need to fix my computer. Yeah. Just us be like, do you go? Do you really need a computer? What are you gonna do on it? Yeah, what are you gonna do? Yeah. No. And then just put the phone down on you. You don't need a computer. Yeah. Well, I mean, you have found, you very famously went up against it. It's hard to comprehend in American society because we pride ourselves on you. You can say whatever you want. People may not like it, but that is your right under the constitution. And I know you've talked about this a lot, but so we don't have to dwell on it, but you gave a very intelligent and wonderful monologue about India and then flew there and what happened? Well, without saying too much, I was doing a show at the Kennedy Center and then I ended up making a YouTube video at the end of it, which was a monologue and ended up just in a very kind of improvised thing where my wife and I were in DC and we were looking at some monuments and I was homesick and I kind of wrote this thing down at 4 p.m. before the show and I showed it to my wife and I'm like, should I do this? And she's like, yeah, what could happen? And then... And it's called Two Indies. It's called Two Indies. And then we found a wedding photographer on Yelp who had a camera and we shot it and we put it up. And it really just began with one news channel. I think we all have the angry on fire all the time news channel in every country. And so I put it up and it went viral for three days, lots of love, and then a news channel picked it up and they kind of set everything on fire. And so on this channel, people were calling me on sorts of things and saying, cancel this passport and filing complaints. And then when I landed, I was like, I don't know how this is gonna go. Where did you land, what city? In Mumbai. Mumbai, okay. And then we just kind of buckled down for two months. The theme of the news specialist also sort of, if you can find a way to stay mentally strong through an outrage cycle, you discover that real life and love is on the way. And I think in moments like that, you discover what it means to be a comic in a certain sense because you never think about sort of, if you really focus, you're not thinking about fair, unfair, any of these larger things, you're thinking, is this funny? Is there a joke that can be told about this or a story that can be told? For context, I cannot wait to hear Chris Rock's five minutes about the Oscars. I've never heard him talk about it, tweet about it, post about it. He talked about it. The rule of being a comic is the first time it happens, it's got to be jokes. And so for me, it was feeling bad that I may have let a lot of people down and also received a lot of love and saying, can I write the joke that makes you both laugh? Because I take any feedback, any feedback is good feedback and valid feedback, head down, mouth shut. And so then I just kind of really dug deep to write a show about being an idiot at the center of the show. And I think two months later after I turned my phone on and there's a lot of love and suddenly you're grappling, you know, it's a little surreal to not know where you stand in people's hearts. And I wrote a joke which was, I was on the homepage of the BBC and there was a big headline that said, comedian polarizes the nation. You know how badly you have to fuck up before the British say that you divided India? And so it acknowledges the fuck up, it acknowledges that it was polarizing and now both sides can hopefully laugh at it. And then I just wrote a show to kind of say, can I take some drama in my life and pivot it so it brings a lot of people joy, which I think is the comedian's job. So that's the learning for me this year is what it means to be a comic, truly. The, you know, it's interesting because I think it takes a lot of discipline and I commend you for that to go through an intense experience like that where a lot of people are upset and remember your job is comedy because I do think many people would say, I wanna go on the equivalent of Oprah and cry. It's something that I've, you know, I bumped into Chris not too long ago, Chris Rock and I was telling him, I really commend you on not, you know, you know everybody, you know, Oprah and every show like that will do anything to get him to come on. Yeah, pay him a lot of money. And maybe tear up and cry and it takes a lot of discipline and kind of a class to say, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to wait for my moment and then do what I do. Because you want the end result of it to be joy, right? That is my job at the end of the day. And I wouldn't hand over my narrative to anybody else. I wouldn't trust anybody with my narrative, but myself. Like I, as much as I know what, for instance, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have gone through, I imagine there will now be a podcast about the book, about the interview, about the documentary, but a comedian doesn't have to go through that. We can just crack a joke and bring everybody to the table again. I think it's the most beautiful democratic of professions in that sense. So yeah, that took a while and you just kind of have to surround yourself with other comics, you know, like I remember I was at the, the cellar, I think the night that I was on the news and a comic came up to me and he was like, you know what the worst part is? They're calling you a poet. Yeah. Right. And that's such a comedian response where you at some point you go, okay, this is going to be funny someday. Yes. And then you buckle down. Did you, when you went back to India, were you arrested or was it just charged? No, it was people filed complaints. They filed complaints. Yeah, and then the police was like, no, we're not, you know, entertaining. And you never felt physically threatened? No. I don't think there's a more powerful feeling than feeling like you've let people down. Yes. You know, and so I think that's the most powerful feeling at the center of the special. Like I'd never, one of the things that was important with the specialist, I never want to lionize myself or victimize myself. Yeah. You know, this is just funny. You know, I think we all know the way that I look at it is I never even referenced the content as such. To me, you can't predict when content becomes controversial, you know, but you can make sure that controversy is in your content. You know, and you can kind of be the idiot always. So I think that's been the learning. Interesting. Ponient as always. What's interesting. It sounds as if based on the exposure we've had of him, which is granted limited, but we've seen quite a bit of your dog. It seems as if going through this process maybe has refined, restored, I don't know his original motivation for getting into comedy in the first place, but to say his primary objective is for people to have joy and to make them laugh. I've not seen that to be his, it's been a huge objective. And I would say it is his ultimate objective for the most part, but he's one of those comics that I would say absolutely at the core of what he talks about is social commentary and makes observations about the ridiculousness of certain things that to those on the side that he's ridiculing would become very offended, which is a part of comedy for a long, long, long, long time. And we have the freedoms we have here in the world of comedy and others. It wasn't too long ago that those weren't here even though we have free speech in the Constitution. Just study the life of Lenny Bruce. You don't have Chris Rock without Lenny Bruce. Lenny Bruce got arrested constantly simply because he used foul language in his stand up. It was illegal to cuss and he did it all the time and got arrested and kept doing it. Another one of the greatest comedians of all time was George Carlin, who did not give a rat's ass about what anybody thought about what he said and said what he said and if you got joy out of it, okay, you know what I mean? So I find it interesting that he sounds as if this has brought him to a place of wanting to be a learning process of that at the heart of who he is as a comic is to bring people joy. And if that means he's not going to do what I've seen him do in the past, which is make social commentaries that many people would consider to be controversial. Oh, I didn't read that at all. No? No. I think he was just saying that my primary goal has always and will always be to be funny. Yeah, I just, I didn't see him talking at all about and maybe it's just because they didn't touch upon the subject hard enough for him to do it. I just didn't see him talking about, and it's not a judgment, it's an observation. I'm not judging him for what he's doing. I'm just saying it's an interesting observation to me of rather than in the past I would have imagined him to have more of a, if you don't like what I said, that's on you, I'm gonna say what I'm gonna say. And this didn't seem to be that way. I don't think he took that back at all. I think he still believes that. Oh, sure. I think he's just being more introspective of, that's why he said both sides, I'm hoping they both can laugh at this because I'm gonna just, my primary goal is to be funny. He's still gonna be the same Vir Das of being in an extremely intelligent and talking about certain things. I don't think he was walking any of that back. So I didn't think he was walking anything back. I know, but I didn't read what you're reading from this at all. I don't think he's gonna change anything he's doing. Nor do, from what I've seen of the special of Clips, is he changing? Of the new special that's coming? Yeah, it already came out a little while ago. Oh, I've seen like Clips. The one that came after the Kennedy Center's thing? Yeah, okay. I've seen like Clips on Twitter. If you haven't seen that, it's the same Vir Das. I think most everybody has seen two Indias and when we saw it, part of, a huge part of us and granted, we are American, didn't understand what a lot of the outrage was toward him, especially when you see what he says at the end of the two Indias. So, always, I mean, that whole thing was very informative. I would listen to the entire podcast. Yeah, it's always good when listening to Vir Das, I always enjoy what he says there as well. I never missed peanut butter when I was in India by then. No, you know what I missed? Salad. I missed my wife. I missed salad. That's the biggest thing for me because when you order a salad in India, what you get is some chopped up cucumbers, tomato and cilantro versus, I mean, salads are meals for me all of my life since I'm a little kid. So, that's what I missed the most was salad. I missed my wife. Yeah. Anyways, let us know what other videos we could write to down below.