EP #160: Anthony Locascio On Humor, Celebrating His Greek Heritage & Taking Risks, Australian Stand-Up Comedian

Welcome back to another episode of Everyday in Dorfens, a mental health podcast focused on the importance of finding joy and happiness in daily living. I'm your host Stella Steffanautolis, and this week I had the pleasure of speaking with Anthony Locascio, who's a stand-up comedian based in Australia with Greek and Italian descent. Anthony's performed multiple sold-out seasons at the Sydney Comedy Festival and other prestigious festivals in Australia. He truly is so talented and I have the opportunity to witness that firsthand. Anthony and I met a while back in Newark City, and I went to one of his shows where he performed his stand-up special called Papu, which means grandfather in Greek. From that moment we just immediately clicked. It was such a funny special. That's really what led us here today to have Anthony on the podcast. Obviously, comedy brings into orphans. Comedy makes us laugh. Laughing makes us happy. But in this episode, we got to dive into how Anthony came into the world of comedy, what inspired him to become a comedian, and really where the inspiration was to creating and writing this special that was focused on exploring his roots, his relationship to his grandfather, and how having a strong connection to your heritage contributes to your identity and sense of meaning and purpose in life. I am very excited for you all to listen to this episode. Hopefully you get a laugh out of what Anthony has to share and enjoy the podcast. Before we dive in, reminder to like, rate, and review this podcast on whichever listening platform you prefer. Hello, Anthony. Thank you for being here and coming on to Everyday Endorphans. Hello Stella. Thank you for having me. So nice to see you again. I know. It's been, what, since February, it's end of May now, a few months. Time goes fast. You are officially living in the future as it is, I don't even know what the time difference is between New York and Australia. But you are living the day ahead of me. So it's kind of crazy to think about how my day is wrapping up and yours is just starting. It's the sunny morning over here. We are ahead. I am actually here to warn you. The zombies are coming. It's happening. There might just be me actually. With global warming, that's kind of what we were talking about before. Maybe those are the zombies that are coming. There's no such thing. How dare you. What are you talking about? I am really excited to get to talk to you. I'm also a little nervous because when I attended your special in New York, you roasted me. I did make the mistake of sitting at the front row. So I was kind of asking for it. But we had a fun little, like, back and forth little bit in New York during your show. Would you like to tell my listeners what happened? Do you remember? Okay. So there's pots in the show where I specifically need to use people around me to get to the next part. I think I can remember. I think I had to use you for one of them. Is that right? Yes. Well, we were talking about a term that your Papu would call you, like an endearing phrase, right? That's right. You did the "Evo de Maceau" thing with me. Yes. Yes. Perfect. You actually nailed it. You nailed it compared to it. So I did the show 85 times. And just for your listeners, what I do is like, my grandfather is saying that he, like, it's his catchphrase and it kind of like, it's "Evo de Maceau" in Greek, which is "I don't chew in English." But it's kind of like, you know, like, don't tell me what to do kind of thing. And I like to illustrate to the crowd that you need to say it in a particular way. Like, you got to say it extra Greek. And so I get somebody in the front row to like, you got to tell me what to do. I'm going to do the act out, right? But I'd basically just use it to like, because I know that the crowd member is going to like, not do it perfectly so that I use it for little moments to like, kind of roast them a little bit. And the main part is like where I say, you got to call my name, you got to call, you got to call who I am. And then normally the crowd member will be like, Anthony, and then I'll come in and be like, no, I'm not playing Anthony. You know, you're never going to make it in this industry. Hollywood's thrown your resume in the toilet already. And then the idea is that like, you have to say, you have to say "Pappu," which is the name of the show and the show's about my grandfather. I mention earlier in the show that my papu's name is "Betro." So some people have extra, they get A++ because I remember that it's "Betro" but "Pappu" will do. You did good. Some people just like, do not get it. Some people were like, I don't know what to do. And then some people, some people are like all bluster. They're like all confidence. And they're like, I know the papu's name. And they just come up with their own name. They just like, chuck whatever name out. And then I'm like, sick. You just made up my grandfather's name. Is that what you did? No, I think I did it wrong because remember that I don't remember the phrase in Greek, but I was, you would call my name and I was, I thought that I had to address you as like, my little penis. That's what it was. That's right. That's right. Okay. How could you forget? That's, I'm sorry. I've, I will never forget because it was so unexpected and my parents were in the audience. I was like, I didn't know what to say. See, you're a comedian, Stella. You have the instinct. There's you called back to a different joke. And now you're listening as a like, she called him a little penis. What the fuck, but yeah, the other kind of joke involved in that is that papu would always call me Pulakimu, which he meant it as like the literal translation, which is my little bird in Greek. But obviously all the Greeks know that Pulakimu is also a euphemism for my little penis. And so yeah, Stella, it, the comedic instincts 10 out of 10 was like, little dick. And no one, do you know what no one across the entire run that I'm ashamed that I forgot about it because no one across the whole run made that link. That was brilliant. Thank you. Thank you for concluding that it's my comedic genius because for basically my entire life, I actually never thought I was that funny. I took a humor writing class in college to try to understand how to write a joke. And I will give props to all the comedians out there. It is way harder than it seems to be funny. So I don't actually think I'm, I think I'm funny in like observation, but I don't think I like, I can't riff on the spot. Maybe I did in that moment, but it was because of the vibes. You made it an emotionally safe environment for me to riff. So I think it was the energy. But it's hard. It's really hard. And like this actually is a great segue into where I want to start this interview, which is better understanding for my listeners who you are and how you got into the world of comedy. And really what inspired you to want to come into this profession because it isn't, it's not easy. I think there's lots of misconceptions that it's easy to be funny, but it's really not. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, you're not wrong. You know what, it's the being funny part. I'm going to answer this question backwards, but the being funny part is actually the kind of easiest part about it. If that makes sense, it's like once you're in the context, then you're in the groove after years of just smacking your head against the wall and performing in the tie restaurants and just all kinds of terrible venues and just learning how to do it. Eventually that part comes naturally. It's more like the knowing how to get into this career. Like you can't find jobs on LinkedIn. You don't know a guy who knows a guy who will get you an interview and a referral fee. And you know, it's not, it's, it's just like you just got to like wait around in the dark with it. But having said that, I've been doing that for just over eight years now. I was in the insolvency industry, which I'm not sure if that's what it's called in America, but it's, it's liquidations and bankruptcies. So it's just like we were the accountant/loyers for if a business goes into liquidation or if an individual goes personally bankrupt, we're just like we're here to pick the carcasses of your rotting business. So just like super duper off-blifting stuff. Just like that's every day in dolphins. A job like that. Poor. Yep. The monotony every day. The stimulating environment that you're in. Those are your everyday endorphins. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Just just just an amazing industry to be around. Like when the first woman who has a bankrupt estate calls you and threatens to kill herself on the phone, you're like, all right, this is exciting. But then when four or five of them do it, you're like, okay, come on, get a new thing. It's clockwork at this point. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. But I like I had always wanted to do comedy. I was I watched Eddie Murphy Raw and then Eddie Murphy Delirious when I was 11 years old with my dad and my uncle, which is not a good thing to show an 11 year old. And I just saw these guys just cro- like dying. You know that like embarrassing like is this guy going to be okay? Laughter. And I just thought that's magic. That's the best thing I've ever seen in my life. And so the seed was always planted. But at the same time, I'm a half Italian, half Greek child of immigrant descent. And you just don't like you don't really get to turn around to your parents. in that kind of a context and be like, "I'm gonna be an artist." You know? You know, like, "I'm gonna smack you." Like, that's not what happens. Yeah, I didn't even fathom the idea. Like, I finished school and they sent me to like a really, they sent me like a really smart school as well. And they paid lots of money. So like, there was never gonna be a situation where they were like, "You go and you go and you play your music wherever you want to play your music. It's fine. Be free." They're like, "No, Dr. Lawyer, go for it." So I went to law school and I almost became a lawyer and I ended up crash landing in that industry that I was telling you about. And I was really depressed. My life was horrible. I was living, you know, I was in the typical kind of living for the weekend just droning my way to work, getting up, getting on the bus, wearing the same suit every day. And at a certain point, I was like, I'm so hating my life where it's going. I'm 24 years old. I'm staring down the barrel of, you know, once the snowball starts rolling with your life in your career path, it's hard to stop. And I thought, I don't want to get to 35 and not have tried to live my dream. So while I was working still in insolvency, I just started doing open mics and writing as much as I could. And like any time, like I kind of had the, the master plan was in my head from like a year before I started. And so any time I said something colloquially, just like in conversation, that was funny. I wrote it down, just in my phone. I was like a lunatic at coffee with friends. I was just like, what are you doing here? I was like, I don't know about it. And so when I started, I just had this whole catalog of things, most of which were not like, were not workable at all. Most of which are like, I don't even know what that means. But it was enough of a base for me to start. And then I realized you're in New York and the United States as a whole. There's like genuinely a pathway for comedy. It's a not orthodox career path, like no matter where you go. But the, especially in New York, it's like, this is the open mics. And if you do well enough at the open mics, like you're gonna get spotted, and then you're gonna get an opportunity at the semi-pro show, and then so on and so forth. And there's like, if you, as long as you're not a complete psychopath, even though many, many comedians very much are, as long as you're not like an unprofessional, like really difficult to work with person, and you're working hard and you're doing well, eventually you will kind of move. Comedy as a, as a, as a quote unquote industry in Australia is very, very underdeveloped. So I was like, I was doing well after a few months, and I was still like really struggling to get anything much to see any movement. So I sat down after a gig with some of the like, older heads that were out the gig. And I said to you know, I feel like I'm doing well, what's the kind of pathway to move up, like how do I, how do I do that? And they said to me, oh, bro, it doesn't matter how well you do, it's irrelevant. You just need to be one of the boys. You need to hang back off to gigs. You need to sync beers with us. And then like we'll tell our friends who book that show that you're a good hang, and you can sync plenty of beers. And then you just slowly, and then you sync beers at that one. And then you continue to just sync beers again and again and again. It was more about like the vibes at that time. Yeah, exactly. Like can you hang? Like you're talented, but also can you hang? That was the exact balance. It was like you need to prove you're a good hang. And at that point, you know, I'm still working this job. And I already had my friends, you know, a lot of people come into comedy just because they're seeking community. I'm like, I don't want to hang out with you guys. I want to come on to comedy, I want to get paid, and I want to go at besting my friends. So I realized that I needed to take a, like a different path. So I rented out a theater, 400 people theater, and I put on an hour show. And I invited for free everybody in my network. Like I'm driving around putting tickets in mailboxes. And I said to everybody, I will give you two tickets. I'll give you one for you. And then I want you to give one to somebody that doesn't know me personally to bring them to the show. And they all came. It was packed out. And I did an hour of comedy after having done comedy for like five months. And it was, it was pretty bad. But I was expecting you to say it was amazing. And that's where I got really discovered. Do you know what? It was, okay, it was amazing. It was not amazing comedy. Also, I ended up doing like an hour and 15 minutes. I had no concept of how long an hour was. I held those poor people to such a long hostage situation. It was, it was, yeah. And it's something that I would not recommend to anybody to do. Everybody around me within comedy was like, what the fuck are you doing? You're not supposed to do that. You know, Tom Sagura said on the Joe Rogan podcast, you got to do 10 years of comedy before you even do an hour. What are you doing? You're breaking the rules. And so we filmed it as well. And there might have been from that hour and 15 minutes that I did. There might have been 10 minutes that was good. And I was able to use that. I put that online and I was able to use just those 10 minutes to start developing an audience. And additionally, the people that came, they may not have been like totally blown away by, by the performance itself. But a lot of them were like, this guy's got balls, man. This guy's, all right. I'm along for this ride. And so many of the people that came that night have come to every single show that I've done thereafter. And you know, to like, witness the progression. And then there was also some people from the industry that were like, this guy's insane. I'm going to go check this guy out. And then they took me for coffee. And then they were like, you're crazy. And I said, well, I'm hungry. And this is just what I thought to do. And so because of that, you know, people within the industry were keeping tabs on me, which was invaluable. And the other thing that was invaluable was that I knew that, okay, you've done an hour, you've filmed it. You've put it all on the internet now. That means you need to write a new hour. And you need to do that new hour in a year. And rinse and repeat. So that's what I ended up doing. And so I had got into a point where I was, I had been doing comedy for like three years, four years. But I had already done four hours. And you progressively get better at doing the hours. You progressively get better at, you know, insuating what is good material and what isn't good material. And you also learn that when you don't have an audience that is entirely made up of your friends and family and their friends and family, you kind of need to have tested material. And so I learned how to, like I learned that I needed to work hard on just making sure all the stuff was polished. So I would do, you know, I would, before COVID in Sydney, we were really lucky. If I really hustled, I could do three gigs in a night, which is really, really for Australia. It's really, really good. But now these days in Sydney, I reckon four a week, five a week is max. But when I was in New York, oh my God, Stella, I went and did Gotham Comedy Club. I went and did a spot there on the Sunday after, after we met. It's like 10 30 p.m. on a Sunday night. And there's 300 people there. And it's like, New York is a different beast. Oh my God. And then I'm talking to the other comics and they're like, yeah, bro, this is my sixth one tonight. I'm like, what? I mean, the stamina to be able to do that is insane. Yeah. I mean, I think I told you when I was over there, just being there for a few days. It wasn't my first time in New York, but it was my first time in New York working. And I fell in love, like I'm addicted to the idea of being in New York as often as possible. I mean, the grass is always greener. I'm addicted to the idea of living by the beach and Sydney and teaching yoga for the rest of my life. But I will say New York is a great city for comedy. It's like it's the place to be. Yes. Yes. And you know, I really love that you shared this story into how you developed an interest into comedy using it first as a passion and as a way to get yourself out of the mundane day to day. And that day to day life that you were living and not really feeling a sense of passion in your day job, but outsourcing that joy to other things that filled up your cup that you've now turned into your career. But also I think the story is so representative to just this idea that if we want things in life, like we just have to go after them. We can't expect ourselves to do it perfectly like to wait to do something perfectly to then do it like be scrappy, just do the thing, just keep doing it. And eventually you'll you'll adapt and you'll figure it out. I think a lot of times we stop ourselves from taking risks and being bold because we're afraid that it's not going to be perfect at the first try. But it's not going to be perfect because you've never done that before. So I love that you were bold enough to go just rent out. that theater and invite as many people as you could and have the confidence to be like, okay, I'm going to just go up, do this hour, hour and 15 minutes and see what happens. And like know that if it's not the best content, that's not a reflection of your talent or ability to get better to keep going at it. I think that's a really great learning and lesson. I really appreciate you saying that and you're absolutely spot on there. There is this phrase, stop me if you know this one that I have taken on and really liked over the last few years and it's that perfect is the enemy of very good. It's like you need to write the shit novel before you write the great novel. You need to paint the terrible picture before you can paint the good one. And obviously that's extremely anxiety inducing a lot of people. And me too, like when I sit down to write new stuff, ordinarily, it's like task paralysis demon. And I had to learn that too. I had to learn that through comedy because I was never that person before. I was always the risk of earth, like don't embarrass yourself, don't fall flat on your face, which I think is a little bit of like a great thing maybe. Like I just had my like my mom's voice in my head like, what are you doing? Don't do that. Well, I was going to ask, do you think that also came from being from like an immigrant family? I do think that there's this fear around not having security and not having that comfort. There's like fear that contributes to being more risk of earth. But then at the same time, families that are immigrants, you know, those people are taking the risk to leave their country and move elsewhere and to pursue a big bold dream. So they're kind of in conflict at the same time. Like how do you see that shape, your willingness to be risk taking or being more risk of earth before you do it into comedy? They are certainly in conflict, but I think for my particular case, I managed to entwine them in the constructive way because I knew that not only my friend, my family, but also my friends, like my close circle of friends, they're all like brilliant, brilliant people. They're lawyers, doctors, business owners. They're really, I'm really, really proud of all of them. They're extremely intimidating people. And I knew that if I was going to make this pivot into this different path in order to, I guess, personally justify it to these people and not have them totally lose respect for me. This is obviously on my head, but it's a contrivance in the situation. I knew that I needed to be 100% serious about it and I needed to work my ass off otherwise it wasn't going to happen. I could have been a guy toiling at open likes and sinking beers with these random guys for 10 years and my friends and family could have been like, "Oh, that's just what he does now. That's cool." But I knew that they, and also they're all Greeks and Italians too. So they have the same thing. And for my parents, yeah, same thing I needed to basically illustrate to them from the beginning. Okay, I'm serious about this. This is my plan. You know, get on board. And there have been many, many times where both of my parents have been like, "What's happening? What's going on?" My dad is very pragmatic about it. My dad is very like, "Okay, we need to make like back up plan and blah, blah, blah," and all that kind of like standard stuff. And my mom's the opposite. My mom is like, with her zero years of experience in the comedy industry, she's like, "I'm your manager. This is what we're doing." How has that worked out for you? Yeah. I mean, she is not my manager for the record, for the listeners. Please don't email her any booking requests. But she'll just like, like in the middle of COVID, she was like, "Oh, there's no gigs. You need it. You need a diversified." So here's what I've done. I shouldn't be saying there's not a public podcast, but whatever. She pulled out like a folder. She had made a folder and she had gone on to the Instagram profile of all of my best comedian friends and mine, and she had made profiles of them to send to like restaurants that were open to basically like package us as a, as a in-house comedy deal, and she had done a financial breakdown, and I'm like, "You need it." I'm obsessed. Why is she not your manager? Because she's taking a lot of initiative, and she's very thorough, clearly. She is taking a lot of initiative, and she is very thorough. The problem is that my consent or approval is completely unneeded from her perspective. That is a Greek mother. So no, she's, she's look of light. I've been doing good enough that she has been like, "Okay, maybe he's got this one." Exactly. Clear, you've proven yourself at this point. That's hilarious. I mean, so you'd mentioned earlier that your entry point into comedy was because at the time you were depressed and you went towards this passion to find some sort of joy. We know obviously comedy laughter that makes people feel happy, and it really does release endorphins, like this is proven. So having you on the show is very much up my alley and in alignment with the mission of everyday endorphins. What's interesting is that from the perspective of a comedian, I feel like writing jokes and content is really a form of therapy and like catharsis. And I would love to hear from you how comedy has helped you navigate or cope with your own mental health challenges. And this might actually kind of inform your response to some questions I have later around the inception of your special papu and really what inspired all of that. I would love to hear first how you see comedy help you with your own mental health struggles. There's a brilliant question Stella because it's just like there's like three, there's like three pathways of answer. The first one is like exactly like you say what comedy inherently is bringing joy, it's bringing laughter, it's bringing like it's fundamentally it's like let's have a good time. And so that's appealing from that perspective, that's the that's the easy one. The one that I would say is more pervasive across everybody like it's something that I can I can say I've learned in comedy but I can attribute it to anything else is that when my life changed to from I wake up every day I put on the same suit, I get on the same bus, I go and work for the same dude, whatever. From when it changed to that to I am the master of my own destiny, everything that I do moving forward is to completely my own hands. Your life becomes like a project, like a video game, like I don't know like a you just have a path and you just feel invigorated by that. And all of a sudden any time that you have any kind of professional success or movement or growth, it grows you personally at the same time. And I think that's totally invaluable. And I looked around you know after a few years where I started properly feeling this, I looked around at all the people in my life that hadn't quite discovered whatever it was that was driving them forward. And I kind of felt horrible you know I thought all I want is for the people that I love to have this feeling you know it's not like it's a victory lap. Comedy is so hard and so many times I go out and do a gig and I finish it I'm like I'm so bad at everything I want to come home and cry. But it's not about how any individual gig goes it's just that you know I'm totally in control of my life. And that's that's so freeing and it's like the polar opposite to what I had before. The final thing which you touched on is like something that I was not expecting and I didn't even I didn't even plan to do it this way but for whatever reason all of my hour shows they have some emotional string pulling in it. It's not just an hour of jokes I've I've I've always had like a story and then a kind of I like to make people laugh for 55 minutes and then cry for five minutes if I can. So that I've always done that and I've always like tried to mine my personal life for that kind of I guess material. But weirdly you know I've spoken about stuff on stage that has plagued me and haunted me my entire life. But as soon as I do it on stage as soon as I put it into a show and I've performed it once it's gone. It's immediate catharsis in a way that therapy has never been for me in a way that drugs have never been for me in a way that like much healthier coping mechanism comedy versus drugs. I mean it's like exposure therapy in a way it's like you're normalizing the suffering or the pain that you've experienced by sharing it and being in community with people. And it's also like an own it's an ownership thing you take ownership of it and it's some it's a lot easier for you to balance it in your in your life. I think what's interesting too is like from the audience perspective some of the jokes that I find. funny, just like generally speaking, I can't recall like a particular one that you shared during your special, but generally speaking, the things that I find funny to some degree I resonate with, and even if it's like a shared struggle, the fact that we can laugh about it makes it less difficult. Like life is more enjoyable when you can move through things with a lightness and a lightheartedness rather than catastrophizing every single thing that doesn't go your way. And I feel like that's also probably like the power of comedy too, and sharing that experience with people and translating your personal life experiences into written content to then present verbally to a whole audience. It's the act of expressing and really bonding with people, I think is what it comes down to. It's like making people feel seen through you just being vulnerable and sharing like your experience and your take on things in life. Without a doubt, and it's why I think that kind of comedy is the most popular and most pervasive comedy. The comedy that speaks to potentially even like sadder or darker things, it's just so powerful because it can flip personal narratives within people and it can like you say make people feel more seen and heard. And even from just a like a surface level perspective, you see somebody being really open about something difficult or something sad or something hard, just something in you says, well, whatever my version of that is, is okay. Exactly. And I know there's like science that supports this, but if you smile more, you like trick your brain into thinking that you're happy. So if you can laugh about the harder things in life, you can kind of trick your brain into thinking, okay, like it's fine. This is a good segue into talking about your special papu, which for those who are listening, we're not Greek papu means grandfather. So it's about your grandfather. And I think that you are inspired to write this show and the content for the show after he passed. And clearly he was a very influential person in your life. So in a way, you've kind of transformed the pain of his loss into something really beautiful through this show. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. And kind of the relationship dynamic that you had with your grandfather. And how it shaped the content that you started to think about with this show. I started writing the show when he got sick a few years ago. But he did not die. I saw him yesterday. He's still kicking. Why did I think that he passed away? I mean, many, many people have. And I kind of like, I kind of type on those on those strings a little bit, like on social media maybe. This is really bad of me to then think that he passed away. No, that's good. It's hilarious. It's fitting. And also when I, in the first in the first iterations of the show, I kind of wanted to leave it ambiguous for most of it as to whether he was or wasn't alive and just kind of like reveal at the end that he that he's okay. But what was in the right way to do it? I feel like, you know, there's a lot of times in the in the show where I kind of mess around with the audience and just trust a little bit. But to do that wasn't quite apt. So in the show, I kind of, I kind of like say at the start that he's, you know, he's still kicking. Yeah. But our relationship has been difficult. He's like, these difficult guy. He's an old Greek man who says three words a day and who sits in his garage and smokes and worries about me driving barefoot because that's illegal and dangerous and he's going to, he's going to die. And so Aaron's like, since I, since I became an adult, which happened only recently, but since I did become an adult, he just hasn't known how to communicate with me. He still always seen me as this kid. And so I would go over and it would be like, I'd go and sit with him and the whole conversation would be like, this is what you don't do. This is what you're avoid. Don't go to this suburb. It's dangerous. I heard it on the news. Make sure you eat the clove of garlic every morning, just old man advice. And for a while, I find this is our dynamic. This is our relationship. I should let you listen. There's no that the kind of crux of the story about him is that he was a goalkeeper. He was a soccer goalkeeper in Greece and he was really, really good. And so he came to Australia and like that was his thing in the 1960s. He was like a very, very successful and good goalkeeper in Australia until he punched a referee in the face and got banned. It had to like just join the regular immigrant experience. And so that kind of contributed to me having this dichotomy, this like duality of him in my head where it's like, we used to play soccer in the front yard and like, he would dive onto the concrete at 70 years old to save the shots that I was taking at him. Like he's a freak of nature. He's genuinely like this mutant athlete. And so I always saw him as this this kind of epitome of man throughout my entire life. But then at the same time, he's a very depressed guy. He's got this notion in his head that he failed at his dream and that he just you know, he just became one of the flock. He just like, you know, he didn't didn't make a lot of money or just whatever kind of misguided, I guess, hyper masculine 1960s notion he has in his head. And so when he got sick, I started, I started inverting both of those narratives within my head. I thought, well, he's not just this mythical superhero guy. He's also this very, very layered and nuanced human being that I might be potentially losing and should do my best to try and have an actual relationship with. And on the other hand, it's like, Papua's dream died. Yeah. I mean, being a soccer player in the 1960s in Australia, not a good career path, you know what I mean? Like it's not even the very, very, very best. They were still working another job too. Like it was, it wasn't an actual thing. But he is now at a point where his grandson is living his dream and getting to go around the world and talk about him in his life and do comedy. And if the immigrant grandfather's dream cannot live but the immigrant, but it facilitates the immigrant grandson's dream being able to live, then that's like the most important legacy of them all, better than anything else. That's what they really want. And so I kind of like try and infuse like that's kind of the moral part of the show. And it made us closer. It made us, you know, I went and spoke to him a lot about his life and he kind of opened up to me a bit more. And then he was seeing what I was doing. And you know, things, things changed in that regard. And then we would do like people in people in media, people in Australia like we'll interview us both together about his story and stuff. And even just getting to do that provided us with a layer of our relationship that we never previously had. I will spoil it here just because it's every day and often you go, I'll do it. The show that I filmed was the one in Sydney in my hometown in this 1600 people theater, which is it was like my dream theater to ever perform in growing up. You manifested that by renting out the theater at your early days. I think so. The brain is powerful. Yeah. Yeah. It's like I still am not really in full belief that it happened. But at the end of the show, I brought him up on stage with me. So it's in the video of a special it's at the end. And he was like in the days leading up, he was like, all right, so I'll get up there and then you'll give me the microphone. And then I'll say, like I'll say thank you and I'm going to say this and I'm going to say this and I'm going to say this. And my, yeah, my grandmother was like, you can't let him touch that microphone. Who knows what he could say. He might have had a few drinks like you just can't just can't let him do that. I kind of knew in the back of my head that when he got up there and he saw that many people and he saw that what I had been doing previously, he's not going to say anything like he's he'd never even seen me do comedy before. Much less on a stage like that. So I knew that he was going to he was going to recoil and he did but he he was up there and he you know, he gave a wave and I lifted his arm up and he was he was really, really happy and it was just it was just a perfect bow, you know, I mean, he in that moment, he was like literally seeing your dream come to life through him in a way like he wasn't able to fully realize his dreams and his potential, but like you have been, you know, that phrase like that person walked so you could run like he walked so you could run like basically that's what it is. And it was a very heartfelt show. I remember that I am still embarrassed that I thought he passed, not manifesting that, manifesting a long healthy life ahead, continuous health, but maybe it was because I was so scarred from calling you little penis in front of my parents that I I blacked out the rest of the show, but I will say the concept is just very heartfelt and beautiful because there is something really special when you're able to connect to your roots and also get to understand the stories of your family and in the generations before you. I interviewed my grandmother for, this was last year, I think, a year or two ago, for this Greek culture museum in Portland, Oregon. And I interviewed her about her life and my grandfather was a priest out in the West Coast and he passed away due to cancer when my dad, I think, was right out of law school. I could get the timing wrong, but he was young. The moral of the story is that my grandfather died young, and my dad and the siblings were young and it was like a very devastating loss for the family and the community. And I interviewed my grandmother about her life and her family being immigrants and the experience of what that was like and then losing her husband and her finding her identity. And you know, it's crazy because growing up like you're around family and you're lucky if you're around them often, but we rarely as kids and even as adults know the stories of our grandparents. And when you really take the time to discover that and understand their lives and the way that they think and what shaped them and how that in a way is kind of passed down through generations, it's insane. And I feel like it brings us a lot of compassion and empathy for understanding why they've made certain choices in their lives or just understanding why they are the way they are because we've taken the time to really get to know them as people and understand their paths and their stories. It's a really beautiful, gratifying experience. And so that for you has been expressed now through this special, which is amazing. And I know that, you know, the audience can feel it because I certainly did. Now you're very sweet. Thank you for saying that. It's also really timely that you bring that up because just weirdly in the last two weeks, I'm very, very lucky. I have only one grandparent that's passed away. I still got three. Not by design, just by complete happens dance. I got the most comprehensive life story recounting from both my year-yah, my pop was wife, and also my Italian grandfather, my non-nor last week, just not at the same time, just like on separate occasions. Both of them, for some reason, just decided to unload the clip on me. And I learned so many things that I didn't know. And it's exactly like you say, Stella. I left there feeling like a level of fulfillment that I, it's so different to anything else. You don't just feel like you've learned this thing about another person. It's almost like you have more context for your own life. Yes, exactly. Because it's like when I think about it for me, understanding my grandmother in that way through this interview helped me to better understand my dad. And when I can better understand my dad, I can better understand the relationship that he has with my mom and why they're together and how that's evolved over time. And then I come into the picture and I'm very close to my parents. I'm very similar to them. So by better understanding both of them, I can better understand myself and why I am the way I am. So it really does date back generations in ways that I didn't even think were possible or I didn't even know were possible. That's a crazy coincidence that you literally just had this conversation with your with both your grandparents. Yeah. And like I didn't bring it up. I was just like, I was just like, hey, I'm here for food. They knew we were doing this podcast. Any crazy revelations coming out of those conversations? Do you feel like you have more awareness into yourself after those two separate chats? I didn't realize how in love my Italian grandfather was with my non-know with his wife. Like he relentlessly pursued her across this way. He was in love with her and he like did not want he did not want anyone else. We need more men like that. The modern dating world is just it's not like that. I mean, there's a lot of guys that are following women home, but that's a different thing. That's a different style. Modern romance. Yeah. Because she was she was going to be none. Yeah. And he was like, no, no, no, no, I'm God. I write here over here. So that was that was interesting because like they I remember their relationship growing up like my non-know was like she was a soldier like she was like not emotional. She was like, today we're doing this, this and this and let's get it done. And so on the surface as a kid, they um like I never really saw a high level of romance I guess in the you know, traditional sense, but it was absolutely there and it was it's nice to like look back on memories and recontextualize them as all right. He like he pursued her across this lead to make her his wife. Like there was there was a great deal of love there. We can't even get a text back now these days. We're getting ghosted left and right like separate conversation. You know what? I think this should be inspiration for your next special is what we can learn about love from psychoanalyzing the love between your your two grandparents. That would be fascinating. I think I have to leave the grandparents spectrum alone for now. I think I've emptied that well although for a while people were like this is so funny like I am Italian in Greek and I at least on social media I'm like kind of beat that drum pretty hard because the Italians in Greeks will come to your show. If you got a show they'll come to the show. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter who you are. So I kind of use it as a business tool. But so I had a lot of Italian people come to the Papus show and they come up to me often. They'll be like well what about none? What about you? When you do a show called none? No, no next. I think you need to get more in touch with your Italian side. I was like okay guys thanks. Well this could be the perfect opportunity. You're really leaning into the Greek culture now you pivot to the Italian. No, no. I don't think so. I think I need to like I need to move away. My cycle has been this is not going to be interesting to you to listen to this but fuck it we're here anyway. My cycle has been like one show that talks about like elements of my ethnicity and then like the next show is something totally different and then we go back to where I well then I have this ethnic problem in my life that's about my Greek and Italian and Australianness and then the next one is like the time that I accidentally stabbed the kid at school. Well I like that because you're not making your cultural and ethnic identity your whole Anthony identity but you can pull on your cultural roots as comedic inspiration for your content because there's a lot that we can we can make fun of with the Greeks and the Italians for sure and it's your truth you know. Like you just validated in my entire existence with one sentence cell because I I'm conscious of like like I didn't you got you've got them in the States too there's a few of them that are like the ethnic comedians but it's like a it's like a racket here you know there's guy there's there's guys and gals who they market themselves exclusively as if you're Italian or your Greek or your Lebanese this is a one-stop shop for your comedy and what it has done is it's conditioned an audience to only anticipate jokes that are like like little in jokes about Greek or Italian things and they don't they can't even recognize a normal comedy joke it's really like alienated Greeks and Italians and wugs from the kind of mainstream comedy audience and because of that when I first started I was like well my Greek and Italian heritage is a big part of my identity but I don't want to be pigeonholed as one of those guys so I just didn't mention it at all for a long time but then you realize as a writer as an artist of any kind if you're not addressing a big part of your identity in your work you're not doing it right so I had to find a way like you say to infuse it properly to be like okay this is a story that I'm telling about my Greek grandfather that immigrated to be a goalkeeper but at the same time I want to talk about homophobia I want to talk about the nature of masculinity I want to talk about addiction you know I want to talk about these things it's just finding the way to Trojan horse it in and knowing your audience I mean I think that's said really beautifully because as we're coming into ourselves like in young adulthood even just being a creative like we have to honor our own lived experience and pull from that and so you would be doing a disservice to yourself by not leveraging what you know to be true and that that is your identity and then where you come from in your background and you should be expressive about that as a human and as a creative but at the same time how do you do it in a way where your whole identity is not just pigeonholed in being Greek or being Italian or being Australian or whatever and separate from like being a comedian I feel like this something that like anyone can ponder on and think about like how we place our identity towards certain things or labels like we are not just one or the other we can be all and we can find ways to communicate about one versus the other depending on who we're talking to and what rooms are in and which communities were a part of and I think that's the beautiful thing about being human is that you're not just one or the other you can be everything and you can choose when and how and where you want to express that and why it's funny because I recently had a conversation about this with a Greek friend of mine and just talking about being a Greek American and what that means and are we more Greek or less Greek? if we are, speak the language, or if we travel to the country, like all these different things that optically make people think we are more Greek versus not, but it's interesting how, when you hold two identities, like how does that take space in your life and how do you communicate that? The rhetorical question, just an interesting thing to be about. - Yeah, yeah, it's, everything that you just said, I wanna write it down and like, go over it because these considerations are really important to me and there's stuff that I think about all the time. Again, not only in my capacity as a comic, but just as a dude, right? 'Cause in your adolescence and your kind of early adulthood, it happened to me, I don't know if it happened to you, but I saw it happen to a lot of other people, whereby in your struggle and your search to figure out who you are, you can lean heavily into your ethnic communities and your pride for that. And like, I was so, so Greek and Italian when I was in my early 20s because I wanted to have all the friends that were off that ilk and I wanted to be, I wanted to be one of them and it's like, well, you're trying to figure out who you are. Here's an easy identity to just adopt, but I think it's really important and kind of an obligation on us to grow as people and be way more nuanced than just, well, we do this because we're Greek. Oh, why would I do that? I'm Italian, come on. Like, no, you can be anything and everything. And I get bothered when I encounter people that are pigeonholing themselves in that way, that are not allowing themselves to explore and grow different elements of themselves because I don't know, well, I'm Greek, but I don't do that, I'm Greek. - Right, exactly. And that's like a close-minded view. And I think from like the other perspective, sometimes people not of the same ethnicity or background maybe have certain judgments that you are a certain way because you are from a certain culture. And I think that that's not really taking like a curious lens or perspective until like who that person actually is, not recognizing that it's part of their identity, but it's not their whole identity. So I think it goes both ways too. - Oh, you mean like the time where I wore a blue denim jacket and a white t-shirt to a comedy show and the comedian was like, "You're the fucking Greek flag now, bro." (laughs) - Exactly that. And there's really nothing wrong with wearing the colors blue and white because you know what, if you wanna dress up like a Greek flag, power to you because I think those colors are very compatible. But, that's where all the Greek stuff, I wanna transition as we start to wrap with this interview and kind of bring it back to the central theme of the podcast, which is about sparking joy in life and happiness and all the things that bring us in joy. So my two final questions for you, Anthony, the first is, how do you define happiness and has your definition of happiness been shaped by your cultural upbringing? - I'm gonna answer the questions in the reverse order if you don't mind. - Yeah, go for it. That feels like a theme. It feels like the last one that I end with is like the most, you know, pertinent in your mind. Maybe it's a better place to start. No, I just think that it's a more linear narrative because I certainly had happiness dictated and what it looked like dictated to me by my ethnic upbringing for sure. Not just that, but your middle class upbringing, your societal status upbringing, the school that you went to, like all that stuff was kind of like painted with an extra brush of like, well, this is how my Greek and Italian family feel about things. And a lot of those things were wrong. My parents got divorced and I was 13. And the kind of basic premise of it was that my dad had this business that started going really, really well. And he was not around at all. And so in lieu of being there for his wife and to a lesser extent, I guess, his kids, he just had this like money, money, money, we're gonna throw money, we're gonna have a nice house, we're gonna have nice things. Like that's how I'm going to provide. Which is an intensely immigrant mentality. It's an intensely like my grandparents all came here and it was like we have left Italy in Greece because there's no opportunities there. There are so many opportunities here in Australia. We're gonna get up every day and go and get as much money as we can to survive and to like, you know, give back to our family. And I just feel like that mentality while totally understandable in that generation, it was a little bastardized in my childhood. And I saw very early on that the pursuit of money and the, your houses are getting nicer and you're living in nicer areas and you're getting nicer plates and you're associating with people of potentially higher socioeconomic threshold. And that's when your family falls apart. That's what I learned when I was 13. So it took me a while to actually implement the lessons that I learned then because I was a teenager and things were happening and whatever. - Of course it took you a while because you just recently became an adult. Your prefrontal pregnancy has now been developed finally. - So, call back. - Call back against the law. - It took you some time. - Very nice, yes. I did manage to finally become an adult at 32 years old. And so now I'm developing these cognitions. And so happiness to me now has just become, I want to live a life where every decision that I make is mine. I want to live a life where I get to spend quality time with people that I love and people who love me in full like reptilian awareness that it's gonna benefit me in the long run because you go and speak to your grandfather and he tells you that he chased your grandmother for us this early and then you leave and you're like, did I just take ecstasy? Or did I, you know, like it's a very, very, it's a very, very self-serving thing to do but it's like a two way thing because I know that my grandfather that night, he got, he was like, I'm in pain, I'm about to be 90, taking me home, we're at my dad's place and he stood up to be like, take me home and we were gonna take him home and then something happened, somebody asked him a question about his life and as he was there, stood up, he told us about his life story for like an hour and five minutes. The whole, I want to go home thing on my back hurts like he didn't even sit back down. It just took over him and I could tell that it gave him energy and joy to be able to share that. So, you know, I don't need a Ferrari, like that's, that's, that's better. - I love that. I mean, you probably wouldn't say no to a Ferrari but we don't need it. - I certainly wouldn't say, I certainly wouldn't say no to a Ferrari. - Exactly, and that's the difference because when we're not chasing and trying to pursue and a team, the things outside of us that we think are gonna bring us happiness. When we do that, we're left with that feeling of emptiness at the end of the day because once you get it, it's like, okay, what's next? Okay, what's next? And that's just not, that's not true happiness and what I'm hearing you say also is feeling like you, you cultivate a sense of trust within yourself that you are in the driver's seat of your own life and that you have conviction with the choices that you make and you know it's serving you. And not really caring what other people think about it or not placing too much weight on other people's opinions. Those things can dampen our sense of inner confidence and I think that that's a really profound response and oftentimes we chase them on things of life 'cause we think it's gonna bring us joy but it's giving us more so immediate gratification rather than delayed gratification, which is the critical part of the longevity in like a happiness equation in my opinion. So I think that's a very, very profound thing to recognize over the course of your life. - Gonna get me wrong. I still have that dragon chasing dissatisfaction. I did that dream theater that I always wanted to do for my whole life earlier this year and then the next day I was like, all right, now what? And I was in New York two weeks later and I was doing comedy in New York and I'm like, oh my God, and then I left New York and I was like, well, you gotta go back as soon as possible, right? So on the one hand, it's like, it's the pursuit of what I, of my dream is like, is driving me and it's pushing me and it's, you know, even if I do, like, if I go to a cafe for five hours and I write one joke that I really like, that's happiness. Like, that's great, that's me adding to the thing. But I am a little scared that there isn't gonna be an endpoint, that there isn't gonna be a, 'cause I'm always still just trying to figure out every day, all right, what can I do to push it further? So I think another crucial component of the happiness equation is not infusing the entirety of my happiness [BLANK_AUDIO] to my career because as much as it does drive me as much as it is amazing to have that North Star, when things don't go the way you want, which is inevitable, everything can't cave in. The floor can't fall in. You need to have all of the other elements of your life sturdy so that that can be okay. I like that. I should trademark this saying, but I have this saying where it's basically what you've just said, but what I've come to learn is like we need to diversify our purpose portfolio. You can't overly index all your joy on the creative output. You cannot do that because if something doesn't go your way or you feel like you're not driving towards this bigger goal or you feel like you're failing or whatever it is, you can't let other things completely fall to pieces. You have to find pockets of purpose and other things in life. And I think to your earlier point, like, yeah, you still are like, okay, what's next? That's normal. And like that's just being human. I think we all feel that too. And something I try to do is to then notice that if I'm falling into that headspace, to be like, okay, this is an opportunity to just be grateful for like what you've already done and give yourself a pat on the back rather than feeling like, okay, it's not enough and I got to do more and I got to do more. So gratitude is a simple trick to help when those feelings arise, me empowering some wisdom onto you Anthony. So we have time for me to ask you the same question that you asked me. Yeah, you can ask me the question. What can you? Can you answer the question then? How do you define happiness and how is your ethnic upbringing facilitated that? I think that happiness, oh, this is hard because I should have a really amazing answer as someone who has a podcast all about happiness. You know, I do this a lot whenever I whenever I go on a podcast. I always like because I feel like a lot of people don't do that. Like, you know, I always like chuck it back to the guess. I'm like, well, tell like, let's hear it. Let's hear from you. It was very, very often they're in a situation like either, like, well, I wasn't expecting. I don't know. I don't know. I'll take the bait. So I think that what I've come to learn about happiness is that we often get it wrong. We think that it's about achieving an outcome. You know, I used to think that happiness was it was largely rooted in achievement for me. And people always tell me, trust the process. And I was like, what the hell? Does trust the process mean? Like in my brain, trusting the process was being passive because I felt like, well, if I didn't do something, nothing was ever going to happen. Like, I needed to be action oriented. And I will stand behind the importance of being action oriented because that goes back to our earlier point. You booked the theater and you were like, fuck it, I'm just going to do this. And that's what you need to do in life, to build a life. You have to do things. You have to take action. But there's a difference in taking action from being a bold and doing it from a place of like fearlessness versus doing it from a place of like impatience and feeling like what you're doing is never going to be good enough. And so rather than seeking for validation and things around me to tell myself, oh, that I'm on the right path, I'm doing the right thing, I'm getting a clue, I'm going to be successful. I started to stop outsourcing those opinions from people and thinking that all the happiness that I would feel is laying outside of me. And I realized that true happiness really comes from within me and the choices that I make every day to choose feeling joyous and feeling optimistic and feeling positive. And with it in those small choices, that is what trusting the process means. It's about being present. It's about not like freaking out about what's coming down in the next hour, in the next day, in the next week, in the next month, but it's not really focusing on here and now what you can control in the moment and not feeling like you need to control every other thing outside of you. And when you do that, life is so much easier. Or it's you take way off of the things that feel really heavy, I think. So for me, it's about being in more flow and less resistance. That's what I think happiness is. And then to answer the question on the ethnicity, it's interesting because like I grew up obviously with two Greek parents who met on the church. And my mom was an immigrant, she came from Greece when she was like five years old. So I grew up culturally very Greek. And I grew up going to church, but I never really felt that connected to the Greek culture and to the having my own definition of like what it meant to have an identity of being Greek. Despite my family and vacationing in Greece in the summers and visiting family there, and all those things, what I will say now through getting really involved at the Greek American community in New York, thanks to some of my friends that you know dearly, Regus and Greg, you know, all the other ones, you know, I started to realize how beautiful it is to be in community with other people and to what it means to feel connected to your own culture. And so through the experience of getting really involved in the Greek community and developing relationships and not space, I started to realize that happiness really comes from feeling close and connected and feeling like you belong. And it was thanks to those two people in particular and others that I started to really understand what it felt like to belong in a group and to feel seen in that way. And so I think it's a beautiful thing to experience, like to feel a sense of belonging in life. And we need that to feel happy and enjoy us and to feel like we can connect with other people. So I think the ethnic and cultural background for me was kind of like a lesson and gateway into what it means to be connected with other people and how community is really like the foundational building blocks to feeling a sense of happiness and satisfaction in our lives. So it was a long-winded answer, but you put me on the spot, so I had to riff off of that. That was a tremendous answer. That was a very, very, very good answer. I actually think that you should consider starting a podcast because you've got this endorphins thing down part, I really think you've got a future in podcast and you should think about it. What you were saying, just like activated so many different things in me, but I do want to say, because it's something that's stuck with me for the last three months, the New York Greek community is unlike anything I've ever seen in my life and it's so cool because I feel like, I mean the kind of youth, the kind of circles that you're talking about, I'm at so, so, so many different people walking around with the regards, he just knows that person, knows that person, knows that person, we're going to have launching coffee and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I'm just there with him. And everybody, I think probably by virtue of the fact that, you know, a good chunk of you guys are not from New York. You just happen to be Greek, Greek Americans and by virtue of all having made the decision to come to New York, some of you are from New York obviously, but by having made the decision to move to New York and as a young adult and also as an American, like it's it's almost like a like a 2.0 of the whole immigrant to New York experience because you're tethered together by your shared ancestral heritage, which is a beautiful thing, but as opposed to how it is most other places that I've visited, including my own hometown and my own country, the Greek diaspora is very strong and people are really connected, but the connections are like obligatory almost, they're like, well, here's grandfather played cards with his grandfather at that club in 1982, so we have to invite them to this thing, you know, it's important, like you're going to go to this ball, like it's just like their family's going to be, it's just like, it's almost formulaic, whereas you guys just like each other, you guys just have a mutual respect for, you know, like we're all we're all in New York together and we're all Greek and we're all young and we're all hungry and after something here and why not help and support each other and care about each other, I felt it's so powerfully having been there for just a week and just, you know, just as it just telling people like I would love to move to New York and then people were like, bro, we'll help you out with this, we'll help you out with that problem, and like nobody in Australia wants to help you out with anything, it was just so, there's just so crazy to me to hear any of that and you know, people might have been blown, smoked up my ass, that's fine, but that feels good too, you know? Yeah, absolutely, I'm so glad you felt that even in just like being here for one week, I mean, you were definitely around the right people because that is the vibe 100% and I think what I've come to realize too is like, okay, it's all fun and great to bond over our shared culture and our experiences and to do the Greek related things and whatnot, but that was really just the gateway into finding common ground with a group of people that are fantastic and then it's like, okay, I've just built really amazing friendships of people and we all happen to be of the same culture and heritage and that's super cool that we can relate to certain things, you know, what it means to be Greek, and to vacation in Greece and all the things and we have friends to travel with, you know, that's all fun and nice and whatnot, but what's been super meaningful to me is like just in a group of people. that are really awesome people that want to support you and uplift you and want to help you out to your point. So there is something really special about the New York scene. I don't know exactly what it is, but it's amazing to be a part of that. And I'm so grateful for the friendships that have kind of emerged from leaning into all of the Greek related events and just being a part of the community. That's definitely been a big endorphin boost for me. So let me let me to you, which is amazing. And you know, it's been such a pleasure getting the talk to you. Your morning, my evening, like crazy how you're about to just have a whole day and I'm going to probably go to the gym and have dinner and call it a night. But this is definitely around me a ton of endorphins. And so this is my last question now to you is what is something that brings you a door fence Anthony. There are a lot of really basic answers. There are a lot of there are a lot of really, really basic answers. I'm going to give a weird one getting an email back promptly. Yeah, that's a big endorphin high, honestly, seriously. It's it's better than the gym. It's better than food. It's better than sex. It's the best. Just sending an email and receiving a response in a timely fashion and just not having to fit like sit there in an anxiety spiral of like not only am I not getting a response with this person hates me and it means my career is over. Like just not having to deal with that part of it. Oh, you know, I love that response because as someone in the corporate world who's emailing a lot. I'm like, I could save so much time if I didn't have to schedule all these follow up emails. So I do appreciate and it doesn't go unnoticed when someone responds in a timely manner. So I love that that's a really good answer in willingness of luck before. But then I also sprinkled in the basic ones. Yeah, I don't know if you I don't know if you saw I don't know if you saw what I did there. Those are all endorphin highs as well. I wouldn't say that getting a timely email outweighs all of those. Yeah, not slide exaggeration. Exactly. It's your comedic flair. Well, hopefully I've been able to keep up with you over the past hour. It's always intimidating for me to interview comedians because like I said, I don't think I'm not really that funny, but maybe you do. Maybe that's why this played so well for the past hour. But really it was such a pleasure having you on the show. Where can my listeners connect with you follow along with your journey, your shows and I'm pretty sure they can launch your special on YouTube. Link in your bio because I clicked on it and that's what led me to the special. So I think that's where they should go to go see a few from the comfort of their own home. I think so too before I say all that, I want to just say that the pleasure was absolutely mine. This is a great way to start my day. This is everyday endorphins like for real. This is just like talking about this stuff is like I'm floating. This has been really, really great. So thank you so much for having me. I am Anthony dot low cash on Instagram. I think that's probably the best hub. Don't go on to Facebook because you'll just see a bunch of like 43 year old in sell Greek men telling me that I'm not Greek and that I'm gay and that like I don't know anything about Greek culture and that I should, you know, just jump over truck and things like that. That's a bit yucky going Instagram Instagram is a place for normal people as far as I can tell. And then yeah, Papu is free on YouTube. Anthony look as you have an hour up your sleeve to any of the listeners. Check it out. I've already spoiled the ending, but you will still enjoy it. Beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of everyday endorphins. If you liked what you heard, make sure to follow along, stay plugged into the community. You can do that through a variety of ways. Follow the podcast on Spotify, Apple or ever you stream your shows, stay connected on Instagram at everyday endorphins, find us on TikTok and subscribe to my substack, which is also everyday endorphins. But on the substack, I get to explore some of my own personal musings on what it means to lead a joyful and happy and fulfilling life. Reminder to keep spreading endorphins and focus on the things in life that bring you joy. Until next time.