Overall, I just love performing so much that when I write, I want to write for me. I kind of learned that on 'Mr. Show,' that even in an environment where you can write whatever you want - which is what that environment was - I realized, 'Man, I still want to be the guy out in front.'

I love to do the stream-of-consciousness thing, because it's exciting for me, and I like to think it's exciting for the audience, too.

When I started stand-up, the people I admired most were the people who were the most themselves onstage.

Performing live can be a drag, the process that leads up to the actual performance. It's all the travel, it's working up all the details and everything, which I hate.

We all forget that when a TV network says, 'Look, we're broke,' it means that they're not making as much money as they would like to be making. They're still making millions and millions of dollars - they're just not making billions and billions of dollars.

Everyone is always asking me about clothes.

I got married and we had a relatively simple wedding and there were not a lot of thrills to it.

A struggle in my life is to feel like I'm a good person and to feel like I'm a nice person. I try to be and anytime I fall short of that it feels really bad.

I love The Rock. I never want him to be president.

I seem to be one of those people that's immune to Super Bowl fever. I may be a carrier, but I'm immune to it myself.

The first time I did Cake Boss or Ice-T or Andrew Lloyd Webber was on 'Best Week Ever.'

If written with enough care and thoughtfulness, a joke can make you laugh at a belief you hold dear.

There are absolutely no limits with podcasting because you can do anything you want.

It's great to work with friends. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't, but everybody goes into it knowing that. Like, 'We might be really good friends, but we might be terrible collaborators.'

I make my money from a lot of different sources, so I'm not depending on any one thing to really pull through.

As human beings we're visual creatures, and it's so easy to play the guitar by looking at it. It's a real challenge to go from that visual way of perceiving the guitar to getting back to that pure sound connecting to the instrument.

One of the things I like to do is to try to jam with everybody.

I'm Not Afraid of the Police' is the first song I wrote and recorded since moving back to Los Angeles. It's a loud-pop, crazy-guitar, big-harmony song with all the police sirens created by guitars and ADA flangers.

While I was writing the songs for 'Fuzz Universe,' I was immersing myself in Bulgarian Female Choir music, Baroque lute and violin pieces, Johnny Cash songs about trains, cows, mules, and mining coal, the Bee Gees, and Ronnie James Dio.

I love my job as a musician, and I am filled with gratitude that good people support my endeavors.

To me, you had to have a least a couple of ugly guys in the band. That's why Saxon was great.

I was doing a lot of teaching on my online guitar school and I started to use vocal melodies as a way of teaching my students. To be able to do that, I had to learn them myself.

Of course, I'm a guitar player, so I'm thinking as a guitarist. I have to work within my physical limitations as to what my hands will do, and also the patterns I'm familiar with, and the places that my fingers are used to going.

To me, the secret of Eddie Van Halen was Alex Van Halen, because the way Alex played was so loose and the way the two of them locked together… Those two are connected so thoroughly they might as well be one person.

I think I had heard Al Di Meola on the radio when I was a kid, that acoustic record, 'Friday Night In San Francisco,' with Paco de Lucía and John McLaughlin. His picking was unbelievable. I thought it was incredible.

Scotty Johnson is a guy who I've worked with on a lot of my tours and albums, and I'm always blown away by his musical knowledge and playing.

Seriously, though, I think the only musical term that's ever put a bee in my bonnet is 'shred.' I tried to peddle the term 'Terrifying Guitar' to the world, but it just didn't stick. Now we've got 'shred.'

Music and guitar are my favorite things, so it's fun to get together with other people who share the passion and talk about the details.

In my daily life, I tend to be very literal and unsuperstitious. But music gives me an outlet to be very emotional.

Teaching has made me realize that a lot of my fast playing is the musical equivalent of, 'Umm… umm… uhh...' - it's like when you're trying to think of the next thing to say that actually has meaning, you fill space. 'Umm' has about the same meaning as my fast playing.

After playing for 40 years, I've been able to evolve the way I see the fretboard and how I hear the guitar in my head.

I use the volume control on my guitar, both for dynamics and as a manual noise gate.

I remember walking into a department store and you would hear an instrumental version of a Beatles song and it was usually kinda cheesy and very un-rock. Kenny G, for example, is a musician that I certainly dont want to sound like, but technically he is flawless but somehow the rock and roll aspect has been sucked out of it.

Teaching the guitar is a constant source of inspiration. I sometimes think I get more out of the lessons than my students.

Recently, I had some powerful magnets glued into the lower horn of a few of my guitars. This holds a metal slide in place so I can easily get to it and put it back, even in the middle of a song.

I've certainly enjoyed doing clinic tours for larger audiences, but the most valuable teaching experience has been the hundreds of lessons that I've given where I can hear the students play.

The Great Guitar Escape is built around world-class seminars, concerts and jam sessions. It's a chance to learn and be inspired by some truly amazing musicians. And it's just a great way for everyone to hang out together in a beautiful place.

It's amazing how a lot of the metal guys have never strummed! And it's not that challenging, but it really opens up a lot of doors in ways they might not have imagined.

Just about every rock band and every guitar player from 1964 to 1984. To me, that's the golden period of rock. From the first Beatles album hitting America to the last Van Halen album with David Lee Roth. That's where all my favorite rock exists.

My first official teaching job was at GIT, which was fantastic because I wanted to pay the rent and I got to stay in the building, which is an inspiring place to be - the vibe was there. My first gig was doing private lessons. It went great. Then they decided to promote me to a classroom teacher. I taught a class called Single String Technique.

It took me years to get my hair right… after years of perms, conditioning… Nirvana came out and it wasn't cool to have big hair anymore. It was just a horrible injustice.

Gilbert Hotel' is my first all-acoustic record.

I went from wanting to be a Beatle to becoming a 'widdly-widdly' guitar player.

I really genuinely love 'To Be With You.' I don't get tired of playing it.

A Herd of Turtles' is the only song on 'Behold Electric Guitar' that is not strictly instrumental. But instead of singing, I am reciting a poem. My poem is about overcoming challenges.

It's so easy to practice out of context. For example, if you're learning a scale, you take that scale and you sit in your room and you go up and down the fretboard, over and over. You've gotta do that, because you need to get that scale working. But you have to keep in mind that that's not the finished product. That's the starting point.

I'm not a reader myself, so I don't expect anyone else to be.

Two words: Kasim Sulton. I've been a Utopia fan for a long, long time, and Kasim's a pop hero of mine. I have to hold myself back from asking him a million Utopia questions.

Life's too short, you know? If you find something you love and that other people love, why not do it?

I think all of The Beatles were from an era when certainly playing was important to them, and they were cutting edge. But for all time, they're master composers.