Hosting the Oscars is pretty much the scariest thing you can do. To me, this is right up there with bungee jumping!
The only way I would go back to hosting would be if it were something entirely new. It would prevent me from wanting to host a standard-fare kind of talk show.
I went to school with Steven Wright, who was the shyest guy I knew, and one day someone suddenly told me that he was in a club doing standup comedy. I went down to his club and he was great. Another friend of mine, who was pretty much a thief by trade, was hosting the show. So I thought, 'If these guys can do it, then so can I.'
Hosting 'SNL' was something I'd always wanted to do. The show allowed me to play to my strengths - mixing music with comedy seemed like a way into that world.
Hosting various versions of my countdown program has kept me extremely busy, and I loved every minute of it.
It's fun for me to go on other folks' talk shows. When you've endured the ups and downs and tensions and pitfalls of hosting, being a guest is a piece of angel food.
It was a real hand-to-mouth existence in those early days - I'd have whatever dry cereal there was in the house for breakfast, 30 cents to spend on lunch and a hot dog for dinner. I did that for years. So there was definitely a hunger in me, of various kinds, to succeed.
Bullfights are hugely popular because you can sit comfortably with a hot dog and possibly watch a man die. It won't be me, but I can sit comfortably and watch it.
In my business, the cheaper the ticket price the better. I'd love for more consumers to walk into an amphitheater, park, have a beer and eat a hot dog. There's no advantage to me to have anything but sold-out shows.
People ask me in Europe, when they do interviews... they ask me, 'Well, how does it feel to be a cook in a country that doesn't know how to eat?' It always touches a nerve, because Europe and the world think that America is no more than bad hot dogs and bad burgers.
Everyone knows about hot dogs and the Big Apple. But for me, New York City street food is all about the Biryani Cart.
They don't sell the Nathan's hot dogs hardly anywhere in the West Coast. So I have to special order them, and I just end up getting Nathan's to ship them to me.
I stayed in a really old hotel last night. They sent me a wake-up letter.
You know the first time I sat in the chair I felt anything but up, it was very emotional for me. I had a chair in my hotel room, a chair at rehearsal, and I was trying to spend as much time as I could in the chair.
I have my guy Semi who is my on the road - he's my personal trainer. He helps me out with training and stuff like that, and he's shown me a lot of things I can do on the road. We were trying to figure out something that I can do everywhere, like in my hotel room, so I don't have to have a gym.
I will keep a Bible or Koran on me at all times - the Bible I can actually carry on my phone, and any hotel you go to has a Bible, but the Koran is harder. I keep a physical Koran in my guitar case and put it on the table in hotel rooms so after a day's work, I can read a few verses.
I've written everywhere - in hotel rooms, cafes, airports, and planes all around the world. Now I have a home office, and the wi-fi is really bad down there, which is great. If I make a date with myself to write from, say, 6 A.M. to 10 A.M. on a Saturday, the fact that no emails come in helps me focus.
I'm in hotel rooms most of the time, and it can be hard to find a hotel with a nice gym. It was important for me to have a workout I could do in my room.
I was not the only journalist to whom Trump offered gifts clearly meant to shape coverage. Many reporters have told me that Trump worked hard to offer them something fabulous - from hotel rooms to rides on his 757.
If I have to travel, I'm going to travel my way and travel in the real world. And I'm going to have conversations every day with people in rest stops and people in gas stations and people in hotels and diners. That nourishes me.
