In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the comedian and podcaster joins me to talk about Idiocracy, the movie he co-wrote and starred in with Will Smith, as well as a few other projects he's worked on. We also talk about his time as a costume designer on the movie "Joker" and how he got to where he is today. Joe also talks about how he almost didn't get cast in the movie, and why he doesn't regret it. And we talk a lot of other stuff too. Enjoy! -Joe Rogan is a standup comedian, podcaster, writer, and comedian. He's also the host of the podcast "The Joe Rogans Experience" and is a regular contributor on Comedy Central's "Saturday Night Live" and has his own podcast, "The Late Show with Seth Meyers." He also hosts a podcast called "The J.R. Experience" which is a podcast where he talks about comedy and other things related to standup comedy. Joe is one of the funniest people I've ever met and one of my favorite comedians. I hope you enjoy this episode and that you enjoy it! -HAPPY BIRTHDAY JOE ROGAN EPISODE. -Jon Sorrentino -JOE JORDAN PODCAST! -Jon Rogan Podcast by Night, all day, by night, by day, and all day by day. Thanks for listening to me, Jon Rogan! Thank you so much for coming to my podcast! I appreciate you, Jon, I really really appreciate you! - Thank you for being here, Jon and I really appreciate it. -TODAY'S and I'm glad you're here! -Amen and Night, bye! Love ya, bye, Bye Bye, Bye, bye Bye, Jon! -PODCASTING! -Emmayday! -JOBY! -Vander Pippin - JOBY'S BABY! xOXO! -SORCH! -KIM & GABE! -RODAN'S! -SAVAGE! -BRAODO'S -JORDANCHE CHEESE -JOSEPH MACHINERY -JOSH MILLER -JACOB RODAN -SALYSE -JON COYLE
00:02:32.000And then I feel like the curse of the movie kind of just spread out into the world or something.
00:02:37.000But I was just thinking about this because I can't – I have a hard time watching it because it just brings back so many stressful memories.
00:03:32.000She said, we could really save a lot of money, just put everyone in these things.
00:03:35.000And then I said, well, what if – but what if by the time the movie comes out, what if everyone's – what if these become popular and people are wearing them?
00:03:41.000She said, oh, these are never going to become popular.
00:04:22.000I know people wear them, a lot of guys wear them, like, in camps.
00:04:27.000You bring them to camp, like, they're camp shoes.
00:04:30.000They wear Crocs around camp because they're light.
00:04:32.000You know, if you're wearing, like, hiking boots all day and then you're camping, you wear Crocs at night when you're hanging around the campfire.
00:07:53.000Well, it was the year 2001. I'd seen the movie 2001 again and thought, wouldn't that have been funny if that movie, instead of everything being pristine, advanced civilization, it was like...
00:08:06.000Giant Walmarts and the Jerry Springer show, and what if that movie made in the 70s was actually that accurate?
00:08:13.000And I just kind of thought of a graph of everything from whenever that movie was made, like 71, to the year that it was, 2001, if you just kept that progression going, and just more crass, foul language in the mainstream, more just everybody getting dumber and dumber,
00:09:11.000It had 65 speaking parts in it, which you don't even – when you're writing, you say, oh, and then there's this – and it's like, oh, yeah, you have to cast every one of those people.
00:09:26.000I remember moving to LA in 1994, and I got a...
00:09:31.000I think someone I knew at MTV hooked me up, and they gave me a VHS tape of all the Beavis and Butthead episodes, and I didn't have cable hooked up yet.
00:09:43.000So my TV was hooked up, but cable wasn't hooked up yet, and so I was watching VHS tapes of Beavis and Butthead, and I remember me and this girl that I was dating at the time laughing our fucking ass off.
00:10:15.000Did you have a gig at MTV? No, well, I did at one point in time.
00:10:19.000I did MTV Half Hour Comedy Hour, and then I auditioned for another show at MTV. And the negotiations of that actually wound me getting up on a Fox show called Hardball, which got cancelled, then I got news radio.
00:10:35.000So that was how I moved to LA. But I was still in contact with someone at MTV and they hooked me up.
00:10:41.000Yeah, I thought I remembered some MTV association with you.
00:15:58.000But this was after months of negotiating.
00:16:00.000And I'm like, well, it takes me, I was animating everything by myself.
00:16:03.000It would take me like six to eight weeks to make two minutes.
00:16:07.000And after two Beavis and Butt-Head shorts, I was kind of out of ideas anyway.
00:16:10.000So I thought like, okay, I'll just – this will be my admission fee to show business.
00:16:17.000I'll just sell this off just to meet people and have them know about me and – I went to different lawyers and there was this mob lawyer in Dallas who was just like, don't sign it!
00:16:31.000I said, well, then I just don't do this?
00:16:34.000I mean, I don't regret it because I think they were ready to walk away.
00:16:38.000It had been months, like five or six months, which I guess in show business isn't that long of a negotiation all the time.
00:16:46.000But Yeah, and then they flew me up there and then they started talking about we're going to do 65 episodes and I was saying, okay, am I going to be involved?
00:16:56.000And they said, of course, it's your baby.
00:17:00.000But they didn't say any of that until they already owned it.
00:17:04.000They didn't want to – maybe it was part of the whole Pauly Shore of it all and those people that had gotten out of there.
00:17:12.000Their lawyer had all the bad intentions of a good lawyer, but she wasn't all that great and didn't know animation.
00:17:19.000So there were some big holes in the contract that I was able to exploit later.
00:17:28.000Yeah, she thought that I was going to be doing the entire, all the animation myself, so there was like a per minute fee that was like three seasons in.
00:17:39.000I got, still my manager, Michael Rotenberg, who's also a lawyer, said, hey, this thing says they owe you a ton of money.
00:17:47.000So yeah, we had, we were able to, I was able to get it back, and now I own it like 50-50 with them, so...
00:18:12.000And then right before the lockdown, because it was Friday the 13th, March 2020, I had lunch with...
00:18:23.000The Chris McCarthy and Kyes Hill-Edgart, the Paramount Plus guys, and just sealed the deal right then and then made the entire movie with everyone on Zoom and every cast.
00:18:38.000So when you pitch a movie, like a Beavis and Butthead movie, are you pitching, are you just saying, look, I want to do a Beavis and Butthead movie?
00:18:45.000Are you saying this is what happens with Beavis and Butthead?
00:18:57.000First one came out in 96. So it was like a couple years?
00:19:02.000So the show, the short first aired in 92. The series started in March of 93. So the show had been on a while before the movie came out, like three years.
00:23:28.000It's just that everywhere you see just 12. I wanted a big clock tower like Big Ben with just a 12. I don't know if I... I haven't even looked if that's even in there.
00:24:02.000It's like, you know, like, the first one I did was a Beavis and Butt-Head movie and I... I remember when your whole life, like however many hours a day, is just fucking with it and editing it and making it in a sound mix and everything.
00:24:18.000And I think the last final thing was the final mix.
00:24:22.000And I remember walking out of that place just...
00:24:42.000Yeah, it's always – that's the other reason I think I don't always like to watch something after it's done because I'm going to go, oh shit, I should have changed that or done that better.
00:24:57.000I mean it's good to be done but so many – it's just like icky.
00:25:03.000Well, it just seems like it's such an enormous amount of time of your life gets put into it, and it's got to be hard to see what it actually looks like.
00:25:11.000Because you're going over the minutia of it, you're editing it, you wrote the lines, you edited them, you watched people do it, cut, let's take two, take three.
00:25:21.000Yeah, you've seen a hundred people audition for each part.
00:25:24.000You've heard the dialogue over and over again.
00:25:27.000You don't know if it's funny anymore, you can't tell, you can't...
00:25:31.000And also all those hours you're spending on it are to change things.
00:25:37.000And so to say it's done, you get – what it is, it's like a feeling of withdrawal really.
00:25:43.000Like it's sort of a – even if you're really happy with it, it's like – it's sort of like you're just so used to doing that and to stop suddenly is just a – you kind of want to do it more.
00:25:54.000You just want to go back and keep editing.
00:25:57.000I mean I like editing and it's fun to do.
00:26:02.000But finishing editing is the hard part.
00:26:04.000Yeah, to just let it go and, you know, not know if...
00:26:09.000If you have a good test screening, that helps, but you don't always do that.
00:28:55.000At some point, we were location scouting this place, and it was, I guess it was a reform school of some kind, like a juvenile delinquent, something or other.
00:29:08.000It was called, like, the Institute of Technological, and it had, like, some fancy names, kind of down by, you know, maybe I won't dox the place.
00:29:15.000It was outside of Austin, just outside of Austin, but I didn't know what it was, and I thought, I was just looking around saying, oh, these people would be good extras, like, when we're...
00:29:25.000You know, and we had a couple scenes with, I don't know, 250 extras, and one was that ass movie, which we actually had to shoot the ass.
00:29:39.000How much footage did you get of that guy's ass?
00:31:16.000We played that movie, though, and, like, I was...
00:31:19.000We had all those, you know, the juvenile delinquents, whatever, and they might have been, like...
00:31:24.000I don't know how old they were, but we put it up there and I'm thinking like, okay, I got to somehow get everyone to laugh, like just laughing hysterically.
00:31:31.000We start playing it and they're just laughing hysterically.
00:31:33.000Like it's nothing but that guy's butt on the screen.
00:31:38.000And I was just thinking, we should just release ass and stop writing a script and everything.
00:32:19.000But yeah, I mean, I was standing outside the theater at a couple of them and I could hear people laughing.
00:32:25.000People seemed to, I mean, they sold out whatever these, the two ones that I went to, so that was nice.
00:32:31.000That's got to be a good feeling to just sit there and watch after all that work, after all the editing and all the weirdness of trying to figure out if it's still good to watch people that have never seen it before, have no idea what's coming, laugh hysterically.
00:32:44.000Yeah, it's a really—I mean, especially something like that that was—both that and Office Space were so difficult to make and didn't do well right away, you know?
00:32:54.000So it's just like, oh, God, like all that work— Office Space didn't do well right away either?
00:36:32.000The levels of it, it was like, he's doing a guy who can't act, but he's doing a good job acting, and he's throwing in an accent that sounds like a football player from Texas, and it was just amazing.
00:36:45.000He was great, and did you see that Cowboy movie?
00:40:52.000I mean, any time one of those would come on, I would just be glued to the set.
00:40:56.000It's really incredible that that moment in human history, like when people were making their way across the continental United States, became such a genre for film.
00:41:47.000I mean, that was the reason why people were motivated to make their way out to those weird towns in, like, San Francisco and, like, all these places, Seattle.
00:42:01.000It's just a very unusual time in history, but as a genre for film...
00:42:07.000It's such a rewarding genre because it's lawlessness.
00:42:11.000So you can have this one person with morals and ethics who keeps the fucking town together and then this bad guy comes in and is trying to take over and just such a, you know, such a classic story.
00:42:24.000Yeah, just pure writing, you know, about...
00:42:29.000Quentin Tarantino used to do a thing where he'd come to Austin and show...
00:42:32.000He has just a collection of prints of movies that no one's ever seen.
00:42:39.000Like, maybe now a lot of them are available, but like...
00:42:43.000I remember around 2002, 2004, a couple Westerns that didn't even have people I had heard of in it hardly, like, that were just incredible.
00:42:53.000I mean, like, I don't know, I won't even try to describe them, but they were, like, on par with all those, whatever, Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns.
00:43:07.000Yeah, I remember there was one where this guy, he goes to a town, he's like a gunslinger, and the bad guys are coming, and they just desperately need him to save the town, and the mayor promises the guy his daughter if he can defend the town.
00:43:23.000You kind of forget about it and there's a big shootout and everybody's happy at the end and you think this is a happy ending and then the guy goes, no, I get the daughter.
00:43:31.000Like he's like – at the end of it, like he's like – and you're like, whoa, this dude wasn't really all – they kind of make him not a hero at the end of it.
00:43:40.000It was a really interesting dark movie.
00:43:49.000You know, when you have a time in history where the morals are completely eroded and you see mass atrocities committed left and right, like even whatever the bar is for the good guys is probably quite a bit lower.
00:45:47.000You know the thing that I just saw that made me absolutely want to watch it is there's an entire series of Rowan Atkinson trying to kill a bee.
00:47:50.000No, because I have this Chevy Chase theory.
00:47:54.000My Chevy Chase theory is like, everybody says Chevy Chase is an asshole.
00:47:57.000I'm like, I bet Chevy Chase is in constant pain.
00:48:00.000Because if you think about all the times that Chevy Chase would fall down for decades...
00:48:06.000All of his comedy was him, like, doing something and falling into a pile of chairs and slipping off of a stage and landing on his neck, and he was constantly falling down.
00:48:19.000He was constantly slipping on a banana peel, feet first, up in the air, slams down on his head.
00:49:01.000But the Chevy Chase one, I'm fascinated by because when I found out that Chevy Chase was considered an asshole by so many people, I'm like, what?
00:49:13.000And then as I got older and I have this deep concern about brain damage and brain injuries from fighters and stuff, and then I was watching him like, how bad is he fucked up?
00:49:25.000Like, I guarantee you he's thinking irrationally.
00:49:55.000But you're going through life like that.
00:49:56.000So you're going through life constantly and also impulse control is fucked because of CTE. I wonder, well, you know all those, it seems like the UFC guys, the MMA guys don't have that as bad as boxers or do they?
00:52:01.000But, you know, we did a thing yesterday.
00:52:03.000We were going over NBA players, or, excuse me, NFL players with CTE. And they said 99% of NFL players that have been tested have CTE. Oh, really?
00:53:19.000The back of the jet ski, but we're behind this boat, and these guys are, you know, they're making waves with this boat, like it's a wake-surfing boat, you know those things, so people get behind them on the board.
00:53:30.000And these guys were riding those waves on the jet skis, just...
00:53:33.000And they have these super-powered jet skis now, they're so fucking fast.
00:53:42.000So every time they land, it's like a car accident.
00:53:47.000So the mush inside your brain is just slamming against the wall, and that soft tissue that keeps your brain in place is all getting jumbled up.
00:53:58.000Is that going all night while you're...
00:55:29.000Yeah, the first time I saw one, it's like big old tusks.
00:55:33.000Like, they're crossed between, I guess, European wild boars that were brought over and escaped just domestic hogs, I guess, that the Spanish brought over.
00:55:50.000This is one of the reasons why pigs are weird.
00:55:51.000When you take a domestic pig, say a male domestic pig, and he's, you know, eating, feed, and whatever you give him, and then you open the gate and let him loose.
00:56:33.000So a regular hog would just start going wild if you I don't think there's another mammal like it, not that I've ever heard of, that when you release them into the wild, they have a physical transformation.
00:56:45.000Like a cat could become a feral cat, right?
00:56:47.000And then they act differently and they're afraid of people.
00:58:17.000I also heard – yeah, when you – well, the ones that my friends hunted out of my place, like you don't get the bacon off the – like when they're wild, there's like – They're still really good, but not as fatty.
00:59:11.000There was a writer on The Simpsons, I forget who it was, he wanted to see, he loved bacon so much, he wanted to see if it was possible to ever, to eat so much bacon that he doesn't want anymore, so he did an experiment on a weekend and just woke up on Saturday,
00:59:27.000started making bacon, just eating bacon, and there's a ton of salt in it, and his tongue and his cheeks started swelling up, and he had to actually go to the hospital Because he's having trouble breathing while he was in the hospital.
00:59:59.000Pork belly versus bacon, what's the difference?
01:00:01.000The most basic difference between pork belly and bacon is the pork belly cut isn't smoked or cured, and it only comes from the belly of the pig, the softer meat that is interchangeable with most recipes that call for pork, whereas bacon can be derived from the belly and is cured and sometimes smoked.
01:00:16.000Oh, so it is the same area, it's just turned into bacon.
01:00:22.000So streaky pork bacon is pork belly, but pork belly isn't bacon.
01:00:27.000Instead, pork belly is the whole slab cut from the fleshy underside of a pig.
01:00:32.000Streaky pork bacon is cut from this slab, and pork belly is unsmoked and uncured.
01:00:37.000Have you ever gone to Dai Due in town?
01:02:25.000It's like if you would imagine a version of tartare, like a beef tartare, because it's raw, but think more in terms of ceviche where it's cured with lime and he'll put it on chips.
01:02:40.000You know, like, you'll serve it with tortilla chips.
01:03:14.000Most places, like say if you go to a restaurant, say in like Michigan, I don't know about Michigan, like California, a good example, and you buy elk.
01:03:22.000You're not getting elk from the United States.
01:03:24.000You're getting elk most likely from New Zealand.
01:03:30.000You know, New Zealand is a weird place because New Zealand doesn't have any predators and almost all the big game mammals that are brought into New Zealand were brought into the, I believe it was the 1800s, they tried to create...
01:03:51.000But they brought these animals over there to create like a wild game preserve for Europeans.
01:03:55.000So the Europeans would come over, we've gone to New Zealand to hunt.
01:04:00.000And they were hunting these animals that didn't have any predators.
01:04:03.000And so the populations boom to the point where, unfortunately, they have to cull the populations of these incredibly nutritious, delicious, beautiful animals, and they shoot them and just leave them there.
01:04:15.000Like, they'll gun them down with helicopters.
01:04:17.000Oh, so they're not even going to waste?
01:04:21.000So you have these mountainous, beautiful landscapes filled with these animals, and it comes a time where they have to keep the populations in check.
01:06:18.000There's certain ranches that commercially sell Neil guy.
01:06:20.000But the way they do it is they you know they have these wild free-range animals and they just they don't like have them in pens and they go out and they they hunt them commercially like long-range rifles and stuff like that they shoot them and then they collect them and then they'll sell like a whole Neil guy to a restaurant and then they'll like Jesse will part it up and you know make steaks and roasts and and all these different things from it,
01:08:17.000You know, you just sit in a stand and you wait and then the feeders go off and the deer gravitate towards the feeders or the hogs gravitate towards and you just blow them away.
01:08:28.000And then there's big game hunting in the West, which is like, you really have to be an athlete.
01:08:35.000Yeah, that's when I start, like some of these, like there's a guy with a traditional bow, kills a bear, and the bear almost jumps in the blind with him.
01:16:14.000And if you were alive 2,000 years ago and those guys showed up on your shore with animal skins over their dick holding a sword, it was over.
01:16:24.000Yeah, they went up the rivers and just raped.
01:17:22.000I know there's one video, find this video, where a guy shoots a deer with a.50 caliber and misses the deer but still kills it.
01:17:33.000He kills it because the bullet passes right by the deer's head and the force of the bullet passing by the deer's head sucks its eyes out of its head and just immediately pulverizes his brain.
01:17:48.000Okay, I don't feel like such a wuss then for being like...
01:23:32.000When you're casting films, that's got to be one of the weirdest parts of making a movie.
01:23:37.000You have this idea, you write it out, and then you meet a bunch of people, and you've got to get them to try to become this thing that you've created on paper.
01:23:58.000I mean, it's like going on some weird, horribly awkward date every five minutes for however many hours you're doing it because every person comes in and they're looking for any sign on your face of how they did.
01:24:12.000A lot of times they're really great and you want to tell them they're great, but they may not just be the type for the part and you want to say that, but all they want to hear is that they got the part.
01:24:25.000So you just kind of go, okay, thank you.
01:24:28.000You know, you want to give the part to everybody, but you can only pick one.
01:24:33.000It's just, it's such a, yeah, and also when you're, yeah, if you wrote everything and you're hearing it done horribly, sometimes that makes you, shakes your confidence in the material and I mean, usually though, like my first experience with it was...
01:24:50.000I mean, doing animation, I was doing a lot of the voices myself for most of them.
01:24:54.000But like with Office Space, when I did start having good people read for it, it makes the writing seem better.
01:25:04.000Like actors can make the writings, make the dialogue seem better than it is sometimes, I think.
01:27:04.000So, I guess, like, I actually auditioned, not for that part, for some of the other ones, a lot of WWE people, and something, a lot of them are decent actors, but there's something just that wasn't funny in the right way.
01:27:18.000But they didn't read for that, but we had...
01:27:23.000Yeah, we had, at one point, Tank Abbott read for, not for that part, but for, I think, the doctor in the hospital.
01:28:23.000I guess all the fights, he would do these pit fights on the beach for the Hells Angels or something, and he just takes these teeth out and goes, yeah, see, I just finally got these so I can just take them out.
01:28:35.000Because, I don't know, teeth kept getting knocked out or something.
01:29:28.000You know, John Crisfalusi, the Ren and Stimpy guy, was way into that.
01:29:32.000And he claims to have given Spike TV the idea for the UFC reality show because he was saying, yeah, you guys got to follow Tank Abbott around when he's installing air conditioners.
01:29:43.000You get to see what he's like during the day, you know.
01:30:20.000The finals with Stefan Bonner and Forrest Griffin was this insane fight that, during the fight, the amount of people increased substantially.
01:31:51.000And I did it for a little while, but I thought it was like a novelty.
01:31:53.000And it was something that I... As a martial artist, the question was always, like, what would happen if a judo guy fought a karate guy?
01:32:01.000So the UFC came along and they said, let's see.
01:32:04.000And so for me, it was exciting just to be there and watch, and I was always a fan of it and a lot of the Japanese organizations.
01:32:11.000And then it was just, I was losing money doing it, and so I quit.
01:32:15.000And so then I got on Fear Factor, and I would go to, once the UFC was purchased by Zufa, the Fertitta brothers and Dana White, I would go to watch the fights in Vegas.
01:32:25.000And I became friends with those guys, and they would get me ringside tickets, and I would say, hey, why don't you, do you know about this guy who's fighting in Japan?
01:32:31.000Do you know about this guy from Russia?