 I'm going to start recording right now and let me ask you, how's the reception from my end? Am I clear? You sound perfect. You sound perfect. Great. So my goal is to have you in my life. So I will, we're rolling by the way, let's do it honey, I want you, I need you in my life. Yeah. Yeah. How can we do this? How can we make this happen? You know, and, you know, and still not piss off any more relatives. All right, let me introduce you to my listeners. I can't even say, I can't even believe I'm saying to Phil Hendry, let me introduce you to my, to my listeners, but I have to because we have listeners all over the world. And I want to make a proper introduction and you're going to have to suffer through this, sir. I apologize. You're just going to have to take it like a man. All right. Well, I'm driving for coffee. So, you know, all right, folks, this is heaven for me. Phil Hendry is on the show. He is one of the most important comedic minds of any generation. And here's what you need to do. Go to PhilHendryShow.com and sign up for his monthly pass. I think it's like eight bucks. He'll tell us in a second. I'm not sure. Maybe it's eight bucks a month. I'm telling you, this is the deal of a lifetime. I just signed up for it. Someone has gone and archived all of Phil Hendry's radio shows. I signed up for it last night. I can kick myself. I didn't know you could do this. And I, I started listening to some old episodes of the Phil Hendry show last night. There are 30,000 hours of Phil Hendry with no commercials. This cannot be good. This is not good for somebody like me. This is, I am, I have an addictive personality. I barely slept last night. Let me tell you how important Phil Hendry is. My son, my oldest son, is in Germany right now. He just graduated from college and he is off studying Karl Marx and speaking German in Berlin, living the life. And we FaceTimed and he said, why are there dark, he said, why do you have dark circles under your eyes? I said, because Phil Hendry is on the show and I was up all last night listening to his archives and my 23 year old son, when I told him that I was about to talk to Phil Hendry, I might as well have said to him, somebody has combined Noam Chomsky and Barack Obama and I'm about to speak to this mutant of Noam Chomsky and Barack Obama and Robin Williams. You could not believe it and he just graduated from college. My kids grew up listening to Phil Hendry in Los Angeles. We timed errands so we could listen to Phil Hendry. I have bootleg tapes of Phil Hendry in storage when my wife threw me out of the house. I have tapes of Phil Hendry and it turns out I don't need them because I just signed up for the PhilHendryShow.com. And Phil, how you doing David? They are better. I guess I already, I guess I know how you're doing, you're tired, you got dark circles. You're in trouble. Here's what I want to do because we've never met and we've never talked. I want to gush a little and get people to sign up for PhilHendryShow.com if you don't mind. Can we do that? That's a beautiful thing, I appreciate that very much. So I may cover some ground with you that is banal, stuff you've already been through and I apologize for it but some people just have no idea how brilliant you are. So who curated the 30,000 hours? How did you do that? Well, most of the people who don't know how brilliant I am are radio executives but... Anyway, I am... No, actually that stuff came to us in a big lump of material from ClearChannel, passing the ownership of the material to us. So what we did then is I had a pretty f***ing click like who was our administrator and basically it was already chronological. So all we had to do was mic platform over to ours, make sure that no links were broken and that was in 2006, David, and from 2006 to today, 10 years, we have gradually refined the logs, refined the media, gone from MP3s to video as well, we've had three or four different designs to the website. So we've improved as we go. One of the things I've learned about websites is it's always constantly, you know, the technology is changing, improving it, and then we add to it with the current little power-long podcast that I do today, which is very different from on the radio show because we're not on the radio anymore, so it's just basically a straight character presentation. The great thing about your website is you introduce all the characters and you explain where they come from and how they evolved, where Bobby Dooley came from and Bell and these voices just, they, like my son, that was, that was an idea that my present web guy Shane Martin had. He said, let's do pictures of these people because really it's about you and them and let's have them in sort of a carousel of characters and because they're just as real. So and I don't mean to the listeners. I mean to me, you know, and that's how that's how bad it's gotten. But I talked to him off the air. So I, that was a great idea. And that's only about a month or so old because the new designer of our site, if you became a member of the last night, David, I think, I heard you say you're entering the website that's only a month old in terms of the design. It's so, yeah. Yeah, I like it. I like the, it's, and the other thing is, and I don't get too technical, but I don't think anybody's tried this before, man. I don't think anybody has a radio repository or an audio comment, comedy repository that's so large. I really would say with confidence that it's probably the largest in the world because most radio guys toss a two minute bit in there to say, here's our show today and we interviewed so-and-so and then the rest of it is just whatever. So such an enormous amount of material that I thought for a while there, we're going to have to hire somebody like the New York public library to know how to actually move it. And just to tell a lot of people that we did find some people that do it. And so there it is. And we're always thick on a guy today on Twitter. Hey, man, I signed up for a BSP. What happened to episode 609 which means you don't get this shit kicked out of me. You know, I'm like, what the hell are you talking about, man? It is, yeah, it's the most important thing going. So I get on the horn to my web people. I go, what happened to episode 609 that you can't find? Oh, yeah, the place that the code is wrong, man. That didn't show up because the code's wrong from the old site to the new site. We just corrected the code. So it's there now. Just stuff like that, which to you and I is a technical or to anybody that loves this, your work or my work, David, they're going to commit Harry Carey. I mean, they're going to have their, you know, you're stealing from them. So, so. Well, let me tell you about Phil Hendry show.com because I have these bootleg tapes. I have the reverend hooking homosexuals, genitalia up to a car, a car battery, curing homosexuality. And I would play this to all my friends over the years and it always held up. But I had no idea if your stuff would, what the shelf life was, it's right funnier now than the first time I heard it. I think you're the only radio personality ever in the history of the medium, unless you go back to like Jack Benny, because he still holds up, your stuff, your stuff holds up. And I cannot believe that you can go to Phil Hendry show.com pay, I don't know, eight bucks. I don't know what it is. I don't care. It was like, I think it's nine bucks or something like that. Nine bucks. I cannot believe that for nine bucks a month, I have access to 30,000 hours commercial free. Let me explain to the listeners what you invented, how profound it was and why people like Judd Apatow, Seth MacFarlane, Rick Overton, worship you. These people, I mean, you're operating at a level. There's there's comedy and then there's Phil Hendry. One of the things you, you stumbled upon something that is phenomenal. You do a regular talk show. You sound like a normal human being. And then you would have a guest on the show who would be the descendant of plantation owners. And he would insist that if we're going to give reparations to African Americans, the slave owners, the children of the descendants of slave owners are entitled to reparations because of all the lost labor. And you would treat the lost income and you would, but nobody knew other than the listeners in the big markets in Los Angeles. We were in on the joke. We knew that you were the voice of the descendant of the slave holders. But we also knew that your show was being syndicated to Backwater Towns. And that's, well, you know, I gotta, I gotta interrupt you there, though, because the really the people that we got that we hooked on the line were from a lot of them were from LA and from the bigger cities. Really? You know, big cities have all kinds of people. Yeah. And I remember, I remember a sales guy, KFI, saying to me when I first walked into the sales meeting there, he said, well, you might have been successful in places like, well, within two weeks, you know, he gave, I proved him wrong because we were not syndicated right away. We were local until 1999. And that's when we became national. So these were, oh, wow. Yeah, all kinds of people. And I mean, and people who were, who would openly admit to me, David, oh, look, I'm a member of Mensa. So don't even mess with me. Okay. And that's how the, I tell the quote would start, you know, I have a degree in psychology and everything. So you, you know, you can just forget your little funny game. And you know, this guy is, well, you're, and you still want to say to the guy, is that right? Well, you're talking to a made-up voice, sir. It's not really a psychiatrist from, you know, I would say, yeah, you, LA, any large city is just, there's just more of everybody, including kind of the dummies, including sort of the dummies. And, and maybe not quite as unsophisticated in terms of city life and that kind of thing. But when it comes to media, especially the way we were using the way like you were saying, because everybody was taking talk radio. So seriously, it was reaching its penultimate moment of, you know, call it the, the campfire, you know, America's campfire. Until it had to be, you know, slamming. And that's, that's what we did. But I interrupted you, but I wanted to kind of, yeah, I was, I was always, well, I had heard somebody told me that Laurie Metcalf, the great actress from Steppenwolf and, and from Roseanne, that, that she was one of the fake callers early on. Is that true? No, no, I would say that, no, she was never on the show that way, but Laurie was a friend from, sort of almost from the minute I got to LA, she got in touch with me and really enjoyed the show. And I had the good fortune to hang out with her. Glenn Headley was another one who was there. And from the Eagles, you know, from the Eagles. No, no, Glenn Headley. I'm not talking about that one. I'm talking about the redheaded, the beautiful redheaded actress who was in Dick Tracy, things you get to do and then, you know, you know, Glenn Headley, redhead, and then Jeff Altman, a rush shaper, you know, guys like that. Oh, wow. Which was a perk, you know, I didn't, I had no idea. I mean, I, I had no idea that that was, I grew up in Los Angeles, but I, when I came here, my whole feeling was, this is going to be cool to be on the air in my hometown, because I know where things are. That was the big perk for me. I know where this freeway is and this town is. I had no, I wasn't prepared for the Hollywood thing, which quick when it came to that. But being, being seduced by people who, who would say things, well, you, you have done a lot of acting jobs. You're in Futurama and you've been in movies that Judd Apatow directed and you're, you were in a sitcom. You played a teacher on a sitcom, right? I, yeah. T, yeah. And it was called teachers. Right. I've even, but I never really thought about anything like that until I got here and be realized that the radio world was a very limited thing. There was a ceiling that I was bumping up against that, you know, these cats, the show, that sounds like a normal thing. You and I, but in radio, they don't want to do that too much work like that. They really want to turn key operation and so, and they wanted their political talk and my show, while it sounded like a talk show, was really just a comedy show and it, and it should have been on its own, almost format, like personality talk as opposed to a news talk. So it was like selling t-shirts. It was like selling really good tie dye t-shirts in a Cadillac showroom, you know, or maybe it's the other way around. Maybe I was selling Cadillacs that tie dye t-shirt showroom. People would come in and say, Oh, wow, that's a really cool Cadillac you got there. We want to buy one. Well, no, I came in here to get a t-shirt, you know. So what happened instead was good people like yourself, Dave, and other people found us, that's why the website works, because now it's a place to go to and say, OK, here is where we can go and we understand it and we listen to it. And this is the library of that act, you know, and we don't have to sit there and wade through all of the noise of a talk radio station, which is pretty daunting. There are two people who paralyzed me in my car. One was Howard. I would sit and listen to Howard. But I grew Howard. There comes a point when you start getting laid and you. You know, we go, All right, all right, I'm done with Howard. Hey, David, David, guys, do you mind if I order some coffee? I would love to hear it. Let's listen. I'm at the Starbucks. Yeah, I'm at the Starbucks drive-in drive-through. OK. And go ahead. But when you hear me say something, I want to hear you order coffee. This is good. Can I get two cups of vintage latte with non-fat milk? Yes. OK, thank you. That's the latte with non-fat milk and tea off the street today. That's it. Thank you. All right, so to my listeners who have never heard of you and this is really important, I'm listening to that wondering, is that really the voice of the girl behind the cash register? Because that's your show. That's one of the things you've done is where you trick the listener into thinking that the other voices you hear are real. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's that. You know, I loved radio since the day I was born, I think. And I wrote with my parents to see my cousins and my aunt. My uncle and my parents moved to California in the late 40s from Toronto. But during that trip and it seemed like I would be the only one awake other than my dad as he was driving across the desert. He had the radio on and I would hear these stations fade in and fade out. I would hear these lone voices providing this amazing entertainment. There's music. He's talking about the weather. He's talking about the city he's in. He sounded first and sound like a nice guy. And I thought, man, I didn't I don't think I thought then I want to do that for a living. But I sure as hell thought, this is a really cool thing that this guy is doing. You know, and so I think from that point forward, I was always thinking of ways to further manipulate it, further manipulate it. I mean, isn't that what it's about? Well, no matter what our heart is, how can we where can we go with it? You know, until it got to the point where satire, I loved humor so much. Satire to satirize it was the next logical step. Not just to do it, but to blow it up a little bit. Because you love it, not because you hate it. You love it, right? Although, I have to tell you, I I don't love talk radio. I I hate talk radio, but I don't I don't hate radio. Well, you hate what it's become, because I think in this country, they're afraid of radio radio is preliterate. Radio is the most dangerous thing around. It gets in your head and it can convince you to do horrible things in Rwanda. They couldn't have had the genocide in Rwanda without radio. It was well, yeah, that they told there was a morning shock, shock. No, the generals would get on the radio, not the television, because they'd get in the head of the Hutus and tell them to start massacring the Tutsis or whatever they were called. I don't mean to be glib. Oh, my God. You know, I had I had no idea. And that's why I mean, I realize, you know, that's why there's so much corporate control in America because of radio, because if people are allowed to say what they want to say, we could have a real democracy here. I was listening to you last night after 9 11. I said, let me just see what happened, but how he handled 9 11. Yeah, Ted Bell, who owns the Ted, the steakhouse. And yeah, he is a real entrepreneur. As you always say, he was the one who was the first. It was the first I guess to put a little bit of right, right. Well, and also, I believe he was the first one to have an actual serrated steak knife or butter knife, you know. I remember I remember taking my kids to the Colburn Music School and we're driving, you know, that's expensive stuff to take your kid to music school and Ted Bell was on and you. Ted Bell Steakhouse was being people were protesting because you didn't want Ted Bell, didn't want handicapped people sitting in the front bank. It's I don't know if you remember this, but you would come in the. You know, it's not it. Yeah, but you would you had some kind of thing with the Make a Wish Foundation or disabled people. It was a special hour where they could come and eat. But then afterwards you threw them out because they were on. They were on appetizing and you're trying to move steaks there and people criticized you for we moved that around at one. We did the same thing David at a Laker game. In other words, he he had these tickets and they were right next to Jack Nicholson and he gave me, you know, Phil, I'd like you to, you know, just bring on. I'd like to take a couple of your listeners. Well, we have a charity that we were. Oh, yeah. Okay, let's help it up with the charity kids and it turned out to be like bald kids with, you know, chemotherapy and suddenly Ted like freak freak out. He's sitting with bald kids and he's and he's also sitting with blessed little hearts to develop manly disabled kids. So some of the kids are not watching the game. They're looking up in the air and they're staring at and they take the hot dog out of the bun. No, I can't I can't I can't do it, man. Well, they're licking the window and putting the baloney on it. And it just doesn't work, you know, I can't do it, man. I can't do it. And there's nothing worse. And you know what, when we when we prep that, because you you learn you learn what the visceral areas are, you know, you can talk about things that are topical, but they have to be visceral. They have to be emotional. Like I can talk about mowing the lawn. Everybody knows about mowing the lawn. But who cares? But if I talk about children, if I talk about immigrants, if I talk about veterans, we, you know, there are areas, animals. And it's certainly children that are disabled and then throw in that you're going back on a promise you made. Now you're a kid of the biggest asshole in the world. And you just got that you go there because you go, how do we pull call? I know how we're going to pull calls. We got to go. We got to go there. And I know how to get us there. But we have to go there, you know, but I remember that this is one of the most vivid memories of raising children. So Colburn School, kids in the back seat, three kids in the back seat, expensive piano lessons, dance lessons. We're driving down to Colburn School. And this is going on where Ted Bell is kicking handicapped people out of the steakhouse because, you know, he's trying to sell steak and people lose their appetite when they see them. And I parked the car and the radio and I'm just I have my hands on the steering wheel and nobody's saying anything. And, you know, it's like four o'clock, the classes start. Yeah. And it's now, you know, and daddy. And I go, no, I think we have to hear this. And they were like a half hour late for their lessons. And we come home and my how are the lessons? Well, there we were late a half hour, Phil Hendry and my wife to her credit said, yeah, well, yeah, it was like this was more important than my kids hear this. It was, yeah, you know, you bring that up because that's called time spent listening and radio. That's a that's like gold when you have people sitting in a car to hear the end of a bit or they that's that's gold. And in LA, our commute time in Los Angeles is somewhere in the neighborhood an hour. So if you can get a TSL from a radio listener of even 10 minutes a day times five, you know, so that's almost an hour a week. That's an amazing TSL in New York. It's shorter because people are on subways near TSL. If you can get somebody for five minutes a day, believe it or not, the average the listener to Howard is probably a lot longer than that. But average radio listener in New York is probably only hearing their radio for maybe five, ten minutes every two days, something like that. When you say that to me or any listener says to me, I stayed in my car, you're like, nah, you give that to a sales guy, and he should be able to take that and go out and sell you a whole lot of airtime. Oh, now you crippled us. What happened to my what happened to my guys? I don't have any idea, but you know, Oh, you you you you cripple us. I have memories because we were originally from San Francisco and we would drive up the one on one and the five and somebody would sit in the front seat frantically searching for Phil Henry that we would be constantly looking for you and it was all the different. It was all the difference. The trip was if we could get you, then the trip was OK. And if we couldn't find you, we were we had to talk to one another, it really sucked. Yeah. Did you find after 9-11 I was shocked by Ted Bell and he was complaining about the 300 people dying on 9-11. Sometimes it was 30,000. He was getting the numbers wrong. The numbers are all wrong. The numbers are all wrong. He was complaining that because he's rich, he should be able to have his limo driver pick up his luggage at the at the carousel. It was as sacrilegious as you could get after 9-11. And at the same time, harmless. What kind of trouble was there or was there any? There wasn't any substantial. The trouble you get with bits like that is it's tasteless. Well, there's an argument to be made there. Is it or is it not? You know, where you're going to get into trouble is if you in danger. I did one that I regret. I had one day our general manager, David Holcomb, on a character that I did saying that he had anthrax because he accidentally sniffed this powder. That is funny and it's also not too dangerous because anthrax in the powder is sort of static. It's in an envelope. It's sitting someplace. You have to go to it or find it. But I really messed up. A week later, I went on and said he had tuberculosis. And that, thank God, I bailed on that bit within about 10 minutes because I just I didn't feel right about it because the next day there was a fair number of phone calls from people pissed off about that. That's a panic thing. And you don't want to do that. That was a mistake. So one of those that we made, you're in a bubble and yet you're not. You know, I'm a stand up comic. I know how I'm doing if I've crossed a line by the booze. And, you know, when you're doing radio, it's the calls. But the calls aren't an accurate barometer of the audience. The calls are the lunatics who have the time to actually call you. That's exactly right. And that's something that you retire business to back when we started doing our show, present only about two percent of the audience or maybe one. And then the colors that get through on our show represent an even smaller version of that. The real audience. Yeah, yeah. That's like when I was a kid and the real audience is not active either. You know, when I was a kid, my father listened to the radio all the time. But I said to him one day when I got older and I was in the business, I said, Dan, do you ever written a fan letter to a guy? What? You know, why would I do that? You know, well, Dan, I'm going to write a letter to this Jackass, but you like listening to him. Oh, sure. Well, that's that's really the typical radio list that they don't really reach out and actively seek out. They just dig it. They listen. It gets them through the day, gets them through a commute. And that's we knew the bit itself, the material itself was going to reverberate into the larger audience in a negative way. One, one bit, one thing that happened in LA in those days, David, you might remember there were windows, automobile windows getting shattered by rocks from slingshots out on the freeway. People were getting their windows shattered from passing cars using slingshots. It's only took place over a period of a week. It happened at night, but it was extreme. And I just bit where I had a gangbanger, you know, where I thought, you know, yeah, well, you know, I'm going to I'm looking for my marriage badge right now, but later on this shit. Well, this little girl calls during the commercial break in my producer system drives home at night for her work. And I want to know if she's OK. And I said, honey, I told her right away what was going on. And generally what happens happened to her. She went from this very serious concern voice to hysterical laughter within five seconds, you know, she couldn't believe she was she was laughing her ass off and also very relieved, you know. So that that kind of stuff will bother me. And I'll I'll definitely break character and break the still called fourth wall to let people know. But beyond that, I don't care. Like I'll give you an example, David, where some people invite it. They invite the insult. Do you an example? I was talking about a I have a character named Harvey Wireman. He's an old he's an ex-Marine attorney. Sort of based on F. Lee Bailey. And I went to Jack's school. The Marines made him an attorney. Now he said, you know, you guys, you know, I was in Saipan and WW2. So don't give me your bullshit. She's her and he's talking about this billboard, this workout billboard. I saw this woman. She was a piece of ass up there. A guy calls and he wants to blow Harvey. I don't know what the premise was, something that really offended this moment. This guy says, he says, what about that woman? I lost my step and Harvey goes, what's your piece of ass? She must have been a piece of ass calling it. Now we get away with that. You get away. That's you. That's you. Yeah, but when I say in the audience, instinctively knows it's OK, what Phil just did there, because that guy was asking for it. You know, he was asking for it. It really is. You just get to certain satisfaction. Well, to reduce it down to its essence, it's not to be insulting. It's kind of like a ventriloquist routine. Where you're you're indemnified, you say these horrible things and then blame your dummies. But it's much more sophisticated than that. Well, but you know, the thing is, the audience like going to a play, the audience will not hold the actor responsible for the horrible things the actor is saying. It's the same thing. If I was just doing a straight talk show, as you will not probably get fired because it's coming through a character and everybody knows they're cool. Oh, that's a little here. Or they get the fact, well, he's making a larger point about this, that or something else who knows, you know, but I always felt that if you had to have a certain a higher level of intelligence to kind of get our show of what we were doing mechanically and also what we were doing in terms of content, it was a real it was it's a real satire, which is humor with a point of view, you know, and our point of view tended I tend to be a liberal fucking everything up. You know, I want to kill everything. So I I could use my liberal sensibility to kind of mess with people and say things like, you know, Bobby Dooley is a character. You know, Phil, we have our homeowners association. These American flags, you know, these American flags, they fuck. They violate our homeowners association. What do you mean they violate? They're too large, you know, they got to put smaller flags up there. I know that my father has a friend who was at Iwo Iwo or whatever that was, and they put a flag in the Iwo G mark. Yeah, the first flag they put up at Iwo Iwo was smaller than the big one that they put up in all of this shit. I can remember driving down the one on one with my family and Bobby was complaining about these new neighbors. They're black, but that's OK. And that was your refrain. Threat the entire thing they're black, but that's OK. You did exactly exactly. Yeah, you know, there's something very psychopathic about that, man, you don't trust that woman at all. You know, I had her. I had a bit, probably one of the more controversial ones, but people, you know, liked it was. Steve and I are going to Europe this summer and we're going to go visit Auschwitz. Yeah, it's really interesting. Have you heard about it? Yes, I have heard about it. You know, I go, Bobby, you realize that millions of people killed there. Uh-huh. Yeah. And we're going to go see that, you know, you're like, she's not quite getting it here, man. You know, I think it works. You get talking about and after that, we're going to go to the Black Forest for a box lunch, you know, like that. I always love it. Just, you know, David, I grew up and Bobby is my mother. You know, I grew up with sort of a psychopathic mother. You know, she was my mom. She and that whole thing that I did with Bobby when people would talk, I do this thing. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Even almost as if she's not really hearing me, I'm saying, and mom, the other thing that I did. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah, it's kind of like your mother. Well, you're telling her that you just not won the Nobel Prize. She's looking to see if your pants are right, you know, and if you got the right socks on and shoes are right, all this shit. The great thing. Yeah, that's my mom. The great thing that I, as I was listening to you last night when I should have been sleeping, it's music. There is music. There is the slow build. It's symphonic. And you know exactly where you are on the clock when you want, you know when to accelerate it. Near the end, you have to get people angry and screaming. And it is a, it's a, it really is, you're a maestro because you begin to provoke and say things and get the people really angry to the point where it completely breaks down, where people are screaming at each other and it is the worst. And it's bizarre. And it gets bizarre too. The guy, you know, next thing you know, the guy's talking about traveling extra dimensionally or something, you know, where, where are you talking about now? I don't know. This guy Jason, I've got Korean War veteran character, I do them. Well, he bona fide, I'll tell you something. And he had another veteran called up. Hey buddy, how you doing? Yeah, I'm fine. Some guy in DC, you know what we used to do to a guy and they're talking about a third person there. Another character I'm doing. We used to take a guy like that. Now this guy is like, no, no, no, we didn't do that. Man, that's no, uh-uh. Oh, come on. Sure you did. I don't want to. So that's an area. Yeah. The, the, I guess this is an unfair questions. I don't want to peel back the curtain too much. How much preparation and how much of a staff do you have? Do you talk it out with anybody? How much of, this is an unfair question, but. Well, I mean, look, the curtain's been peeled back for me. And I'm gonna be very honest with you. People sometimes say, well, you must have a lot of people. And actually no, I worked with a producer writer for a few years and I had some really good ones. But I found that I am better at it. I'm better at knowing exactly what the topic is. I know exactly how I want to write it. I don't, I never did have, and I had some good ones, but I never had one that was quite as, as I was. So I wound up really with a bare staff. I, it was me and I also produced and wrote, we had an engineer and we had a phone screener who had a staff of three toward the end. When we had that thing pumping on all cylinders, and I would say 2005 was the year it was really smoking. That's what we had and it worked great. I know exactly, you know, everything kind of came together. I know exactly what kind of topics, you know, one of the big mistakes we make in talk radio is you grab newspaper and you look at the headline. And I always used to say to my guys, the only reason why they have a headline there, man, is because they have to have a headline. There may be nothing going on, but they're gonna put up some stupid thing like water bond issue passes. Wow, everybody's talking about the water bond issue then, huh? No, nobody gives a shit, man, but they gotta put something there. So you gotta, that's, those are the days when you gotta kind of sit there and almost telepathically figure out what's the country talking about? I was driving to work one night. It was late January at four o'clock in the afternoon. Nothing going on, man. I think the Super Bowl had already been played. It was that dead time of year. And I just sat in my car for a few minutes before I went inside. I said, it came to me. People are talking about their jobs. Right now, they're talking about their jobs, how much they hate driving to work. And that's, I went upstairs with that as a colonel of what I was gonna do on the show, and it was a great hour. I don't, I forget what we did with it, but if you looked at the headline that day, it probably would have been some bullshit about, who knows what, man, some president threw up, maybe pushed choked on a fuck. And in terms of prep, in terms of prep work, you, if you don't mind my asking, is it conceivable that some of these shows, you just show up at the studio and are totally unprepared with just the German? No, no, that can happen, but a couple of things have to be happening to make that happen. For instance, one night I was on the air, WCCO in Minneapolis, I went upstairs for a cigarette. It was the last news break of the night. It's one o'clock in the morning, I get off the air too, so I got an hour. And I don't like what I got planned. And all of a sudden, I popped into my head. Maybe it was something we'd been talking about unrelated to during the hour. Something popped into my head. And in that five minute period, I formulated exactly what we did that show on radio. Maybe two or three times. So you have to, you got to work, you know, like everything else in this world, you have to work. And some days it's easier than others. You remember, just checking in, Gary, Oh, I'm laughing, yes. Of course. Yeah, yeah, Gary used to say, Gary used to say, for every hour you're on the air, that's how many hours you should prep. So if you do a three hour show, you should prep for three hours. And I did that religiously for many years. After all, it was Gary Oden. I found out that, well, that worked for Gary Oden. This show didn't work for Phil Henry, because I would spend three hours worrying about shit, man. You could do it the other way. And we could do that, you know. How do I find that an hour and a half for me is... How do you know if the show is good or bad? How do you measure the quality? I have to, if I'm entertained, I have to really go with that, because they were good calls, but they didn't really crack me up. They all just kind of won after the other. I'm sure that we had hours and even whole shows toward the end of my run on live radio, where I had a whole lot of people that kind of knew who I was and kind of got what this thing was, but maybe I was being serious, maybe I wasn't. So they were very cautious. And in being cautious, it wasn't as freewheeling as it could be. And so I would sense that. And so it wasn't very funny, even though it seemed like it maybe was working. I have to laugh if I'm cracking myself up. And I don't mean that to say, gee, aren't I a genius? Just if I'm laughing, then I gotta say, well, by God, I must have hit the bullseye tonight because I'm laughing. I don't know. Where and when did you find that confidence? The confidence to laugh and to know that it was good that it's that you're the final judge, jury and executioner. Oh, yeah. After I would say, you know, David, I spent 17 years as a disc jockey kind of morning show host, kind of a guy and you know those shows, you know, you're you're going in and you're doing, you're trying to be funny and you even have a joke service. And then you sit down with the program director it tells you how much you suck that morning and you go home and you're just wondering why am I doing it. And your entire life is based on does the boss like me? Does the boss like me? And if you get fired enough times and in radio, we, that's what we say, you know, there's people that, two kinds of people who believe that the ones that get fired are the ones that haven't been fired yet. But you get fired enough times and you either do one of two things. You get your ship together and figure out how to really do this thing or you get out of the business and do something else, you know, and I fortunately, I was the former. I said, well, no, wait just a second here, man. I like doing this and I know I'm good at it. I'm just gonna, I'm gonna take the governor off and I'm not gonna edit as much and I'm just gonna go for it, man, no matter what happens. And that's when you say, care who laughs? I don't care if I get a big audience or a little audience. If I'm speaking my truth, you know, if I'm doing exactly what I've always wanted to do and then I'm a success, you know, I mean, I heard an interview with Brian Denning, he was an actor, driving a cab in New York. He said, I was making $50 a week driving a cab and I was doing this equity waiver theater and I thought I was a success. They said, why? I said, I was happy, I couldn't have been more happy. He wasn't a movie star, he wasn't even a big theater star. He was making 50 bucks a week driving a cab and working for free and equity waiver. And you know, to be successful, you gotta really dig it, you gotta enjoy it. It's just, you know, like, and if I shake my head some days and I go, God damn it, man, why haven't I won a Marconi award? You know, I don't wanna say it's because these, the fools don't understand, I don't wanna be like Dr. Frankenstein or anything. There's just a whole lot of other considerations out there that aren't quite making it down to my level yet, but I know I'm doing good stuff. And I have good guys like you and Lori and whoever I've met through the years that I admire and I love and I think are funnier than hell. And the biggest award that I could get would be a guy like you, David, calling me up and saying, we'd be on my podcaster, John Apatow saying, you wanna be in my movie or, I mean, I could never, in my wildest dreams, have thought that that would happen to me, so. Well, you are operating and you've been very generous with your time and I know you have to get your show ready. I wanted to ask you two more questions about intellectual stamina, because you have stamina. I'm always curious where you get that stamina from. How you're able to do it day in and day out without burning out. Although, well, you gotta make a living, you know. It's as simple as that, you know. And now I own a business, you know. So if I was just working for a radio station, I'd probably quit, take a month off, go here, go there, maybe something like that, but I own this business now and I have to keep the dollars coming in. And you know, that's like, I always use dear people who own restaurants, you know, you're there, you're mopping the floor and you're cooking the food and you're doing everything. Well, that's true. And with this little business that we have, we have not only the show has to be produced, but we have to make sure that technically we're right, we do fulfillment, we sell merchandise, we are in touch with our advertisers, we are in touch with our subscribers, we're, you know, it is never a minute of the day that I'm not thinking about my girlfriend is off and on a cruise this week, I would love to be with her, but I can't do it, you know, so. Right. Well. I think it's just, you gotta do it. Look, you have kids, man. You don't say, well, how do you do it, David? I got kids, I gotta take care of, you know. I got a family, I gotta take care of, you know. So you find a way. Let me tell my listeners that they have to go to PhilHendryShow.com and sign up eight, nine bucks a month. 30,000 hours have been archived. I promise you, you will end up quitting your job, leaving your wife, sitting in your car, immobile. You'll be paralyzed by this man's genius. You know, David Letterman said of Robin Williams, when Robin came on the scene in Los Angeles, all the comics realized that there was Robin Williams and then this other type of comedy that people were doing that the rest of us were on the ground and Robin was in the stratosphere. And then Robin would go off and do movies and then the comics could pretend they were funny and then Robin would return to remind the comics that yes, we're just mere mortals. The same holds true for PhilHendry. This is true and I hope my listeners will go sign up for PhilHendryShow.com and start listening to this. You're operating at a completely different level of comedy and I started listening to you last night, the archives and I, you know, my bootlegs of you hold up because I've listened, you know, I play them for people but the stuff I was listening to last night, funnier, the second time, not only does it hold up, not only does it hold up, it's at another level of artistry and thank God that they have been archived and curated, you've done, whoever did that for you has done such an amazing job to go through the years and they tell you who the characters are and what the premise is and I'm pretty much gonna go get off the phone with you and go listen to some more stuff. This has been, this is an honor and a little terrifying. You must know though that anybody who does comedy in Los Angeles knows what you are. Right? You must know that. I really, well, I got a lot of friends, I've made a lot of friends in the standup comedy business, somebody like Jennifer Coolidge, who I think is hysterically funny and I met her one day at a Napoleon Dynamite voice session, she was playing a character and she worked and she looked at me, she goes, oh, you're the guy they all think is funny, huh? There's that, I get that reaction right now again. Fortunately, generally the women, no, I wouldn't say that. It helped because I was doing once a month, if I'd known you, David, I would have asked you but I was doing once a month of so many friends over the Hollywood improv and fortunately, I could call up four people and say, would you please come up on stage with me? And they would and I doubt what you guys do, I cannot do, I wish I could, I can't, I can't write jokes, I can't stand there, my timing sucks, the audience gets to me too much. I can stand in front of a camera, I could go on stage and do a play but standup comedy takes so much courage and I'm not just saying that, after the year was up doing that at the Hollywood improv and they said, do you wanna do some more? I said, I can't, I don't think so because I don't think I'm any good at it, man. Well, it's not even, standup for the most part is just this rigidity, this repeating the same bits over and over and honing them, your mind is, you're working so fast and you're so prolific, why would you bother with standup comedy? Your mind is so, anyway, I can't even begin to thank you for the joy that you brought my family and continue to bring my family and my listeners, go to PhilHendryShow.com, watch his live show that he does every day and go through those archives, you will, no commercials, you will be, you won't be able to move, you'll be crippled. Thank you so much, Phil, Phil Hendry, thank you so much. Thank you, David. Thank you, brother, it was great, great time, thank you.