Shia’s dad, the entrepreneur
“My dad was a Vietnam vet. He was in Vietnam long enough to come back and be a disaster. My dad brought something called the ‘elephant seed’ to Oahu, Hawaii. And in Oahu, it became the ‘Thai’ stick. But how do you make millions on weed when you don’t own a plant? Nobody owns a plant. Well, my dad wasn’t thinking franchise. He was selling things to the Hawaiian mafia, and then they would give it to their cab drivers to sell when they picked people up from airports.”

Diving into a showbiz career
“I just knew that money was a solution to whatever the hell was going on in my household. With money, I and my family would have had more options. So I went after a job that I thought I could make the most money for a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old boy.”

Starting a stand-up comedy career
“I started doing stand-up at this place called the HBO Theater. And then the Ice House let me come in, and Baked Potato. I’d get up there and go, ‘Hey, m–f–! It’s time for some jokes.’ And all the drunks would be like, ‘Hey, wait a minute. This is weird as hell! What’s this 10-year-old talking about?’ Plus at the Ice House, where they would normally serve drinks during the show, they had to hold the drunks’ drinks while I was performing, which they didn’t like, so you’re already starting off on a bad foot. So I would just attack them. I would come at guys, like, ‘What’s going on with you in your life, man?’ I would just break a whole guy’s life down. ‘He’s a 50-year-old man at a comedy club by himself?’ There are so many jokes there, sad, weird, twisted stuff. And everybody would laugh at it, and that guy would hate it. I was like an insult comic.”

His generation vs. his parents’
“My generation will actually be the first generation that is tamer than the one that came before it, and it will probably be poorer; less fun and less money. It’s ridiculous. In my parents’ generation, rebellion was pop culture. It’s not anymore. You can see it in something as simple as where their music was at and where ours is now. If you look at our Billboard Top 100, a lot of those songs on there are from Christian country artists. A lot of rappers, too, are very Christian. The fact that [religion] is even still talked about is kind of wild to me. I think my generation understands it, but they are too selfish to let it matter.”

Greed as part of pop culture
“There’s no patriotism. There’s selfishness. It’s the movie Wall Street. Pure selfishness, ‘Greed is good, It really happened. People don’t look at that character, Gordon Gekko, and see an enemy. They look at him like they look at Scarface, a kind of role model. ‘Hell, yeah. That’s the guy! That’s the superman!’ Well, that’s our pop culture. That’s its values.”