Comedian Joe Rogan joins Jemele to discuss how he went from being a PA to becoming the Executive Producer of The Daily Show and how he got to where he is today. He also talks about what it's like to work a full-time job in Hollywood and what it was like growing up in an Italian-American family in the 80s and 90s. And he talks about how he balances it all with being a stand-up comic and working a full time job as an executive producer on a TV show that's now airing on Comedy Central. It's an incredible story, and one that you don't want to miss. Also, Jemele and Rory talk about how they met and fell in love with comedian Rory O'Donnell and how they ended up working together at the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Sarah Silverman. And they talk about why they don't have the same sex drive as the rest of us and why they think it's a good thing that Rory should get a dog. It's a great episode, and you should definitely listen to it. Thanks to Rory and Jemele for coming on the pod and for letting us know that you're a good friend of ours. We really appreciate it, and we really appreciate you, Rory! Thank you so much for being on the show, Rory. XOXO, J.R. & J.J. xoxo Music by Jeff Perla - The White House - "Good Morning America" - "The Good Life" by The Good Fight Club - "Outro Music: "Goodbye Outer Space (featuring The Good Life) by Ferg & The Goodfellas (feat. by The Fucking Good Morning Goodbye" by Mr. McElroy - "A Little Late" by Pizzi & Mr. Goodbye "Thank You" by Fucking You, Myself and "Fucking Goodbyes" by Squeell and Mr. Cribbs by Jorma and The Good Ol' Day - "It's Too Effing Goodbyed" by Ms. Babbby is out There's a Good Morning America - "Let's Talk About It (Goodbye" & "I'll See You Next Week" by Missed It (feat., "Let Me See You Soon) by P. & I'm Too Good Bye, My Love & I Can't Wait To See You"
00:01:07.000No, it's very un-Hollywood in the sense that I was in New York and working at The Daily Show, which is next to the horse stables for Central Park.
00:01:16.000Yeah, I should say it's a great showbiz story.
00:02:56.000But I mean, it's hard to work, what I was going to say, it's the hardest thing in the world to work a full-time job and then try to go out and pursue something because all your juice is gone.
00:03:12.000And that's even harder because they have hours of training they have to put in every day.
00:03:16.000But just when you're done, at the end of the day, you're done.
00:03:19.000You want to get a bite to eat, watch TV. You don't want to go over your notes and fucking...
00:03:24.000Yeah, or for me, the other thing was, too, is I'm still not even at a place where I walk into a club and they're like, oh, just get right up.
00:03:32.000Usually they're like, why don't you clean up this mess at 1.30 a.m.?
00:03:35.000So for me, a lot of it was just, I love doing the time, but sometimes you've got to hang out at the club.
00:03:43.000My bigger problem was, because then I have fun hanging out with other comics, and afterwards I have a couple of drinks, the next thing I know I... The harder problem was getting up the next morning and being on time.
00:03:52.000Yeah, you have to be working three hours.
00:04:22.000That's one of those stories that you're gonna ruin the expectations for every fucking kid who ever becomes a PA. They're all going to think, this is it.
00:04:29.000I have to say, at The Daily Show, because it's been on so long and John's such a cool guy and really gave people opportunities there, I was among the first people to make that journey, but now have not been the only one.
00:05:18.000But I always tell people it's a good place to start to get interested in a topic and then go off and do your own research or whatever you want.
00:05:25.000Because when people get into political debates...
00:05:38.000When you're doing a television show that's also an educational show and also has a very progressive point of view.
00:05:47.000What you would think of when you think of Jon Stewart is very intelligent, very progressive, mocking of both the left and the right when they do ridiculous shit.
00:06:10.000through the end of the show, obviously, when he hosts it.
00:06:13.000But in other words, he's so intimately involved and he's so smart and he's so sharp that when he's in the chair, I never worried about a joke not working.
00:06:22.000Because even when they didn't work, He just would call an audible in his own head and then remember a joke from the 90-an meeting that he liked that didn't make the script and throw that in.
00:06:32.000It's pretty amazing to watch him, too, sitting in the studio because he'll change a joke in prompter as the prompter's scrolling, and then later there's a callback to the joke he changed, and he remembers to change the callback or skip the callback.
00:06:45.000And I'm sitting there with the script watching the prompter going, oh, no.
00:07:07.000Like, for Jimmy Fallon or maybe for Seth Meyers, who tried the same sort of impromptu ad-lib, they might pull it off, but Jon Stewart's been doing it forever.
00:07:26.000But he also just knows, he understands comedy in a way that, I'm sure those, you know, I know both Seth and Jimmy, super funny guys, I just never worked with them in that capacity.
00:07:37.000So I know John understands it like music, you know what I'm saying?
00:07:41.000Where he'll go, oh no, that won't work, this will work.
00:08:52.000There's a guy there named Adam Chodokoff who's just a guru of information, and will come in to the rewrite room between rehearsal and the show after we change the joke.
00:09:11.000We really fact-check stuff that goes out.
00:09:16.000Really, a big part of the day is figuring out how to tell the story, the narrative, and then adding the jokes is why you have writers and guys like John.
00:10:11.000It's hard sometimes for it not to in comedy because everything that's...
00:10:16.000When you're pointing out some things that are just straight up absurd, it's hard sometimes not to seem left because you're throwing away, like, you know.
00:10:25.000So I think that's why people go, oh, why don't people do a right-wing Daily Show?
00:10:29.000It's like, it's not really a left or a right thing.
00:10:31.000It's just a lot of times comedy is dismissive of people taking themselves too seriously and conservatives have a tendency to take things very seriously.
00:10:45.000And a comic by nature is the guy sitting in the back of the classroom being like, look at this dick, you know?
00:10:49.000It's just like, you don't really care about what the person's saying.
00:10:52.000You're just finding places to get a laugh.
00:10:55.000And I think, so for us, when the left does absurd things, which is also quite frequent, like, Occupy Wall Street was a perfect example of my favorite times at The Daily Show, where we're like ripping the left a new asshole, and the audience, because I'm in the studio, or used to be, and the audience is like, what?
00:12:30.000Well, it's one of the more interesting things that's happened during the transition between the Bush administration and the Obama administration, is that people are starting to deny this whole party thing.
00:12:40.000They're starting to go, look, we're getting fucked here.
00:12:46.000These ideas that everybody on the right subscribes to, like, immediately.
00:12:49.000You tell someone that you're a Republican, and they immediately think you've got some freaky ideas about gay marriage, you're pro-war, you're anti-abortion.
00:12:59.000Like, you automatically get tossed into a very extreme category.
00:13:03.000Or, if you say, I only vote Democrat, you automatically get...
00:13:24.000It's so funny that you say that because that's literally like the thing that's Obsessed, I'm obsessed with since I left the show and that's why I've been talking about my stand-up act.
00:13:33.000It's like we're giving two choices and it's you pick a box and then that's what you feel about every issue in that column.
00:13:52.000In other words, whatever happened to something comes up and smart people sit around and talk about it and think about it instead of going, knee-jerk, knee-jerk.
00:14:00.000If this happens, the right's going to get this.
00:17:14.000You pass the handgun class, get a handgun, you register...
00:17:17.000To me, it's just about knowing who's getting the guns, because then at some point, someone's like, I want to take the bazooka class, and you're like, we should watch that guy.
00:17:52.000But the same is true with the First Amendment, because people used to just stand in a town square and yell stuff they wanted to get off their chest.
00:17:59.000But now we've got Twitter, which is like the AR-15 of free speech.
00:18:03.000And it's like, now you've got crazy people putting shit out there.
00:18:47.000I think the gun argument is that if you make it so that people have to take a mental health evaluation, the real extreme guys would say, well, then someone is going to decide who gets to have this gun.
00:19:01.000And that'll be political and ideologically driven, and the left will make sure that no one is mentally capable of carrying a gun.
00:20:24.000That was a solid weapon for centuries, actually.
00:20:26.000Yeah, I mean, you can't deny that an arrowhead is designed specifically to kill things.
00:20:31.000So if you get pulled over with a bunch of arrowheads, you're in trouble.
00:20:34.000Well, you could, if you were attached to an actual device, like a stick, like if you had a spear in your car, like a real spear that was tied down with animal sinew and a giant flint fucking blade.
00:21:45.000I would love to find something like that that you know somebody used for sure hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and you're just holding on to it, trying to think about what time has passed with that.
00:24:57.000And they believe that, like a lot of the water, they believe that hit earth came from, probably scientists right now are listening to me going, what the, you don't know what the fuck you're saying, stupid!
00:26:49.000I mean, if you are not a good wiper, the amount of shit material that's still in your ass, if you were about to take a nice clean bathtub and someone said, okay, I'm just going to give a 1 16th of a teaspoon of shit and stir it in the water, you'd be like, get the fuck out of here!
00:28:45.000There's one doctor who's from the region who studied here at Harvard and is back there now.
00:28:50.000He wrote this thing about it, or they did an article on it, just saying how his biggest struggle is convincing people in these villages that they need to take these warnings seriously and things like that.
00:28:59.000There's all of these other components of it besides the fact that the disease is just spreading rapidly, but the people aren't Oh, that makes sense.
00:29:09.000And I'm not saying it's not a terrible thing.
00:33:16.000She comes here and tries to emulate human beings.
00:33:19.000And when she emulates human beings, she takes men, and I don't want to give away the plot, but she lures them in with her beautiful good looks and charm, and she's naked in half the movie.
00:36:29.000I was married at one point, which is a whole other thing.
00:36:33.000But I don't even think it's bad when you realize that that's an incompatibility.
00:36:37.000I think there's a reality to that, which is like, we're going to be conflicting all the way through this.
00:36:43.000At some point you just go, I'm crazy about this person, but there seems to be a disconnect in my ability to agree and your ability to agree with each other on things because we both want to go our own way.
00:36:54.000And there's not absolutes in these types of relationships.
00:36:56.000Sometimes people can just figure it out and work it out.
00:37:02.000You know, it's like when you talk about these things, whenever it sounds like a given advice, like relationship advice, people will always get pissed off one way or another.
00:37:10.000They're always like, you're judging or you're this or you're that.
00:37:13.000But the reality is, who the fuck knows The idea of a man and a woman finding the exact right compatibility for each other is so fucking hard to do.
00:37:25.000So when people think they have to break up and they know they have to break up, like, God damn it, we fight all the time, we gotta fucking break up.
00:37:31.000It's hard to just start all over again.
00:40:39.000Doug and I were working together, and he got this phone call, and he hung up the phone, and his face was ashen, and he's like, Hedberg might lose his leg.
00:46:08.000And he has stuff in that about the environment that's as pertinent now as it was even more now, particularly now because people are talking about it more.
00:46:18.000But the Iraq War, talking about Dick Cheney and the Iraq War.
00:46:50.000And it's like, when it's ready, it'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas, you know?
00:46:54.000Like, we're a surface nuisance, you know?
00:46:55.000Well, when you start paying attention to all the different mass extinctions that they've been on Earth...
00:47:00.000They just pulled up some new evidence that shows there was another comet that hit the Earth way before the dinosaurs that was thousands of times a bigger impact than the one that killed the dinosaurs.
00:47:13.000Like a couple billion years ago, apparently, we were hit by a planet.
00:47:53.000Everyone thinks it's going to be like 90 and laying in bed and their grandkids will be tickling their feet, but you don't fucking know.
00:48:00.000But even if it is while you're in bed, people say, I want to go in my sleep.
00:48:04.000What if you go in your sleep and the nightmare is that the Grim Reaper is riding your face, choking you to death, screaming into your eyes?
00:50:20.000Remember you used to give me all posters.
00:50:22.000You used to give me boxes of posters like, just get rid of this.
00:50:25.000Brian eBayed all these posters that I had from like the early days of the UFC. I had pride posters that were, they're probably pretty valuable.
00:51:37.000I don't have a disciplined writing process as much as I really like finding it on stage and then trying to repeat it the next night if I can.
00:51:45.000It's a bad way to do it in a lot of ways because it takes sometimes longer to find the material.
00:51:50.000But if I record it now, I just record it on my phone and I can listen to it back and go, I told that joke.
00:51:55.000We were kind of talking about this earlier with that joke.
00:51:57.000It's like I told a joke a perfect way that night and it killed and I can't figure out what the fuck I did.
00:52:02.000So now I like being able to go back and listen to it and go, oh, I just paused there.
00:52:06.000And then sometimes it's just I got lucky that one night.
00:53:01.000You just Google it and you go, oh, look, there's a whole forum dedicated to it.
00:53:05.000Yeah, that's actually a question I always have for other comics, which is, what is your...
00:53:08.000Because I have had people come up to me at stand-up clubs...
00:53:12.000Both ways, but I've had people come up and go, hey man, there was a comic down here, you know, like I'm in Atlanta or something, some local guy, or Austin, some local guy.
00:53:18.000There was a comic down here who was doing a bit that you did in your half hour, so I just let him know.
00:53:23.000I was like, yeah, never do that again.
00:56:03.000Either you can write more or you can't.
00:56:06.000If the hour of stuff I was doing right now was the only hour I could ever come up with, then I'm wasting my time here, man.
00:56:14.000Well, the only thing I ever feel is there's a certain amount of responsibility you have In saying something, because if you don't say something, then he steals from somebody else, and he doesn't say something, you sort of almost help the problem if you don't at least have a dialogue with the guy.
01:00:23.000And as generous as it is, at some point you're like, I don't want to do every set I do in front of my mom and dad because I need somebody to come.
01:00:30.000And then you start finding ways to get up.
01:00:34.000In the beginning, I did more of producing my own shows.
01:00:38.000Getting up at clubs in New York is hard.
01:03:02.000I remember it feeling like oh man like this everyone in this is like weird and competitive but then as you do it for a while and you get past that first stage of like crazy just looking for five minutes here and there and you really start to get to know like real professional comedians and people who do it there is a like weird bond between people who do stand-up like it's a I've only had I mean I can't say 100% of the time,
01:03:23.000I'd say 95% of the time I've met other stand-up comedians at whatever level.
01:03:27.000I've had a pretty easy time to chat with them and get along with them.
01:03:31.000Once you're past that, like, going on IMDB and seeing what the other guys are doing stage and you get comfortable in who you are, you know?
01:04:39.000So if I go to Zany's in Chicago, or I go to Helium in Philly, or just in Madison, places where there's fans of The Daily Show, probably more than not, and they promote it pretty well, I could sell out a room that holds 150 to 200. But if I go down to...
01:04:54.000I've been in Tampa on a Wednesday night in some of those rooms.
01:05:16.000But when you have those experiences, and you meet other people who've had those experiences, like, you have a lot, you know, just eating, like, I try now to eat as healthy as I can, but when I'm on the road, I just don't even try, because you're in, like, a hotel in fucking Kentucky.
01:07:17.000You ever gone to a place and they start talking to you about NASCAR? Yeah, I've gone to places where they don't like me a lot.
01:07:24.000I always feel like the whole thing with stand-up, when people say, there's a weird thing you have to get over in the beginning, which is you're kind of an asshole.
01:07:35.000Because you're basically saying to people, not only do I think I'm funny, I think I'm so funny that you should sit here, not talk, pay money, and hear what I have to say.
01:07:45.000So I always feel like if people don't know you and you don't already have their trust as a performer, They just see some guy coming in the room going, oh, here comes some guy who thinks he's funny.
01:07:56.000I've found that I end up in conversations with people in places I don't want to talk to them or about things I don't want to talk to about.
01:08:19.000It's very interesting to talk to people that are just as confident in their beliefs, which are polar opposite of yours.
01:08:26.000And some of them, like, you know, you'll go to some places in the Deep South, especially, they'll just assume that you're on their side about certain things.
01:08:40.000I also feel that sometimes, though, there is that perception, and then there's also the flip side, which is not everybody is the stereotype of what you think those places are supposed to be.
01:10:15.000Depending on what went on in that relationship is really the determining factor.
01:10:19.000I mean, I guess it's more common for the women to get kids and more money, but I think if you're getting kids, then yeah, you should get the fucking money.
01:10:27.000It's a guy's responsibility to take care of his kids, even if they get divorced, you know?
01:10:30.000Unless she did something to endanger the family, you know what I mean?
01:10:34.000I think a lot of times divorces are more one-sided, maybe, than we realize.
01:10:43.000My point is, I think a lot of times guys are the dick.
01:10:46.000Well, sometimes women are evil, though, man.
01:10:49.000I've had friends that have been involved in evil divorces.
01:10:52.000I've had several friends that lost a shitload of money and they just got scammed.
01:10:58.000I can bring you a bunch of stories, which I just don't want to talk about them on the air, but about Good friends that fucking lost everything they worked for for like a decade.
01:11:12.000Women get fucked over and men get fucked over.
01:11:14.000Bill Byrd does that bit on his last, I think it was his last one, the You People Are All The Same, where he's talking about we have a gold-digging whore problem in this country.
01:12:21.000It's so funny because I thought it would be being a redhead roofing in August.
01:12:28.000He talks about guns in that special and he's saying how he wanted to buy a gun and the guy wanted a shotgun, you know, like the guy was trying to sell him on a shotgun.
01:13:34.000He has this funny bit, too, about black people being, they get called racist less than white people just because of where they put the word fuck.
01:15:11.000And they're like, yeah, they haven't, like, jumped on the plane yet to L.A., you know what I mean?
01:15:15.000Or New York, wherever they want to do it next.
01:15:17.000But, you know, that's the really cool thing about comedy is, like, I mean, I was from New York and working at The Daily Show, so I didn't...
01:15:23.000Do anything but try to get up there, which is always hard, still is hard.
01:15:27.000But there's these guys who live in these cities, and there's a whole scene, a whole comedy scene, and they get tons of stage time.
01:16:00.000It's like, oh, there's a whole way to get good at this without having to beg people to give you 10 minutes, which is nice.
01:16:08.000Yeah, well, there should be a bunch of different options, but it's cool when a club like the Laughing Skull comes along where you have one club, which is sort of the epicenter of creativity.
01:16:19.000They're not making a lot of money there.
01:16:52.000Just waking up, going out, doing a gig in Philly, going home, stopping, getting a cheesesteak, and going in a room, just leaning over the desk in a Hyatt, devouring a cheesesteak, and then getting right into bed.
01:20:59.000The rent must have been 50 grand a week, a month, whatever.
01:21:02.000So all of a sudden, over time, and again, I love this club, but we'd be sitting in the green room, and then there used to be menus and Fiji water and things.
01:22:20.000Yeah, like a bar fight, except one of the dudes was in a wheelchair, and he launched himself out of the wheelchair, tackled this guy, and was just pummeling this dude.
01:24:46.000Well, he had a place where he was across the river, but he had this, like, top floor of his apartment where you would look out and you'd see the most insane city in Because you saw the city and the water from a distance.
01:24:58.000I was like, dude, you might have the best view in the world.
01:25:01.000It might be worth living in Brooklyn just for this view.
01:25:04.000Well, that's what they're selling in Queens, because you're right on the other side of the river, so you're looking right at Midtown.
01:25:25.000But places like that, if you got them, I don't know him or when he got his place, but that kind of real estate was a home run 15 years ago.
01:28:53.000The Young Turks had this thing that they were doing about the presidential campaigns, and they have something on their website where you can write in people who you'd like to see run for president instead of Hillary Clinton or whatever.
01:29:07.000And they were talking about how much money Hillary Clinton has gotten from banks, just recently, from Goldman Sachs, doing speaking engagements, like hundreds of thousands of dollars, just recently.
01:29:17.000Just to give these sympathetic speeches about how people don't understand, the banks aren't that bad, and this is all the good things.
01:30:07.000There's this weird lack of actual exchange that's occurring.
01:30:11.000And so these guys have figured out that system somehow.
01:30:15.000Well, they have, but they have only because of the need for a third-party system.
01:30:19.000And that's where Bitcoin and things like that get very interesting and terrifying.
01:30:23.000For people that run things right now financially, because if digital currency gets adopted, and it is adopted in a lot of ways now, there's a lot of things you can buy and pay for in Bitcoin.
01:30:33.000A lot of people are doing shows where you can pay for their show in Bitcoin.
01:30:37.000They're buying televisions, and Tiger Direct is selling computers with Bitcoin.
01:30:41.000I think Dell's using Bitcoin, too, right?
01:30:45.000I might not be wrong about that, but if that catches on, then this whole business goes away because there's no third party.
01:30:52.000If you sell microphones and I say, hey, Rory, I want to buy a microphone, how many bitcoin is it?
01:30:56.000And you tell me how much and I give it to you and we're done.
01:31:14.000To me, though, that's the only really...
01:31:16.000I mean, I guess now it's becoming legal all over the country, but it feels like, you know, if they want to make money, like, just tax weed and make it legal, like, you know, that's going to get us out of...
01:32:36.000It's like, you know, I mean, like, you know, alcohol companies, tobacco companies, like, all sorts of big bribe politicians kind of industries are worried.
01:32:59.000Well, it's also they have a real problem when you're running any sort of a giant corporation is that your business has to increase every year.
01:33:54.000Hey, if they want to fucking play with bodies over there, go at it.
01:33:57.000I think that that's a very accurate...
01:34:00.000From my understanding of it, which is limited, I won't pretend it's not, but it's like, from my understanding of it, it seems that the straight-up, hardcore business mentality is the only thing that matters is the bottom line, is how much we made.
01:34:24.000They go, well, you know, government's taking tax on any of that money, so technically they're giving a lot of it away, you know, that's not...
01:34:31.000Anyway, so then why do they have to cure Ebola?
01:34:34.000Why can't they just get a crystal bathtub?
01:34:38.000And that's where you get into this, like, what I call, like, the soup of America right now, where people are mad that there's, like, these super rich people...
01:34:47.000But then there's another group of people who are poor and being told that someday they will be super rich, so they should protect the super rich people.
01:34:53.000And then there's the left who just feels like, oh no, no, no, no.
01:34:56.000Everyone should have an equal share of everything.
01:35:32.000These people that grow up in these mud huts in Africa where the fucking Ebola lady who died in the hut next door and the husband's trying to pretend she's not dead and the whole city gets sick.
01:35:42.000I mean, that guy's got it way fucking worse than anybody in America ever.
01:37:39.000Well, there's an even bigger one in Indonesia that they think might have been responsible for the reason why all human beings come from like a group of original humans.
01:37:49.000They think that the one that happened in Indonesia was so fucking big 75 million years ago or whatever it was, or 75,000 years ago, that it killed so many fucking people that there was like very few people left.
01:38:02.000And that we all came from the survivors of this extreme cold front that washed over the entire country.
01:38:08.000Or the entire world and put the world into essentially an ice age.
01:38:25.000If that motherfucker blows, there's not much anybody can do, but try to figure out a way to can food and preserve as much nutrients as you can and bags and get underground.
01:38:38.000And you'll probably bring some fucking vitamin D because you're not going to get any from the sun for the next decade or so.
01:39:25.000We take most of what we have, I think, for granted.
01:39:30.000You know, it's like, you ever, like I was, when I flew in here, you know, it's like they got on the PA on the plane, they go, oh, you know, the Wi-Fi's down on the plane, and you hear people like, ugh.
01:40:06.000I didn't know he talked about Wi-Fi on planes because I thought that was...
01:40:08.000I wasn't even, again, not even trying to do a bit.
01:40:10.000So, again, perfect example of what we were talking about, but not trying to do a bit, but just the idea of, like, we do take, and Louis, I think, is on the forefront of bringing all that shit up.
01:40:19.000Like, that's why he's so fucking awesome.
01:40:21.000It's just, like, we're always unhappy, and we take everything for granted, and that...
01:40:26.000The thing that opened my eyes to that more than anything was when I did a USO stand-up tour last summer in Afghanistan and hung out with those fucking guys and was like, not only am I a huge pussy, which had been confirmed years ago, but I have no...
01:41:38.000They don't have to, yeah, you know, that's, again, where you get in the hypocrisy of all things, where you can't ever escape unintentionally being a hypocrite.
01:41:47.000Let's just put willfully ignorant at the top of the list.
01:41:50.000If anybody that's, like, super progressive, I'm only a vegan, I'm only trying to save the whales, I don't want to harm anything, but I have a fucking iPhone.
01:42:58.000But I had this conversation with a friend, and he was like, well, did you know that the people that jump off the building in China, it's actually the same percentage commit suicide at those factories as the national average?
01:43:09.000I go, yeah, but how many of the national average kill themselves while they're at work?
01:43:19.000In other words, you can't joke about, oh, well, if it's the national average, like, it still seems like if a guy who made my phone wanted to kill himself, it's still a little bit, it should be a little bit of guilt.
01:45:23.000Yeah, when she was doing that, All I wanna do is have some fun.
01:45:27.000Apparently when she was doing press for that album, like back in the 90s or whatever it was, she had, you know, it was the old school phones.
01:46:31.000That could be already what's happening.
01:46:33.000Well, that's what people worry about, Wi-Fi signals.
01:46:35.000I mean, I don't know how much time you spend in the real wilderness, but this is going to sound totally unscientific and probably ridiculous, but...
01:46:43.000I have a feeling that there's a little something that your body is interacting with when you're in a room that has Wi-Fi, when you're in a town that has radio, there's television signals in the air.
01:46:54.000Everywhere you go, there's cell phone signals.
01:46:56.000There's signals in the air, and they freak out bees.
01:46:59.000Bees have a real hard time with cell phone signals.
01:47:54.000But yeah, and the other part of that too is when you go into a less populated area that doesn't have all these signals, you ever go to lock your car with your little key fob thing?
01:50:23.000I feel like that takes some getting used to though, right?
01:50:25.000Well, you can shut it off if you want to.
01:50:27.000Yeah, what if it freaks out and just like slams on the brake, you're going like 90 on the freeway and it slams on the brake or it jerks over and you hit it.
01:50:33.000Better yet, what about that Michael Hastings guy, that guy that committed suicide who was going after all these generals and exposed all this crazy shit and was, you know, said to all of his family that he was worried that they were going to try to take him out and then he winds up going down, was it Sunset?
01:51:44.000I don't know what the fucking revelations were, but apparently people are freaking out about these new, like, hours of tapes that just came out that just show how they've paid off the regulatory commissions.
01:51:54.000Like, how the whole thing is, like, the bankers, like, established the standards and run the system.
01:51:58.000But there's a legality, there's like a weird loophole where politicians meet.
01:52:03.000This happens with Nancy Pelosi, and everyone kind of just stopped talking about it, but it's like they meet with these stock guys, get all this insider information, and then are still allowed to invest in the companies and fucking make money on it.
01:52:23.000Those are the issues that really hurt my brain, especially since we get distracted by something else, and then we stop talking about it, and then somehow it just is okay.
01:52:31.000In Bloomberg, this is the article saying, the reporter, Jake Bernstein, has obtained 46 hours of tape recordings made secretly by a Federal Reserve employee of conversations within the Fed and between the Fed and Goldman Sachs.
01:52:47.000They're calling it the Ray Rice video for the financial sector.
01:55:10.000And he didn't think there was anything wrong with saying COVID because he was like, you know, we were probably like 18 and he was in his 60s.
01:56:03.000Do you know that used to be mongoloid, like the term that they used to use, mongoloid idiot, is the term they used to use on your birth certificate if you're born with Down syndrome.
01:56:14.000No, I know, there's books, if you read like anthropological books from like the 1800s, the way they refer to different kinds of people, like, it's frightening.
01:56:23.000Thaddeus Russell was on the podcast last week.
01:56:26.000He's awesome, by the way, I heard that.
01:56:58.000People get, like, I have a lot of, like, Italian, like, Long Island fans, you know, like, who's like, fucking Mexicans coming in, like, that kind of shit.
01:57:05.000And, like, it's like, that's just, they're just the Italians of now, you know what I mean?
01:57:09.000Like, the Italians were just the Mexicans of, like, the early 1900s.
01:57:51.000And look, again, illegal immigration is a different argument, but there is a tendency to be waiting on line at the nightclub, and then you get in, and you're like, look, are you going to let those assholes in?
01:58:05.000You look back at the line, and you're like, dude, you just got in the fucking club!
01:58:08.000Well, I think if people could fly around, it would be even more ridiculous to not have immigration.
01:58:14.000Because if people could fly around, if we all had flying cars, and you could just go across the border left and right, there would be no one to stop you.
01:58:19.000Because you could just go anywhere you want.
01:58:21.000Unless they figured out a way to grid up the sky, where they could block you and do a traffic stop in the sky above Mexico.
01:58:35.000They would go to America, and then America would overrun, and people would start slowly trickling back into Mexico and reestablishing communities, and it would even out eventually.
01:58:43.000But if they don't do that, it's almost never going to even out.
01:58:47.000People are like, ah, Mexicos need to get their shit together on their own.
02:00:11.000At some point in time, it seems crazy that a person has a chance or doesn't have a chance based on which patch of dirt they just got shit out on.
02:00:29.000That's what we were talking about, about people needing help.
02:00:33.000It gets complicated in America because you want to help people, but then you start going, Well, we want to help people, but we don't want to have a system where people are like, fuck it, I don't need to work, I'm getting this sweet.
02:00:46.000And then it's also like, well, I work really hard, and I'm giving a lot of my money back to the government, and I don't really have much of a say in how they manage that money, and I don't think they do a very good job of it, which I think anyone would say.
02:00:56.000But then at the same time, somebody...
02:00:58.000So now you're going to have that whole argument about people who live here and are born here and what rights they have by being born here.
02:01:03.000All it is is like, I was literally born here, but you've got to make a rule somewhere.
02:01:08.000Think about how radical a proposal would be if a presidential candidate or someone got on television and had a detailed, outlined idea of how they want to improve inner cities.
02:01:19.000And one of them, it starts with re-educating the adults in the community.
02:01:25.000I mean, people would be like, what the fuck?
02:01:26.000But if they don't do that, anything else you do...
02:01:29.000If you add money, and if you give people money for nothing, you can call it whatever, reparations, you could call it welfare, depending on what race you're talking about.
02:01:38.000Just giving impoverished people money, white people included.
02:01:40.000People who are poor, live in fuck-up areas.
02:01:42.000You give them opportunities, you give them money, you give them education.
02:01:44.000If you don't do something about the mindset of the adults, nothing's going to change.
02:02:47.000Like, they were barely, they were already at my knees when I was born, you know?
02:02:50.000And I wasn't born rich, but I was born like a, you know, I came from Italian Jews, like, working class people, hardworking people, but I was able to go to college.
02:02:59.000I was able to, like, do an internship for, like, a Dave Letterman for a summer.
02:03:36.000But if you could do it, okay, you spent all these years working for The Daily Show, and there's a lot of political thinking involved in that kind of a job.
02:03:44.000If you could fix it, what would you do?
02:03:46.000I mean, if someone said, all right, President Rory, you have all this money to allocate.
02:04:34.000I'm just saying everybody has this complaint that there's a disparity in wealth.
02:04:37.000Everybody has this complaint that the people that are in the minorities, that are in poor neighborhoods, crime-ridden, they don't have a chance.
02:04:45.000And you're right, but what the fuck can be done?
02:04:47.000Well, you know, I don't think there's such a thing as a society where nobody's poor, except for, like, Norway, or, like, those weird, like, Nordic countries where people, I don't know, somehow are all rich and look the same.
02:04:58.000Well, that's just because there hasn't been a society.
02:05:01.000But I do think, like, George Carlin used to have a thing where he would talk about poverty, and we'd go, like, this is how the world works.
02:05:25.000And it's like the system needs to function in some capacity.
02:05:29.000So there's always going to be poor people.
02:05:30.000And I do believe that in a lot of cases...
02:05:36.000Richer people in this country, some of them were born privileged, but somebody along the way was shrewd, somebody was smart, and a lot of times it was just screwing people over.
02:05:44.000I mean, if you look at all the tycoons of the industrial age and all those guys, they fucked over a lot of people to get really rich.
02:05:53.000And also, I don't know, a lot of times the people who got here first have all the money, like the real wealth in this country, like the waspy wealth, it's like that's Plymouth Rock.
02:09:33.000And he was having a conversation with my friend, and he said, if whatever you do, because she has kids, he said, whatever you do, do not let your kids have money.
02:10:00.000He's never been a piece of shit to anybody.
02:10:02.000And it's not to say that someone who's born in that same scenario couldn't have found...
02:10:07.000You know, at painting or music or become, like, successful at something they do on their own or decided, you know, I'm not going to touch that money or I'm going to donate that money to charity.
02:10:16.000I recognize the pitfalls of this scenario, so I want to be something different other than, you know, with this map that's sort of leading me to go into a certain direction.
02:10:33.000I would also say that, like, if you really fucking wanted a man up, like, then fucking go live for a year with, you know, $50,000 in a bank account and go live somewhere in the country and try to survive.
02:10:46.000But that's not even real, though, because they know they can always go back at the end of this week.
02:10:49.000Well, as soon as this year's up, I'm killing Vietnamese people.
02:10:52.000I'm sure there are rich people who have found a way to fucking give back or do something in life besides feel bad about the fact that they can just do whatever the fuck they want.
02:11:03.000Well, the fucking virgin guy, Richard Branson, famous for that.
02:11:14.000But Richard Branson, Streeter Seidel is a really funny comic and writer.
02:11:17.000He just got a job at SNL, but he did a thing on that show I worked on with Neil Brennan this summer where he was talking about Richard Branson is his favorite rich guy because he does all the things.
02:11:27.000You said you would do if you were a rich guy when you were a kid.
02:11:30.000Like, I'm in a hot air balloon around the world!
02:11:32.000He's like, I'm going to build a spaceship!
02:11:35.000You're like, okay, like Richard Franson.
02:11:37.000Would you ride that fucking spaceship that's like 100 grand?
02:12:27.000I think you have to really look over the applicants, make sure that something, I mean, if a guy's a roofer and wants to go to Mars, go, hey bro, there's not going to be any roofs.
02:14:32.000Jimmy Page, like, Robert Plant was singing there one day, like, all sorts of crazy shit, and I would hear it and whatever.
02:14:37.000So one day I'm there doing this edit for the show, and I was like, you know, in this dark edit room, and I go to take a piss in the, just the Sony bathroom, and I hear like, and it's fucking Steven Tyler taking a, not, yeah, it's taking a piss in like green lizard pants, like leopard pants,
02:14:52.000you know, whatever, like super tight, like flowy shirt, and I guess that he was warming up his voice, but it was so, you know, it's like the tile, it's a bathroom, so he's just leaning in the yard, like, And I was like, this is the coolest!
02:15:04.000And I peed up next to him like, what's up, man?
02:15:57.000And then afterwards, I saw him, you know, he was talking to John after the show, and I, like, went in to tell John something, like, I, like, made something up.
02:16:04.000I was like, I have to tell John this thing, because I, like, wanted to fucking meet Springsteen.
02:17:53.000I'm like a little kid, even though I'm older at this point than professional athletes, which is one of the harder things about watching sports for me now.
02:18:01.000I remember in the Rangers playoffs, someone would get on the ice and be like, look at this 35-year-old who can still tie his skates.
02:18:58.000Like, if they gave you a pill, and all of a sudden you could do it with Michael Jordan, you'd be like, you've got a superhuman body, like you're Spider-Man or something.
02:19:05.000I mean, that's the thing, too, is like, when people talk about, oh, comedy, like, why'd you want to do comedy?
02:19:09.000I was like, I don't know, it was kind of funny growing up, and I was like, if I could make a living doing this, that'd be cool, but if I was good at baseball, fuck, dude, I'd...
02:20:02.000It was just the kind of thing where, I don't know, I remember being a kid and being funny and just being in school.
02:20:06.000And John Oliver and I used to talk about this all the time, because he and I were a month apart in age, and he grew up in England, but having these weird parallel life experiences across the pond from each other, where we were talking about being in school and a teacher Saying something that was a perfect setup for a joke.
02:20:26.000And you knew if you yelled out the punchline, it would crush.
02:20:29.000But you also knew you would get in trouble.
02:20:30.000And it was like no doubt in your mind.
02:22:47.000And for some comics, it's like the insecurity is what leads you to, like, it propels you to get past the fear of going on and doing public speaking and the whole idea behind it.
02:22:56.000But my fear was, like, actual physical violence that I was involved in fighting from the time I was 15 to 21. So I was scared all the time.
02:23:07.000Before I retired from competing, my life was a series of getting ramped up for competitions, getting through them, relaxing for a day or a couple hours, and then being terrified of the next one.
02:24:32.000So one day, a friend of mine, this girl, this black girl at school, had a hair weave, you know, like she had hair weaved in, and she was playing with it, and like, I was talking or whatever, and I pulled one out.
02:24:42.000I was just like, fuck around with her or whatever, and I had it, so she was laughing, so I put it under my hat and put my hat on.
02:24:47.000So I had like Pais, like a Hasidic Jew.
02:26:11.000And there is a weird part of that where one thing that's nice about different cultures and hanging out with different people is that's why I love being a stand-up.
02:26:18.000If I hang out with Latino comics, then they're ripping on me for being a white Jewish guy, and I'm ripping on them for being Latino.
02:27:12.000I'm older than you, though, and when I went to school, it was less of an issue.
02:27:16.000But did you ever, like, you grew up in a time where, like, a coach would, like, slap you on the ass if you did a good job, like that kind of shit?
02:28:16.000Oh, pull in the money truck, put in the town.
02:28:19.000Yeah, but then the other side, or the real extreme other side, the really religious side, Is like, not just, you know, kneel and whisper into your hands.
02:29:54.000But there is a component to that where you start to just go like...
02:29:58.000Look, we've got to give everybody the proper respect, proper respect, proper respect, but I have a very difficult time accepting the fact that I fucking spent money to fly to Israel on a plane and there's a fucking dude standing next to me praying the entire flight.
02:34:43.000I mean, even if it's one or two that have it, I would imagine the vast majority are doing the sensitivity, like trying to make it more sensitive.
02:34:51.000I actually read recently that magnums aren't really bigger, but they're marketed that way to make guys feel good about having to wear them.
02:36:19.000A man who has a hundred orgasms a day breaks down in tears on This Morning, I guess that's a TV show, as he reveals that it's ruining his life.
02:36:52.000He developed this persistent genital arousal syndrome, that's what they call it, in September of 2012 after slipping a disc in his back while getting out of a chair.
02:37:07.000You have to understand that in America, 90% of jobs are service industry and nobody would ever put me in front of their customers, so working is pretty much out of the question.
02:37:43.000I don't know if this is true, because a producer could come up to this guy and ask him a question, and he could get on a television show, and how much vetting do they do?
02:39:00.000He says there's different intensities.
02:39:04.000He says, the ones that cause me to drop to the floor feel like all the muscles from my chest to my thighs have gone rock hard and everything just seizes up.
02:39:12.000It hurts and it feels good at the same time.
02:39:14.000And you have all these things running through your head as they happen.
02:39:16.000You don't want to be around anyone and you don't want anyone to see it.
02:42:35.000And he's like, your dog will have less energy.
02:42:37.000He's like, it's just, is what's going to happen.
02:42:39.000They will lose muscle, their body slims down, and they'll probably have less energy.
02:42:44.000And he's like, it's not popular to say, he goes, but it's a physiological reality.
02:42:48.000Yeah, it's definitely getting your balls cut off.
02:42:52.000You know, there was a woman that, there's some really controversial experiments that were done with dolphins in the 1960s and the 70s, this guy John Lilly.
02:43:00.000John Lilly is this famous psychedelic pioneer.
02:43:04.000He's one of the guys that, he invented the isolation tank, actually.
02:43:06.000And he was this guy who was working on interspecies communications with dolphins and he set up all these experiments.
02:43:14.000And one of the experiments he set up, this woman lived with a dolphin.
02:43:18.000And by lived with it, I mean the dolphin was in a tank of water.
02:43:33.000She was in the water, constantly with this dolphin.
02:43:36.000And the dolphin would get really horny, so she would jerk off the dolphin.
02:43:39.000And that was a big part of the controversy behind these experiments, because in her mind, she was like, look, he was young, he's male, and he was really distracted, and he couldn't concentrate on the work.
02:43:49.000And the work was, they were trying to teach the dolphin to try to speak English.
02:43:52.000And they were trying to teach it how to say human-type noises.
02:44:49.000I can't imagine that dolphin was fucking happy.
02:44:51.000I can't imagine he was like, this is great, I'm living with a lady.
02:44:53.000I don't know if he thought it was bad.
02:44:54.000I mean, we have this big hang-up about sexuality, but imagine if you had an itch on your back and you couldn't reach it, and you were being taken care of by someone and they scratched your back for you.
02:45:04.000No, I just mean, I would always lean towards, like, if I could put the dolphin.
02:45:07.000Yeah, I mean, I'm more of a don't-jerk-an-animal-off kind of a guy.
02:45:10.000But I just mean, my point is, well then maybe get a better facility to keep the dolphin in, get a couple of dolphins, let them live, put them in a, I don't know.
02:45:18.000I mean, you know, anytime you have an animal in captivity, it's pretty fucked up, but I don't know that jerking them off is the right way to do it.
02:45:23.000If you had to choose one, which one would you do?
02:46:52.000I had my four-year-old with me, too, and she was in the water, like, right next to me.
02:46:55.000Literally, I was holding onto her while we were swimming, and she's got the scuba mask on and shit, and she's, you know, snorkeling, looking down while the dolphins swim underneath it.
02:48:27.000Imagine if they looked like people, but with tails, but they were all the same color as a dolphin, and they did breathe air, so they came out for air, but we didn't understand them, because they spoke like dolphins.
02:48:36.000Would we be comfortable, if they lived the exact same life, would we be comfortable with them in captivity then?
02:49:52.000He was known for being featured in an anthropological exhibit in the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri in 1904 and in a controversial human zoo exhibit in 1906 in the Bronx Zoo.
02:50:09.000He had been freed from an African slave trader by the explorer Samuel Phillips Varner, a businessman.
02:51:11.000It says, throughout the late 19th century and well into the 1950s, Africans, in some cases Native Americans, were kept as exhibits in zoos.
02:51:36.000But human progress, there's pretty clear evidence that something's going on.
02:51:41.000And in this abandonment of retard and these words that we don't want to let go...
02:51:46.000Ultimately, it seems to kind of be moving in a better direction.
02:51:49.000Yeah, I would say that anytime you're resistant to that stuff, it's a natural impulse to like, fuck that, I'm not changing.
02:51:55.000But then the reality is you're always kind of on the wrong side of history.
02:51:58.000If you don't at some point go, I actually understand that there's a group of people who associate themselves with this term and it makes them feel like shit if I say it.
02:52:07.000And, you know, there's going to be ones that I give in on and ones I probably don't.
02:52:10.000And as I, you know, become more mature, I try my best.