Matt Rife

Rife comes to Theo Von's show to talk comedy and spends its best hour grieving, which nobody expects from the crowd-work king of Netflix. He remembers Ralphie May putting him onstage at sixteen and paying him enough to buy his family Christmas presents, then taking him to an LA diner and making him order three entrees so he would have a week of leftovers, the kind of thing you say about a father without ever using the word. Around it runs a genuine question about what happens after you sell out Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl and still have no idea what you are building toward. Von, without a tour date booked for the first time in two decades, does not try to fix it. They just sit in it, which is rarer on podcasts than it should be.