M. The S. W. Media.

I'm happy to be joined today by my friend, author, columnist, comedian, co-founder of the

Nowear Comedy Club. Please welcome Steve Hofstetter. Steve, how are you? I'm good, Austin. Thanks for having me. It is great to see your face again, my friend. Thank you. It's great to be able to show my full face now that the mass claws are changing and people are getting vaccinated. It's a very different time from the last time we talked. Very, very different time. And that's what I wanted to talk to you about today because you just got off a tour at the end of May. You're going back out again, July 8th. We'll talk about where you're going because I want people to be able to go and see you because your shows are prolific. And

if you're lucky enough to watch Steve take down a Heckler, it's one of the finer things in life. Thank you. There's many, many videos you can search on YouTube, which is Hofstetter Heckler. And they all come up and they're just search Heckler. It'll come up. Pretty, pretty great. Yeah, like the Heckler and you'll get Hofstetter. So tell me a little bit about what it was like because you went to several different cities and several different states. And right now all of the states that have 70% of adults or people have vaccinated with at least one shot or all

states that voted for Biden. This has been a highly politicized effort to roll out these vaccines. I know Joe Biden wants to get 70% of the country at least one shot by July 4th. It looks like we might come a little bit short of that because of a lot of these red states. What was it like being out on the road in the different kinds of cities that you saw? Well, I checked and, you know, I don't know what the latest numbers are. But the last time I checked. I was curious. I was like, how many red states, you know, I don't want to call a whole state red. But how many states that voted for Trump?

And the last presidential election are above the national average when it comes to vaccinations. And the answer to that is zero. Iowa and Florida were tied with the average and everything else. Everything that was above average were blue states. And that's, you know, that's in many categories. But especially vaccines. It was fascinating to be out there on the road because the first couple of days of the tour was before the CDC announced. You don't have to wear masks if you're vaccinated indoors anymore.

And we still kept them on during at the March line because we want to make sure everyone felt comfortable when they came over.

We didn't mandate them anymore. You know, different cities had different mandates. Everything from, you know, Minneapolis don't even wake up without wearing one to, you know, Fort Wayne, which is don't you dare wear one ever.

It was a crazy dichotomy. We did 13 different cities in 16 days. And so to see all the difference was it was nuts. It was seeing Darwinism in real time.

Yeah. And it's interesting too because, you know, I know that we, I went on tour before the pandemic. And we went to red states. But the cities we went to were blue dots.

And of course, the audience that we draw, there's not a lot of Republicans in those, in those audiences. And so, you know, we have to keep that in mind too because you said something very important.

Just because it's a red state. That doesn't mean it's all red, right? And so, you know, you've got these sort of OACs of different political beliefs.

Yeah. It's, if you, if you play a city that is just 50,000 populations, so smaller city. So if you play a 50,000 population that went 9010 for Trump, you know, you still have more people that can fit in that show that voted against them.

So you certainly shouldn't expect anything based on where you are. Now there are places where certainly it's easier to draw progressive crowd.

But I performed in Steven's point Wisconsin because it was geographically in between Chicago and Minneapolis. And so it made sense.

And most of the crowd was wonderful. And one guy yelled out, what do you think of Trump 2024? To which I responded, I think it's more realistic that it's 25 to life.

And he was not happy about that. And so I asked him, I said, you know, do you think that Trump will be the next Grover Cleveland?

And he did not know what I meant at all. And I was like, well, well, this is why you support Trump because you don't know what I mean.

And if you knew the history of politics, you would understand how wrong you are. It is, it is a self-selected crowd for sure. When, you know, Andrew Rivers was on the tour with me and he had a joke where in the beginning of the joke he asks how many people have been vaccinated.

And almost everyone said, yes. And what's really incredible is my, my tour in Seattle, they're requiring the venue itself. I would love to be able to do that. But some venues won't let me.

But the Neptune in Seattle is requiring people to be vaccinated to come to the show. And I'm thrilled. I love it.

How many, how many seats does the Neptune have?

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