Joe Rogan is a stand-up comic, actor, comedian, writer, and podcaster. In this episode, he talks about what it's like to grow up in New York City, what it was like growing up in the 60s and 70s, and what it s like to be an adult in the 80s and 90s. He also talks about his love of the blues, and the time he lost a tooth in a car accident. Joe Rogan's new show, is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, Blu-ray on Amazon, and also rental on Vimeo. Click here to buy tickets to his upcoming show, "The Irishman," which premieres Friday, February 15th. Thanks to our sponsor, Caff Monster Energy Drink, and to our patron, Joe's old high school buddy, Alex, for joining us on this episode of the podcast. We hope you enjoy the episode, and don't forget to leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms! Thank you so much for listening, and supporting the show! Cheers, Joe and Sarah. Timestamps: 1:00 - 2:30 - 3:15 - 4:20 - 5:40 - 6:10 - 7:10 8:00 9:00s - 11:30s - 12:15s - 13:40s 14:20s - 15:15 15:00 s 16:15 s 17: 17 - 18: 19:30 s 18 :00s 19 - 21:00a. 22:40 23:40 s 23 & 24: 25:00 ? 26:00 + 27:30 35:00 #1 30s & 32s 33s 35s 36s 37s 38s 39s 41s 40s 45s 42s 44s 47s Theme Music: Theme Song: "A Song" by Ian Dorsch (feat. ) & #1s & #1st 36th & #3rd 39th & 4th Music: "Goodbye" by : 41st & 1st (Song: "Blues & Blues)
00:00:54.000That's something that most of us, I think, perhaps we're compelled to skip out on that once we leave school.
00:01:01.000Once we leave the club level in showbiz, where we're confronted with all kinds of other neighborhoods of folks and different kinds of shoes and haircuts and music.
00:01:11.000And approaches to the politic and social.
00:01:14.000Once you're out of school, you kind of, okay, I joined the law firm.
00:08:10.000It comes from when I would go over to the Van Halen site, that's like Ridgemont High.
00:08:15.000I went to, like, Cooley High, all right?
00:08:17.000And their music was all Led Zeppelin, Stones, The Who, Sabbath, like this.
00:08:25.000And starting at the seventh grade youth club dance for me, that was all Motown, which, you know, later my record collection was everything from Rick James and, you know, the funk.
00:08:39.000I took Eddie Van Halen to his first black concert at the Forum.
00:08:42.000I think it was the only one that he ever went to.
00:14:17.000Remember all those Blue Note jazz album covers, and you might not even know what to call them, but if I hold it up, you go, oh, I've seen that a thousand times.
00:14:28.000Even the drummer has a cigarette in his mouth.
00:14:33.000And the places in the movies when I was very, very young were all black and white.
00:14:38.000And it was Humphrey Bogart and I think Ingmar Bergman or whoever it was.
00:14:43.000I'm not even sure who it was, but she was gorgeous, and I was young, and I was just sort of getting started and tuned into the way, like just basically a teen.
00:14:54.000And she turns to him with a cigarette and says, got a light?
00:15:00.000And along with 20 million other baby boomers, I went, you bet.
00:15:08.000And then later, when I was 13, we went and saw Goldfinger.
00:15:13.000He smokes a cigarette named after a Roth.
00:16:21.000I myself am a very indelicate house blend of a Kurosawa, Samurai Epic, and Groucho.
00:16:28.000And how many times, I don't know if you've ever, I don't know you well, but any kid in my neighborhood growing up, at some point did this to a pretty girl with your eyebrows.
00:18:17.000I think that in terms of authorship, where you really have to use your intellective, something like playing chess or writing a book or a play or novels or whatever, that nicotine has a major impact.
00:18:33.000All of my favorite musicians who are composers, Leonard Bernstein, have you seen the coming attractions for...
00:28:16.000Whatever here is left over from not putting it in the gas tank.
00:28:20.000Those days are important to connect to though, right?
00:28:22.000Don't you think that it's important to stay in touch with the feeling that you had when you were starting out and you were trying to scrap together all that money and scrape together all that money to buy food?
00:30:11.000And then you had to learn to laugh at each other and find the resource when you wanted to quit or die or just die.
00:30:18.000And no matter what, you had to learn laugh to win.
00:30:22.000Now, whether you're a surgeon doing night shift, Struggling, whether you're a combat veteran, mixed martial arts, you better learn how to laugh to win.
00:36:46.000So is that going out of style or is that becoming more popular?
00:36:52.000Is that because, you know, we are a very highly valued culture now.
00:36:57.000We love to have public, you know, we love to assign ourselves of our values, whether it's social, whether it's political, etc.
00:37:06.000And the idea of even, you know, it's You make fun of lifestyles of the rich and famous, but I'm gonna wonder if it's even secretly more popular than ever before and just not cool to talk about in public.
00:38:52.000And if you're lucky enough to move out of the country for a while, you'll start seeing programs.
00:38:58.000When I was in Japan, you'll see Indonesian reality series, you'll see Korean reality series, and Half the time you're not even aware literally what they're saying, but you can figure it out exactly.
00:39:12.000And it is a warship of the bling that I think I'm going to wonder if America is just learning to hide it.
00:39:23.000Or if there's an actual change, what do you think?
00:46:03.000And from there, my first day traveling through the lobby, this fella's sitting there and I'm not out of line to say, Joe, great to see you again.
00:47:01.000So I'm walking through the lobby in Japan, and I'm not out of line to say there is a huge person sitting in a very special chair that was not in that lobby when I left.
00:50:59.000That is there that if one of those guys, watch, they're going to try and grab that handle because if he can get hold of it, you could throw his ass out of that circle.
00:51:07.000That's what they're trying to deflect there.
00:51:09.000One of those 400-pounders gets hold of that belt.
01:01:36.000Like this, their me wall contains virtually everyone from the Cirque du Soleil, every action hero you can possibly imagine without naming names, It's always back, right?
01:01:50.000Yeah, every sports hero, every pitcher, every golfer, every rock and roller who carries a guitar around with them, etc.
01:02:00.000And I'm up there three times, three or four times as well.
01:05:06.000But the first thing I would say, if you said, Dave, you're coach for a day, I'd go, you're fighting in Japan, get there three months in advance.
01:05:15.000You want that jet log off, you want your body used to the agua, the water, you want your body used to the humidity, the temperature, because it's all different.
01:05:25.000This is a monsoon archipelago, and it's exotic here as it sounds.
01:06:12.000And collected half a dozen of his friends, Dr. Senior, put them in the back of a pickup truck in the days when you could just sit in the back, and drove them to the Us Festival to watch the mighty Van Halen perform in front of 350,000 people back in 1983. 350,000 people?
01:09:33.000At 75, post-heart surgery, wow, so that was two years ago, so he's 77. But see if you can find an image of his body, because there's a photo of him shirtless that was pretty recent.
01:12:24.000Like, if I'm listening to classic Hendrix, I just think about what it must have been like for him to be Jimi Hendrix in 67. See, some people always say, yeah, the music reminds me of when I was young, and I think like you do.
01:13:35.000Because when you look at your tattoo, for all of you who are just pondering, remember that you're going to think of where you got it and who put it on you and what the music was that you heard and then who you were at the time.
01:13:50.000So I went out of my way and I made sure I went to Yokohama and had Sting do it, so to speak.
01:16:47.000And what I did, Joe, is I created a liberal arts education that I never had because I went on the road with Van Halen and never looked back.
01:17:11.000And you would learn how to handle the end of that paintbrush so that when you handle the end of that sword and it's surgically sharp, you have that finesse in your hands.
01:17:25.000If you can make a perfectly straight line with your breath...
01:17:29.000You're more liable to be able to manage that surgically sharp five-pound sushi knife that's in your hand here because your eye has been trained to where to position a fine point.
01:17:47.000So I went to art class the way you would in the 1500s, and I spent two years learning how to handle four shades of gray and one shade of black.
01:18:08.000You had to learn art, painting, poetry.
01:18:10.000If you don't have a real fine touch with the brush, the first thing that you're going to do is you're going to grip that blade with all of your fingers, okay?
01:18:21.000And you're going to end up tearing all of your tendons like that.
01:19:43.000You wanted to give yourself a balanced education.
01:19:45.000I knew I was going to come out a different person after two years in Japan.
01:19:49.000I had no idea how or what that would be, but I was very intrigued on what it might turn out, so let's go.
01:19:56.000Where do you think you gained that perspective to have the foresight to know that you would get great benefit out of just doing this very unusual thing, moving to Japan, learning kendo, learning to play Go, learning to paint, learning the language?
01:20:12.000That this education would be very beneficial to you.
01:20:17.000I mean, that's a very rare thing to do for a rock star, right?
01:24:50.000She says, you got great practical scores.
01:24:53.000She says, I know you were just planning to, you know, graduate and move on, but you can get a uniform and we'll get you in an ambulance and you can go do your 200 hours or whatever it is to an artist like us, to a poet like us,
01:26:24.000Many of you who work in EMT services, fire, law enforcement, etc., in the Coney Island area, I'm going to change his last name a little bit, but you're going to remember exactly who I'm talking about.
01:27:31.000Donnie would call himself in to the ambulance, and we would have to go get him.
01:27:37.000We always acted like we knew him, but we treated him like we'd never heard this before.
01:27:42.000And we would drive him to Coney Island Hospital, where they would give him a meal, warm him up or cool him down, and release him, say four to six hours later.
01:27:52.000On a day like today, when we would get on shift, we would all ask fondly, Has Donnie checked in yet?
01:28:00.000Because Donnie would call himself into the hospital four times in one day.
01:28:05.000He would be released and you'd get another call and we'd have to drive back down to the liquor store and pick Donnie up as if we hadn't seen him that morning.
01:29:51.000We would routinely, when it starts getting summer, and I bring it up now, when we get on shift, we would wonder, what time do you think Donnie's going to call it?
01:30:21.000International School for Tactical Medicine, Explosive Incident Command, History, Treatment, Mechanism, and Future Prospects and everything.
01:33:44.000Well, the way I said to the guitar teacher, and she says, imagine that I'm sitting at a beach bar somewhere like, say, Florida.
01:33:57.000And there's all kinds of interesting people.
01:34:00.000You have Jimmy Buffet types, and hey, there's some fashion models on a shoot, and Joey's there, and some of the guys from the gym, etc., like this, and somebody hands me a guitar.
01:36:59.000Like, for him to, like, take an EMT classes and all these different things going to Japan, he's almost got to, like, insert himself into, like, a struggle.
01:38:15.000I was watching a video I took at a concert that I went, well, the only time I saw Prince live, but that's what he was doing.
01:38:23.000He kept coming in front of the stage, performing a little, backing off, turning the lights down, and full control of like the whole venue from the mic.
01:40:05.000In that position, bent over like when you first started reading the Sunday comics on the floor, you would lay on your belly or on your knees.
01:42:54.000Yeah, I would stand up for my two-hour lesson because I couldn't sit down.
01:42:59.000And he felt initially that I was not playing like a Korean would, which felt I was weak.
01:43:08.000And he felt that even though it was unorthodox that I would stand up to play the game, that it increased my aggression, and that I was playing more like a Korean, and that was of value.
01:45:34.000You want to work the four corners and surround.
01:45:38.000And that's what's happening when we start seeing colonial You follow?
01:45:44.000Well, suppose, you know, when you hear that, and it's not just Chinese, it could be any country, but when you hear, for example, so-and-so is buying up all the water in Africa, all the oil in Ecuador, and all of the ice in the south of it,
01:46:00.000whatever, they're thinking in four corners.
01:50:44.000And then you'll start getting the genius-level, combat-proof, full-blast, industrial-strength brains, because you're going to have to be a psychiatrist, a social worker, a Delta team member, a SWAT team fellow.
01:52:51.000The defunding the police thing is idealistically, I see what they're thinking.
01:52:55.000They're thinking that there's too much police brutality, there's too many rogue cops, too many people that are unqualified to handle the job, and then they over-escalate situations, and we see those viral videos, and they're infuriating.
01:53:10.000I can solve it with the color of America, which is green.
01:53:56.000And I think police officers in particular are woefully under-trained.
01:54:00.000And if you talk to people like Jocko Willink, who's a former Navy SEAL commander, he'll tell you that they should be spending somewhere in the neighborhood of like 60% of their time training.
01:54:12.000So when they go into situations, they know exactly what to do, how to handle it, and they do it with discipline, the type of discipline that you get with special forces groups.
01:54:33.000I have no love for abusive police, but I have all the love in the world for police that are doing their job and risking their life to help people and keep people safe.
01:54:41.000I think that's what most of them are doing.
01:54:43.000And most of them are infuriated by bad police work.
01:54:46.000Most of them see guys being abusive and see horrible things that get escalated unnecessarily by insecure cops.
01:55:21.000You're seeing it in a lot of these places that have defunded the police or at least taken the teeth out of the police.
01:55:25.000Then you have radically escalating violence, radically escalating murder rates, break-ins.
01:55:33.000It's horrific shit, and it's not the way to handle things.
01:55:35.000You're just going to make people less safe, you're going to make it more dangerous, and you're going to make the cops less likely to engage.
01:55:42.000Cops now are scared to go on calls because they don't want to wind up in a viral video.
01:57:43.000I get that they're trying to shape the world in a better place.
01:57:46.000And I think a lot of the statues that they're taking down, here's the rub with a lot of the statues that they were taking down that were put up during the Civil Rights Movement of Confederate soldiers and stuff like that.
01:57:56.000Those were put up in protest of the civil rights movement and they were really cheap.
02:00:02.000If you're gonna start to argue about it and it becomes a huge contention, then it virally will expand to something ugly, like Hamilton, which was the play that got made in a movie, got disincluded from winning an award because Hamilton owned slaves.
02:00:21.000Now, the individuals who wrote that play probably never even conceived of that, and it's a play That is heavily black Spanish speaking, ethnic hood, whatever you want to call it.
02:00:36.000It's a whole new approach to that moment in history.
02:00:40.000And they're disincluded from awards because the hero of the play, which if I'm not mistaken is not played by a Caucasian, in real life owned slaves.
02:01:54.000When Kurosawa, the great director, you know, you would know it from Sanjuro, Seven Samurai, etc., you had a one-sentence acceptance speech.
02:02:04.000I might as well have it tattooed on my leg and read it every day.
02:02:08.000To be an artist means you can never turn away your eyes.
02:02:43.000And then instead of letting them talk, they get like 90 seconds and they're standing on a podium and it's all completely unnatural and it's all very quick.
02:02:51.000They have to have, if you're going to be an artist, you can never turn your eyes.
02:03:11.000And it's what will you share with those behind you?
02:03:15.000The problem is now there's too many people that are deeply invested in saying things that they think people want to hear rather than saying things that express their true feelings or their true thoughts or their true emotions.
02:03:31.000I think we're using opportunities frequently as an artist.
02:03:37.000This lack of box of chocolates is so tempting.
02:03:40.000These broad-based generalizations and being able to go, wow, they love my music, therefore they'll love my children, my choice of car, my third wife, and this Broadway play I wrote.
02:04:39.000Honestly, most of the time, what's infuriating to me is that it doesn't resonate as being genuine.
02:04:45.000I don't really think that that's what they're thinking about.
02:04:48.000I think they want you to think that they're deep and profound, that they're thinking about these things.
02:04:53.000And that's what drives people the most crazy.
02:04:55.000That virtue signaling, the clear and obvious virtue signaling, where you know they're doing it because they think it'll be good for their career to say the things they're saying.
02:05:04.000They think that it'll endear them with the people that cast films and write films and produce films or whatever the fuck else they're doing, television shows.
02:05:16.000They want to be a part of the chosen ones.
02:05:18.000And the best way to do that is to use that time in a performative way instead of like an honest, genuine method of expression or time of expression where they're on that stage and they speak from the heart and they have something that is like really deeply moving.
02:08:38.000That's the pro with seeing another act.
02:08:43.000And if you're not competing with somebody else, you should have the fear that you're not maximizing your talent and you're wasting your time.
02:08:51.000So, but that's what I'm saying is that's the pro.
02:08:53.000Like, say, if you went to a concert and you saw Hendrix live, it would scare you.
02:08:59.000You'd be like, Jesus Christ, we gotta get on the ball.
02:09:02.000That was what Eric Clapton said, right?
02:09:04.000He saw Hendrix play, and he was like, what am I doing?
02:10:12.000Yeah, and today it requires a 50,000-hour surgeon to duplicate a trip to a downtown $15 visit of a dentist in 1926. Yeah, but it'll probably fit better.
02:10:25.000It's the same fellas who do the movie teeth.
02:10:28.000When you see, like, Johnny Depp with the pirate teeth with the sapphires and the gold and stuff, it's showbiz city.
02:10:48.000But it's curious that to, you know, move to that...
02:10:52.000Anyways, it is a mindset, and I am continually thrilled, even now, especially with YouTube, you know, being able to access the past at a moment.
02:11:05.000It used to be, go look it up at the Encyclopedia Britannica.
02:11:08.000How many times did I get up from the dinner table and start rifling through that thin paper?
02:11:13.000Right, and you had to make sure that that was real, that what the encyclopedia was saying was real.
02:11:17.000You couldn't cross-reference it with other online sources.
02:11:24.000And now, literally as we speak here, we can rev it up.
02:11:29.000I used to have to sit in front of the television at the million dollar movie and hope that that thing is going to come on at a certain time.
02:11:38.000I'm going to get to see this one routine quickly and then it's gone.
02:11:44.000Whether that was a dance scene or a fight scene or whatever.
02:11:50.000You can dial up, for example, dial up going down to Argentina, the Nicholas Brothers, okay?
02:11:58.000This is a flash team from the 30s and the 40s of tap dancing, but gymnastic shit, you know, flying through each other and, you know, this kind of thing.
02:12:07.000If you knew that movie was coming on at 11 o'clock on Channel 5 on Thursday, that was the only time it was there for two years, and you better make sure you're in front of that TV. To watch it once.
02:25:08.000All of your burpees are included in the forms, but a form is something that you can get better and better at, and you can do it in a very small space without a class, without a teacher, without a bag, without gloves, and without So do you do any striking anymore?
02:25:26.000Do you hit bags or anything like that anymore?
02:27:29.000Jesus, Paul McCartney puts out 14 songs.
02:27:32.000The human thing is to pick your favorite and your worst and skip the rest because there's nine other records available right here in my shoe phone.
02:27:40.000I don't have to go to Canterbury Records anymore, buy one record at a time, go home, sit and listen just to that record.
02:27:49.000Your wristwatch contains all of the music ever recorded.
02:28:40.000Outlaw Country, Hip Hop Nation, Rock the Bells, Groove Channel, then the two BPM and Aria, and then I listen to Fox and MSNBC. You listen to Fox and MSNBC just to get a balanced perspective of propaganda?
02:29:12.000I get concerned with people that are on one side of the ideology 100%.
02:29:17.000I don't think that's realistic, and I think it's more in line with tribal thinking than it is with real objective, discerned reasoning.
02:29:27.000Someone who's really looked at the issues and thought about it from a balanced perspective and really looked at the pros and cons of We're good to go.
02:33:32.000He was simply emulating the thinking of a mutually aged individual, but you're looking at him as a 70-year-old looking at your daughter, and I would concur.
02:38:12.000I understand what you're trying to convey in your songs, but I'm saying, what does it feel like to know that your songs have impacted millions and millions of people?
02:40:47.000I got fired from playing too much ethnic music.
02:40:52.000I got fired for having too much of a view like we're doing right now.
02:40:58.000Well, the problem was you were taking over a time slot that had been clearly established by arguably the greatest radio broadcaster in the history of the world.
02:41:09.000I agree with that, and I still agree with it.
02:44:20.000Monday morning and say, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome David Lee Roth and let you just go wild?
02:44:25.000Yeah, and I'd have an intro from a Wilson Pickett tune, or I'd loop the musical intro from Cool and the Gang, or I'd loop the musical intro from some Arabian Nights something or other,
02:44:43.000and no, no, no, no, this is classic rock.
02:44:46.000We want to stay in the classic rock mode.
02:44:48.000We want to stay with classic rock type guests in the approach.
02:44:51.000So that was because Stern on terrestrial radio before he went over to XM Sirius was on a classic rock station.
02:45:53.000Like what kind of subject matter was upsetting?
02:45:56.000For example, 9-11, okay, the buildings down there, Trade Center, World Trade, the EPA director, Christy, I think, Whitman perhaps, I might be wrong with the name,
02:46:13.000I'm in error, at the time was declaring, this is 15 summers ago, that it was okay to breathe down there.
02:46:21.000And I maintained under no circumstances Was it okay to breathe down there, having been involved in some version of healthcare training and so forth?
02:46:34.000First time I got walked into the hospital, I was eight years old.
02:46:38.000I remember my father saying, Sybil, it's time he sees what his father really does for a living, and he showed me everything in that hospital.
02:46:46.000I was a Massachusetts general when he was a resident, okay?
02:46:51.000And I went on record, and they got calls from the mayor's office to shut up, because I was saying, it is under no circumstances is it safe to breathe down at that site.
02:47:30.000Bad choice of word, but maybe it's right.
02:47:33.000And I was threatened with getting fired, and the mayor's office called, and you're going to cause a big problem and big trouble, et cetera, like that.
02:48:19.000Well, I took your approach, which is, it was what I was doing then, and you can tell I'm still irate, is much closer to what you're doing here.
02:48:29.000And I would bring people on who were extreme right-wing and extreme left-wing and extreme everything.
02:51:36.000How about just do whatever the fuck you want to do?
02:51:38.000Well, because then there's competition because doing whatever you want to do is informed by your parents.
02:51:43.000And your parents may be putting bling on you.
02:51:46.000You may be wearing diamonds to grade school.
02:51:48.000You may be wearing $120 hair cutting some brand new New Balance where my kid can barely afford some slaps.
02:51:58.000My kid might be wearing camo, because that's all I can wear, because I can't afford to wash a fucking thing, so it doesn't show the dirt, like I wore when I was a kid.
02:52:08.000And the bling kid is liable to think they're somehow superior to my kid.
02:52:11.000So is this an actual conversation, or are you just being poetic now?
02:52:14.000Did you have this actual conversation on the air?
02:52:16.000I talked just like this, but I was way rougher.
02:53:17.000I think what's more important than anything is compassion.
02:53:19.000And there's always going to be people that have more, and there's always going to be people that have less.
02:53:24.000The real problem is when that becomes everything, when that becomes your defining characteristic, when that becomes your personality, when that becomes the thing that everyone's aspiring to.
02:55:08.000And in the times when my pop was just getting started in medicine and we didn't have money in the house, I was equal to the kids from La Cunada when I was in my gi.
02:55:21.000And now that I am a millionaire several times over, When I was in kindle class, then the kid who has nothing.
02:55:48.000Yeah, well I think there's definitely a benefit in kids learning martial arts for sure.
02:55:52.000And learning martial arts in the same uniform, there's a real benefit in that too because you realize it's not about the uniform, it's not about what you look like, it's about getting things done.
02:56:01.000Then as you learn and grow and become more accomplished, then you receive these belts.
02:56:37.000And it also gives you this goal, one day I want to be a black belt.
02:56:40.000And you just think about it like one day I'm going to attain a rank of proficiency where I'm going to be someone who's actually, to whatever level, mastered a very specific style of martial art that's incredibly difficult to learn.
02:57:33.000They talk about how when the Beatles emerged, people don't realize they had so many hours of playing, and it's one of the reasons why they're so good.
02:57:43.000They were playing so often, constantly.
02:58:05.000To afford the speakers and the turntable and the music, you had to have a live band.
02:58:12.000And you would tear off the left-hand side of the billboard chart and learn it.
02:58:19.000Alex and I went through a list just recently that we found of 120 songs that we could play at the drop of a hat by everybody you could imagine.
02:58:33.000From Smoke on the Water to Get Down Tonight.
03:00:52.000Jan Van Halen and I were very good friends.
03:00:56.000And he would tell his sons about when the bombing would start, and they would all move into the subway tunnels, and he would play saxophone for everybody hiding during World War II. Every time I sing,