[Music] [Music] hi everybody how are you good okay this is my first time uh speaking with this microphone and uh it is uh very uncomfortable i didn't realize that until right now i feel like britney spears but uh let's do it i know we are here to talk about being bold and brave i'd like to acknowledge something right off the bat as a comedian i am at the low end of the spectrum of brave okay i understand brave people are soldiers firefighters police people battling terminal illness comedians are here okay k-pop dance groups around here
okay so i know where i am on the spectrum not trying to say i'm this incredibly brave person i like telling jokes it's fun i won i was telling my mom that i was going to do a a ted talk and she's like is it going to be weird to stand in front of people and not make them laugh and i said mom you must have forgot about the beginning of my career there's a lot of ted talks going on then and bars all over new york city so we've come a long way to go
full circle i want to talk a little bit about the shift in culture uh what's going on right now with maybe political correctness and how that's affected my industry and how you can possibly be bold and brave in that regard times have changed we've got a lot more sensitive can you guys feel it yes okay now not only sensitive we've got a lot more entitled to our feelings if we feel something it's important we let everybody know okay now why did this happen does anybody have kids here yes a couple people no one two three
four now everybody has kids okay ah a second ago baron now everybody has a whole troop so you guys [ __ ] it up you guys [ __ ] it up with the kids okay your parenting sucks and i'll explain why all right when i was growing up and i got in trouble in school which was a lot i would come home and i'd tell my parents mom dad the teacher doesn't like me okay and my mom and dad would say who gives a [ __ ] in life people are not gonna like you figure
it out now you guys when you have kids in elementary school they come home they go the teacher doesn't like me and you go well let's get the teacher fired because my kid's perfect and everybody likes my kid so you instill in his brain or her brain that the world should bend to them and now i'm doing comedy and i tell a joke about something and someone stands up and they go i don't like that well why not because i don't well everyone else is laughing but that doesn't matter because in this moment i don't
like it so now you have to leave you get kicked out of my show i had an instance recently a girl had a seizure at my show that's how funny i am now uh talk about killing anyway so uh she had a seizure at the show we checked on her she was fine she leaves everything's good so i started to make fun of what happened in the situation and a girl in the crowd stood up she's like you can't make jokes about that that's not funny and i asked what she did for a living she
said she was an emt and i was like why didn't you help [Laughter] and you know why she didn't help is because this is what we do now we complain but we don't help because we think that's enough anyway so here we line this situation where there's certain topics that people say you cannot joke about they're taboo cannot joke about uh violence sexism rape incest these topics you cannot make any content about whatsoever until game of thrones comes on you know then uh you can make a whole show about it for eight seasons it's only
literally about those topics but after that you can't you know not anybody else you can or unless you're president you know so all i'm saying is i want the moral obligations of the president is that that much to ask i don't think that that's too much to ask of a comedian right but unfortunately for me we live in an environment where people want to be very critical of what you say so how do you be bold and brave in that environment here is my journey i had a lot of success early on in television but
not necessarily stand-up comedy i wanted to do stand-up but the stand-up industry for whatever reason would never let me in so i had to find a way around this blockade or whatever it was i sat there and i go okay you know what i'll do i come from two hard-working parents they would do it themselves i'm gonna do it myself so we go out we film this special we shoot it four different comedy clubs in new york city we get the cab rides in between and we really dive into what a night of comedy is
for a new york comic okay we put it together we cook it up we pitch it to everybody everybody said no lowest point in my whole career but it was actually the most invaluable time in my entire life because i learned a couple things one adversity introduces a man to himself that's an old phrase i'm sure if they said it now it would be adversity introduces a non-binary person to themself or whatever uh forgive abraham lincoln it was a different time he was progressive for his time of course though so we pitched everybody everybody says
no everybody says no now what do i do okay the doors are closed for everything i have to figure out this business uh something i learned in life is from nothing comes everything and again you learn these things later in life you know sometimes the lessons that happen in the moment they don't hit you two months years after so i started kind of looking at the business and figuring out if i could hack it in some way you know i've always felt like my competitive advantage and whatever i do is problem solving so how do
i solve this problem and i think you can learn everything about whatever business you're in by asking people who are not in that business oftentimes we're too close to understand the problems that we all have okay so i asked my friends to watch stand up what they were watching and how they liked it and they would all tell me about the things they were watching and then they would all say the same thing every single one would be like yeah i watched it it was funny but i didn't finish it i go oh that's interesting
oh it was funny yeah it was really cool like this guy didn't finish it huh nobody's finishing it okay specials are too long so i decided to take this hour special that i had cut it down to 15 minutes and put it out on youtube all right i we made this thing i was really proud of it i just want to get it out there in the world right it it stopped becoming an outcome-based endeavor and just became something that i was proud of and wanted to share does that make sense okay good even though
you didn't respond so what we did is we put this little 15-minute special out okay and immediately that weekend i sold out a bunch of shows in san diego and i was never a sellout guy you know i'd sell maybe a few tickets but i never sold out you know the club i was like maybe that's a coincidence maybe i got fan base in san diego and i kept doing different tour dates in different places and more and more people came out and i was like wow maybe there's something that given away this material online
so i started putting out a clip every week on youtube i was going to do it for a year every week i put a new clip out on youtube and these clips would start to go viral and they would blow up in places all around the world india bulgaria romania russia you know obviously america as well and i would start to sell out these shows and it was crazy to see these people start to gravitate towards me and my career kind of really blow up off of just putting out this material and i realized something
i decided to break it up into these small bits and create tons of different ports of entry to me as an entertainer right and by doing this we saw this crazy effect happen on youtube where a person would watch one video and then they would be watching for the next two hours okay so my problem initially was the business would not let me in and then the business itself had a problem where people would not watch their whole hour special and somehow i found a way where people would watch two hours of comedy in a
row and why was it is because it was two things authenticity and choice i always felt like the best sleep i have every night is the nine minutes i get when i press snooze okay i wake up i'm exhausted snooze that nine minutes is like uh i could have just did that i didn't need the other six hours just let me snooze right i applied the snooze effect to stand up online you watch a three minute clip and then all of a sudden youtube goes you want to watch another one you go snooze i watch
another one and just like when you sleep in you end up snoozing for two hours that's what you did with me okay my career kind of explodes because of it the other part authenticity i've always been drawn to and we'll wrap this up right now but i've always been drawn to larry david and i tried to figure out why larry david was this amazing character that breaks all cultural barriers anybody you meet that has experienced larry david loves larry david right he's not just old jewish people's favorite comic he's young puerto rican's favorite comic too
right why and it's because larry david is an experiment in authenticity it's what would it be like if you were your true self 24 hours a day right hey can i have a bite of your sandwich no why not i don't like your mouth we all want to say that but don't so when we see somebody say we gravitate to that and i think that what i always believed is i was going to do authentic material i was going to do material that came from me it hits you in your gut i don't do material
for how you want the world to be and stand up i do material for how we know the world is down here and i realize that by putting it out there in the internet right i put it out there on youtube where there are billions of videos out there somehow it was able to somehow is able to touch people and people gravitated toward all around the world because you cannot deny your gut and that is what i learned and that is what i share with you today that if you want success in whatever industry you
are in obviously find ways to hack it but uh by being truly authentic you do not have to gravitate to the world the world will gravitate to you my name is andrew schultz have eleven nine okay
