The First Time Bert Kreischer Tells a Joke, It's Already Perfect

Lex Fridman opens with Ernest Hemingway: there is nothing to writing, you sit down at a typewriter and bleed. Bert Kreischer agrees, but only for journaling. He cannot write standup on the page. He cannot construct a bit in a notebook. When he journals, the pen moves faster than his brain, and the two catch each other in the act. That is the closest he gets to Hemingway's bleed.

The reason he loves Hemingway is almost embarrassing. He is a little dyslexic, not a strong reader, and Hemingway wrote simply. Working at Barnes & Noble, someone asked if he loved the titles. Kreischer said yes, *Sun Also Rises*. They corrected him: *The Sun Also Rises*. The article did the work. That night, after a long Greenwich Village party, he was on the roof at five in the morning. He grew up a Florida sunset person. New York sunrises, he says, are electric blue. Standing there, the title finally landed.

Fridman notes that Hemingway's craft is carving down: write drunk, edit sober, a handful of words to pin a point. Kreischer is the opposite. He stacks. Hemingway also said the first draft of anything is always shit. Kreischer does not think so. For him, the first draft is the best one he has. Editing is how he destroys the original.

The first time he tells a joke onstage, it is perfect. Then he tries to make it jazzier. He had a two-line bit about driving with his daughters past a "deaf child" sign. Louis C.K. was in the room, liked it, and that was supposed to settle it: if Louis likes a joke, it goes in the special. Kreischer padded it into a fifteen-minute piece with razzle dazzle and gun control. On Louis's podcast he asked what had worked. "It was just simple," Louis said. The daughter did not know how they figured out where deaf kids lived. That was it. Kreischer had to walk the bit all the way back. Short jokes, he learned, come out purest on the first telling. Long stories like "The Machine" need structure and work.

Fridman asks why the Machine story captivated people. In college Kreischer went to Russia, got pulled into a night with gangsters, and came home with a story that eventually became a Netflix movie. He still cannot fully explain the reach. His best guess is that everyone has had one wild night, told their friends, and watched the friends refuse to believe it. Comedy fans from the early Deathsquad days also liked watching a podcast anecdote get worked into a stage bit. The process itself became content.

Does Vladimir Putin know who he is because of that story? Kreischer hopes so, then catches the sound of it. He knows it can read as narcissism. He is not performing the modest answer. He says what is in his mouth when it arrives, and the honest answer is that it would be cool. He sketches Putin at a computer, someone mentioning the clip, Putin watching and muttering "this guy." Fridman says it is not out of the realm of possibility. The podcast has been teaching him how small the world is.

Kreischer had been a loyal listener of *Drink Champs* and never imagined N.O.R.E. would know his name. Then the invitation came, and the host told him he was a fan. Kreischer sat there remembering moving to New York listening to N.O.R.E. and Capone. After *Razzle Dazzle* and the movie, the phone calls got stranger in the same direction. He and his daughters watched catching drills from a softball player in Tempe and dance videos from a girl named D. Glazer. When he reached out, she asked if he knew who she was. He did. That, he says, is how the world works now.

Fridman asks which world leader Kreischer would drink with. Putin does not drink much. Volodymyr Zelenskyy drinks more, still not much. Boris Yeltsin would have been a real session. Hitler, Kreischer says, put a spoonful of sugar in wine. The answer is Winston Churchill. He has the daily routine memorized: a huge breakfast with cigar, coffee, eggs, toast, bacon, sausage, tomato, beans, fruit, orange juice, and a scotch with soda; three hours of work from bed; an hour in the tub with champagne; goose at lunch with more champagne; then a nap.

Every year on January 24, the day Churchill died, Kreischer lives that schedule. Breakfast in bed with a scotch, then he parties until night. The justification is simple. The man drank from morning to night, lived into his nineties, and was one of the most heroic figures in the history Kreischer cares about. "Never surrender," Fridman says. Kreischer calls it a badass saying. His Churchill-and-the-queen material, he admits, comes from *The Crown*, not from archives: a young Elizabeth pulled from school and taught not to hold eye contact, while Churchill had to walk her through world politics, including the hard questions about Africa.

If the drink has to be with someone living, he names Kim Jong Un. He has heard the man drinks Johnnie Walker Blue. He also suspects the morning IVs in Pyongyang would outclass his own. Then he pulls back. Drinking with someone who parties differently is uncomfortable. Atrocities are not a side topic you can leave in the coat check. Fridman does not like drinking with the rich and powerful either, and he hates a scheduled "drinking meeting." Kreischer's energy is not the fraternity pledge pin, the night someone announces they are getting you wrecked. He never took mushrooms to see Jesus. He wanted to watch Rain-X on a windshield. If the plane to Pyongyang were real, he would have to start blacking out on the flight just to enjoy the day.

Asked for a drink by occasion, Kreischer starts with the godfather sit-down: Joe Rogan invites him to talk about something real. That pour is whiskey, on the rocks, lots of rocks. It will not be a precious bottle. Rogan is not a fancy boy. Jack Daniel's or Buffalo Trace, maybe whatever whiskey Rogan is buying that month. The more millions Rogan has, the less regular some corners of him feel, but the floor is still a regular dude with ice in the glass. Almost all of Kreischer's time with him has been on podcasts. He misses the late nights at the Comedy Store when it was just the two of them.

Fridman used to think podcasts were performative. He does not anymore. For Kreischer they are a chance to sit with people he would never share a table with. David Cross does not run in his circle. Kevin Smith does not either. If they have something to promote, they come to the house and talk for an hour. Tom Segura is the opposite case. Off mic, Kreischer would rather be alone with him. They know too many of each other's secrets. He values Segura's insight as a father, a man, and a son. On mic they become two people trying to make each other laugh, which is fun because nobody makes Kreischer giggle harder. The podcast version has performance in it. The private version does not.

The great afternoon drink is a Campari spritz. He first chased Campari because it is red and looks like Kool-Aid; an old commercial promised Campari on ice would be so nice. The taste was earthy, rooty, bitter. Then came the Negroni, then the spritz: Campari, Prosecco, and soda in a wine glass. Bitterness, sweetness, then the soda flattening it, still looking like fruit punch. The scene he wants is Venice after a day of walking. The family meets at a statue. His wife is hot and uncomfortable. The daughters, sixteen and eighteen, ask what is next. He says it is Europe, who wants a Campari spritz? The alcohol is light enough that they buzz without tipping over, then they order another round and keep walking.

Fridman walks him through kinds of drinking alone. There is the bar full of strangers. There is the train or the plane, a body in transit. There is the empty house, and the hotel room. Kreischer has done all of them. The hotel version is a Sunday night, bag packed, six in the morning flight, *Road House* on the TV. He asks the desk if the bar is open, takes six Heinekens upstairs, and tells himself two are extras. He drinks the six. He has done a helicopter, after the pilot said absolutely not, by pouring into a flask. The highest form, he says, is drinking behind someone's back. Christmas shopping at the Beverly Center, wife says split up, the elevator bar has just opened, double Jack on the rocks, a sneak, a buzz nobody is supposed to know about. Then she asks. He admits it.

Mood is a different map. After Russia, the girl he liked slept with his best friend. He did not know what to do with the feeling. His friend Mike Osborne told him that if he drank, it would go away. He did it. That was the first time and, in the way that matters, the last. He has slipped a few times since and tries not to. Anxiety can go to alcohol: flying, getting worked up. Depression he tries to sit in. Heartbreak is the dangerous cousin of both.

The last time LeeAnn dumped him, they had been dating four months. His instinct was a drink. Friends were at a Middle Eastern restaurant; Corey offered a cocktail. Kreischer declined. He wanted the girl, and if he started drinking he would shrug and say forget it. He has already rehearsed a heavier day. His father had a complete blockage in the widow-maker twice, stents about twelve or thirteen years ago and again in the past year. Everything with his dad, who is 74, feels like extra. The movie premiere, the first time his father saw him do standup in a Tampa arena: extra. He does not know whether he will drink when that extra runs out.

At the premiere his father came out sobbing, shaking, saying he had underestimated him his whole life. Kreischer could barely understand the words. He jokes that maybe his father just disliked the movie and he heard what he wanted. Asked what he learned from the man, he says it will not make sense. Sometimes he feels like a professional wrestler: all he cares about is whether you come to see him do standup. The real inheritance is humility, applied in different ways across a career.

On his 26th birthday he picked up the phone hungover, expecting happy birthday. His father said he was a tremendous piece of shit. No humility, no success, lying to himself and everyone around him, not chasing the dream; the father had broken him and failed as a father. Buried in the speech was an instruction. If he wanted something, he had to go after it as hard as he could, whatever it took. Kreischer said that is not how it works. His father said that is how it works for a poor kid from Harlem who needs it. Kreischer had grown up with privilege. He thought he would be fine. He went and got a job on the door of a comedy club. That was the first time he understood humility, and it made him uncomfortable.

He still uses it. Becoming a paid regular at the Comedy Store happened late. Most people in his position would have shrugged: already touring, already on television, no need. He wanted it, so he went after it humbly. He does not mind selling tickets, selling a project, or making fun of himself so people know he has a show. Standup is the one thing he knows he is good at. Other comics mock the clown in a speedo. He tells them they can be that guy; he will be this guy. He wants the room full.

Taking the shirt off became a meme. He still loves it more than wearing one. He has tactile issues; a collar on the neck and cuffs on the arms make him sit wrong. Stretchy jeans, a loose belt, a V-neck, or nothing. Fridman's black shirt, he says, is his version of shirtless. Each of them had to find a costume that feels like an escape from convention. People ask what happens if he loses weight. He will take the shirt off anyway.

Hemingway's other line: the best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. Has he been betrayed? Yes, professionally, by close friends. The mantra he hates sharing is "So you think I'm weak?" The people who burned him were smaller than he is. He grew up in Florida, got beaten up, and is not afraid of a fight. The wound is not the loss. It is the verdict that he looked soft enough to take.

Even Ari belongs in that frame. Outsiders treated the drugging as a betrayal, and Kreischer did too for a while. Ari is one of his best friends. He could not stop loving him and could not cut him out. They talked it through. Ari made a bad decision; Kreischer had to forgive him, because Ari knew the mantra. The cost is that he is harder to trust now. He is not as apt to hand people that first jump.

Then a project leaked. He and Tom share managers and agents, and those teams, he says, make more money if they can split the two men or capture both. They pit them against each other in small ways. His team told him Tommy was the rat. LeeAnn asked if he thought Tom would do that. He is not especially religious, but he told her he believed in Tom, would stand on that ignorantly, and would ride or die, because he cannot live in a world where he does not trust him. If he cannot trust Tom, he is finished. It was not Tom. The feeling was strange and clean: you can close your eyes, jump, and find ground.

Rogan helped him get there. After a bad stretch he trusted no one, not Rogan, not Joey, not Tommy. Rogan said they were trying to be his friend. Kreischer could not parse the interest. Then he realized Rogan was just a nice guy. When trust goes the other way, he ruminates on a hotel treadmill, fighting the person in his head until one day he evicts them. He and Segura once had a business deal where money was producing feelings. One of them said the feelings mattered more, so they should split the money. *Two Bears, 1 Cave* still runs on a handshake. Segura calls with a number; Kreischer says yes and does not check the books. Segura once put a hand on his swollen arm after stem cells and said, "You're okay." That, more than the python-and-khakis joke about who is the lunatic in a couple, is the relationship.

What he loves most about Rogan is that he is the most selfless person Kreischer has met. If you are on the podcast, Rogan wants you to be the funniest and smartest person in the room, even though he is funnier and smarter. Before that show, comics did not share their audience. They took you on the road hoping you would eat it. Rogan wanted you to shine. Name ten of his friends, Kreischer says, and eight are playing arenas. He tried to pay the compliment in Austin and Rogan could not take it, so he gave him a gift and listed the debt: friends, a career, a movie, arenas, the Machine onstage, three podcasts. Rogan did not lead him to water once. He handed him a machete, showed him a path, and said he could use that path whenever he wanted. History will rank him among the ten most important people in standup. He changed the game. He will not accept that.

Happily married nineteen years, Kreischer's dating advice sounds off by design. Do not tie yourself down peeling mini shrimp every night when you are looking for a lobster. He was never the guy bouncing from person to person. He wanted someone who understood him. When you know, you know: you cannot imagine a life without them. He had loved LeeAnn without noticing. The second she dumped him, he knew he did not get a great life without her. He ran, cried in the shower, bought *Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus*, watched *Fight Club* in a closet, drank NyQuil to sleep, and hiked Runyon Canyon. Coming down near Ben Affleck's house at sunset, he asked whoever was listening to give her back. He got home and she was in his room in a sundress.

He uses the same test at work. A good assistant showed up when the team worked past dinner and the restaurants were closed: four different meals in the hotel room, none for himself. The social media manager felt like she was thinking about him. You have to be available enough to notice. In the marriage, he does not claim to have kept her as happy as she has kept him. She is the gangster who does everything. He is a rodeo clown, often on the road, gone three months for the movie. What he can do is stay on the same team: no cheating, no hitting, no yelling, and an apology in the moment when he is wrong. She needs to sleep on an apology. As a parent he learned, through his older daughter Georgia and through therapy, to vary consequences instead of always going to the top of his voice, the way his own father had.

Fridman calls him something like the MrBeast of comedy and asks for the secret of putting work online. The number one thing, Kreischer says, is do not be afraid to suck. Nobody sees the stuff that fails. It does not get views. It gets forgotten. He once explained Instagram Stories ticket-selling to Sean Patton, Ari, and Mark Normand, posted a swipe-up, and showed 145 people in ten minutes. Then he watched Patton try for fifteen minutes to make a story about a cup of tea and never post it. Kreischer filmed the attempts from the couch. Each of his stories did 145,000 views. Patton posted nothing. The biggest mistake is not doing it. Turn the camera on. The idea will show up.

He gives himself maybe three takes. The hip-hop dance video got two. The marching band at the house got two. More takes kill the fun. His favorite promo was desperation: a second or third show added, he was leaving the next day. He put on a speedo and an American flag, handed Ila the hose, LeeAnn the leaf blower, Georgia the drone, and played Bob Seger. Larry the Cable Guy texted that it was genius. His ass on Instagram, he says, is a million views, guaranteed. He is promoting the movie until it hits a streamer, plus Fully Loaded, a cruise, Red Rocks, and a Tops Off world tour. For the first time in his career he has scheduled a January break: sleep, resting heart rate, maybe three months without drinking, and a pause from thinking in promo.

Fridman suggests that less is more, pointing at how rarely Rogan packages himself. Kreischer refuses the premise. Rogan records several times a week. More is perfect. When Rogan does a story it is one take of elk and jalapeños and a Traeger, even if the frame is ugly. Kreischer still loves the polar-plunge clip where Rogan missed a minute, took internet heat, then sat twenty minutes and dropped his core temperature. He draws from men he is not: David Goggins, Cam Hanes, Andrew Huberman, Tim Kennedy, Jocko Willink, Fridman himself. Adding a little of that control into an uncontrolled life felt good. Bone broth during a fast. A pandemic marathon on a treadmill, not all at once. He showed Ila a Jocko clip about the first victory being getting out of bed. She paused it to praise the snooze nap, then threatened to quit if Jocko said no to donuts. He still tries to steal the wins: no snooze, gym every morning, skip the donut on National Donut Day, then Campari and edibles that night.

He will argue for the snooze nap too. After early press and a short sleep, a thirty-minute nap felt like five hours. Tour-bus bunks are the peak: ice cold, pitch black, show at seven, a coffin of pillows from five to six-thirty with a history show in the corner. He likes a full day, a nap, then a box of wine on the treadmill at a 3.5 walk, *Guy's Grocery Games* or *Game of Thrones* on, his wife on the couch in the old house. Sometimes he runs when the soldiers on screen run. He is deep in history podcasts now, from Marcus Aurelius and Cleopatra to World War II. He cannot hang with the densest material; too many names and he is gone. The Noiser is history for dummies, in a way he can use. Dan Carlin is the one he calls the motherfucker: Genghis Khan, Martin Luther, the rest. Discovering podcasts, he says, was the coolest time of his life.

The best road trip in college started with a burned bar whose liquor was still inside. Five guys loaded a Jetta and drove from Tallahassee toward West Virginia, mushrooms, inner tubes, debauchery. He was trying to be a poet then, and it was a bad era, because he is not a good serious person. He is a good fool. The best road trips of his adult life were the pandemic drive-in theater tour he invented when nobody was working. They COVID-tested, took the bus, and built a bubble. The first night, outside Gallup, they watched thunderstorms over a lake with cigars and IPAs. They picked up pickleball and disc golf in an emptied middle of the country. He did not make much money; the crew had bills. At night they got back on the bus and got wasted. Nothing, he says, will ever be like that run.

The anxiety was the other half. Halfway through a run he would become sure he had COVID, in the months when COVID was killing people. They started isolating in Sedona Airbnbs before going home. The first time they skipped that, families in Los Angeles were terrified. On the Fourth of July he was allowed an egg toss with Ila; the egg broke on her face, and that night, high and drunk, he pictured killing his daughter with an egg toss. LeeAnn later hugged him at Christmas, said she thought she had COVID, and proceeded to give it to the family. In Park City, Georgia cried that she had infected her high-risk father, "a fat alcoholic." Ila never got it. What they miss from the mask years, he says, is the eyes.

He is a pilsner guy, ice-cold beer. One of the best buzzes he ever had was after three or four dry months in COVID, two German tallboys in a backyard that was not yet a finished house. A beer buzz sparkles on contact, especially an irresponsible afternoon one. Night beer is already thinking about tomorrow. IPAs need a place and food; a Salt Lake City growler in the bathtub at six in the morning, before a Stratosphere jump, put him off them for a decade. His public drink is still a double Jack on the rocks, lots of rocks. Flight attendants now walk it over without asking, even on mornings he planned to stay dry.

Fridman associates vodka with Eastern European camaraderie, but real drinking, for him, is whiskey neat or that afternoon lager that makes a regimented person say forget the rest of the day. Kreischer will never get that precious "fuck it," because he is not regimented. Fridman's slip is Kreischer's version of doing cocaine. He cannot even explain what Fridman does for a living, or quite what his own father the lawyer does. Everyone in his life worries about him. Nobody tells him to work harder. He does not understand people without the drive to work all the time, and he envies them. If he played video games he would open a Twitch. His version of overwork is a plane every day, gym at six, go until one or two. If he did not drink on planes, he suspects nobody would worry.

On the treadmill he starts at a walk, builds to a six when the body is loose, then plays fartleks. He mutes foreign-language cooking shows and blasts hip-hop. He stole a Cam Hanes trick: jog to Fryman Canyon, hike it, jog home, and only later notice it was eight miles. In a park in Serbia the loop was mostly downhill. A butterfly led the first mile one morning; a tree fell in front of him the next. He took both as signs he was on the path.

Marc Maron once wrote that Kreischer is a gonzo warrior driven not by cynicism but by a need to have a good time, arriving at the true humility of joy. That desire, Kreischer says, arrived in college. He showed up wanting to be Eddie Vedder, a poet, a lead singer, wanted by women and respected by men. The real Bert chipped that away. In the fraternity he said things so funny they surprised him. On bus trips he did an hour of standup on the walkie-talkie. In Russia the young bandits were stoic; making them laugh was real joy. He walked into a club with tampons in his pocket because class had said Russian women could not get them. He pulled out lemons for lemon drops and Igor asked if the Machine ran on lemons. That is how the name stuck: he tried to say something like *mashina* and said he was a car. Backpacking afterward, he could turn a night into an event, including thirty minutes dancing on a bar in Strasbourg to keep it open. Rolling Stone wrote about him. Serious dads told him to follow it. New York tried to make him an edgy comic. The real Bert chipped that away too: take the shirt off, kill a beer, tell the Machine, tell stories about your stupid kids. Leave gangster comedy to Chappelle, Burr, Rogan, and Segura. Bring a spark and let people forget their day.

Fridman does not love how alcohol feels in the body. He loves the camaraderie when a whole group says they are in. Kreischer lives for that yes, especially when he can pull LeeAnn into it: a skull of beer on a red carpet while he is supposed to be selling the movie, or a glass of Malbec in the Adirondacks while the dogs play. A lightly feathered Vespa ride through hills outside Florence, rain starting, Ila yelling for music, the family singing "Hooked on a Feeling," is a day he is not sure exists without a little. A lot is another country. Fridman once got so drunk with Rogan that he tried to tell David Goggins he was a fan and then found himself in a push-up contest. Kreischer calls that a gift. You are letting someone see you at your worst, with no lies. His rule is he will never get angry at a person for getting too drunk. Bad people leverage that morning. Whitney Cummings, after his own blackout at her roast of him, told him he had been fantastic. The tape said otherwise. He thanked her for the lie.

The promo he is proudest of is the hip-hop dance he made after Rogan, Segura, and Ari refused to take lessons for Sober October. He spent about $1,200, put tour dates on a video that was half good and half funny, and watched the run sell out. Segura copied the form and sold out too, arenas included, before they were arena acts. Then a marching band for $2,400. Then the baller move: the night before surgery to reattach retracted triceps, he told the anesthesiologist he would not count backward. He would read a Red Rocks promo until he passed out, CCR in the background, phone falling to the floor. He woke up asking for the phone. LeeAnn had already watched it. Ego, he says, is the death of comedy. It is hard to be the coolest person in the room and still want to be a comic. Turn the camera on. You never know.

Outside his close friends, the greats he names keep spilling: Mitch Hedberg, Dave Attell, Norm Macdonald, Dave Chappelle and Bill Burr as the two best of the generation, Doug Stanhope, Louis C.K., Sarah Silverman, Janeane Garofalo, Marc Maron, Patton Oswalt, David Cross, Chris Rock's *Bring the Pain* as the reason he got into comedy. He hopes Eddie Murphy comes back. Advice for young people is not to worry too much about what they will do, and when they do start worrying, to find the thing they love so it never feels like work. He cannot imagine being a lawyer reading papers all day; that is what school felt like. Charles Bukowski's line, find what you love and let it kill you, is the bullet train he is already on. Fridman quotes Hunter S. Thompson: you are not supposed to arrive in a well-preserved box. Kreischer's perfect ending is to be 95, last man standing with Joey Diaz, still at the Mark Twain Prize, with people asking who saw that coming. If there is a Churchill of comedy, that is the bet.