[Tim Dillon walks on stage. He is wearing a suit that costs more than your car. He looks like he just got off a phone call with someone who ruined his life. He looks like this every night.]
Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself. I know you've heard this. Everyone's heard this. It's on T-shirts now. It's on bumper stickers. There are people in Nebraska who couldn't find the Virgin Islands on a map and they have EPSTEIN DIDN'T KILL HIMSELF on their Ford F-150 next to a sticker that says THESE COLORS DON'T RUN. And you know what? They're right. He didn't. But here's the thing nobody talks about — nobody cares HOW he died. Nobody actually cares about the mechanism. What they care about is that a very powerful man had a list and the list had names and the names had faces and the faces go on television every night and tell you to vote for them. That's it. That's the whole thing. Bill Clinton was on that plane and he's still doing speaking tours. He's out there charging two hundred thousand dollars to stand in front of a room full of compliance officers at a Goldman Sachs retreat in Scottsdale, Arizona, and talk about — I shit you not — LEADERSHIP. Bill Clinton. Leadership. The man whose definition of leadership is "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" while his wife is in the next room running a shadow government out of an email server she kept in a bathroom in Chappaqua. LEADERSHIP.
And then you have Trump. Trump is — look, Trump is a miracle of engineering. Trump is what happens when you take a man who has never read a book and you give him the nuclear codes and he just — he just goes. He just does it. He doesn't think about it. Obama thought about everything. Obama was the most thoughtful president we've ever had and it was a disaster because he was so busy thinking about drone strikes that he forgot to stop doing them. Obama would drone a wedding in Yemen and then go on Marc Maron's podcast and talk about the complexity of the situation. The COMPLEXITY. Marc's sitting there in his garage with his cats going "yeah man, it's tough" and Obama's like "it really is, Marc, it really is" and meanwhile there's a crater in Sana'a where a reception hall used to be. But he THOUGHT about it. He thought about it so carefully. He wrote a memo. The memo had footnotes. The footnotes had footnotes.
Trump doesn't do footnotes. Trump does ALL CAPS at 3 AM on Truth Social. "JUST SPOKE TO NETANYAHU. GREAT GUY. VERY STRONG. WE'RE GONNA DO BEAUTIFUL THINGS." What beautiful things? Nobody knows. Netanyahu doesn't know. Netanyahu is too busy trying to stay out of prison to know what beautiful things Trump is talking about. Netanyahu is doing to Israel what I do to a bread basket at a restaurant — he's taking everything, he knows he shouldn't, everyone at the table can see him doing it, and he just looks you dead in the eye and takes another piece. That's leadership. That's ACTUAL leadership. Not the Bill Clinton kind where you pretend. The Netanyahu kind where you don't even pretend. You just take the bread and dare someone to say something.
Pete Hegseth is the Secretary of Defense now. Pete Hegseth. The man who admitted on live television that he hasn't washed his hands in ten years. TEN YEARS. This man has access to biological weapons. He has access to the entire nuclear arsenal of the United States of America and he doesn't wash his hands. And nobody — NOBODY — thought this was disqualifying. You know why? Because we've moved past qualifications. Qualifications are a 2015 concept. Qualifications are like having a landline. Sure, some people still have them, but nobody's impressed. Tulsi Gabbard is the Director of National Intelligence. Tulsi Gabbard. She went from a yoga retreat in Maui to controlling the CIA. That's not a career path. That's a glitch in the simulation. That's what happens when the algorithm breaks and the recommendation engine just starts putting random people in random positions. "You watched a video about surfing? Here, run the intelligence community."
Alex Jones was right about like forty percent of everything and that's the most terrifying sentence in the English language. Forty percent. If your doctor was right forty percent of the time you'd be dead. But if your conspiracy theorist is right forty percent of the time — that means the conspiracies are real and the theorist is still mostly wrong, which means reality is worse than the conspiracy, which means we're all just sitting here watching a man sell supplements while the actual truth is somehow even more insane than what he's screaming about. Joe Rogan had him on the podcast and Joe was sitting there going "that's crazy, man" like he always does, like a golden retriever who learned to speak, and Alex is going THEY'RE TURNING THE FROGS GAY and Joe's like "have you tried elk meat though" and somehow — SOMEHOW — this is the most trusted news source in America. A man who hunts elk and a man who screams about frogs. That's our Walter Cronkite. That's our Edward R. Murrow. Two men in a studio in Austin, Texas, one of them is on DMT and the other one is selling bone broth.
I went to a show last week. Not a comedy show. A music show. Downtown. Some club in the Lower East Side that used to be a bodega and before that it was a crack house and before that it was probably a church and the whole history of New York City is just the same building cycling through identities like a dissociative disorder. The band was called — I'm not making this up — the band was called ANTIFA FEMBOYS. Which — okay. Fine. Whatever. I've been to enough shows in New York that nothing shocks me anymore. The lead singer was a six-foot-four Black woman in a latex Wehrmacht uniform and she was singing about — I think it was about cryptocurrency? Or maybe the Federal Reserve. It's hard to tell when there's that much reverb. The bassist was a furry. Full suit. Fox ears, tail, the whole thing. Playing a five-string Warwick bass in a fox suit and honestly? Honestly? He was the best musician on stage. The fox was shredding. The Nazi dominatrix was singing about quantitative easing and the fox was laying down the groove of his life. And I'm standing there with my drink going — you know what, this is fine. This is America. This is what we are now. A latex Nazi and a fox and a song about the money supply. Don't shoot each other. That's all I ask. Just don't shoot each other and we're fine. We'll figure out the rest.
I can move through any space. That's my gift. That's the thing. I can talk to billionaires and I can talk to homeless people and I can talk to the fox bassist and I can talk to the Nazi dominatrix and I can talk to Pete Hegseth even though he hasn't washed his hands and I can talk to Alex Jones even though he's screaming and I can talk to Obama even though he's thinking about it too carefully and none of it — NONE of it — touches me. I can walk through all of it like I'm walking through an airport. Like I'm in the terminal and all the gates are different countries and all the countries are insane and I'm just a guy with a rolling bag looking for a Cinnabon. That's me. That's what I do. I walk through the insanity and I find the Cinnabon and I eat the Cinnabon and I comment on the insanity while I'm eating and everyone thinks I'm brave but I'm not brave I'm just hungry.
[He pauses. He takes a sip of water. Something changes in his posture. His shoulders drop half an inch. His voice loses exactly one layer of performance.]
So there's this sushi place on Jericho Turnpike in Long Island. It's called — it doesn't matter what it's called. You know the kind of place. It's in a strip mall between a nail salon and a place that does your taxes. The sign is one of those lightbox signs where two of the letters are burned out so it says something like SU HI instead of SUSHI and you'd think — you'd think from the outside that this place is a disaster. You'd think this is where food goes to die.
But you walk in and there's this guy behind the counter. Japanese. Maybe sixty. He's been there since — I don't know, since before the strip mall. Since before the tax place. Since before Long Island knew what sushi was. He's been there since the eighties when nobody on Jericho Turnpike had ever seen a piece of raw fish and he just — he opened a restaurant. In a strip mall. Next to a nail salon. And he started making sushi.
And the thing is — the thing is — his omakase is perfect. It's not good. It's not "pretty good for a strip mall." It's perfect. The rice is — the rice is the thing. The rice is warm. Not hot. Warm. Body temperature. You know how hard that is? Do you know what goes into rice that is exactly body temperature? It means he's been thinking about that rice all day. It means the rice has been on his mind since he woke up. At what point did he start the rice? When did he season it? How long did he let it cool? Every single one of those decisions — every single one — was made with a level of care that Pete Hegseth has never applied to anything in his life including his own hands.
The fish — he gets the fish from — I asked him once where he gets his fish and he just looked at me. He just looked at me like I'd asked him where he gets his oxygen. Like the question was too stupid to answer. He gets his fish from somewhere and the somewhere is not my business and the not-my-business is part of the experience because I'm not supposed to know. I'm supposed to sit there and eat what he gives me and trust him and that — THAT — in a world where nobody trusts anyone, in a world where Bill Clinton can't be trusted with an intern and Trump can't be trusted with a tweet and Netanyahu can't be trusted with a bread basket and Alex Jones can't be trusted with a microphone — in THAT world, I am supposed to sit at a counter in a strip mall on Jericho Turnpike and trust a sixty-year-old Japanese man with my dinner. And I do. And it's the only trust I have left.
He does this thing with the — you're not going to care about this. Nobody cares about this. But he does this thing with the ginger. He doesn't give you the pink stuff. He doesn't give you the neon pink pickled ginger that comes in a plastic tub that tastes like a chemical plant in New Jersey had a baby with a flower shop. He makes his own. He makes his own ginger. It's pale. Almost white. It tastes like — it tastes like ginger. It tastes like the thing it is, which is a concept that has been lost in this country. Everything in America tastes like a version of the thing it's supposed to be. The bread tastes like bread-flavored bread. The cheese tastes like cheese-flavored cheese. The politicians sound like politician-flavored politicians. Everything is a simulation of itself. But this man's ginger tastes like ginger. It tastes like a root that came out of the ground and was sliced by a man who gives a shit and was placed next to fish that was cut by the same man who gives the same shit and the shit-giving is — the shit-giving is the whole thing. The shit-giving is what's missing from everything. Pete Hegseth doesn't give a shit about his hands. Bill Clinton doesn't give a shit about the truth. Nobody gives a shit about anything and we're all walking through the terminal looking for Cinnabon and this man — this sixty-year-old Japanese man in a strip mall where the sign says SU HI — this man gives a shit about ginger.
[His voice has changed entirely now. He doesn't notice. The audience notices. He's not doing a bit anymore. He hasn't been doing a bit for two minutes. He's describing a sushi restaurant the way a man describes the person he loves when he doesn't know he's describing the person he loves.]
The counter seats eight. Eight. Not twelve. Not twenty. Eight. Because he can only take care of eight people at a time. That's — that's integrity. That's a man who knows his limits. Obama didn't know his limits. Obama tried to take care of three hundred and thirty million people and ended up drone-striking a wedding. This man takes care of eight people and every single one of them gets perfect rice. That's the difference. That's the whole difference between everything that's wrong with the world and this sushi restaurant on Jericho Turnpike. The world tries to scale and the scaling is the failure. This man does not scale. This man seats eight.
And I go there — I go there maybe once a month. I drive out to Long Island, which if you've ever driven to Long Island you know that the Long Island Expressway is where hope goes to die, and I sit in traffic for an hour and a half listening to Alex Jones scream about something on my phone and I get to the strip mall and I park next to a guy in a BMW who's there for the nail salon and I walk in and I sit at the counter and the man looks at me and he nods. He doesn't say "welcome." He doesn't say "how are you." He doesn't ask me about my day or my career or my podcast or whether I've seen the latest thing on the news. He nods. And the nod means: I see you. You are here. I will feed you. That is enough.
And it is enough. It is the only thing in my life that is enough.
[He realizes what he's been doing. The audience is completely silent. He looks down at his water. He looks up.]
Anyway. Where were we. Epstein. Right.
[He tries to get back to the bit. He can't. The sushi restaurant is still in the room. It will be in the room for the rest of the set. He doesn't know this yet. The audience does.]
The — yeah. So. Moving on.
[He doesn't move on. He stands there for four seconds, which in comedy is an eternity, and the four seconds contain the entire performance — a man who can walk through anything, who can survive anything, who can make fun of anything, standing completely still because he thought about rice.]