Follow your favourite podcasts, listen offline and in the car with CarPlay and Android Auto, and always pick up where you left off. Free to try.
Victor Varnado is many things: standup comedian, founder of Supreme Robot, King Super Nuts, and the man behind the Worldwide Tic-Tac-Toe Championship. He's also the guy who built disability gaming tech worth $500K — and never saw a dime.
Lou sits down with Victor for one of the more wide-ranging conversations we've had on this show: Richard Pryor's evolution as a performer, what a histology class taught Victor about how history gets told, the UCB rap battle comedy scene, why AI is "like discovering electricity," and how you turn tic-tac-toe into a global competitive sport.
Oh, and the story of the National Science Foundation grant Victor received to build voice-control and audio-description software for disabled gamers — software that could help people who are paralyzed, blind, or deaf play video games without extra hardware — that got sold to a tech company for shares against their IPO... and then the IPO never happened.
TOPICS:
— Gary, Indiana, The Jackson 5, and tall-tale fathers
— Richard Pryor vs. George Carlin (and why Pryor won)
— The histology class that changed how Victor sees the world
— Bombing at the HBO Aspen Comedy Festival callback
— 7 years of rap battle comedy at UCB (Battle Ish)
— Supreme Robot: how Victor builds and tests IP before finding investors
— AI and what stays valuable when everything changes (people's attention)
— Opening for Scott Thompson (Kids in the Hall) and Gilbert Gottfried
— Norm MacDonald on Sam Kinison and what comedy is actually about
— Tic-tac-toe as a strategy game (and how to make it competitive)
— The disability gaming tech that a company bought and buried
— Neuralink and the medical future Victor actually wants
Play the game: highscoregamearcade.com
0:00
Intro — who is Victor Varnado?
1:35
Growing up in Gary, Indiana and the Jackson 5
4:40
Richard Pryor, George Carlin, and the art of performance
6:15
The histology class that changed how he sees the world
9:30
Moving to Minneapolis, bombing at HBO Aspen, and going solo
11:30
UCB, the Hammer Cats, and 20 years of NYC comedy
13:50
Battle Ish: 7 years of rap battle comedy at UCB
16:10
All those unfilmed shows — and why Victor actually recorded everything
18:30
Supreme Robot: his IP incubator explained
21:10
AI is like electricity — and why that's scary and exciting
24:40
Opening for Scott Thompson from Kids in the Hall
26:40
Opening for Gilbert Gottfried at Caroline's
27:05
The joke he's working on about marriage
29:20
Norm MacDonald, Sam Kinison, and what comedy is really about
31:55
The Worldwide Tic-Tac-Toe Championship — yes, really
36:10
HighScoreGameArcade.com and the 100M player goal
37:55
The National Science Foundation grant and disability gaming tech
40:10
The $500K he never got — and what happened to the tech
41:40
Neuralink and the medical future he actually wants
42:15
Outro
The Lou Perez Podcast is part of the Lions of Liberty Podcast Network.
Watch full episodes of The Lou Perez Podcast and more on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4Vb53s4I0A&list=PLb5trMQQvT077-L1roE0iZyAgT4dD4EtJ
Listen on Apple Podcasts → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-lou-perez-podcast/id1535032081
Listen on Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/2KAtC7eFS3NHWMZp2UgMVU
Lou's book — That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore: https://amzn.to/3VhFa1r TheLouPerez.com | info@thelouperez.com Newsletter: https://substack.com/@louperez
