Comedian Joe Rogan stops by to talk about his time in Ireland and his love for the Irish comedy scene. Joe also talks about what it's like to work at The Comedy Store in New York and what it s like to be a stand-up comedian in the big city. And of course, Joe talks about his love of the Irish festival, the Kilkenny International Comedy Festival, and the amazing people he met on his first ever Irish tour in the late 80s and early 90s. We also talk about the early days of his comedy career and how he got his start in the comedy scene in NYC. You won't want to miss this! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. The 500 is a production of Native Creative Podcasts. All rights reserved. Used by permission. If you enjoyed this episode please leave us a review and/or a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you get your content. Please be kind enough to leave a review. Thank you for supporting this podcast. It helps us to keep bringing you quality, diverse, high-quality content. Please remember to spread the word to your friends and family about what we're doing this podcast! We appreciate it greatly! Cheers. -Jon Sorrentino Jon and Paulie Timestamps: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 34. 35. 36. Intro Music: Theme song: Theme Song: "Blame It On You (feat. & Other Music: "Goodbye" by Mr. ) Music Credit: "Shout Outro: "A Good Morning, My Name Is" by & "Good Morning, Goodbye" by Jeffree Star by ) & "I'm Yours Truly by Fountains of Paradise by Skynyrd by Suneaters (Feat. & ) by
00:04:48.000It's like, you know, whatever makes you happy, you know, we've talked about this, it's like, I just love the idea, and I know you do, you have a thought, and you can go on that night.
00:04:59.000You know, I mean, imagine, like, an actor can't do that.
00:05:03.000No, it's giant, too, because sometimes that thought is funny to you right there in that moment, and you know why it's funny to you, and you might forget why it's funny the next day.
00:05:10.000You might have, like, a little napkin with something written down, you know, tampons, Kleenex, you know.
00:07:46.000I like that as well, but I do like getting up, opening up the tent, looking out, just seeing a mountain filled with trees and hearing the birds chirp and putting your boots on, having a cup of coffee that's warmed up by a fire.
00:08:16.000We did this hunt in Montana in 2012. It was like six or seven days in the Missouri Breaks, which is like a very, really, a real wild place.
00:09:50.000Some people just want to be able to go to the grocery store, pick up a little styrofoam container that has a steak in it, take it home, cook it, and they're good.
00:11:09.000I had fallen, and the rifle scope was installed by one of the guys.
00:11:14.000As we got there, we changed scopes because there was a sponsor of the company, a sponsor of the show, rather, and they put a different rifle scope on and shot a deer with it, and it was wounded, and it didn't die.
00:13:50.000Then I was thinking, you know, we always had those images of pterodactyls where they were flying around and they had like bat-like wings, right?
00:14:33.000When they show that image of them with the skin for wings instead of bats, I don't know if they know if that's real.
00:14:42.000I don't know if that's based on what they absolutely know or like what they think because they're starting to think that a lot of dinosaurs had feathers now.
00:14:52.000I was in the museum in Bozeman, Montana, there's a museum, like a natural history type museum, and they have like a split image of a dinosaur, like a raptor, and it's covered with feathers.
00:15:07.000Yeah, because they think it's entirely possible that a lot of the dinosaurs were covered in feathers, but there's just not as much fossilized remains of it.
00:15:15.000I didn't know that man never lived with dinosaurs.
00:22:57.000I love beating him in that and shooting baskets because he calls me old man, grandpa and all this shit, so I want to beat him in something.
00:23:11.000He's like, he knows how to not be overexposed.
00:23:14.000And I've fucked that up in the past and now I'm just like, when I hear, when I get requests for interviews, I'm like, I say too much already.
00:24:16.000Having a conversation with someone when you're under the gun of five minutes, and there's a band there, and you're sitting sideways, and you're at the desk, and I'm sitting over there.
00:24:26.000We're talking about some project that I'm doing.
00:25:21.000It was the most fun I ever had doing live stand-up.
00:25:24.000Because I said, let me go sit in your high chair and judge me like a little joke monkey, and then I'll come over and we'll say funny stuff there, too.
00:26:56.000Not fake accents, but, you know, accents from other places.
00:26:59.000Foreign accents, I should say, not fake.
00:27:01.000Also, it's like, the thing that bothers me, and I love stand-up, and it was when a guy acts so different, like, all of a sudden he goes into this character.
00:34:11.000I made people laugh, but the people that I made laugh were all psychos.
00:34:15.000They were all, like, guys that I was training and fighting with.
00:34:18.000And I was just, like, I felt like we were all freaks, you know, because we were martial artists that were traveling literally all around the country and entering into these full-contact tournaments.
00:35:14.000I was always dehydrating myself and...
00:35:17.000I would, like, do things in the shower, like jump up and down in the shower and shadow box in the shower with the hot water on and try to sweat out weight.
00:35:27.000I couldn't eat for, like, a whole day.
00:35:29.000And then I would fight that day, and it was terrible.
00:36:28.000And the other one was when we went to the place that were those guys who own the Sacramento Kings, the playboy club, and you had fights there.
00:40:34.000Because that's one of the things that I feel that I always battle when I do a special, is that like, here's the moment, it's now, ready, go.
00:40:43.000And one of the best ways I found to combat that was I'd do a bunch of shows.
00:40:54.000I've seen people do one and it becomes a disaster You could feel the tightness on stage because there's so much riding on it, but it's just not just a regular show There's no room really to fuck around You gotta have room to fuck around like part of what a live show is is it's flowing I mean I would like to get myself in a club where I'm half If something's worth talking about with an audience member or something that's really cool,
00:44:03.000For someone today in 2018 with this vast variety of music that we have and so much good music over the history of music, you know, so much recording that it's hard to understand how in the 1960s how amazing the Beatles were.
00:45:07.000And some guys swim, but some guys have real massive potential.
00:45:10.000But really, they should be fighting someone of a lower caliber and developing their skills and experiencing a bunch of different styles, and then eventually working their way up to the UFC after five, six years or so.
00:45:20.000And instead, they're fighting in the UFC at 20 years old, and they're just not really ready for top flight competition.
00:45:25.000Because in the UFC, if you string together five, six wins, you're in title contention in some weight divisions.
00:45:30.000Yeah, that'll discourage the shit out of you.
00:45:32.000Yeah, and you're getting fucked up by some guy who's just many, many levels above you.
00:45:52.000And, you know, we've seen him in the Octagon develop and grow and become this guy, and now he's just, there's everybody, and then there's Mighty Mouse.
00:46:01.000Mighty Mouse is just another level above everybody.
00:46:03.000I've never seen anybody as good as Mayweather to avoid punches.
00:48:29.000Yeah, I mean, when I was, you know, when I started out, if you were on The Tonight Show, that would be the first time all of America saw you.
00:48:37.000But the whole world, not like this, the whole world hears this.
00:49:27.000And we were also streaming live on Ustream, and there wasn't many people listening to that either, or watching that.
00:49:34.000But I was like, but this keeps growing.
00:49:35.000And I knew that I was very interested in doing it, so I knew I was going to get better at it.
00:49:40.000And I was always trying to figure out what ways I could do it better, how to get out of my own way, how to not talk over people, knowing when to talk, when not to talk.
00:49:56.000You have to put yourself in the seat of the person that's listening, and I think listening to podcasts helps that as well, and listening to things that you don't enjoy.
00:50:05.000So one of the things that Stephen King always says about writing is that you should write, but you should also read.
00:51:05.000Chris will go in there, and he's not just trying to kill every time he goes on stage.
00:51:14.000He's trying to develop material, and he's using that time, and it's a very valuable thing for him.
00:51:21.000Well, I really believe that this generation is better than the generation I started with, and only because they got to see them and grow from them.
00:52:21.000Yeah, he, I was listening to one of his recordings on the way home, a big steaming pile of me, like, I don't know, at least a year ago, probably more, but I remember, like, getting a noticeable bump in my writing after I listened to it,
00:52:39.000I think that's a giant advantage that we have today with YouTube and iTunes and things along those lines where you can listen to anything you want.
00:52:49.000I was listening to an old Woody Allen recording the other day.
00:52:53.000Just in my car driving, I was listening to Woody Allen do stand-up in the 1960s.
00:52:57.000You could tell he was a fucking pervert even back then.
00:53:06.000And Diane Keaton goes to this high priest, and she steps on his beard, and it's a very funny scene, and he says, the most beautiful thing in the world is a 12-year-old girl, blonde hair, preferably twins, right?
00:53:45.000Yeah, well, isn't that something that people tend to do?
00:53:48.000They try to normalize whatever fucked up perversion they have, and they put it into art.
00:53:53.000Like, that was one of the things that they were accusing Louis CK of with this movie that he released right before it came out that he was jerking off in front of a bunch of people.
00:54:02.000He had this movie, and part of the movie was just talking about how everyone's a pervert.
00:55:03.000I think he's a different person than when he did those things.
00:55:07.000I think those things that he did, jerking off in front of a bunch of people, is terrible.
00:55:10.000And I think he probably had an idea in his head of what those things were and of who he was and who he would be.
00:55:17.000And I think a lot of your self-definitions a lot of times are based on this very limited idea of who you are, very limited idea of who you're going to be.
00:55:27.000And he's like wallowing in his own weirdness and just wants to jerk off in front of somebody.
00:55:32.000You know, it's out of all the offenses of things you could do to someone, it's one of the least egregious.
00:57:43.000The only way Cosby gets rehabilitated, I mean, not really rehabilitated, but the only way he gets reintroduced into society is if everyone believes those girls are lying.
01:01:30.000Like, you realize, like, a lot of our struggles and a lot of the shit that we go through in this life, a lot of it is about perspective and a lot of it is about who's around you and what kind of loving environment you're around.
01:01:43.000And it's also having kids and not having the strain The financial strain, the emotional strain, and the ignorance strain that my parents had and their parents had.
01:02:03.000My mom didn't hit me, but it was a common thing for people to hit their kids.
01:02:08.000I remember Bruce Willis said to me one time, to be a name drummer, He said, you know, one of the things about having kids, he goes, this little girl, I forget the middle one's name, he said she would wake me up to walk her to the bathroom.
01:03:09.000Yeah, I went to see you at Nick's, and I went to see you two nights in a row, because one night I thought you were supposed to be there, and either you missed your flight or something happened, and Dennis Leary was there instead.
01:04:28.000Well, if you were a girl and you were a huge comedy fan, like imagine if you were a girl and you just, you love Chappelle and Bill Burr and Dom Herrera and Duncan Trussell and Joey Diaz and all these great comedians and then you start dating a prop act.
01:07:30.000When she was on my podcast, the fucking comments were hilarious.
01:07:34.000Like, men either love her or they fucking hate her.
01:07:39.000Like, her, the thumbs up, the thumbs down versus Eliza, like on the podcast, the thumbs up versus thumbs down, she got like one of the worst ratios of anyone that's ever been on the podcast.
01:08:19.000When I was younger, someone that was cocky or overconfident or just...
01:08:25.000I'd feel threatened by it or I'd be upset by it or I'd judge them in a weird way where I'd connect all my own shit to them and get upset at them.
01:10:52.000It's pretty obvious what he said, but I'm sitting there going, what is going on with late night TV? Yeah, well, you know, Kimmel's been on a run lately of crying and talking about this.
01:15:16.000I think the kid who did the latest shooting in Florida, if I'm putting two stories together, I don't know, but apparently he was underage and had fake ID and still was able to buy it.
01:15:45.000And then one of the things he wrote, he wrote it on Facebook or something, that he wants to be a professional school shooter.
01:15:52.000And then two years later, and he got visited by the FBI. The FBI actually checked this fucking kid out, talked to him about it, decided he wasn't a threat.
01:16:00.000How do you decide someone's a threat or not a threat?
01:16:03.000Well, if you're talking to them, they're a threat.
01:16:05.000I mean, the FBI can't talk to everybody, but I would be suspicious of anyone that it took that much energy to go find him.
01:16:47.000That's what people have to take into consideration.
01:16:49.000This boy, this 19-year-old boy who did that, was a baby at one point in time.
01:16:54.000He's a failed process, a failed product.
01:16:58.000Whether it's through his environment, his family, his DNA, all the above, his life experiences, all the pain, the trauma, mental illness, all these various factors.
01:18:56.000We were talking about Louie, and not to knock Louie again, but this kid, I was working the brokerage in Long Island, and he comes in with his mom to see me, and he said, I don't think what Louie did was that bad.
01:22:32.000They're just giant contracts to air the Olympics.
01:22:35.000Giant amounts of money to build these stadiums and set up these events and everything is about nationalism and national pride, whether it's in Korea or Russia or wherever the fuck they do them.
01:22:47.000But meanwhile, the athletes don't get dick.
01:22:51.000If you're lucky and you're Michael Phelps, you become famous out of it and you get a bunch of commercials and endorsements and you make a shitload of money that way.
01:22:58.000But how many Michael Phelps's are there?
01:23:02.000I mean, but how many in all the Olympics?
01:23:04.000And out of all the Olympics, Jamie, you're a sports fan, out of all the Olympics, say like the Olympics this year, well, let's go to the last one.
01:26:59.000Taekwondo you don't punch to the face, you punch to the body and you kick to the face and kick to the body.
01:27:03.000Which is a very different thing because it's so easy to punch someone in the face comparatively and so hard to kick someone in the face.
01:27:11.000So the dexterity of the legs, like for people that know how to kick, it's just you develop much more leg dexterity and you get way better at kicking and moving your legs.
01:27:22.000But as soon as you fight a good boxer, you realize how poor the balance is between your hands and your feet.
01:27:30.000And I had to really develop my hand techniques.
01:27:32.000And so I was really concentrating on boxing at that point in my life.
01:27:37.000Like really learning how to box and learning how to punch correctly and learning how to put...
01:27:41.000Kicks together with punches because you just there's a bunch of stuff that you can get away with if someone's not Punching you in the face that you can't get away with as soon as they start doing it And I was already kind of disillusioned because I was learning I was just learning that it was very flawed and then I started doing Muay Thai with leg kicks and I realized like what Jesus Christ like as soon as you kick the legs like this most of this shits out the window right the changes what's a bill what you can and can't get away with and What do you think is the most lethal martial arts?
01:28:19.000Because wrestling, you dictate whether or not the fight stays up or goes to the ground.
01:28:23.000Wrestling is like, in my opinion, the best base.
01:28:26.000But once you've passed that, then it's about submissions.
01:28:31.000So it's wrestling and then submissions.
01:28:33.000Because if a guy has wrestling, he can take you to the ground and punch you in the face and stuff like that.
01:28:36.000But if the guy on the bottom is good at jiu-jitsu, he might still be able to submit you like the early UFC days.
01:28:42.000Hoist Gracie submitted much larger people like Dan Severin off of his back.
01:28:46.000And Dan Severin was a real world-class wrestler at the time.
01:28:49.000And Hoist submitted him off his back with Jiu Jitsu because he didn't know Jiu Jitsu.
01:28:53.000So I think wrestling, the ability to take someone down is probably number one, but Jiu Jitsu is a very close second.
01:29:01.000Because the problem with jiu-jitsu is if a guy knows how to wrestle really good, and he can keep you standing up, and if he's better at punching and kicking, he could fuck you up standing up, and you'll never get the fight to the ground to use your jiu-jitsu.
01:29:10.000Because his wrestling could also keep the fight standing.
01:29:13.000The wrestling dictates where the fight takes place.
01:29:16.000That, to me, is the most critical thing.
01:29:18.000If you're a wrestler, you have the ability to take someone down, you have the ability to stand up, and you have the ability to keep someone from taking you down.
01:32:43.000And they said he went to the comedy store that night and got fucked out of his head and was stumbling into the streets and just out of his mind.