Comedian and stand-up comic Joe Pesci talks about being starstruck by Gene Simmons' son at a New Year's Eve show, visiting an abandoned zoo in Los Angeles, and the weirdest place you can go in LA. Plus, a story about a man who thinks he's the reincarnation of a famous rock god. Also, we talk about a guy who thinks it's a good idea to do drugs in the old abandoned zoo where you can walk through the old zoo, but it's really just an old abandoned parking lot that used to be home to some pretty cool animals. And we get into the weird stuff you can actually do in LA, like walking through an old zoo that's still standing but has been knocked over and turned into a ghost town. And we find out that it's not just an abandoned park anymore, it's actually a place where people hang out at night! We also talk about the coolest place in LA that you can visit in the late 90s and early 00s, which is a place you should probably avoid if you haven't been to LA in the past week or so. Thanks to our sponsor, for sponsoring this episode! If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts! or wherever else you re listening to this episode, and we'll give you a shoutout in next week's mailbag! Thank you so much for listening and supporting us! Love ya, bye! Peace, Love, Blessings, Elyssa, Kristy, Sarah, and Joe, EJ, Elesa, and Chelsie, Sarah & Joe. XOXO. <3 - The EJ & Joe <333 - P.S. - Tom - Jack - Mike - - Sarah - Joe - EJ - BOB - JOSH - JOSEPH - DANICA - CHEER - JAMES - RYAN - PENNY - MURPHY - SON - KEVEN MCCARTANCHEVERYTHING - YANKEE - JAMIE - LOS ANGELES, LA - PODCAST EPISODES - GRAVY - DADDY - JORDY - KELLY LYNNE - GREECE
00:00:00.000Gene Simmons came to see me do stand-up at New Year's in L.A. And his son listened to one of my CDs and liked it, so he dragged the whole family out.
00:00:10.000I've never been starstruck before at a show where I was like, I feel weird about to go on stage.
00:01:03.000There are some people, there are some young girls who would be more starstruck by Gene Simmons' son if she saw the two of them walking down the street, or some young kids in general.
00:01:41.000They closed it down because it was so fucking small, and so they raised money for the current zoo, and so it was like a mile down the street.
00:01:49.000And so now, I found out the other day that you can actually go to this zoo.
00:01:54.000Yeah, they filmed the movie Anchorman.
00:01:56.000There's a scene in it from that movie.
00:01:58.000So anyways, you go through this weird trail, and you go through this parking lot, and then you end up in this zoo, and it looks like this is where the tigers were.
00:04:39.000I got to that thing and I was just so freaked out by the obvious madness that I was seeing that they had taken some animal and put it into what is really like a swimming pool.
00:04:50.000And this fucking thing is just going back and forth and back and forth and there's no room for him.
00:04:55.000Oh, so like a swimming pool on its side?
00:04:57.000No, I mean, when I say a swimming pool, it's like the size of a swimming pool, and it's cement.
00:05:02.000I mean, it's just this weird fucking thing that this poor creature is stuck in, and he's pacing back and forth, and I'm watching him, and I'm like, this is madness.
00:05:11.000Like, there's some, like, really tiny-ass zoos in some places where these poor little fucking animals are just, you know.
00:05:18.000Even if you go to a nice zoo, though, does that not ever freak you out?
00:05:30.000I grew up by one of the best zoos in probably some people consider the whole country or whatever, the Columbus Zoo, where Jack Hanna's from, you know, and all that stuff.
00:05:58.000Yeah, I think, like, do you know that you're on, you know, where you're at right now?
00:06:03.000You know, if you grew up on an island like Hawaii or something like that, I mean, that's way bigger, but, you know, elephants, they just want a big thing of grass.
00:06:54.000One of them, there's a lion and two lionesses, and they take down this giraffe in the middle of a street.
00:07:01.000And these people are filming this from their fucking car.
00:07:04.000They're inside their car, and they're filming it through the windshield, and this fucking lion takes down this giraffe right in front of them.
00:15:14.000It doesn't really matter if you behave exactly the way everybody else behaves.
00:15:17.000But when you see a really tight-knit ethnic community, and you appreciate not that they're racist or biased against anybody else, but that they have this real distinct flavor to them.
00:15:29.000The way they behave, the things they like.
00:15:32.000They have this real distinct, real uniqueness to it that makes it interesting.
00:15:38.000It's one of the interesting things about life.
00:15:40.000One of the things I was thinking about when I was in New Orleans this weekend, I was like, this is a completely different way to live your life.
00:15:47.000Here there's these people that are living, this is a totally different flavor, a very unique flavor of its own.
00:15:56.000New Orleans people are almost like it's from another country.
00:16:00.000But I think that when people get assimilated, the perfect thing is to have everybody be cool with everybody and there's no people who are prejudiced against any particular group because we're all some sort of weird shade of grey now.
00:16:14.000We've all interbred to the point where there's no distinctiveness between, no way of distinguishing us between anybody else.
00:16:20.000We're all just one sort of individual type of thing.
00:16:23.000But along the way, man, we're going to lose a lot of fun.
00:16:27.000There's a lot of fun in people being weird.
00:16:30.000There's a lot of fun in Armenian dudes wearing gold chains and trying to get some pussy.
00:17:41.000Well, she took the Paris Hilton thing to some completely new level to the point where every time I'm at the airport, I'm throwing my fucking sneakers into a bin.
00:18:40.000I mean, I'm kind of in the same boat where it's like, all right, I can either be walking around furious out of my mind all the time, or just don't really pay attention to it and enjoy the absurdity of it all.
00:18:53.000Like, watching Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, like, I just saw on the news, I don't know, they were, like, debating each other, and it's like...
00:19:46.000When you look at it now, to take it seriously, as in, you know, to take it to think that there's really some sort of a big vote going on and we're going to change the way the whole thing works.
00:19:54.000Hey, I hear they're going to throw out the Federal Reserve.
00:20:24.000This is a terrible message to send out.
00:20:26.000You haven't really researched this enough to be absolutely accurate, and yet you're saying this damaging thing that voting doesn't change anything, and you're sending a terrible message to people.
00:20:34.000But at what point in time are you allowed to be objective?
00:20:37.000At what point in time do you look at a guy like Obama who acts like a Republican and does all this creepy shit that if GW was doing it, liberals would be fucking calling in to newspapers every day and protesting every day?
00:20:50.000He's doing shit that's just like the stuff that Bush did.
00:20:54.000And yet somehow or another, yeah, absolutely.
00:20:57.000Somehow or another, liberals aren't even saying anything about it.
00:21:01.000It's so bizarrely creepy and so bizarrely weird.
00:21:04.000Just like Windows versus PC. It's like the same sort of retard battle going on.
00:21:09.000It's the same sort of weird control over some fucking boat that doesn't even have a steering wheel.
00:21:15.000It's like one day you break into the fucking main cabin.
00:21:18.000Alright, we finally got to the head of the boat.
00:21:20.000There's no steering wheel on this fucking boat.
00:24:17.000I wouldn't want to be there in a winter.
00:24:19.000There's a certain quality of your life that you sacrifice when you live in some place that's brutally cold.
00:24:25.000Well, it's the way it's so rural that everybody's got a 45-foot kind of dirt driveway thing, and then when it snows and freezes, it's like, I can't drive my truck down there.
00:25:07.000It's a fairly small population, and it's got an incredible amount of wildlife, an incredible amount of woods, and just beautiful nature shit to look at.
00:25:20.000When you're driving, they drive up to Burlington, and you're like, God, look how beautiful it is.
00:25:25.000Just clear air, and not that many people.
00:25:29.000No outdoor advertising in Vermont, too.
00:25:55.000Can you imagine if they just became super rich and then just became ballers, but then they'd have to put on the fucking Birkenstocks for their ad campaigns.
00:26:02.000They just want to be out there doing blow.
00:26:33.000Yeah, how the fuck did that McDonald's thing happen?
00:26:36.000Remember when there's like real clowns dressing up as McDonald's and you can go to McDonald's like certain days and Ronald McDonald would be there and you're like, holy shit, there's a guy, Ronald McDonald's gonna be at this, and people get excited about it.
00:30:17.000If you think about just the nature aspect of it, even though we're not going out and getting the stuff, even though we're not killing it ourselves, we're still eating it.
00:30:29.000So the attitude that you must have, like cultivating your body, if you're a flesh eater, a constant flesh eater, it's got to be a more predatory attitude.
00:31:04.000I'm going to repeat what you said as fact to other people now.
00:31:08.000I think if we all ate shit that was grass-fed, if we all ate just grass-fed beef, there would be way less of it, but it'd be way better for you.
00:31:17.000And people would probably enjoy it more.
00:31:19.000But there's certainly, at this point, I think there's just too many goddamn people and not enough food to live like that.
00:31:28.000I mean, there are a lot of, you know...
00:31:30.000We would have to have monstrous, monstrous farms to compete with some of these crazy chicken farms where they fucking grow them all stuffed together.
00:31:37.000That freaks everybody out when you watch those chicken videos.
00:31:40.000But if they weren't like that, how much farm acreage would it cost?
00:31:57.000If that's the case, if it's like we need to do the factory farming thing because there's fucking way too many of us, and they're just sending chickens out the moment they shit them out, they're fucking pumping them out with hormones because they've got to get them big quick so they can ship them out to the 300 million motherfuckers.
00:32:13.000And out of those 300 million, how many are farmers?
00:32:17.000How many out of 300 million people are farmers?
00:32:43.000All I'm trying to say is, could you imagine, if that was the case, if it was one in every 300, could you imagine if one person had to take care of 300 fucking people?
00:33:30.000They have 100 people and they do the work of 5,000 individuals or more.
00:33:34.000I know obviously it doesn't work like that, but it almost seems like at this point the resources versus population is in a weird place where we need an incredible amount of food and we all sort of take for granted that it's out there.
00:33:54.000And if the three of us went out right now and had like two hours to just buy as much food as possible, we could each buy so much fucking food.
00:34:19.000It's just, to me, staggering the way we have grown from being hunter-gatherers to people who lived in small villages to cities where we have to get the stuff sent in every day in trucks.
00:34:34.000Just more meat for the wheel over and over again.
00:34:38.000Trucks and trucks of meat are just pumping into the city all day long.
00:34:43.000And it's really only been going on for a few hundred years.
00:35:45.000Because they were talking, you know, like as the thing, I mean, everybody knows enough that it's about a disease that spreads.
00:35:49.000And they would show like, you know, New York population, whatever, 8 million, whatever lives in New York, California, or Los Angeles population, this, and then they would go to Tokyo and it said 36.4 million.
00:36:21.000It's funny if you judge any group like that, say a lot of Asians are small, all of a sudden you're tipping on the verge of the swimming pool filled with racism.
00:36:30.000Like right there, what are you saying?
00:42:00.000I mean, he's one of those dudes that you're like, wow, he made it through.
00:42:04.000Yeah, and now he's like this mainstream, like, did you ever think you'd see Ozzy Osbourne doing like a fucking, I don't know, he's in some like...
00:42:10.000A sitcom sort of a thing with his wife and his kids on TV. Well, there's that, but commercials too.
00:42:14.000You see them in pretty mainstream commercials.
00:42:42.000It's like all these award shows and shit, and apparently he's super talented, a great singer, and there's some people that are accepting it, some people not.
00:43:14.000People are doing more deviant shit, so they're like, well, let's not be so hard on that guy because, I don't know, maybe I want to fucking try some of that weird shit or whatever.
00:43:23.000Don't you think that people have bounced back from shit that they could have never bounced back from before?
00:43:30.000You know, sports, yeah, I think Michael Vick is definitely something that wouldn't have happened 25 years ago.
00:45:24.000I bet his pussy output tripled after that Monica Lewinsky thing.
00:45:28.000Because there's a lot of girls that just want to let him know and then keep their mouth shut.
00:45:31.000Listen, I know you had that problem with Monica, but she's a little girl, and it's not me, and I'm a grown woman, and I know what I want, and what I want is you, and I don't need anything other than you in my mouth, and that's the end of it.
00:47:37.000I mean, you know, Kennedy, Martin Luther King, both Kennedys.
00:47:42.000I mean, it just seems like anybody who's kind of like steering us towards some decent change winds up with their fucking head blown off by a lone fucking crazy gunman.
00:49:21.000I've watched like five seconds of it and go, what the fuck is going on?
00:49:24.000I think he's in more than one monkey movie.
00:49:25.000It just shouldn't be legal that if you're a person who is a professional pretender that you go on to be the guy who tells the truth to the nation.
00:50:48.000You know, there's some big conspiracy theory about people who created Star Wars, the strategic defense system Star Wars, that it was all bullshit, and that the scientists, one by one, have been killed off.
00:51:03.000Apparently, 22 different scientists who worked on it were killed in strange ways.
00:57:03.000And then Billy Crystal makes an appearance, and I totally called it, like, because he, like, goes through Tooth Fairy training, you know, learns how to fly, all fucking bumping into it.
00:57:25.000And then he turns into the Tooth Fairy, and then we're watching it, and I was like, all right, Billy Crystal's old Jew character is going to make an appearance, or Whoopi Goldberg, or somebody like that.
00:57:42.000And then fucking right there, Billy Crystal comes down this ladder like, okay, hold your horses, hold your...
00:57:47.000And he gives him some books on how to be a Tooth Fairy, and...
00:57:51.000And then he turns into the Tooth Fairy randomly, albeit out in public, and the wings just spur it out.
00:58:00.000I feel like I'm losing momentum with trying to sell this shitty movie.
00:59:20.000But what we're going to do with the Ice House is we want to set it up so that comics getting offstage and going onstage can have a little different podcast.
00:59:27.000Not my podcast, but we're going to call it an evening at the Ice House.
00:59:31.000Whatever comic is there, within reason.
01:00:42.000Yeah, and we're going to start doing that on a regular basis.
01:00:45.000And as soon as I'm done with this Fear Factor stuff, which should be pretty soon, then we're going to move forward in different dynamic podcast directions.
01:00:53.000So we'll call it an evening at the Ice House or something along those lines.
01:02:00.000There's kids right now that are growing up from the time they're little kids.
01:02:06.000They've been hacking into the registry and fucking with things and reading on forums and finding out how to do things and working on coding.
01:02:17.000They speak a language that we can't even fucking wrap our heads around.
01:02:21.000There was a documentary on one small area, I think it was of Russia, I forget what eastern block country it was, but they had this one town where they have a disproportionate amount of internet scammers.
01:02:33.000And virus makers and people stealing credit card numbers and they were all just driving Mercedes back and forth.
01:05:01.000If the government regulated the internet the way the FCC regulates television or the way they regulate radio or anything.
01:05:09.000If they told you what you could and couldn't put out there.
01:05:12.000Because that's where it all got out of hand.
01:05:14.000Everything was doing great until the 80s, and the 90s came along, and all of a sudden, people were getting their information from different places.
01:05:23.000They were getting it from a fucking computer.
01:05:25.000But with that WikiLeaks guy, I mean, aren't they essentially like, it's like, you can't really put everyone out there.
01:05:31.000Well, they locked that guy up, and they gave that guy some sort of a house arrest deal where he had to show up at the police station and check himself in every day.
01:05:39.000And from what I understand, he's trying to fight being extradited.
01:05:42.000He doesn't want to have to leave the country.
01:05:45.000I have no idea what the fuck happened, but I do think that I don't believe that this would happen this way if he wasn't that guy.
01:05:52.000I think it seems pretty obvious that someone's targeting him.
01:06:00.000I don't believe she's even saying it was really rape.
01:06:03.000It was by some really broad definition of rape, like regret afterwards or something like that, the feeling of being deceived or something along those lines.
01:06:11.000She changed her mind when he was finishing up or whatever.
01:06:29.000You're not allowed to release information unless you're the New York Times or CNN or an established news organization slash corporation that we can trust.
01:06:41.000You're not allowed to just release that.
01:06:46.000What would the New York Times do if it was given that information?
01:06:50.000If it was given all the WikiLeaks documents, if someone came along and said, listen, here's a gigantic file, you're going to fucking shit your pants, this is all a bunch of shit that I took from U.S. data banks, and it's going to blow the hole on this whole Iraq War thing, and there's a lot of things in it that's going to really disturb the shit out of people when they find out about real relationships between different foreign countries and different things that we're doing in all sorts of different parts of the world.
01:07:51.000Is that ever going to get to the point where that doesn't happen anymore?
01:07:53.000Is that like a remnant of the old days that's slowly starting to work its way out to the point where police aren't going to have that kind of absolute power anymore?
01:09:01.000I mean, the internet, essentially, I mean, you could argue that, you know, that screen that everybody had in their apartments in 1984. Was 1984 supposed to be the year where this story took place?
01:12:54.000That old ride at Walt Disney World in the future where it was like this thing where you just sat there and watched what the future is supposed to be like.
01:13:04.000If you look at it now, it's pretty crazy how similar it is.
01:14:25.000I went to a concert a couple weeks ago, and I went to smoke a cigarette and was looking at the whole crowd in the Hollywood Bowl, and you just see all these little light-up things.
01:14:36.000Yeah, and it's like, that's kind of crazy, man.
01:14:40.000Really, ten years ago, you didn't see...
01:14:42.000I was typing an email today, and I was on the iPhone, and I was just thinking about how crazy it is that you could just touch these little spots.
01:15:23.000I don't really understand the service, but yeah, for ten dollars a month you can put in like Rolling Stones and every Rolling Stones song will come up and you can download them.
01:15:33.000But what's cool is whoever has it connected to their Facebook, like a lot of your friends, like Duncan is a perfect example.
01:15:40.000You can see His whole entire music, like, what he likes, what he listens to.
01:15:45.000So you can just, like, if you're looking for new music, you can see what Joey Diaz is looking at.
01:15:48.000You just, like, look at all his music.
01:18:31.000Yeah, it's like the Melvins and fucking...
01:18:34.000But is Nirvana, like, if you talk about, like, that kind of music you want, that you like, if you say Nirvana, do they think, oh, you're all mainstream?
01:18:41.000No, no, because, I mean, Nirvana, like, naturally happened.
01:18:45.000That came from, like, they wanted to be as big as Sonic Youth or Dinosaur Jr. and just...
01:18:50.000They just wrote songs way too good and fucking just got huge.
01:19:48.000About how it was insensitive to have that song, and that song promotes violence against women in LHS, that people might find it offensive.
01:19:56.000And then the other song they complained about was the Scorpions, Rocky Like a Hurricane, because obviously we're in New Orleans, and New Orleans had been hit by a hurricane.
01:23:49.000If you're going to sit down and fucking police Wikipedia on your fucking own time just because somebody adds Jerry Seinfeld started directing adult films after whatever.
01:24:00.000If you're somebody who's policing Craigslist for people trying to be funny or gross on it...
01:24:18.000Well, because, like, usually what they're doing, I mean, I'm just speaking from experience of, like, I had a fake Yelp account where I would just complain about businesses.
01:24:28.000Like, I took businesses that had, like, there was a car wash called the Handy J. And I wrote the review, like, I was expecting a handjob at the end of the car wash, and it was blatant false advertising.
01:24:39.000And there was a restaurant called The Happy Ending on Sunset.
01:24:42.000So either way, it was just all written by this naive guy who was in a shitty marriage, and he was just looking for a handjob.
01:24:48.000And none of these places gave him handjobs.
01:24:50.000And this pink taco place in Arizona, like, some guy beats the shit out of him because he tries to get his daughter to fuck.
01:24:56.000I mean, it was just a silly thing I was doing.
01:24:59.000But he got taken down because I guess somebody, you know, complained or was monitoring Yelp.
01:25:05.000And I lost all of my fucking handjobs.
01:26:26.000He registered it because they were fucking slow on the take and they didn't realize the power of the internet.
01:26:31.000So then he writes this blog detailing these horrific fucking physical ailments that are occurring to him from just eating nothing but Pepsi Spice from us.
01:27:55.000Once you have that little taste, I was like, hey, roll me a cigarette, like a couple days later.
01:27:59.000I was staying with him in upstate New York after Montreal, and so I was kind of on vacation, that vacation mode, and was like...
01:28:06.000I'll have a couple smokes until when I get back to LA I'll stop and went down to the city for a week and bombed a couple cigarettes but cigarettes are like 15 bucks a pack there so I was like I'm just gonna buy a pack and you know give them the people and I'll smoke and either way just snowballed into is that the only physical addiction you've ever had um cock Brian.
01:30:41.000But once you get out of the woods, when I quit a couple years ago, I mean, I went like a year, and it's been a year now that I've been smoking again.
01:31:38.000I even heard that after six months, it starts burning fat that has nicotine still in it, and so you start getting cravings again after a certain period.
01:32:02.000So if that, I mean, if it's there, maybe, I mean, it's obviously the grip of that stuff is way stronger than the grip.
01:32:10.000I mean, there's people that say they get addicted to marijuana, but there's nothing like the feeling that I don't think that they would get with cigarettes.
01:32:16.000They don't need to smoke it all day like that.
01:33:32.000It's when you go and you're hungry as fuck, and you go to the movie theater, and you smell that popcorn, and you're like, fuck, I need that popcorn.
01:33:41.000It's got to be way crazier than that because I could pass on the popcorn.
01:33:44.000No, because you can sit there and not get popcorn, but if you sit there and keep on smelling it over and over again, it'll drive you crazy.
01:35:25.000But I do, if I'm around people, like, I was staying with a buddy of mine in Austin, and he wakes up in the morning and has a cup of coffee and a cigarette, and I would do that.
01:36:36.000And we were just like, you know, kind of drunk talking on the phone one night.
01:36:40.000And we were both talking about how like, God, what are we still smoking?
01:36:43.000You know, because he smokes cigarettes too.
01:36:45.000And he's saying, yeah, if an alien life form was looking down on us, they'd be like, wait, so this fucking thing kills a million people a year and it's not illegal?
01:38:50.000So nicotine on itself is addictive enough, and all the 599 other things just enhance.
01:38:55.000The other shit is like what they do to food at McDonald's.
01:38:59.000It's designed to burn a certain way, for the ash to be shaped a certain way.
01:39:06.000Do you notice the difference between the cigarette experience from the natural ones and the ones like the cool lights or something like that?
01:42:55.000You're one of those guys that, right now, in my book of funny guys to watch, you're one of those that hasn't been nationally recognized yet, but it's going to happen quick.
01:44:46.000So thanks for tuning in to the podcast, and thanks for everything, and thanks to The Fleshlight for sponsoring the podcast.
01:44:52.000If you go to JoeRogan.net, click on the link for The Fleshlight, and enter in the code name ROGAN, you will get 15% off the number one sex toy for men.