Jimmy Kimmel

The titan of late night takes his turn on the other side of the desk for an in-depth interview with the ‘Our Way’ gang. Kimmel opens up about his early years in Las Vegas (when he played trumpet at Wayne Newton’s house!) and his breakthrough on the Comedy Central classic ‘Win Ben Stein’s Money.’ He also opens up about the rough beginnings of his long-running network talk show, some of the biggest guest star train-wrecks he’s encountered, and how he earned his reputation as one of the greatest pranksters in the business — even though it annoys his wife on occasion…And, of course, he reveals the origin of the epic televisual union between himself and Guillermo.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Our Way with yours truly Paul Anka and my buddy
Skip Bronson, is a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, folks, this
is Paul Anka and.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
My name is Skip Bronson.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
We've been friends for decades and we've decided to let
you in on our late night phone calls by starting
a new podcast.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
And welcome to Our Way. We'd like you to meet
some real good friends of ours.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Your leaders in entertainment and.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Sports, innovators in business and technology, and even a sitting
president or two.

Speaker 3 (00:34):
Join us as we asked the questions they've not been
asked before, tell it like it is, and even sing
a song or two.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
This is our podcast, and we'll be doing it our way.

Speaker 4 (00:47):
You know, when I started, at the very beginning of
the show, it was clear that a lot of the
guests didn't even know who I was.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
You know.

Speaker 4 (00:53):
It was like they'd come The first two years, i'd
have a sidekick sit with me for the whole week,
so like I'd have Ed McMahon there or Mike Tyson
there for the week, And sometimes the guests would come
out and they just start talking to the other person,
and I'd be sitting there quietly like, hello, I'm you
know I am actually the most of the show.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
Hey, hey, what's going on? Did the rain shut you down?
No golf?

Speaker 2 (01:31):
No?

Speaker 1 (01:32):
No, golf got pretty funky. I couldn't play pickleball either.
It's okay, Hey, our guests coming up. Man, he had
a cool you know I saw him the other night
with Denzel Washington. Oh really yeah, a cool little vibe
to it, and it really was very very cool. He's
such a good interviewer. And I'm talking about Jimmy Kimmel,
who's going to be on with this This guy, he's

(01:53):
different than everybody else on the air. You know that
the others aren't talented, but this guy really holds the crown.

Speaker 3 (01:59):
And his monologue is you know, if you look at
the three Late night guys with you know, he and
Fallon and Colbert. I mean, his monologue is just so good.
His delivery is great. In fact, I want to ask him, like,
how does he do this? He has memorize it. I
wonder if he uses Q cards or maybe he has,
you know, a teleprompter. But yeah, it's all so natural,
you know, it's not forced at all.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
It's funny. And I also want to ask him. I
know he grew up in Las Vegas.

Speaker 3 (02:25):
But why, Yeah, did his father work in a casino
and how did that all come down.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
I'm just going for the human being. I mean, because
of my daughter and Amanda and Jason. I mean, he's
so loved and he gives back in terms of charity
and its children hospital, and it's so diverse in from
being a fly fisherman to being a chef, and he draws,
and he's just a great human being that's loved by

(02:51):
everybody in our industry and obviously by the public. I'm
going to go hit all of those little bases. I
think it's going to be very, very important.

Speaker 3 (02:59):
And the way he eats the people around him. Guermo,
the guy who was a security guard, is sort of
his Ed McMahon, that's his sidekick. I want to hear
about how that first came down. Cleto is buddy who
you know, grew up went to high school with his
band leader. I mean, he's got his family, is not
Chippy and his cousins.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
You know, Galero is certainly not Ed mcmahoning and wasn't
a song and dance man, No, not at all. He
was a park cards in the security guard in the parking.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
Lot but his comedic timing is terrific.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
He's a good talker.

Speaker 3 (03:32):
When Ghirmo goes and goes to the Academy Awards and
backstage and he interviews the winners, and I mean, it's
just fall down funny.

Speaker 2 (03:40):
I mean, the guy is just great.

Speaker 1 (03:41):
They got this ship down, They're in the right zone,
and he's just I'm so looking for I hear so
many great things about him, and I know it all
holds up because you can't get that many people that
have all that good to say. So I'm pretty excited
about it. I really am. And I hope you are skipt.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, I am.

Speaker 3 (03:58):
You know, I first came across and when he was
on that show when ben Stein's Money, that was the
first time any of us had ever seen him, and
he was really funny and smart clever. I'd like to
know how he wound up with that gig, and then
from there his career.

Speaker 2 (04:14):
Just took off.

Speaker 3 (04:15):
But the Late night show is just spectacular great. I
also asked him about you know, I know he was
a lot heavier and when I've heard these stories that
he fasts two days a week, he eats whatever he
wants five days a week and then fast two days
a week.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
I want to hear if that's apocry full or if
that's real.

Speaker 3 (04:35):
Son'd like with the people we have on Paul, we
like to hear sort of their routine, you know, go
to bed early, go to a bit late.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
Exercise, do this, do that. It'll be fun.

Speaker 1 (04:46):
You want to hear and get into what most people
that are listening don't ever get to know. Yep, and
that's what I like, all right, my darling. It's time
to say good night and sleep warm, and you get
up in the morning and you just tell me what
it's about. When I get ou at eleven.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
You bet you check in.

Speaker 1 (05:01):
I love you, man, love you too. Take care Skip.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
See you.

Speaker 4 (05:13):
There. He is, gentlemen. There.

Speaker 1 (05:15):
He is one of the most loved men in show business.
My daughter and her husband Jason adore him. So I
have the advantage of periphery things about this amazing human.
And I've got to tell you, I know, as happy
as I am about it, you're right in there with us.
And I go back maybe near the beginning Skip, because

(05:38):
his mom and dad came to see me at Caesar's
Palace and I met with this woman who had more
energy than I did and his dad, and they were
so proud of it. Was in the beginning, skip right,
when Jimmy was just putting this footprint from radio to
where we know him as probably the King of the Hill.
And I go back to Carson so I could say that.

(06:01):
Tell me, firstly, how are your parents.

Speaker 4 (06:04):
My parents are doing great, Thank you for asking. They
are excited that I'm on with you. And I will
tell you your daughter, Amanda, who I love dearly, is
annoyed by how much I talk about you with her.
You know, to her your her dad and to me
you're paul Anka and skip your skip ronson for sure,
no question about that. But I'm excited. I'm excited to

(06:26):
be here. I really am. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
It's correct now.

Speaker 1 (06:30):
But take us back. You know you and I shared Vegas,
probably in different time periods. I know you were their
eighties and on, probably a teenager.

Speaker 4 (06:38):
And I was there seventies eighties.

Speaker 1 (06:40):
Yeah, there you go. And I was there with those
guys the rat Pack, running around a steam room nude,
looking at well, having trouble with eye contact with the
guys that built Vegas. What was it to you and
how's it remained in your life?

Speaker 2 (06:54):
Jimmy.

Speaker 4 (06:55):
I was also running around nude, but just not really
not with the just a shrieker.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
Oh you were the guy.

Speaker 4 (07:04):
I will tell you a funny story about being nude
with someone famous. When I was a kid in Las Vegas,
I used to go to this gym occasionally called Camelot. Yeah,
it was like in the neighborhood, you know, it wasn't
out on the strip or anything. And I go there
every once in a while with my best friend who's
now my band leader, Clto, and we'd often see Sigfried
from Sigfried and Roy in the gym and he would

(07:26):
come and he'd do like fifteen sit ups and then
he'd go sit in the hot tub and the steamer,
you know, overworked. And you know, I couldn't. I just couldn't.
I couldn't figure out. I was like, Wow, this guy
really he doesn't work out? What is he doing here
all the time? I mean he's just sitting in the
hot tub with a bunch of naked guys walking around.
And then years later I figured it out.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
It all came to like, like.

Speaker 4 (07:49):
Why is he in a place that costs seventeen dollars
a month to be a member and that was.

Speaker 1 (07:54):
Why they were good guys.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
Yeah, oh god.

Speaker 3 (07:58):
I was on the Border Mirage resort, so obviously had
a lot of contact with Sigfrid and Roy. And Roy
was always just as Paul knows, the coolest guy see
you and say skip, hey, how things, how are your kids?

Speaker 2 (08:09):
What's going on?

Speaker 3 (08:10):
You could meet Siegfried twenty seven times. He would look
at you like a dog when he hears a funny noise,
how it talks his head to one sidelight. He sort
of thinks he's seen you before, but he's really not sure.

Speaker 4 (08:23):
There's always you know what's It's just like any couple.
You got one who remembers My wife is constantly saying like,
you know this person and she's been on the show,
you know, say alone and I'm like, oh hello, I
haven't seen you since the show. And then there's people
like me and Sigfried who don't know anything what's going
on at all.

Speaker 3 (08:40):
Sigfrid was smart, though he didn't want to bother with
the cats. He would dance out on the stage, you know,
on prance around and announce that welcome to the show
and whatever.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
But you know, Roy was the one. He literally would
sleep with the cats.

Speaker 4 (08:54):
One of the funniest things I ever saw, skip to
this day, was my dad got free tickets. That's the
only time we'd ever go to see anything is if
my dad got free tickets somehow to see Sigfried and
Roy at the Frontier. This is in the seventies, you know,
And we went to the show or in the back
in the front row was a group of Japanese businessmen

(09:15):
and they were all wearing suits and obviously on some
kind of business trip, all dressed up, sitting in the
front row, and this elephant begins urinating forcefully on the
stage and soaking them. I mean like it was like
turn into like a Gallagher concert all of and stuff.
They were diving under the tables, and I thought it
was just the best thing I've ever seen.

Speaker 1 (09:37):
Just speaking of diving under the tables a quickie. When
I worked with the boys in the early sixties, all
the mob guys, they were in a black book and
they weren't allowed to come into Vegas, and they really
monitored it well well. Whenever they would come in town,
we'd sneak them in. They'd be sitting at the San Showroom,
which was very small, and they'd be sitting ringside. Whenever

(09:58):
the spot like would deviate from the stage and hit
the tables, they'd all dive under the tables. That's how
we knew they were in sit there's Lord and neck
under the table. They were crazy.

Speaker 4 (10:15):
You know what I do, Paul, I often will be
in control of the music if we're having a party
or dinner or something like that with with your daughter,
Amanda and Jason, and I'll always secretly gain control of
the music and put your music on. And it's great watching.
And now you sit there and I watch Amanda as
the song comes on, and it usually takes her about
four seconds, and she turns to me.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
It's like, oh, well, speaking of which, Jimmy, speaking of which,
here's what I know about you. This guy Skip, I'm
gonna give him a title of a song, and he's
gonna tell you what year he so has it in
his head. You ready, black Hole, Sun sound Garden?

Speaker 2 (10:53):
What year?

Speaker 4 (10:54):
Oh gosh, I know, seem I'm good at recognizing the
tunes themselves, but that one I do actually know. I
think that's probably I'd say that was nineteen ninety. Wait,
let me think of where I was working in radio
at the time that was probably nineteen ninety four. You
got five? Four? Yeah, four, ok, you got it.

Speaker 1 (11:14):
How would Billy idol eyes with a face.

Speaker 4 (11:16):
Eyes without a face? That was nineteen eighty eighty four?
I think eighty three. Okay, eighty three, Okay, I was
gonna leave. That is an option. But yeah, that's up
the eighties. The pop songs of the eighties, I can
hear two seconds like name that tune and identified the
songs immediately. Anything after the eighties I'm bad with all.
I do you know the old songs too?

Speaker 1 (11:37):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (11:37):
What did your dad do? Why were you in Las Vegas?

Speaker 4 (11:39):
We're still not sure. He was very quiet. He would
come home and we'd look at each other and then
he'd watched TV. But no, he worked. For sure, you
guys would know Howard Hughes owned a company called Suma.
Oh yeah, yeah, Suma Corporation, which they owned like seven
hotel casinos in Vegas. And my dad worked in something

(12:02):
called management information systems, which I still don't know what
that means. We never really inquired about what it was
he was doing all day. All I know is when
the bowling, when the bowling tournament came to the show Boat,
my dad would go into work, he'd punch in and
then he'd be gone the whole day for the whole week,
so he could watch the bowlers.

Speaker 1 (12:23):
That's why he's so quiet. That was Mayhew. Mayhew was
the guy that put all those deals together because because
we were fascinated, we heard about this guy, but he
never showed up. And then we heard the rumors that
he bought all of it, and that's when it changed
for all of us. But what was curious was we
found out how we could clock how Howard Hughes was

(12:43):
in Vegas. Jimmy buy back then you know, unfortunately you
were not born yet, and I was. We had one channel.
It was that guy, and that was signing the shoes.

Speaker 4 (12:55):
Was I know this story, I know exactly what you're
going to say. You're going to say, here know about
this Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:01):
Okay, go ahead, I'll let you finish it. Go ahead.

Speaker 4 (13:03):
Well, there was he owned the local television station and
he used it basically as his own VCR. Correct, So
Howard Hughes would say would call the station and he say,
put this movie on. I want to see it. And
then if he had to like step away or go
to the bathroom or something, he'd call. He'd have his
assistant call and have them replay the same clip that
he just missed, and nobody in Vegas knew what was

(13:26):
going on. And what was happening was Howard was just
using it as a special channel for himself only.

Speaker 1 (13:33):
Well, here's the next stroke to that. You're right purely
argue with that. Here's what would happen. He loved Ice
Station Zebra. Do you remember the film with Patrick Station Zebra?
No film with a great English actor, Patrick mcgoin, and
you know, he came over here. He's very successful, but
he loved Ice Station Zebra. But he would call up

(13:53):
and they'd play it like three times between midnight and
five in the morning, and we'd all sit around and say,
what was this movie I stationed? So that's when we
figured out that she was in town because of this
movie I stationed Zebra. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (14:07):
Do you guys remember all those great local commercials, Like
there was Mordecai the Jeweler and then they're hit and
he had Larry Holmes in his commercials sometimes, ye, like
Mordecai is my man, you know, and he and mud
I kind of had a voice like this come to
the Jewelers and then there was six Sakowitz did a
local TV show. Did you ever do SIGs show? Yes?

(14:29):
It was chesty man from Chicago.

Speaker 1 (14:31):
Three hundred pounds huge and.

Speaker 4 (14:33):
He wore a little beret which made him seem even fatter,
and yeah, Sigzachowitz, Joe Bahart, Gus could you Frey? Yeah, Gus,
I assume you knew Gus. Yeah. Yeah, he did a
lot of local stuffy. There was a guy named Joe
bahar who would he'd say, like today, the tomorrow, the diet, today,
the great buffet. And they do all these crazy live

(14:57):
local commercials where they'd be at some local joint on
the strip and they'd be inviting you to come down
in between, you know, in the commercial breaks, and no
place had anything like that other than Las Vegas.

Speaker 1 (15:10):
Yeah, it was very very special with that. It was,
you know, something to see it today, Jimmy to turn
into a major city and the sports capital of the world.
Who would have known it's really evolved into being a
big time city.

Speaker 4 (15:25):
Big has Yeah, we used to, you know. Of course,
the big exciting thing in the late seventies and early eighties,
mid eighties was the UNLV basketball team. Now I think
was our first taste of national even though it's funny
because everybody knew Las Vegas, and Las Vegas was a
popular city, and obviously, you know, everybody knew all the

(15:46):
legends that performed there, but we never felt like we
had anything until then that was like something that was
homegrown and that we could be proud of as Las Vegas.
Otherwise it was everyone else's town. Yeah, you know, like
someplace they stopped in and they went back to their home.
But when the rebels and Jerry Tartan and you know,
Lois Tarkanian just died recently, Jerry's wife saw that. That

(16:09):
for me was like where I think I became proud
of living in Las Vegas.

Speaker 3 (16:13):
Was that as exciting as when your high school band
played for Wayne Newton?

Speaker 4 (16:17):
You know what? That was a that did happen. I
was in high school and they hired us. I don't
know what they paid the band program. They probably paid
them three hundred dollars or something. And the gig was
show up on Wayne Newton's lawn at seven o'clock in
the morning and play Happy Birthday for him. This is
like a seventy piece marching band. And so we all

(16:38):
loaded into a bus at like five o'clock in the morning.
We didn't know what was going on. We went to
Wayne Newton's house. He comes out in his robe. He
didn't look that excited. It wasn't I wouldn't say he
was thrilled to have a bunch of teenagers blasting music
on his on his front lawn. But it was one
of those experiences that when people ask me what it

(16:59):
was like to grow up in Vegas and then you
share a story like that, they're like, Okay, it was weird.

Speaker 1 (17:05):
It was weird, Jimmy, You were in radio in Vegas, right.

Speaker 4 (17:09):
I kind of was. Yeah. I did college radio at KUNV,
the local college radio station, and I would call into
this guy, this local DJ named Anthony Miles. I would
call into his show and he put me on the air.
I'd do comedy bits and that sort of thing. So
I wasn't paid to be on the radio Las Vegas,
but I was. That's where I got excited about it.

Speaker 1 (17:29):
So where did it evolve for you to get into
our industry from radio to how that all happen?

Speaker 4 (17:35):
It was honestly an accident. I was a disc jockey.
I worked in a lot of towns. My first paying
job was in Seattle. I got fired there. I moved
to Tampa. I got fired there. I moved back in
with my parents in Phoenix. I got a job in
Palm Springs. I didn't get fired there, and I got
a job in Tucson. I got fired there, and finally

(17:55):
got a job in LA at a radio station called
k Rock, which is a big alternative radio station. I
did well there. I was the sports guy on the
Kevin and Bean show. And because I was in LA,
people were producing television shows and I would get calls
every once in a while saying, hey, you want to
come audition for this or that, and I never really
got anything. You know, I'd go audition for these acting roles,

(18:18):
but I was never an actor. And I actually got
a call about being part of a game show. And
Fred Silverman was the producer of that game show, and
he liked me and he let me host the game
show show and the run throughs, which I was just
supposed to be a writer and like a character on
the game show. And I did a presentation for a

(18:39):
bunch of game show buyers and they all liked me.
And even though that one didn't get picked up, they
picked up a show called Win Benstein's Money. I was
the sidekick on that show. And that was my first
television show.

Speaker 1 (18:52):
So you didn't have a great face for radio.

Speaker 4 (18:55):
Yeah, no, I never imagined i'd be on television. I
did some like local movie hosting at my first job
in Seattle, and I went back and I watched the
tape and I thought, well, I'm bad at being on television.
I'll never do that, and I better focus on radio.
It's not something I set out to do. I just
kind of fell into it. But ben Stein, he was brilliant.

Speaker 1 (19:16):
Right, an accountant. He's like an accountant or something.

Speaker 4 (19:20):
Can I tell you today on the day we tape.
This is his eightieth birthday, really, and he was a
law professor. His father worked for the Nixon administration. He
was a speech writer for Nixon and Nick ben was
a speech writer for Nixon. And he's just a very
bright guy. He's got to you know, he knows a
lot about a lot of things. And so the idea
of the show was you had to beat him in

(19:40):
a trivia contest, which he would just sit there and
read the encyclopedia. He just sit there and just consume.
By the end, I think like our fifth season. He
was almost completely unbeatable, and he would get so upset
when somebody beat him. I had to give him pep
talks from time to time because he would some high
school janitor would come on the show and beat him
and he would be devastated. And I said, Ben, if

(20:02):
you win every game, there's no show, right, you understand that, right,
And he'd be like, you're right, you're right.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
Okay, Oh, you're right, you're right.

Speaker 4 (20:09):
That's very wise, that's very wise. He wanted to win
every single game.

Speaker 2 (20:14):
Oh, got it. He was so dry.

Speaker 4 (20:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (20:16):
You know.

Speaker 3 (20:16):
My wife Peedee Baskin was the photographer at Saturday Night
Live for the first twenty five years of the show,
and she worked with norm M MacDonald speaking of dry yeah,
and she thought, by the way, he might have been
the funniest person of all time.

Speaker 4 (20:29):
Yeah, he was very, very funny.

Speaker 2 (20:32):
You had a sports show with him, very call right.

Speaker 4 (20:34):
I did. I produced a sports show. I pitched it
to Comedy Central and we hired him as the host
of the show. And he's I think unproducible would be
a good way to describe nor M MacDonald because we
had an idea that it would be kind of like
The Daily Show, but with sports. With Norm as the host,

(20:54):
it seemed like it couldn't miss. But Norm preferred like
thirty eight minute long on conversations with Super Dave Osborne
to talking about what was going on in sports, and
really his primary interest in sports was gambling. It was
betting on them. He was less interested in the sports
as he was with the gambling. And I think maybe,

(21:14):
like now, that would be fine, but back then it
was not something that you talked about in detail on television.
It was actually frowned upon because it was illegal.

Speaker 3 (21:24):
But when he went to Saturday Night Live, as you recall,
he did Weekend Update. Yeah, and he was just fantastic.
But for whatever reason, Don Olmeyer, who later in life
became a friend of mine, we played golf together, he
hated Norm MacDonald and he forced Lauren to fire him.
He couldn't stand Norm. Just hated him.

Speaker 4 (21:43):
Yeah, I recall, And you know, I don't know what
the real story is. And people like to attach narratives
to this, but Norm the OJ jokes rubbed Don the
wrong way. Because Don was a friend of O. Jason,
as people do with their friends, didn't believe that on
anything to this day seemed clear to everybody else.

Speaker 1 (22:04):
Yeah, Man, in the beginning, when you started with the show, Jimmy,
like a lot of things that you go through those
growing pains, you know.

Speaker 4 (22:13):
Yeah, and.

Speaker 1 (22:15):
When it started to take hold for you, When was
that when you really decided to get some legs and
it was what you wanted to do. The passion was
there and it was going to be around for a while.

Speaker 4 (22:25):
I think it may have been ten years. In Honestly,
it took me. I'm not even joking when I say that.
I think it took me a very long time to
even be decent at the job and to be confident.
You know. When I started, like at the very beginning
of the show, it was clear that a lot of
the guests didn't even know who I was. You know.

(22:45):
It's like they'd come they knew they were on a
talk show. Sometimes I'd have a side first two years,
i'd have a sidekick sit with me for the whole week.
So like i'd have Ed McMahon there for the week,
or Mike Tyson there for the week, or Snoop Dogg
or whomever agreed to do it. And sometimes the guests
would come out and they just start talking to the
other person, and I'd be sitting here quietly, Hello, I'm

(23:09):
you know, I am actually the show. I might have
some questions. It got to the point even where the
director of the show would sometimes I remember times where
I was waving at the camera, you know, the show
was live at that time, just to get the director's
attention to put it back on me so I could
ask a question if I had something to say. It

(23:30):
was deeply humiliating.

Speaker 1 (23:32):
That's a growing pain, big time, right.

Speaker 2 (23:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:34):
Yeah, Well look at you now, man, look at you now,
and you've got that great wife of yours that she.

Speaker 4 (23:40):
Just poked her head in here. That's Molly.

Speaker 1 (23:42):
Yeah, produces. Well, I run into Molly and you got
a big time asset there. That's a good stroke in
your life.

Speaker 4 (23:48):
Well, thank you very much. I agree. Yes, she's an
executive producer and one of the writers on the show,
and you know, hilarious and very funny. And yeah, she
and your daughter are very tight. I know that when
I'm texting my wife and she's not responding to me,
that in that time period she has texted back and
forth with your daughter Amanda forty or seventy times. I

(24:11):
had to call her today. I was like, hey, would
you answer my text please?

Speaker 1 (24:15):
It's about work, that's sir. How's that dynamic work, Jimmy.

Speaker 4 (24:21):
It works fine. We work in separate buildings, you know.
We have two buildings here. One's the theater and one's
the office, and she's over in the office most of
the time. And we don't necessarily take our work home
that much. A certain extent, we do, but not too much.
And we met, you know, works out just fine for us.

Speaker 3 (24:51):
But your sidekick Germo, I mean, was he really a
security guard, that's part of the bit.

Speaker 4 (24:56):
No, he was our parking lot security guard, Guermo. He
was using people's cars to sleep in, and so like
during the show when he's supposed to be guarding the
Lotti knew, you know, everybody was inside paying attention to
the show, so he would ask our announcer Dicky for
the keys to his prius so he could sleep in
it while the show was happening. And I found out

(25:18):
about it, and I was kind of mad, to be honest.
I was like, what is this guy's sleeping And then
they tricked him and they said, hey, Jimmy got a
new car. I just bought a range Rover and he's like,
Jimmy got a new car. You want to hang out
in that tonight while the show is on. And he's
like yeah, okay, which is ridiculous. And then of course
they set him up so that I came downstairs and

(25:40):
saw him like with my car seat leaned all the
way back and he's taking a nap in my new car.
I was like, what is going on here? And he
was so nervous it made me laugh. And then we
decided to put him in a bit where he played
Michael Jackson's chef. Michael Jackson chef had written a book
and so we had him play the part of Michael

(26:01):
Jacksons chef and he was so terrified on the air.
I remember, as we're doing it, is looking at him, going,
oh yeah, this guy's going to be on a lot
of times. This is funny and we're going to get
a lot of mileage out of this.

Speaker 2 (26:13):
People love him, though. Do you ever spend time with
him off the show?

Speaker 1 (26:16):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (26:17):
Yes, In fact, not only do we spend time together,
I now I do not invite him to my house anymore,
because no one accepts an invitation and doesn't show up
more than Guillermo. You would think the roles were reversed
on it because I used to have him over for
Christmas every year, I'd have him for Easter or whatever,

(26:38):
and then it'll be like nine thirty, I'm like, hey, Gemo,
I got a spot for you. Where are I was like, oh,
I'm sorry, I forgot you know, or my wife or whatever.
So we do spend time together, but it has to
be unscheduled because if you invite him to something, he
won't come.

Speaker 1 (26:54):
Well, I suggest you replace Howard on vacations and take him.
I would love to get a report on that from friends.

Speaker 4 (27:04):
Yeah, well you know Howard and my wife Molly, and
Howard Stern and his wife Beth. That we went to
Italy on vacation over the summer, which was a big
deal because Howard doesn't typically not just leave the country,
he doesn't leave his house, and we were very nervous.
We were very concerned that he wouldn't have a good time.
But a miracle occurred and he had a great time,

(27:26):
and I think it might even happen again someday.

Speaker 1 (27:29):
Sorry to hear that.

Speaker 3 (27:32):
I grew up in Hartford. You've got your start on
local radio. So he got his start in Hertford, Connecticut
on a local radio station.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
That was his first entry into the business.

Speaker 1 (27:44):
It's crazy they have in common. They're both painters. I
don't know how do we define that, Jimmy will, but
they both love to paint. Howard does and Jimmy does.
And give us some clarity on that. Jimmy, that's interesting.

Speaker 4 (27:57):
I wanted to be an artist when I was a kid.
That was my plan for my life. And I started
doing radio stuff and I really loved it, and I
moved away from that. But I don't paint. I draw,
and I've always loved it. And my mother is an artist.
My daughter, my oldest daughter, is an artist professionally now.
She makes ceramic figures and she's doing very well with that.

(28:19):
It's just something that I always thought would be the
thing that I did. It was what I was best
at as a kid, and so I like to do
that for fun and with my kids. And I'll draw
like obscene caricatures of the people I work with, and
it's mostly used for evil. You know, it's well, there

(28:40):
are likester on top of that. I know that I
appreciate a prank. I love it. I can't stop it.
I really I just got my wife a terrible personalized
license plate that she wants to kill me over.

Speaker 1 (28:55):
Explain yourself, Okay, she wanted a license and you did what.

Speaker 4 (28:59):
She wanted one of those. You know, in California you
can get one of those old timey looking black and
yellow license plates. And she said, I like to look
at that. I'd like to get one of those. I said, yeah,
all right, I'll take care of it. And she was
not looking for a personalized plate. She was looking just
for a regular plate of that collar. And so I
got her a license plate that says we be jamming

(29:23):
on it. When it came in the mail, I actually
like stuffed it in my back of my pants because
we were together and I had to like sneak it
out to the garage, so I felt like I was
sneaking a Playboy up to my betroom or something. I
stuffed it in the back of my pants, and suddenly
I've got good posture, you know. I walk out of

(29:44):
the garage and I get this screwdriver and I unto
the other one and I put this on it, and
I'm so delighted with myself. And I called her out
and I said, I have something for you. And she
knew something was wrong, and she's like, what's going on.
I said, no, no, no, I think you're gonna like it.
I really think you can enjoy it. And she comes
out as she goes you and there's a lot of

(30:05):
profanity and she now wants it off, but it's still
on for a while until we get her a new car.

Speaker 1 (30:13):
You're forced to get her a new car.

Speaker 2 (30:15):
That's great.

Speaker 1 (30:15):
Well, I love you for that, man, because I'm a prankster. Listen,
I think humor. Humor is the final refuge of sanity.

Speaker 4 (30:22):
Give me some pranks that you pulled, especially like from
the old days, the.

Speaker 1 (30:26):
Old Well, okay, I'll give you a Steve Win. How's
that skip? You know?

Speaker 4 (30:30):
Going right?

Speaker 1 (30:30):
Okay? So Steve Wynn, his family and I we would
travel all over the world together and we wind up
in Italy and we go to the Chipriani Hotel, which
is a very I'm sure you've been there. It's on
a small island in Venice. Okay, So we land there
and there's twelve of us. I got five daughters, he's
got his two, we got the wives, and we take
over the hotel that night. Before dinner, they all plugged

(30:52):
in their hair dryers and blew out the electricity. Small hotel. Okay,
So now we're there for about four days. I'm getting restless.
I want to pull a prank and I call Steve
in his room. He's with his wife before dinner, and
I call him from my room and I go, mister wuin, Yes,
this is Roberto Covini down the front eska. He says, yes,

(31:13):
what can I do for it? I said, well, I
know you're checking out tomorrow, and we're very, very hand
to have somebody like you here. But you know, we
got a problem. It's the summertime and all the Arabs,
you know, they come over here, and we got some
of the royalty people coming tomorrow and we need all
You've got so many rooms, we're going to need your rooms,

(31:34):
and could you check out at six in the morning?

Speaker 4 (31:37):
He says.

Speaker 1 (31:39):
You got to know, Steve Winn know how this guy
goes into orbit? He says, Wenning econom mister Win. You're
in the business, you understand. But you know, if you're
coming down, we'll feed you in the bar and we'll
take it the luggage and will put it in the gondolas.
You'll be very but six sixty thirty maybe. He says, Look,
I'm in this business and there's no way then I'm

(32:00):
gonna get these women. And you're gonna have us check
out tomorrow at six in the morning. And this is
something I will not entertain doing. And I don't know
why you're calling, but mister Uynn, you must understand these
are Arabs. They come every year when they we needed
the rooms. He said, Look, I am telling you we
cannot check out now. This is where the teeth meet.

(32:24):
We cannot meet it suc warning. I said, okay, mister,
well in that case, fuck you. Oh he comes fucking
storming down at the front desk. In that case, fuck you.

(32:46):
That's just one of them. When I take it to dinner, Jimmy,
I've got about fifty of them. I put them one
on skip, which is too long because I haven't done
Marley Carlo with Prince Renye, and I'm not gonna I'm
not gonna eat the time up, but we'll do that.

Speaker 2 (33:00):
Would I love this shorter, Jimmy, A shorter one note
what he did to me. I was at Medeo.

Speaker 3 (33:08):
The restaurant used to be on Beverly Boulevard down there
downstairs and I'm in there with two other couples. I'm
sitting at my table and my phone rings and it's
Paul and he goes, hey, I said, He said, where
do I find you? I said, I'm out to dinner.
He goes where. I said, at Medeo. What I'm at Mendeo?

(33:28):
Is you're at Mendeo?

Speaker 2 (33:29):
He said yeah.

Speaker 3 (33:31):
He said, stand up and wave and I'll come over
to your table. So I said, really, I stand up
and I start waving my room like this. By the way,
Brian Grazer is the next table looking at me, like
what's he doing? Trying to get a waiter or something.
So I said, well, where are you? He said, well,
you know, I'm short and I can't see so many people.
I can't see over everybody. Just wave again.

Speaker 2 (33:51):
Tell me where you are. I sent him by the
banquet by the end of the bar. Just come over here.

Speaker 3 (33:57):
Well, just stand there, just wave one more time. So
again I get up and I'm waving and waving, and
I said, Jesus Christ, where the fuck are you?

Speaker 2 (34:05):
He said, at home?

Speaker 4 (34:07):
I said. He had called my.

Speaker 3 (34:10):
House and the housekeeper hits of the phone and he
said where is he? And she said, well, he's out
to dinner. He said, where to Medeo.

Speaker 4 (34:20):
That's a good one. I like a simple one like that.
That's nice. Yeah, I recently. My Aunt Chippy is someone
she lives in Las Vegas, and she's the reason that
we moved to Las Vegas. The reason we moved to
Las Vegas. My uncle Frank was a security was a
police officer in New York and he heard that he
retired after twenty years on the force, and he heard

(34:41):
that you could get a job as a security guard
in Las Vegas if you were MYPD. So well, first
they were going to move to Florida. And they went
to Florida and they were staying with friends, and they
put a down payment on a lot, actually like one
hundred dollars down payment, which was a good amount of
money for them at the time, and they were going
to build a house, track house in Florida. And that

(35:02):
afternoon there was an alligator in the pool, their friend's pool,
and they said, oh, look outside, look there's an alligator
in the pool. And my Aunt Chippy said, I didn't
raise three daughters to have aim eetn by a fucking alligator.
And so Florida was now off the table and they
decided to move to Vegas. They moved to Vegas with

(35:24):
my grandparents. Everybody moves together, and my Aunt Hippy has
lived there now since nineteen seventy five, and I've been
pulling pranks on her since I was a boy. The
most recent one. You've seen those driverless cars and Waymo cars.
So in La there are these cars that don't have
drivers and you can get in them and they'll take
you where you want to go. But Aunt Chippy has

(35:44):
never seen anything like this. She's eighty five years old,
you know, she doesn't know that this is going on.
So she came in to visit and I have her.
I have this guy pretending to be a driver. He
loads her into the driverless car and he says, will
you excuse me, I have to go to the restroom
and I'll be right back. She's like, yeah, okay, go ahead.
He closes the door and the car drives away with
no driver and she goes berserve. We got cameras in

(36:10):
the car, of course. Oh my god, oh my god,
oh my god, was really a dream come true for me.

Speaker 2 (36:19):
And I saw that, and when she called her daughter
that it was fantastic. Oh my God, that was so great.

Speaker 4 (36:26):
Yeah, everyone gets in on it. We got the whole
family in on this prime.

Speaker 1 (36:30):
Okay, a quick one, Ace for Base the sign what year?

Speaker 4 (36:34):
Oh I still say yeah, Ace of Base. That was
Let's see, I was in I was working in Tampa.
I think when that came out, my daughter, I'm going
to say nineteen ninety one four. Oh yeah, No, years
are not my thing. Really, it's the tunes.

Speaker 1 (36:52):
It's hearing the tune.

Speaker 4 (36:53):
It's the tunes. Yeah, it's filling the blank on the tunes.

Speaker 1 (36:56):
Yeah, I'd be more impressed if you got the year. Really,
I can go ahead to ahead with you that with
that on the.

Speaker 4 (37:03):
Two, well, I would think you could.

Speaker 2 (37:05):
Yeah, sure, on your show.

Speaker 3 (37:07):
I get to see your show at eight thirty at
night because they have the East Coast speed.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
Here in La.

Speaker 4 (37:12):
So oh wow you got that.

Speaker 2 (37:13):
Huh yeah, when you do your monologue.

Speaker 3 (37:16):
So again with my wife having been at Saturday Night
Live where they obviously live with Q cards.

Speaker 2 (37:22):
But how do you your monologue? Do you do that
with Q cards?

Speaker 4 (37:25):
I used to do with Q cards and our Q
card holder had rotator cuff surgery, so she said, I
have to I can't hold these Q cards anywhere because
the QU cards are heavy, you know, right, you know this,
And I said, all right, well, I'm not sure what
to do here. She said, well, why don't we do
teleprompter while I recover? And we never went back to

(37:49):
the Q cards. It was just easier. The problem with
the Q cards is if you want to make any
kind of changes, it's a big mess. You know, they
have these white tape they put her over the words
and just looks like it's all bandaged up by the
time you get to showtime. So the teleprompter's easier. That's
what I use now.

Speaker 1 (38:05):
Yeah, and everybody's using in ears now Skip on Broadway everywhere.

Speaker 4 (38:09):
They'll talk to you in the in ears that I
don't use. I don't have the concentration to hear somebody
talking in my ear while I'm on the air. I've
had it happen a couple of times, and I just don't.
I can't. I just can't do it.

Speaker 1 (38:24):
And skip. You're going to bed so early, it's so boring.
You got to take a couple of hits of a
joint and then watch him at eleven thirty. Denny's really amazing,
so much funnier just to hit skip. What is this
fucking nine o'clock. You're missing everything in the world.

Speaker 4 (38:40):
Paul's usually going.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
To bed Jimmy at the same time as I'm getting
up in the morning.

Speaker 4 (38:44):
I love that. That's my natural schedule too. I think
there's something about Las Vegas that I mean, obviously your
career lends itself to that, but also it's so hot
in the daytime. It's just nice to be up in there,
and the nighttime in the desert is beautiful. Once that's
your routine, that's your routine, right, I mean, that's that,

(39:05):
and what a routine?

Speaker 1 (39:06):
Why would I give up finishing a show with those
guys at one thirty going into a steam room. Jase
Seburn would show up and give us all haircups. Now
that's two thirty. Then the show girls would show up
at three thirty, and I'm only twenty one years old
living this dream, saying who do I give the money

(39:27):
back to? We wouldn't leave that place till seven in
the morning, and that was like five days a week.
I mean, the needle went right up the arm. And
only in Vegas could you do all that the stuff?
As they say, what went on in that town with
those guys when the mob owned it and they were
the best. To work for those guys the best. It

(39:48):
was just something I'll never forget. I don't live in it.
The rearview mirror is gone, but to live during those
days and you had a taste of it, Jimmy, was
just something.

Speaker 4 (39:56):
A very short I remember, And of course I was
never in any situations as incredible as that, but I
do remember going to college in Phoenix and the first
weekend I was out and they had closing time and
I never heard of closing time before. It was one
am closing time. I was like, what does this mean?

(40:18):
Closing time? We have to leave? And they're like, yeah,
you have to.

Speaker 2 (40:21):
Leave, the bar's closing.

Speaker 4 (40:23):
I didn't understand it. I was like, well, this is outrageous.
What kind of where are we Salt Lake City? What's
going on here? I just never heard of it. You know.
We would stay out till it got yeah, till it
was morning till and the worst part of staying out
till seven o'clock in the morning is when you're driving
home and people are jogging and you're just like, oh

(40:45):
my god, my life is so different from you. I
put a curse on you you're jogging at this hour. Yeah,
I'm just about to head home and go to sleep.

Speaker 3 (40:56):
But now that you don't live in Las Vegas, what
time do you typically go to bed then wake up.

Speaker 4 (41:01):
Well, I have two little kids now, so I still
stay up fairly late, but I wake up fairly early,
so I'll get up around six forty five. Last night,
I went to bed at about twelve thirty or so.
I think I like to have a little bit of
time with myself at night. You know, I grew up
in a loud Italian family, and the only time the
house was even close to quiet was in the middle

(41:23):
of the night. I'd watch Carson, I'd watch Letterman. Yeah,
I'd watch NBC News overnight with Linda Ellerb. I'd stay
up just watching TV and drawing late into the night
every night. And I still I feel like that's in
one day when I don't have to get make pancakes
in the morning, that that will be my schedule.

Speaker 1 (41:43):
Once again, that's a cool family you got, And I
got to ask you. A lot of people out there
may not know, but I know how charitable you are
and how committed you are to that. I mean, three
and four days a week. It's nothing for you to
go and give back. And you know that's why you're
so loved man, and you got those two great children.
It's very commendable, and I really expect you really respect well.

Speaker 4 (42:05):
I have a lot of Catholic guilt, so you know
I have to do. I have to do everything everyone
asked me to do.

Speaker 3 (42:11):
I get it.

Speaker 1 (42:11):
I grew up in a Catholic premise, the fear religion,
right right, that's right. You mentioned Carson just a second ago,
and I was very close to that scene. Obviously, Dad
obviously put Amanda for school, right. She used to hide
the money in the drawer. She's only only my kids
that take all the cash and stash it in her
clothing there anyway, are you going to go for the
Carson record?

Speaker 4 (42:32):
No, no, no, no, I don't think. I mean, listen,
I think those days are long gone. I mean you can't. Also,
Johnny figured out a way to make it pretty easy
on himself, you know, as far as his schedule went.
My schedule is relentless. I don't what did Johnny do?
What thirty three years? Actually, I think Dave did more

(42:54):
years than Johnny did, did he really? Yeah? But Johnny
also Johnny did ninety minutes yea for the first I
don't know how many years, and and was on live.
I mean that's grueling, it really is.

Speaker 1 (43:07):
Yeah. Well, I think listen, he puts some money in
my pocket with that sound.

Speaker 4 (43:11):
Sure, And I think about that a lot because when
I did a show called The Man Show before my
talk show, and I wrote the theme song for the
you know with me and Adam Carolla, my co host,
like we wrote the theme song, but the producers of
the show insisted that they be credited as songwriters so
that they could get a cut of the money. And

(43:31):
at the time I was still I was too young
to know that that wasn't right. And my agents also
happened to be their agents, so they didn't care about
the fact that it wasn't right.

Speaker 1 (43:41):
Right.

Speaker 4 (43:41):
And I think about the fact that Johnny he probably
could have he probably could have gotten away with stealing
that song or or paying yell Lump and throwing his
weight around, but he didn't. And I think that was
I mean, unless I have this story wrong and you
tell me, but I think that was a big thing
to do.

Speaker 1 (44:00):
Well, what happened was everybody knew early in the game
that they wanted to always collect on copyrights. That's the
big game right now. And then what happened was Jimmy
I was working in England doing a TV special for Grenada,
and I said, who wants to listen for an hour
and a half of my music? You know, I said,
all that teenage stuff and all that. I said, we
need some relief here. I want to get a comic.

(44:21):
And they'd send me kinescopes to London and I'd look
at them and I saw this one kinescope with this guy,
Johnny Carson, who'd be drinking all night. He'd show up
with a hangover, and he was the host of a
kiddie show. They were all like six year olds, screaming
and yelling. Well you get the picture. So anyway, I said,
he's great. So they bring him over. We get to

(44:42):
know each other as much as you can with Johnny.
Not easy, not easy to get to know. Fade out,
fade in. We go to New York. I run into
him and hey, Johnny, how you been good?

Speaker 4 (44:51):
Good?

Speaker 1 (44:51):
What are you doing? He said, Well, I might take
over this Tonight show for a couple of years because
I really need to work and bubble Okay, So he said,
I'm changing a few things. I said, would you like
to do the theme song? You know me open a
fridge I perform. I said to him, yeah, okay, great.
So I'm run in and it cost me about four
or five hundred bucks and I put my vision down
about and I send it to him and they said, yeah,

(45:13):
I love it. Then he called me a couple of
days later, he said, Paul, I apologized, Man, I can't
use it. I got this guy, Sketch Henderson, who by
the way, was about twice my age, and he's been
with the show before me, and he said, let some
kid write this. He said, no, I'm going to do it.
I said, jeez, I'm sorry. John. I said, look, why
don't you think about this. I'll give you half the song.

(45:34):
I'll put you as half publisher, half writer. It'll say
Johnny Carson, Paul Anka, just take it and use it
and you'll collect what I collect. Next day and he says,
you got it. The two years went to you nowhere.
It made so much money. He was on every night
that the societies came in and said, well, there's new
regulations now, because it was earning every night. But that's

(45:57):
how that started. I just gave him. I just gave
him half the song.

Speaker 4 (46:00):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
Yeah, wow, I was that thirty four years right, thirty.

Speaker 1 (46:04):
Four years, thirty eight or thirty four something like that.

Speaker 4 (46:07):
Yeah, unbelievable.

Speaker 2 (46:08):
By the way, you mentioned about weight throwing your weight around.

Speaker 3 (46:11):
Speaking of weight, I read once I think you'll correct me, Jimmy,
but a while ago your.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
Diet regimen was basting two days a week.

Speaker 4 (46:21):
Was that true, Yeah, we'll do that. Or as a kid,
I was very skinny. Then I got a job at
a pizza place, and you know, I was drinking, like
you know, everything was free. You know, this was like
having like nine SODA's everything on the menu all day long. Whatever.
I started putting on some weight. And then in my

(46:42):
twenties or whatever, I was chubby and I never really
thought about it, honestly, Like when I was twenty two,
I would have fish and chips for lunch every day,
and I thought it was healthy because I was eating fish.
I was like, oh, this is good. It was so
deep from you know, like I didn't know anything. I
was an idiots. Yeah, so I knew. I like, I

(47:05):
have no self control. I'm just an animal. So I
was just like, you know, what I have to do
is I just have to starve myself for four months.

Speaker 2 (47:12):
And I did.

Speaker 4 (47:12):
I starved myself. I was eating like seven hundred calories
a day or something for four months, and I lost it,
the little weight. And then I was like, Okay, I'm
gonna determine to stay in a certain range. I wasn't
going to keep it all off, I knew, but I
was just stay in a certain range. And the best
way for me to do it was to eat like
the usual pig five days a week and just eat
nothing for two days a week. And I did that

(47:34):
for a long time. I did that for like three
or four years. And I get all these guys who
were guests on the show asking me like, well, I
what do you you know whatever? And they want to know,
and I started like writing it out and then I
would just cut. So many guys would ask me about it.
I just cut and paste and send it to them.
And then the next time I see them, they're like,
I don't know, I just can't. I can't do that.
It's too much. I was like, I don't know. I

(47:56):
just stick to it. And I was doing Mondays and
Thursdays and then I just you know what. I'm gonna
do a different version of it where I don't eat
until lunch, so I only eat lunch and dinner. I
don't eat breakfast. So each day I have about twelve
or thirteen hours of not eating. And I don't know
if it works. I don't I really don't know. All
I know is I'm eating less than I I would otherwise,

(48:19):
and that seems to be the only way to stay
thin to me.

Speaker 1 (48:22):
Jimmy, that's your singer to the choir man. I've stayed
like this partially what you're talking about. But we'll talk
about that at another time. But Skippy, you got this
guy depends where we eat. Skippy. You got to understand,
this guy's a chef. Now, if I lived in his hood,
you know where I'd run into him. At Costco.

Speaker 4 (48:41):
It's right.

Speaker 1 (48:42):
I love Cosco. Get the big fucking trailer you do.
I oh, you have the food. You know there's great
quality at Costco.

Speaker 4 (48:50):
Jimmy, I agree with you. I could you know what
people think we're crazy when you say that. They think
it's like smart and final.

Speaker 1 (48:57):
It's not.

Speaker 4 (48:57):
It's different. And you know that you're getting good stuff there.
You know you're not getting ripped off.

Speaker 1 (49:02):
So tell us about this being a chef. Tell us
being a chef.

Speaker 4 (49:05):
I love to cook. I find it relaxing. I feel
like my job is something that it's ethereal, you know.
I do a show, and that I have nothing to
show for it when I come home, as opposed to
people who build things or you know, even just dig
in a hole. You can see the hole at the
end of it, you know. And I missed that, And

(49:25):
so I started cooking. My wife loves it, and I've
gotten good at it. I really take an interest in it,
and I have a lot of friends who are chefs,
and I pay close attention and I like to learn
and I'll take notes on recipes. I'm very serious about it.

Speaker 1 (49:40):
You know. I've got an Italian fiance and her dad
had a restaurant in Newport. She was raised there. And
we are in the kitchen cooking. This woman, besides being beautiful,
big hearted and caring, she cooks and I sit in
there and have so much fun with her because I
have restaurants in my background. But it's so much fun.
You're absolutely right.

Speaker 2 (49:58):
Great, You're absolutely right.

Speaker 4 (50:00):
I love it. I really do. I like the whole process.
It makes me.

Speaker 1 (50:03):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (50:03):
You know, there's something about feeding your family that is
very rewarding.

Speaker 1 (50:07):
Especially when you can pay for it.

Speaker 4 (50:09):
Yeah, that's a big part of it.

Speaker 3 (50:23):
I was going to say, Paul l the bet on football.
That's one of our things we do together. You know,
when you have a best friend, you can always play off.
So we each have a handicaper. Mine is wait for it,
James Carville. He's immediately unbelievable.

Speaker 4 (50:39):
Because he didn't do such a good job predicting me.

Speaker 1 (50:41):
He did not.

Speaker 3 (50:44):
That.

Speaker 1 (50:44):
Boys, I believe that.

Speaker 2 (50:46):
But hold out. But he was six and oh in
football this week and that was more important.

Speaker 3 (50:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:53):
Yeah, and then Paul's guy.

Speaker 1 (50:54):
Guy in Vegas, Jimmy, we'll.

Speaker 4 (50:57):
Believe that at that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:00):
Your cousin Sal is a good handicapper, isn't he?

Speaker 4 (51:03):
My cousin Sal is a great handicapper, and he is.
My cousin Sal has been booky since he was fourteen
years old. He started selling parlay cards in junior high
school and he loves it and he's kind of a
math genius. He really is very good. But he's always
got lots of little scraps of paper with all sorts

(51:23):
of coded materials and he bets some weird stuff. I mean,
he's now betting like every hole of golf, he's betting
women's soccer in Bulgaria. He's betting all kinds of weird stuf.

Speaker 1 (51:38):
I like the internetternament.

Speaker 4 (51:40):
Yeah, the Internet has opened up a very unhealthy world
of gambling for sal Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:45):
But I used to follow him though. He was pretty good.

Speaker 4 (51:48):
He's very good. He's very good. He always comes out ahead.
He loves football. He and Bill Simmons do a podcast
together where every week they guessed the line after the
weekend games, they guess the line for next week before
the line comes out. It's fun.

Speaker 3 (52:03):
I like that.

Speaker 4 (52:03):
I think that's a it's a fun way to gamble
without gambling.

Speaker 1 (52:07):
Those kind of guys, you know, move the line so early.
Right now, Vegas is turning down by the weekend twenty
and thirty thousand dollars players because they figured out how
these guys are taking advantage of the situation. So it's
really down to a science. Those guys, they know what
they're doing, and they make shower money, a lot of money,
because you're never going to be ahead at the end

(52:29):
of the day as a layman just gambling away your money.
It just doesn't work.

Speaker 4 (52:32):
No, you're never and people don't understand that. They're like, yeah, no,
I figured it out, Like, oh really, I figured it out.

Speaker 1 (52:38):
I was in China recently, Jimmy, you know, I toured
all over the world. Is down in Asia, and you know,
I've got a lot of friends down there. So they
said to me, you know what the new thing is.
I say, what, Well, you know all our people that
are in gambling here. We go to Europe and we
find the weakest teams, like let's say Italy. We know
Italy is never going to win a fuck sucker game.
And there's two players that are good on the team

(53:01):
and they only make one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars.
And we go to them and we say, look, you're
making one hundred and twenty five we'll give you another
two hundred thousand, just make sure you throw the game.
And they wire into two or three teams and they're
making a fortune.

Speaker 4 (53:16):
Wow. Yeah, wow, Yep, that's shocking.

Speaker 1 (53:20):
It isn't because if I told you some of the
Jimmy all we used to do in Vegas. You know,
they had single decks and Frank would play. We'd all
be sitting there and we must have leave two three
thousand dollars in tips because these guys had families and
dealers and got down to where I mean, I can
tell you now we were chating. So we sit down
and let's say I'm sitting there with the fifteen right,

(53:43):
and he's got a face guard, but he knows what's
going I say, hit me. He said, nah, you don't
want it. He turned the card over be a four.
But they knew what to do with those decks, Jimmy.
They were called they were called mechanics, and every time
a guy come in from Texas or where he started
beating him, they called in the mechanic and he'd come
in with that single deck and beat him up. But

(54:06):
back then, I mean it was nothing just wow. Oh yeah,
we were until Hughes came in and laid the law
down to Frank because he did whatever he wanted. And
that night that I was there when my Mo'm gonna
give him the story because I love Frank. But they
turned him down. They wouldn't give him any more chips
because sometimes we never paid. We were late. I mean
there's late, but three years. But the cheating that went

(54:30):
on back then, it was amazing.

Speaker 4 (54:33):
Man, we was awesome.

Speaker 1 (54:35):
Oh my god, tell you when I see you the
great Sinatra story. I can't tell you on the air.
But because he was the guy, man, he was.

Speaker 4 (54:42):
The Do you get annoyed when people act like my
way as Frank Sinatra's song, you know, because I do.
I'm like, well, that's not Frank Sinatra song. That's Paul
Anka's song. And and in fact, I think your version
is the superior, even though it was certainly great.

Speaker 1 (54:59):
Look, there's no The thing is as a writer, you know,
writers and the people in the background, they never get
what they deserve. I mean, okay, it makes up for
the Olympics. They drop my name. Other times it's Frank Sinatra.

Speaker 4 (55:11):
I get it.

Speaker 1 (55:12):
Most of the time, when you hear hit songs by
someone else, it's always the artist that's singing it. It's
very rarely the writer. And nah, I'm grateful for that.
It doesn't bok at the end of the day. Who
takes the check to the bank. You know, No, that
doesn't bother me at all. Man, I only regret not
writing your theme song. So if you stay another ten years,

(55:33):
you got half. Let me ask about the oscars, man.
I know, they asked you, is it always going to
be known for a couple of years.

Speaker 4 (55:42):
Well, no, I mean I think that it's something I
would consider in the future. It just there are a
lot of factors, and one of them is pure time.
Is I'm still doing a show every night, so preparing
for the Oscars is kind of all consuming for me. Yeah,
and there's no way for me to do it halfway.
So I knew that if I did it again that

(56:03):
it would be another four months of just pushing everything like, ah, yes, no,
I'll get to that after the Oscars. I'll get to
that after the Oscars. So it makes the whole year
very difficult. And also, you know, superstitious, like how many
times in a row is it going to go well?
You know, like, Okay, I did it two years the
first time, and it went well, and then I thought, okay,

(56:24):
I'll never do that again. And they came back to
me and asked me to do it, and I said,
all right, well I think I will do it, And
then I did it two years in a row. One wall.
I was like, really, how many times in a row
you think it's going to you know, It's like baseball,
you know, like how many hits are you're going to
get in a row.

Speaker 1 (56:38):
Plus you can't take a hit in the jaw.

Speaker 4 (56:40):
Yeah, you take one in the you're not wearing a
cop you're totally exposed.

Speaker 1 (56:45):
Hey, Jimmy, I used to sit with Carson so Done
and he really bitch about people he didn't like interviewing
that were really difficult, and he was very verbal with us,
you know, I mean, I'm gonna put you on the spot.
Can you share some that were maybe somebody that's dead
that was difficulty.

Speaker 4 (57:03):
Well, sometimes people don't understand why they're there. Sometimes people
come in and they're like, listen, I'm here, I don't
want to talk about this, And like it's one thing
if it's a touchy situation and this is a guest
you'd have on anyway. But sometimes like like we had
Monica Lewinsky on not that long after the whole thing
with Bill Clinton, and she's like she agreed to be

(57:25):
on the show, and then she came and she's like, oh,
and by the way, if you mentioned Bill Clinton, I'll
get up and leave. And I was like, what are
we going to talk about? What's left? Your handbags? You know,
your hand.

Speaker 2 (57:39):
Painting.

Speaker 4 (57:41):
So but most of the time. The bad guests are
they want to do well, they just don't. You know,
there's they You know, you can have somebody who's a
great actor and you just go like, well, how is
it possible that this person can be a great actor
and unable to put seven minutes together of conversation. Even

(58:01):
you might say, like, just pretend you're a talk show.
Get you know, act like you're a talk show, gat right,
and maybe maybe that will work. But it has happened.
It happens a lot, and it's happened recently.

Speaker 1 (58:14):
Well you handle it well, man, I try to. I
always try to read into it when you're looking at
it and going, you know, but you know.

Speaker 4 (58:22):
If I talk a lot, that means I'm carrying the ball.
And it's funny because sometimes it's young people have never
done a talk show and they're just not seasoned enough
to be in that seat, and I wind up talking
a lot, and then the show goes on the internet
and all the fans complain that I talked through the
whole thing. I'm just trying to keep us both room drowning, right,

(58:44):
you know, like I'm not I don't care, I don't
need to talk. I'm here to listen, but if you're
a guest and you're not saying anything, the space needs
to be filled.

Speaker 1 (58:52):
Yeah, can't win either way.

Speaker 3 (58:54):
With the Internet, there are so few of you that
have actually hosted Late Night You ever stay in touch
with let's say Leno and Letterman or.

Speaker 4 (59:03):
Today Colbert and Yeah, I do. I actually have become
very good friends with all of the guys who do
the other shows because we did a podcast together during
the writers' strike, So those are guys that you know.
We text each other regularly. We don't talk on the
phone much, but we text, and we've gone fishing together.

(59:23):
I went fishing with Fallon and went fishing with Stephen Colbert,
Dave Letterman. I hear from from time to time, which
is always a thrill for me because he's my guy.
He's the reason that I wanted to do this in
the first place. And it's different than it used to be.
In the old days, there were two shows and they
were both on at eleven thirty, and you had to

(59:44):
pick which one you're going to watch and pick which
one you were going to do, and there was a
lot of competition. And now there are so many different
ways to watch these shows. That it doesn't feel. It
doesn't feel. It feels like we're all just swimming in
the same pond and nobody's kicking each other. You like, Jimmy,
I love it. Do you go a lot?

Speaker 1 (01:00:03):
We've been up to Montana?

Speaker 4 (01:00:04):
Where'd you go for?

Speaker 2 (01:00:05):
I do?

Speaker 4 (01:00:05):
I actually own a fly fishing lodge in Swan Valley, Idaho,
and I spent a lot of time up there fishing.
I started in Montana fishing with Huey Lewis got me
into fly fishing.

Speaker 1 (01:00:16):
Oh, I love you. He's a good friend of Eddie
de Bartolows and he's always right.

Speaker 4 (01:00:20):
He's alway right.

Speaker 1 (01:00:20):
Eddie's my buddy, but he always talks about your friendship.
I mean, he doesn't elaborate or give anything up, but.

Speaker 4 (01:00:25):
I know he loves Huey, loves yes Eddie and all
those forty nine ers.

Speaker 1 (01:00:30):
Guys, there's so much fun, man. I got to bring
you in one of Eddie's when he gets them all together,
you would have a time.

Speaker 4 (01:00:36):
I've heard it's a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
We take him to Vegas and look out, twelve of
them at that table. It's killer. It's killer, It's killer. Okay,
one more, are you ready before we let you go.
Sure daft punk around the world.

Speaker 4 (01:00:50):
Oh, I don't even know that. I don't even know
what I've heard of the band.

Speaker 1 (01:00:55):
Yeah, like the Offspring self Esteem.

Speaker 4 (01:00:59):
The Offspring not one. I do know because I worked
at k Rock when that was happening. I was there
from ninety four, I think ninety five. The Offspring.

Speaker 1 (01:01:07):
Yeah, you're in a ballpark, man, I'm impressed.

Speaker 4 (01:01:11):
Yeah, pretty close. Sometimes they stretch over two years, so
it's you know, when the song hits and when it
was released are different. So I'm going to give myself
that out.

Speaker 1 (01:01:20):
You got it, man, you got it?

Speaker 4 (01:01:21):
Yeah, and then while study up the years for next time.
And uh and I appreciate you guys having me on.
That was a lot of fun. I definitely also want
to follow up. I want to hear all the pranks
and all the old stories from the old days.

Speaker 1 (01:01:36):
Check check with the warden. Okay, Amanda will Amanda Demanda.

Speaker 4 (01:01:41):
We may have to cut Amanda out of this because
I think she's heard too many of your stories.

Speaker 1 (01:01:45):
She hasn't heard any of the good stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:01:47):
Oh she hasn't. Okay, all right, Well, if you're going
to feel inhibited by her, then we should also leave
her out of the dinner.

Speaker 1 (01:01:56):
Jimmy, thank you so so much, man, I mean.

Speaker 4 (01:01:59):
Thank you, Paul, thank you, Skip. I appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
Jimmy. Thanks. I'll visit with our mutual friend Al Michaels
and tell.

Speaker 4 (01:02:05):
Him I'm yes, give my love.

Speaker 2 (01:02:08):
We play golf together and he said, I love you,
so I'll.

Speaker 4 (01:02:11):
Save it here than Jimmy, thank you so much. All right,
thank you for taking care, okay.

Speaker 1 (01:02:21):
Our Away with Paul, Anka and Skip Bronson is a
production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 3 (01:02:27):
The show's executive producer is Jordan Runtogg, with supervising producer
and editor Marcy Depina.

Speaker 1 (01:02:34):
It was engineered by Todd Carlin and Graham Gibson and
mixed and mastered by Doug Bone.

Speaker 2 (01:02:40):
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review.

Speaker 1 (01:02:44):
For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.