Tai-sanity with Tai Nguyen part 2

January 26, 2022·53 min·3 clips

Tai Nguyen orders pizza from three places mid-show and tries to convince each delivery driver to get on stage and tell a joke.

Host Aaron Tito opens by asking Tai Nguyen how he went from recording a special at the Paramount Theater to running comedy shows out of his house. Tai explains that after the Paramount he had no clear career direction and returned to hitting open mics around Austin. His father convinced him to buy a house despite Tai's reluctance, and when he toured the property he now owns, he immediately saw a wall that would be perfect for a stage. He didn't build it right away — instead he was working a customer support job on Howard Lane until one morning he woke up miserable, called in to quit, and immediately started constructing the stage. The first show was a housewarming party with about 30 attendees including comedians Nano, Brian Bogart, DJ Connins, and Trace Hulk. He ran weekly Tuesday open mics until the pandemic shut things down. Aaron recalls that the first time he performed on Tai's stage was during a Zoom comedy show at the start of the pandemic, where he and comedian Lando came to Tai's house to broadcast together. After the pandemic Tai resumed Saturday shows and developed the pizza delivery concept: he orders from three different pizza places mid-show and when drivers arrive at the door, he tries to convince them to get on stage and tell a joke. Out of roughly eight shows, five or six drivers have agreed. The first told a chicken-crosses-the-road joke about Chick-fil-A; another non-English-speaking driver sang a popular Hispanic song the audience already knew. Tai tips $5-7 on the app normally but gives $20 when someone performs. Aaron praises Tai's consistent habit of publicly supporting other artists and comedians on social media, noting it is rare in a competitive industry. The conversation shifts to cryptocurrency: Tai says he has been invested since the start of the pandemic, starting with Dogecoin rather than Bitcoin, and advises that the market is currently too uncertain to recommend to others, suggesting a two-to-five-year hold strategy. He explains NFTs as digital certificates of ownership rather than the artwork itself, and notes their potential utility in real estate and car ownership documentation. The two discuss the metaverse, comparing it to Ready Player One and agreeing that its danger lies in becoming a distraction that allows the wealthy to maintain control while everyone else stops paying attention to real-world conditions. Tai describes doing a VR comedy show as a pixelated block character and says it felt more real than a Zoom show but he would still choose a live open mic over a paid VR set. The conversation turns philosophical: Tai argues that race, national borders, currency, and religion are all collective agreements humans invented, and that we are already living inside a kind of metaverse of constructed meaning. He connects this to his own biography, explaining that in community college he became deeply interested in Illuminati conspiracy theories and absorbed a subconscious distrust of white people through documentaries his Black best friend shared with him. He says doing stand-up comedy was the first sustained exposure he had to white people as individuals, which dismantled that subconscious belief. Aaron illustrates the same mechanism with a story about a German immigrant in 1940s New York who immediately adopted local anti-Black discrimination despite no prior exposure to it in Germany. Both agree that subconscious bias operates below the level of conscious thought, like knowing not to fall when you walk. The episode closes with a brief discussion of conspiracy theories, with both agreeing they are fine to hold but become dangerous when they motivate people to harm others, citing QAnon and January 6th as examples.

As heard by us

A loose, skeptical metaverse discussion that turns digital-world hype into a joke with some real unease underneath.

The conversation leans hard on the metaverse: what it is, why people are buying digital land, and why the whole idea can look like a dressed-up chat room with better branding.

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Why you'd press play

Play this if you want the metaverse roasted like it deserves it.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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