Comedian Jeff Ross stops by The Comedy Store to talk about his new show on Comedy Central, roast battle, and playing ping pong with his cousin. Jeff also talks about how he met his current girlfriend and why he doesn t care if she likes him or not. Jeff is a standup comic and host of Comedy Central's Roast Battle. He is also a comedian, writer, and podcaster. His new show, "Rox Battle," premieres on Wednesday, February 15th at 8/7c, and is available to stream on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening and Good Luck Out There! -Jon Sorrentino and Matt Knost Also, if you like the show, please give us a five star review on iTunes and tell a friend about it! Thank you Jon and Matt for making this podcast possible. We really appreciate it. -Jon and Matt - Thank you so much for making it possible. Jon and Matchett - Matt and Matt - Good Luck out There's a lot of good stuff going on out there. - Jon & Matt - Cheers, Cheers. Cheers! -Jon & Matt - Kristy . Jon "Thank you, Jon & Adam" - Matt & Adam - Cheyenne -- Cheez Joe Rogan - Cheez Whaley Thanks, Jon and Adam & Jake and ( ) And much more! - Jeff Ross is a very special thanks to Jon and Sarah @ , Brian Can't wait to have a good time, to have you out there in this episode in Los Angeles, LA, - Joe Rogans for coming out in this podcast AND + CHECK OUT THE SHOW AT THE ROOAST BECAUSE WE'S SOOO MUCH MORE THAN YOU'LL HAVE A GOOD THAN THAT'S YA'S BOOOTY AND I'S TOTALLY SEXY AND HE'S GOT A GOOD PRODUY AND YO'S PODCAST AND WE'LL TOUCH IN A PLACE AND A POTTER AND A DOUG AND A JOTTER THAT' MAKE ME LIKE THAT' AND A S NOT QOTHE AND A QOTTER
00:04:03.000Damn, I just never wanted to know and I shouldn't have asked.
00:04:05.000I was here one night where Eddie Griffin was telling a Bruce Lee story and Eddie Griffin was just drunk as fuck and he was making up some Bruce Lee story.
00:04:12.000He's like, there was 39 people in the room when he died.
00:04:35.000Yeah, because you know his son Brandon died on the set of a movie where they had a fake gun, like a gun with a blank, and they shot at him, and there was something inside the gun, and it wound up killing him.
00:06:27.000Fish lasted one season, and everyone remembers it.
00:06:30.000Do you think this now that, you know...
00:06:32.000You've been on TV a bunch of times, and you've had your own show, and now you've got Rose Battle on.
00:06:37.000Do you think there's so many shows on now, with so many networks and so many channels, and then there's streaming shit like Netflix and Hulu and CISO? It's almost like there's too much content.
00:06:50.000I think it's just, for some reason, more narrowed.
00:06:59.000You know, like Doug Benson has something for pot smokers, and someone else has something for home improvement, and there's a channel just for cooking shows.
00:08:00.000There's something, it's so intimate, it's so, and when you see someone get fucking crushed in the belly room, like I've heard some goddamn titanic lines up there.
00:08:09.000What did Kim Kong did say about this girl?
00:08:13.000Oh, she said, she's not Union, but her tits are sag.
00:08:19.000It really is a joke writer's showcase.
00:10:19.000You know, it was one of those crowds where if you did new shit that you were excited about, they were with you, and as soon as you did a bit that had any dust on it, they just fucking flatlined.
00:10:30.000So do you think that was you, or they felt it in you?
00:10:48.000And then when you transition into shit that you've been doing for too long, you lose that freshness and they sense there's a difference between the material.
00:10:57.000There's a moment when you're doing an old bit where you have so much shame and you try to reignite it and It's like when you see a guy yelling at his son in a parking lot.
00:11:19.000Is when you see someone yelling at their kid and then you look over and you make eye contact with them and they realize they shouldn't be yelling at their kid and they've lost their cool.
00:11:28.000Plus I can imagine you looking at a guy who's yelling at his kid.
00:11:31.000There's probably a little bit of a menacing look on your face.
00:11:43.000I might raise my voice occasionally if they're doing something really fucked up, like they're being mean to each other.
00:11:48.000But I remember people yelling at me, man.
00:11:51.000The cortisol reaction that happens in a kid's brain and all the stress hormones that get released, there's plenty of fucking bad shit going on in the world.
00:12:02.000They don't need their parents yelling at them, too.
00:12:04.000Well, especially when you put it in perspective.
00:12:06.000Like, your parent, at any given time, is possibly three or four times bigger than you.
00:15:00.000Well, I guess you kind of have that in all martial arts.
00:15:03.000But Taekwondo, you're doing a lot of light contact sparring, and because of that, I think it's not as engaging as jujitsu, because jujitsu is kind of like full blast, because you're not hitting each We're good to
00:20:50.000Because the thing is, now you just think about how much your cell phone is in your pocket, how many waves are going through your semen all the time.
00:25:24.000I was watching this video that someone was playing on their Instagram page where they were there while Trump was walking into this room in D.C. and surrounded by Secret Service agents.
00:25:34.000And all these sycophants and all these weird people around him, and this guy's yelling out, Thank you, Mr. Trump.
00:26:40.000Well, they were saying that about G.W. Bush, is that there was a pretty well-documented case when he was in college, where did he go to Texas or something?
00:27:44.000I didn't see him for years, and then I saw him recently, and he was in a wheelchair on some interview and some video, and it made you realize, like, wow.
00:29:57.000I think the cheap fucking route is to say that religion sucks just because that's an easy blanket to go, fuck religion, it's just caused every war, it's the worst thing.
00:30:06.000It's like, yeah, there's a lot of fucking negatives to it.
00:30:08.000You know, they blamed it on every war, but war is something that's caused by people.
00:30:13.000People would have found a reason to go to war.
00:31:21.000It's just crazy how tribal people are.
00:31:23.000And that's one of the things that you're seeing with this election, too.
00:31:26.000Whether you're a Trump supporter or a Hillary supporter or a Bernie supporter, whatever, if you just can step back from it for a second and look at it objectively, what you're seeing is these people that are like blindly loyal to one side or the other.
00:31:40.000And then you just see giant clumps of them that move in that direction.
00:31:44.000And very few people who look at it and have a balanced perspective that's outside of an ideology.
00:34:25.000It used to be like, if you watched CBS, NBC, ABC News, there was a journalistic integrity that they subscribed to, and both sides said, these are the facts.
00:34:36.000There's no news outlet any longer that both sides...
00:38:19.000I mean, this might be me being ignorant, but I don't know if I've ever seen a president in a press conference or president-elect shut down a source like he did CNN and was like, I won't talk to you.
00:38:30.000I don't know if I've ever seen a president single one out and then...
00:38:34.000They probably slyly ignore certain journalists that they don't want to fucking talk to, but I've never seen one be like, I don't talk to CNN. I don't talk to that news source.
00:39:38.000How much simple shit have they seen where it's so annoying?
00:39:41.000At some point, they've got to be like, fuck, this is so boring.
00:39:44.000Especially when they get on Air Force One and they're going to fucking Russia for 10 hours and they're just sitting around so they can do a 30-second photo op and yell questions at them and then another 10-hour flight home.
00:39:54.000Imagine one of the guys in the group is just like, I think I'm going to go talk to him.
00:40:19.000Wait, I read the greatest, I wish I know the source, just because I don't want to fucking say somebody else's shit, but there was just a meme floating around on the internet that said, I bet you, eight years ago, when Obama gained presidency, there were so many fucking extremists going,
00:40:35.000I bet you the first people he's going to talk to are rappers and Steve Harvey.
00:40:39.000laughter And then you see Trump just drags in rappers.
00:44:17.000It's like where he has money in certain types of ways, but it's not his income taxes where you know what he spent on phone calls and security and everything.
00:45:35.000But if something like that did happen, if it wasn't Trump, if it was somebody like that, maybe it's the next guy to figure out how to do it like that.
00:45:41.000We essentially exposed the personality contest.
00:47:55.000He likes it when he can rub elbows with famous people.
00:47:58.000That's what's so funny about this inauguration weekend for him is that he couldn't get any celebrities and that's all he really cares about.
00:50:05.000Well, they were going to do it, and then they got so much shit from their fans, and then they said, we're stepping down out of respect to the boss.
00:55:55.000They played it like this thing that they've been doing over and over and over again.
00:55:58.000They fucked up in that they rigged it for so long that their popularity contest got taken over by someone who's actually popular, like an actual famous person.
00:57:49.000I mean, it's like any other time when I'm not happy about what's going on politically, I just put my head in the sand for a while and I go, I'll just check in in a few months.
00:57:57.000But I cannot stop reading on my phone in the papers.
00:58:02.000This is like we're living through a part of history that's probably more turbulent than any other presidential transition.
00:58:13.000Metaphorical question, but because of, like, Obama lived through the age of, like, the bursting of the internet space and its involvement in politics, you know, of, like, Twitter and Instagram and all this shit.
00:59:40.000He's a guy who a lot of people go to and he's not without his criticisms.
00:59:46.000I mean, a lot of people criticize him.
00:59:48.000He's had this ongoing feud with Sam Harris.
00:59:51.000But if you look at what he's talking about here, if there's any shred of truth to it, that you're seeing this old institution attack this new incoming guy and do it in a foolish way that actually kind of strengthens This disbelief that people have in the news.
01:00:10.000If they make up some crazy story and you hear CNN talking about it and all these other people talking about it, unsubstantiated reports that involve lewd activities and golden showers, who the fuck is doing this?
01:01:20.000You know, if you're right about saying that he's never going to leave, then obviously that's going to become a problem.
01:01:26.000But if you're not right about it, and he does manage to show some flaws in the system and expose them, Then it could be great, sure.
01:01:37.000No one else is going to do it other than Bernie.
01:01:39.000If Bernie won, and obviously they were conspiring to keep Bernie out, but if Bernie won, we could have seen some really weird changes in the system.
01:04:33.000I remember the skating ring popping up and he was always talking about taking over swaths of land in New York when you were lucky to get a little apartment somewhere.
01:04:42.000This guy was going to buy where the trains were, the subways used to be.
01:05:12.000Some of the smartest, most successful people I know in New York supported him.
01:05:17.000Do you think, though, that the level of responsibility that you have when you become the president, the amount of power that you have, do you think that anybody can really manage that correctly?
01:05:29.000It's a ridiculous position, and this is one of the things it's exposing.
01:05:33.000This is exposing how ridiculous the position is, that you could get someone who's just this one popular person that gets into place and run this entire thing.
01:05:43.000Like, one person running anything is crazy.
01:05:46.000Well, are we overstating how much the president really runs?
01:08:25.000Because anything they come up with is either fake news to him or it's something crazy that makes people go, dude, how funny was that they pissed on that fucking bed that Obama...
01:08:32.000I mean, then it becomes like a social bit.
01:08:34.000The worst thing that could take place is that people decide while he's in power that he can't be in power.
01:08:42.000People decide that there can't be a president anymore.
01:08:44.000We've decided as a nation that we're going to abolish this and we're going to start a whole new system of government.
01:08:50.000That is where shit could get really crazy.
01:08:56.000Remember when he was running for president, he said, she goes, maybe Trump should win because maybe it's time we do have a revolution in the streets.
01:09:05.000It's like, yeah, that's easy to say when you're on the fifth and a five-story brownstone with guards, you know, not fucking living in the projects during a revolution.
01:09:14.000It's harder for a rich person to say that.
01:09:16.000A poor person has nothing to lose and would call for revolution, but when a rich person does it, I think she's got something.
01:09:22.000Do you think they'd be coming for her first?
01:14:09.000It was like, well, but you didn't lose any money.
01:14:11.000Yeah, I mean, I can't sit here and say, for all the bad things I say about Trump, I can't sit here and tell you that I was passionate about Hillary or that I even like her.
01:14:18.000I just saw it as the lesser of two evils.
01:14:22.000Yeah, you saw her as business as usual, not business way worse.
01:17:18.000He actually did move to Bisbee, Arizona and essentially start a whole community of weirdos that live down there and hang out and work with them and do podcasts with them.
01:17:30.000And he's kind of using the podcast as like an open mic.
01:18:38.000When you're near the border like that, you see families coming over.
01:18:43.000I've talked to dudes who've been hunting in Arizona, and there's areas that they avoid.
01:18:50.000Because too many people are coming over the border and they walk.
01:18:55.000And they'll even put things on their shoes, like big chunks of carpet, and they tie them down to their shoes so that they don't make any footprints.
01:21:23.000With all of us having access to the internet in our pockets, the same as people from India, that there would be this amazing image of all the walls falling down.
01:21:36.000But that doesn't seem to be happening, do you think?
01:21:40.000No, because we're getting more connected, but But culture means a lot to people, and they're going to keep it, and that identifies them with who they are.
01:21:51.000They're never going to get rid of that and just become super...
01:21:54.000Otherwise, the westernization of the world would just be them all being us.
01:22:08.000Yeah, but I mean, we know for a fact that Apple goes to China and pays people pennies, and they have nets all around the buildings where these people live and work.
01:22:18.000They have dormitories, and they cover them with nets.
01:22:41.000And we accept that not just in China, but all throughout South America, there's a bunch of different factories that employ people that pay them pennies.
01:22:50.000Compared to what they would have to pay the same person in America.
01:23:03.000Like if someone took a guy like you and made you work for someone at the blah blah blah factory that makes fucking jeans or sneakers or whatever the fuck they make, If they made you work for that amount, you would think you were in jail.
01:23:18.000You're like, oh my god, I have to live off of this?
01:24:11.000They could develop their own culture and society just like the United States did.
01:24:15.000But if you just make them in prison to these factories where they get paid slave wages in these foreign third world countries that we don't care about as much as we care about Detroit or we care about Chicago or we care about places that are just like that place connected to us.
01:24:52.000So a million years from now we're still going to have deep poverty in Mexico and we're terrified of the drug war and leaking over our soil.
01:25:10.000This is a hiccup along a gigantic trail that leads from us throwing shit at each other from a tree to us being able to transcend literal space and time, become a part of some artificially created dimension that they establish.
01:25:23.000That's 100 years from now or 200 years from now.
01:25:26.000This whole thing we're going through right now is a blip in time.
01:25:30.000And it's also a challenge to how much technology really connects us.
01:25:35.000This guy's going to present a lot of challenges as to how much technology can unite human beings.
01:25:42.000Well, the problem is, and you and I were talking earlier about, what's the law called again?
01:26:05.000And the problem with it is, I'm reading this book right now about it, and the problem with it is that we can't keep up culturally, emotionally, legally with how fast information is traveling and how,
01:26:21.000like you said, everybody has access to the same information.
01:26:25.000But it's also just the ramifications of information.
01:26:29.000You know, corporations being able to get into your information.
01:26:33.000Like, we don't have laws in place that can really tackle that because it's happening so fast.
01:27:05.000I'm like, this is going to be a payphone.
01:27:06.000People are just going to have Priuses and people are going to take Uber and it's better.
01:27:12.000You know what's happening in big cities is Uber started replacing the cabs, making it tough for cabs and probably buses and private limos certainly.
01:27:24.000People are not needing a car in major cities in LA. And it cuts out all that drinking and driving shit.
01:27:31.000I watched some guy slam into a fucking barrier last night.
01:27:35.000I was driving home last night, and there was this guy driving home from the ice house.
01:27:39.000There was this guy to the left of me, and he was speeding, and he was flying by me, man, and he was losing control of his car a little bit.
01:30:12.000Drive home in the snow and shit because I didn't want to pay for a hotel, dumb stuff, you know.
01:30:17.000I was running late at night and I saw that car.
01:30:20.000There was a really bad car accident two months ago on Fountain where a girl was fucking shit-faced and people always fly home on Fountain because it's fast, there's no lights.
01:30:32.000And a girl must have clipped a curb...
01:30:35.000And then jetted to the other side, like the fucking other side of the road, and missed parked cars, which was insane, and smashed into one of those concrete walls on the corner.
01:31:02.000When you see someone really hit something with a car, you realize how crazy car travel is and how those autonomous cars are like the future.
01:31:11.000You're not going to be able to argue against it.
01:31:15.000I mean, I've fallen asleep at the wheel on the highway at night.
01:31:18.000I used to drive from Boston back to New York.
01:31:20.000Saturday night, I would do two shows...
01:31:23.000Then I'd get in my car, wherever the fuck I was, and I would drive to New York that night.
01:31:27.000And I can remember windows open, singing as loud as I could, just because I would close my eyes and I would fucking wake up on the shoulder.
01:33:41.000Well, LA doesn't really have a lot of it.
01:33:43.000In Chicago, where I'm from, it's a big thing of commuter bikes, passenger bikes, and messengers.
01:33:48.000They get hit all the fucking time, and then when they die, they spray paint it white, and then they chain it to the pole at the intersection.
01:33:56.000My mom was saying it was like, one year it was almost like every other block she was driving down, it was like, there's another bike, it's another bike.
01:37:47.000They literally write for a month for one roast battle.
01:37:51.000Two of the roasters told me they have the bracket up on their wall and they're writing ahead in case they advance or for when they advance.
01:37:57.000Well, you guys have always said it best.
01:38:06.000You need to have that world exist for people in a world right now where PC and people on their toes and who knows what to say what all the time and that's such a fucking deal now.
01:38:17.000I'm so happy that that is still being represented in the comedy world because it fucking lightens everything.
01:38:26.000All the voices shut the fuck up and enjoy two people making fun of each other.
01:38:31.000It's like the most clean thing that we need in entertainment, especially for comedy.
01:38:37.000Because, dude, right now I feel like you're on tippy-toes sometimes when you do shows in places and you're like, what are these people going to get offended by?
01:40:33.000Thank God the audience knows that Failure in comedy is still a thing that's not just like, everything's not just a special prefabricated late night set.
01:40:42.000I think a lot of people, because they only see comedy in that way, they see specials on Netflix, they see late night sets, things that are tight and are formula that have been practiced, that when they come see live comedy, an inch of any sort of faltering and they're like,
01:41:07.000So when that comes out, do you abandon your material now?
01:41:10.000I mean, I've already started to implement a bunch of new stuff and do both right now before it even comes out just because I'm trying to get in the habit.
01:41:59.000I mean, I have years where I write like a motherfucker, and I have years where I'm like, I'll look at a set list on my computer that says January 2016, and I look at it recently, and I'm like, wow, this is not that different than what I'm doing now.
01:42:15.000I see a bunch of stuff I tried that didn't work, and then I have years where, yeah, I will come up with close to an hour.
01:42:21.000This is going to be the year where every comedy, that's the one thing, every comic will have three specials a year.
01:42:56.000I can imitate certain people's voices, but I have a very limited range.
01:43:00.000The people I can do, I can do good, but I can't do him.
01:43:05.000Trump is almost so quote-unquote simple that that's why anybody that comes down on SNL, there's a lot of people that can do the impression, but they were saying how hard Hillary was.
01:43:24.000Trump, that's another reason it's so cartoonishly perfect that you're like, anybody who can do a voice like that is going to get- Well, and Bernie was easy as hell.
01:45:05.000But don't we know that anybody who has kind of the audacity and fucking self-indulgence to want to be president is also behind that fucking crazy person.
01:45:23.000Or isn't it possible that someone could not want to be president until they realize that the country's back is up against the wall and that's when he finally ran?
01:45:35.000Do you think had the DNC not fucking strategically shoved Hillary Clinton in front of him, if he had fucking won, do you think he could have beat Trump?
01:48:49.000Someone who speaks no English and doesn't understand our culture would go, well, they're probably making fun of, it looks like they're making a character of somebody.
01:49:37.000What when you were a punk kid in third grade or fourth grade were doing to each other, mocking shit, it was so obvious that that's what it was.
01:49:45.000There was this comic, and you guys probably wouldn't even remember him, but he was an L.A. comic, one of those guys that was just always around, and you never really saw him go on stage much.
01:49:55.000And he had these giant front teeth and like a receded upper lip so that his teeth just like jutted out.
01:50:04.000And I'm talking to him and I don't know what the fuck was going through my mind but subconsciously I like curled my lip up above my teeth and then he just looked at me and he goes, oh that's really funny.
01:50:17.000And I realized like in a second that I was doing it.