Joe Rogan Experience #1973 - Joey Diaz
Episode Stats
Length
2 hours and 29 minutes
Words per Minute
180.83806
Summary
Joey Diaz is an actor, comedian, writer, and podcaster. He s been in the public eye for 22 years and is one of the funniest people I ve ever met. In this episode, we talk about how he got to where he is today, what it s like to grow up in the late 80s and early 90s in Los Angeles, and what it was like growing up in a small town in New Jersey. We also talk about his new book, "My Life on the Run," which is out now and is a memoir about his life growing up and how he ended up in Hollywood. Joe also talks about his relationship with his ex-wife and how they met and fell in love with each other. And of course, he talks about the time he almost got run over by a car and almost got into a car accident. This episode was recorded on location in Las Vegas, NV. Check it out! Joe Rogan Experience is a podcast by day, The Joe Rogans Experience by night, The J.R. Podcast by night. See you next Tuesday for the next episode of the J.J. Rogan Podcast. Thanks for listening and God bless you! -Jon Sorrentino and God Bless You, Blessings, Jon - Jon & Sarah Jon and Sarah - The J&S Podcast - Sarah & Sarah - Jon & Geri - The J-Rogan Experience by Night - by Day - by Night, by Night by Night and the J&R Podcast by Night is a Podcast by Day and Night by Day by Night by Night & Evening by Night. by Jon & Rory - by Jon and Rory - By Night and Rory by the J & Rory by Sarah & Rory, by Jon And Rory - by Jay and Rory, by The J & R by Jay & Rory? by Joe & Rory & The J and R by Night's Back by Night By Night by Joe and Rory & the J and Aby & Alyssa & The R & R by Mr. B & Aby and B & R & A & A by John & A by the P. & AY & B & B by Tom & B by the R & J & A& A. & G & C by J & K & A. by K & J by D & S by P.
Transcript
00:00:35.000
Ron White, Tony Hinchcliffe, him, all these guys.
00:01:01.000
And then I hooked up with Erica Florentine, Jimmy's niece, and she put it all together for me.
00:01:22.000
You know, I always think I've heard all the fucking stories and then another one pops up.
00:01:28.000
If you really could, like, document everything you've been through in your life, like, no one would believe it.
00:01:34.000
People still sometimes don't believe some of those stories.
00:01:41.000
The one thing that, writing it and reading it, I did the audio book.
00:01:53.000
And I'll go in there and just knock it off in two and a half weeks.
00:01:58.000
But once I read it, like, you know, because it's been in your head for a long time and shit.
00:02:02.000
Once I read it, I only got one thing out of this book.
00:02:09.000
When they picked me for a life, I got my money's worth.
00:02:12.000
Whether it was good or bad, you know what I'm saying?
00:02:14.000
Whether it was good or bad, I got my money's worth out of this life.
00:02:27.000
I was the biggest loser how many times I started over.
00:02:30.000
If you read that book, I must have started over 60 times.
00:02:35.000
Pick up, move, and go to another town and rob them blind.
00:02:46.000
It was so funny because I remember I was talking to some guys the other night in the green room about when I met you.
00:02:52.000
I was like, I had come to LA and I was just so not used to actors.
00:02:59.000
But I was so used to like comics and degenerate pool hall people.
00:03:05.000
And then I met you, and I was like, oh, I know you.
00:03:16.000
I remember, like, there's so many people that got weirded out by you.
00:03:19.000
It was so funny when I bring you around, like, news radio.
00:03:29.000
And you would go into the fucking, the green room where all the executives and you were eating all the shrimp cocktail.
00:03:35.000
And they were like, they were scared to say anything because like, that room was separated from everybody else's green room.
00:03:43.000
So they had their own thing where they go in there and everything was catered and beautiful and champagne and you just strolled in there and started eating shrimp cocktail and they're like, Who's this criminal-looking fellow who's eating a shrimp cocktail?
00:03:56.000
Well, they had the table with the regular food, and I remember they had chili.
00:04:02.000
I was broke, I was hungry, and I must have ate ten bowls of it.
00:04:05.000
And then I looked over, and there's all these little white dudes with, you know, ha, ha, ha, ha.
00:04:23.000
And then they came to you and you would die in a laugh.
00:04:36.000
I think the first, like, eight years you were like, I don't know if I can handle this guy.
00:04:42.000
Do you remember Stand Up New York with Sussman when I went off on the owner?
00:04:53.000
And he's like, you're not going to get a spot tonight.
00:04:55.000
I go, I didn't ask for a fucking spot, you asshole.
00:04:57.000
He just looked at me and was like, what the fuck, Joey?
00:05:03.000
But no, at the beginning, I know that you were like shaking your head a lot.
00:05:10.000
I love being around you because I know people like you.
00:05:17.000
It made me so uncomfortable because I never knew who they really were.
00:05:23.000
Not all of them, but it was just like there was enough of them out there that were trying to make it in Hollywood and they were putting on a show for everybody, everywhere they went.
00:05:35.000
With you, I was like, right away, I was like, oh, I know guys like you.
00:05:40.000
It was rough those couple years, because I would go to meetings and stuff, and people would go, I don't know.
00:05:49.000
And then I remember I went to HBO. Somebody got me a meeting at HBO, like in 98. And I had no success at all.
00:05:58.000
Like, I wasn't having any success at all, except for the Comedy Store.
00:06:06.000
I went with actors and agents, and you know how proper they are.
00:06:13.000
And I could just take it for so long, and I just went.
00:06:16.000
And I talked about growing up in a funeral parlor, picking up bodies, going to fucking JFK, and bringing the bodies back, and slinging them in the mouth of the guy's body.
00:06:27.000
The mouth would open on the body, because my friend had a funeral parlor.
00:06:39.000
And I was like, OK. And then after the new year, I gave them the notes.
00:06:45.000
Some guy hip-pocketed me and took me to a meeting.
00:06:53.000
I was like, OK, OK. And they were like, we don't know if this is going to work.
00:06:58.000
They go, we like the idea, but funeral ideas haven't worked.
00:07:04.000
And then six months later, fucking Six Feet Under came out.
00:07:15.000
It was about two hoodlums who worked at a funeral parlor.
00:07:20.000
But I think the concept is just constantly handling dead people.
00:07:25.000
There's something about that that never was really covered before.
00:07:30.000
I remember the first time I saw my grandfather was in an open casket, and the first time I saw his body, I remember immediately, it was very interesting, because one of the first things I felt was like, oh, he's not there.
00:07:43.000
You know, like, it's not just that someone's not alive anymore, like, he wasn't there.
00:07:49.000
That was when I started wondering, I wonder if a soul is a real thing.
00:07:53.000
I wonder what that is, that concept of what is the force inside of someone that causes them to be alive.
00:08:00.000
Because the strange thing about dead bodies is not just that they're a human body that's dead.
00:08:08.000
Like, you have a feeling that's very intangible.
00:08:15.000
When the person's not there, it's like, well, he's not there anymore.
00:08:20.000
It's not as simple as the heart's not beating and the lungs aren't catching oxygen.
00:08:29.000
And it's also, when you're looking at a body that's in an open casket, it's been drenched in formaldehyde and covered in makeup.
00:08:40.000
Now, they say that when you die, you lose how much pounds?
00:08:51.000
That was based on some sort of a study, but from what I understand, it's not real.
00:09:10.000
When you watch The Sopranos, they go to a wake every other week.
00:09:14.000
I've been there three years, and I already could have gone to like 18 wakes.
00:09:27.000
I would never let my daughter go to a wake now until she's 18, just because the effects it did to me.
00:09:35.000
I don't remember my father's wake, but I remember my friend's wakes from grammar school, and I remember my mother's wakes.
00:09:44.000
To the point where somebody else died when I was like a junior or a senior in high school and I didn't go to that wake.
00:09:56.000
I got exposed to it at a young age and it just wasn't healthy, man.
00:10:03.000
It didn't fuck with me as much as those caskets fucked with me.
00:10:08.000
So when my buddy had the funeral parlor years later, I volunteered for the job because I didn't want to have that creepiness between us, and that eliminated...
00:10:31.000
You know, but it's so weird how it's like the number one career to get into.
00:10:40.000
Like, off the bat, if you go to school, embalming school, whatever they call it, it's like a funeral director, the whole thing, they cover everything.
00:10:52.000
A year to make a hundred and something thousand dollars.
00:10:58.000
Yeah, if you're willing to work with dead people.
00:11:01.000
My friend's funeral parlor had a fireman that did the embalming.
00:11:11.000
I don't know what it's done during the embalming.
00:11:14.000
I know they break the spine, they drain the blood, they fill you with formaldehyde and shit.
00:11:19.000
But that whole process, and then you go back and look at the Aztecs and how they did.
00:11:25.000
The Chinese, they put you on a boat and they float you away.
00:11:34.000
Everybody had their own thing, which is very interesting.
00:11:38.000
The Aztecs, this, that, everybody had their own way of dealing with it.
00:11:45.000
I just don't think of going in there and sitting with a dead body for three hours.
00:11:50.000
And then I heard stories from Cuba where they had no embalming fluids and you would have to bury, your body would die and you would have to wake at your home.
00:12:00.000
Like in the 40s, 20s, they had wakes of people's homes without the embalming fluid.
00:12:05.000
And at one point, the fucking hand would pop up.
00:12:09.000
And you'd have to break the arm to put the casket down.
00:12:12.000
Because once that rigor mortis sets in that arm, that's a straight, that's fucking straight strength.
00:12:17.000
You're not just going to bend that arm in and do an arm bar or a kimura.
00:12:23.000
So they have to break the arm to put the arm down.
00:12:27.000
So when I was a kid, my mother would always go, if you hit your mother, your arm pops up in your fucking casket.
00:12:36.000
I'm going to walk into fucking hell with your arm up like Hitler.
00:12:43.000
You're the first person to tell me about the scams of the whole mortuary industry.
00:12:51.000
Even if you want to get an embalming, or even if you want to get someone cremated, you still have to get them embalmed.
00:12:59.000
You still have to fill them up with formaldehyde.
00:13:01.000
You were explaining the caskets, how they guilt you into getting a nicer casket.
00:13:08.000
You want to be buried in four pieces of wood or you want the Cadillac caskets?
00:13:16.000
But how weird is it that people give a fuck what the box looks like that they bury you in?
00:13:23.000
The things that people do to show that they cared when someone was alive.
00:14:01.000
It's all a natural part of the cycle of life of all living things.
00:14:09.000
And you could say, well, it was a good thing because you ever watch that HBO show with Dr. Michael Badden, Autopsy?
00:14:15.000
Exhumed people and they find out that the wife really did it.
00:14:25.000
In fact, they took Biden, what was his name, Michael Bowden?
00:14:29.000
He was retired and they took him back to get the autopsy on Epstein.
00:14:33.000
And they found out that he had a fracture in his neck that was indicative of being strangled with a ligature.
00:14:42.000
Yeah, and this wasn't like when people hang themselves.
00:14:45.000
When they hang themselves, the weight of it goes up because your body is hanging down.
00:14:52.000
This was down on his neck, like low, like someone strangled him from behind.
00:14:57.000
In his throat, the bones in his neck were fractured, which is also like a ligature strangulation.
00:15:10.000
They put Ghislaine in jail, and they never released a client list.
00:15:15.000
The fact that that's okay with people, and everybody's freaking out about Bud Light.
00:15:24.000
You should really care about that, because it's showing that people that are in power can probably have people killed and probably hide evidence that they did something that people would find atrocious.
00:15:42.000
The more of that shit that's out there, the more people realize how fucking ridiculous it is to think that these people that are in positions of power give a fuck about you.
00:15:57.000
Because at the end of the day, it don't matter.
00:16:05.000
Some couple asked me if I was a fucking Republican.
00:16:13.000
There's a couple next to you and you're talking, you're watching a game.
00:16:16.000
And she goes, are you a Republican or a Democrat?
00:16:24.000
I go, listen, I don't play that shit, okay, lady?
00:16:27.000
I go, all you motherfuckers have gotten too political in the last 10 years.
00:16:32.000
I go, I got here in 66. And I always paid attention to elections and what people said.
00:16:38.000
And by the time I was 18, I realized, you know what?
00:16:41.000
These people come along every four years with the same fucking story and nothing gets done.
00:16:45.000
So I chose a different path for my life instead of focusing on that.
00:16:53.000
You don't have to go to work and you're going to get your balls licked all day.
00:16:56.000
Until that fucking time, I get KLS because I still got to get up and be a thief every fucking day.
00:17:01.000
I still got to get up and hustle every fucking day.
00:17:08.000
And I'm still getting up, busting my fucking hump every fucking day.
00:17:17.000
But I think a good president, you just take for granted.
00:17:20.000
You don't think anything and just go about your life.
00:17:22.000
There was a lot of great presidents that we had.
00:17:24.000
But it makes the country safer if someone makes good decisions, if someone's a good figurehead.
00:17:33.000
The problem when someone isn't, whether it was Trump or whoever it was, when people mock them and are angry at them, it's just bad for morale.
00:17:45.000
I saw the last two or three presidents how much as Americans we backbite.
00:17:50.000
When I was a kid, we didn't backbite that much.
00:17:57.000
There was a lot of people that hated Kennedy, right?
00:17:59.000
Like that was one of the things about when he got assassinated, there was a lot of people that were very happy.
00:18:05.000
That's one of the kinkiest things in our history.
00:18:12.000
There was a lot of Republicans that did not like him.
00:18:19.000
And, you know, he had all this talk about secret societies, the being abhorrent, and that he wanted to disband the CIA. That motherfucker wanted to get us out of Vietnam.
00:18:36.000
Sexual proclivities and all, you know, all the documented things of him being a freak.
00:18:41.000
That's why those people became presidents in the first place.
00:18:47.000
And men who wanted power were all like, you know, like your stereotypical man in power.
00:18:54.000
Like that's, there's a reason why that stereotype exists.
00:18:57.000
But when you look at what he was trying to do for the country and trying to unite people and the speeches that he gave, To this day, they're fucking incredible.
00:19:10.000
Even talking about going to the moon, just the way he phrased it.
00:19:14.000
We choose to go to the moon, not because it's easy, because it is hard.
00:19:23.000
He wanted it to be a symbol of American excellence.
00:19:36.000
You know, those Cubans feel like he fucked them.
00:19:43.000
I've been told several different versions of it, that he was double-crossed, that they pulled out support.
00:19:50.000
They pulled out their support at the last minute.
00:19:55.000
I've heard he was an idiot, and I've heard he was a piece of shit, and I've heard, no, he got fucked.
00:20:00.000
So it's like, I would have to go do a deep dive.
00:20:04.000
You know, it's very difficult when you're reading some versions of history, because you can read a lot of versions of history that treat the Lee Harvey Oswald lone assassin stories if it's plausible.
00:20:20.000
But then you'll read, you know, David Lifton's book, Best Evidence, and you'll be like, there's no fucking way.
00:20:31.000
For sure, someone in the CIA had something to do with it because of Jolly West's involvement.
00:20:39.000
Jolly West was the guy that was the head of NK Ultra.
00:20:42.000
He was the guy that dosed up Manson and they ran the Haight-Ashbury free clinic.
00:20:51.000
The CIA ran a free clinic in San Francisco for fucking decades.
00:20:56.000
And then they ran Operation Midnight Climax, where they would dose up Johns with acid.
00:21:04.000
They'd think they'd go to have sex, and the woman would give them a drink, and they're drinking acid.
00:21:09.000
And they'd just get dosed up, and then they'd study these guys.
00:21:16.000
When he got, when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, he went to visit Jack Ruby in prison.
00:21:24.000
And from that moment on, Jack Ruby lost his fucking mind.
00:21:28.000
He was hiding underneath the bed, saying the Jews are being incinerated, they're coming to kill us all.
00:21:36.000
I think they just dosed that guy into a fucking coma, and then after they dosed him into a coma, they gave him cancer.
00:21:49.000
And the idea that no one was involved in that assassination other than Lee Harvey Oswald, that doesn't make any sense.
00:21:55.000
Even if Lee Harvey Oswald was the only one who pulled the trigger.
00:21:59.000
Lee Harvey Oswald was traveling back and forth to Russia.
00:22:05.000
Like, the fact that this is in the middle of the Cold War.
00:22:12.000
I think they set him up from A to Z. Somebody was giving him money, letting him know.
00:22:18.000
Listen, you don't want to base yourself on stupid things, but remember that speech that that dude gave Kevin Costner?
00:22:34.000
The guy, that motherfucker, got offered a deal for Animal House.
00:22:39.000
He would have been, like, $11 million, he took the $10,000 one payment.
00:22:56.000
The guy got shot, and within 10 minutes, they already had a whole background on this guy.
00:23:10.000
Yeah, newspapers were already reporting stories on him, on him, who he was, what his background was.
00:23:19.000
I started, listen, you know when people tell you to watch a show?
00:23:23.000
And you're like, I don't want to watch that fucking show.
00:23:25.000
But people tell you constantly, watch that show, watch that show.
00:23:28.000
I've recently put on a show, I didn't know what to expect, Joe Rogan.
00:23:42.000
It's that dude that played Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the brother that goes after Sean Penn, the big dude, Forrest Whitaker, the fucking great actor.
00:24:01.000
So it's about that guy that Denzel Washington played.
00:24:05.000
I don't want you to think, oh, Joey showed up here with this...
00:24:09.000
This show, first of all, the first season, basically by Muhammad Ali in Harlem.
00:24:18.000
K... Malcolm X... And they already told him, listen, your name is Muhammad Ali, but we're not going to change it until you win the championship, the title, because you'll lose the white sponsors,
00:24:38.000
But not only that story, it talks about civil rights.
00:24:44.000
What they saw, like, in Chicago, how they knew for sure was the mob in the CIA that killed Kennedy.
00:24:50.000
They talk about how when Malcolm X was gonna meet...
00:24:54.000
He was gonna do a speech at the United Nations with Che Guevara.
00:25:09.000
You have to tie a gangster in with political because then he blows up that pilot.
00:25:20.000
That all these gangsters had something to do with this history.
00:25:28.000
That fucking dude that blows his head off in Full Metal Jacket.
00:25:55.000
And the guy Giancarlo Esposito, who's a fucking G, he plays a congressman.
00:26:00.000
And he's always meeting with presidents, but Bumpy's wife works for him.
00:26:09.000
Hulu, the first two seasons, and MGM Plus, the last season.
00:26:20.000
You know, at the end of the week, you pay for so many.
00:26:28.000
It's all this little, you know, the Cuban dude, how all he wanted.
00:26:32.000
Battle, that dude that we talked about with T.J. English.
00:26:35.000
All he wanted, he was selling code just to take Cuba back.
00:26:40.000
Can you imagine you coming to me going, Joey, we're gonna do this, this, this, but the fucking final result of this money is me going back to Palermo to take my grandfather's village back.
00:27:03.000
So they tried, they get with the CIA and they show how many times they tried to kill Operation Mongoose, the fucking wetsuits, the fucking cigar that explodes.
00:27:20.000
Remember when that motherfucker walked on the subway in New York?
00:27:25.000
And he walked on, that's what they show in that.
00:27:26.000
He walked on the subway in New York and the guy goes, you got a bulletproof vest and he lowers it and he goes, I got nothing on it.
00:27:39.000
Forrest Whitaker's a fucking great actor, isn't he?
00:27:44.000
He played the guy that hustled Fast Eddie Felsen.
00:27:53.000
He hustles him out of all this money, and at the end he goes, Can I ask you a question?
00:28:06.000
Fast Eddie went in there with a big ego, thinking he was this man, this big-time pool hustler from the 1960s, and Forrest Whitaker plays this guy that's, like, super eccentric, who hustles him out of all his money, and then that's his fuck you at the end.
00:28:25.000
Forrest Whitaker's played some fucking good roles, too.
00:28:49.000
He seems like a guy that would be a nightmare to have a political talk with, though.
00:28:54.000
Like if you sit in the craft service table and he starts breaking about the Biden administration's new plans for this or that, you'd be like, oh, my God.
00:29:20.000
Yeah, the one from surgery, from my knee surgery three years ago.
00:29:27.000
I go to the gym at 10. You go to the gym, you're drinking.
00:29:31.000
And then I go, let me go up north for something, a meeting or something.
00:30:03.000
The traffic in and out of New York City is probably the worst traffic I've ever experienced.
00:30:09.000
That shit that we left in LA had his moments too.
00:30:13.000
When the 10 goes to the 405 at 430, that was the worst.
00:30:17.000
There's some ways into the city though where it feels like there's only one way.
00:30:20.000
Whereas if you're going down to like Orange County, there's a few different ways.
00:30:26.000
You can kind of skirt around it up until you get deep in.
00:30:29.000
Once you get near San Diego, you're kind of fucked.
00:30:34.000
Driving from L.A. Remember we'd do like the La Jolla Comedy Store?
00:30:39.000
You would leave at 1. I would leave at 6. And do 90 on the shoulder the whole way.
00:30:44.000
Because if you left at 1, it was still 4 hours.
00:30:48.000
So either you had to leave at 6, or you had to leave at like 6 in the morning, or you had to leave at like 6 o'clock at night, which would give you a two-hour window.
00:31:05.000
Do you remember I used to make it back from San Diego in, I think, like an hour?
00:31:16.000
I would leave San Diego, La Jolla at a quarter to twelve.
00:31:22.000
And I would make it to my Coke dealer's house by 1 a.m.
00:31:28.000
What is the distance between Los Angeles and San Diego?
00:31:34.000
So I would get on the 5. I think it's 110. Okay, I would get on the 5. This is it.
00:31:39.000
Get on the 5, do 75. Once you're like five miles away from immigration, where they ask you to stop for fruit, I would kick it to 100. 118. I would kick it to 100, and then once I'd pass the fruit, I'd slow down to the speed limit,
00:31:55.000
and from there to Irvine, I'd do 100. The next thing you knew, it said LA, 29 miles.
00:32:02.000
I used to fucking, I remember I got stopped a few times.
00:32:05.000
And the cops pulled me over, you know how fast you were going, but because I wasn't drinking.
00:32:22.000
Aren't you glad your coke days were before the fentanyl problem?
00:32:29.000
This is why I only do anything I get from who I know.
00:32:33.000
I'm to a point now where I just deal with laughing gas.
00:32:37.000
I eat that mushrooms, I eat anything from them because I know where I'm getting it from.
00:32:43.000
In LA now, you gotta be really careful with anything you touch.
00:32:48.000
Even if it's prescription, you gotta be fucking careful.
00:32:55.000
Well, I heard that people were buying testing kits for cocaine.
00:33:07.000
You know, snorting coke was always a fucking Russian roulette, right?
00:33:15.000
Now you can either die of a fucking heart attack or fentanyl.
00:33:26.000
They're putting in edibles in LA. That's everything.
00:33:39.000
You really gotta be careful what you're putting in you now.
00:33:50.000
How much fentanyl is coming in and how many people are dying from that shit.
00:33:54.000
Didn't they say now they're giving you Narcan at home?
00:33:59.000
I don't know if that's the case, but I know a lot of people are buying Narcan and sending it to their kids at college.
00:34:09.000
Scary shit, man, because it's like, this is not something that anybody had to deal with before.
00:34:13.000
Like, this level of contamination was something that's so deadly.
00:34:19.000
When you get like, I think it was like 100,000 people one year died of overdoses.
00:34:38.000
And the amount that can kill you is so small that if you look at a penny, it'd be like a tiny little piece on a penny.
00:34:45.000
Like, there's an image that's online, like a famous image of the...
00:34:50.000
There's an amount of fentanyl that can kill you, and it's next to a penny.
00:35:01.000
So, you know, in medications, it's used, but they know what the dosage is.
00:35:07.000
When you're getting it from the cartel, someone's mixing it in a bathtub in Tijuana.
00:35:22.000
It's basically the amount of coke, the amount of fentanyl that's in Lincoln's beard.
00:35:26.000
If you take that amount from Lincoln's beard, if you're looking at a penny, that'll kill you.
00:35:35.000
And the fact that they mix that into everything, it's fucking nuts, man.
00:35:47.000
And it's scary how they'll just hand out pain pills to people.
00:35:57.000
I learned a very valuable lesson from those pills with my last surgery.
00:36:03.000
The lesson is I learned that I think those fucking Oxycontins promote more pain.
00:36:11.000
I can tell you this now after the surgery, because when I had the right knee surgery, okay, number one, I got to give it to New Jersey, though.
00:36:19.000
New Jersey, listen, I know a pharmacist, and she tells me that she used to work in Staten Island.
00:36:25.000
When somebody goes in there for pain pills in Staten Island, they give them $100.
00:36:38.000
If you're going to take them for pain every six hours, that don't add up.
00:36:42.000
They didn't give you enough from the beginning.
00:36:46.000
So they're worried about you becoming addicted.
00:36:58.000
Not the way it was in LA. But Staten Island's open...
00:37:01.000
Yeah, because New York State is different prescription things.
00:37:04.000
So when a doctor prescribes you OxyContin in New York or Staten Island or for the five boroughs, they give you like 90 of them.
00:37:13.000
In New Jersey, they give you 19. Look, I thought the pharmacy was robbing me.
00:37:18.000
Like, I would get home and go, where'd all the pills go?
00:37:25.000
They don't give them to you to drive you crazy no more.
00:37:28.000
But I had one prescription and then it took me three days to get another one.
00:37:35.000
And then I took another prescription and by the end of that week...
00:37:41.000
And it got to a point one day where it was that bone by my ankle.
00:37:53.000
So I think the pain was promoting The pill was promoting my pain.
00:37:59.000
Because once I threw the pain pills away, I'd have no more pain.
00:38:02.000
And what was the decision to throw the pain pills away?
00:38:20.000
It's when you do those things every day, like when you get a surgery and they give you those things every day, that's when I think it's a problem.
00:38:27.000
Because when I took the fat ball out of my That was horrible.
00:38:31.000
At the end of that prescription, and I was a full junkie then, I did not feel good, Papa.
00:38:40.000
It took me a couple weeks, and it wasn't, you know, you do the probiotics, you do all that shit.
00:38:47.000
When I was on the Xanax, it was basically during the pandemic.
00:38:55.000
Because he was sending me 90 a month from 2012. On automatic monthly.
00:39:10.000
When I had my little situation at the comedy store that we goofed about.
00:39:17.000
There's no way I should be on a standing walking 10 count.
00:39:21.000
That's what that was that night, when I had to follow Morgan Murphy.
00:39:26.000
Doug, I asked Paulie Shaw, I told you this story, and we laughed about it.
00:39:31.000
But, Doug, now thinking about it, I should have done something.
00:39:40.000
Yes, you were coming in later, because on Saturdays, I used to close the original room.
00:39:52.000
You know, Saturday night, just look at the girls.
00:39:57.000
I walk to the thing, and as I'm walking, I walk up the steps to the original room, and Morgan's on stage, and Paulie's standing there laughing at her.
00:40:06.000
And I walk up, and I'm like, damn, I don't fucking feel good.
00:40:18.000
Whenever I had anxiety in the original room, I had a window.
00:40:22.000
When I'm on stage, I got a window on the right.
00:40:29.000
That day in particular, when I went in there, I didn't see a fucking window.
00:40:40.000
So I walked down the stairs just to look at the door.
00:40:47.000
I thought I was going to fucking have a heart attack.
00:40:57.000
But I didn't explain it to you correctly because I was cracking a joke.
00:41:04.000
I remember walking past Paulie, and that's it, Joe.
00:41:10.000
And then I remember waking up on stage and people laughing, and I was probably on automatic pilot.
00:41:23.000
I went to the doctor, and he goes, what was that?
00:41:27.000
Kept having these little panic attacks, little panic attacks.
00:41:40.000
I would take it on the road if I went on a plane or something like that.
00:41:45.000
You got to remember, too, it was your walking contradiction.
00:41:49.000
I'm talking about myself because you said it best.
00:41:53.000
I'm eating 2,000 milligrams of THC and scaring the fuck out of myself, right?
00:41:59.000
Then the Xanax, I would take the Xanax to calm me down off the anxiety.
00:42:09.000
Those edible weed sessions, when you do too many of them, I do think they make people very anxious.
00:42:15.000
I think they just shift the pole of your brain.
00:42:25.000
My big problem, Joe, is still to this day asleep.
00:42:29.000
So now, two nights, three nights a week, I drink a bodybuilder sleeping thing.
00:42:35.000
Do you have a hard time sleeping because you're not tired?
00:42:37.000
Do you have a hard time sleeping because you're thinking?
00:42:56.000
I'm not looking to stay up till 4, but I'm not going to bed at 9.30.
00:42:59.000
So I'm tired about 9, but I push the envelope a little bit.
00:43:13.000
Once I go up there, bro, I'm thinking about the guy who came to my house who asked me if he could take an orange, but he took three instead.
00:43:24.000
Yeah, and you're like, that was 11 years ago, Joey.
00:43:27.000
I think about the time I bombed in the original room following Don Myrera, like, does it matter?
00:43:32.000
I think about the time I ate a bucket of dicks in North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
00:43:37.000
Does it really matter that you ate a bag of dicks?
00:43:47.000
I got the Whoop Watch to help me with recovery because I was lifting and going into jiu-jitsu and my back would hurt.
00:43:52.000
So I want to figure out what kind of calories I could do and I won't go over those.
00:43:58.000
If I could do those five days a week, that's fine.
00:44:00.000
But I can't go in there, burn 800 fucking calories in jiu-jitsu and expect a deadlift the next day.
00:44:10.000
It's helped me sleep better because I finally realized, oh, you slept four hours last night.
00:44:21.000
So I got it up from four and a half hours of sleep to eight hours pretty much.
00:44:24.000
Last night I only slept like five because of the flight.
00:44:31.000
Now I'm sleeping 11.30 to 8. Don't get me wrong.
00:44:45.000
But when I was doing comedy, there was no sleep, Joe.
00:44:54.000
You know, everybody thought I would leave the store because I was going to do something bad.
00:44:58.000
Do you know why I was leaving the store before midnight?
00:45:04.000
Because Starbucks is open till midnight in Studio City.
00:45:07.000
And God forbid I didn't catch my flat white before midnight.
00:45:11.000
God forbid I didn't catch my grande flat white before midnight.
00:45:15.000
And then I'll call you tomorrow and tell you how I didn't sleep last night.
00:45:22.000
Now I have an espresso at 5 and I'm not sleeping.
00:45:34.000
I eat a chocolate something, I can't fucking sleep that night now.
00:45:38.000
I really focused on my sleep the last couple years, you know, especially since I got this whoop about 16, 17 months ago.
00:45:46.000
That's what's really improved in my life, is the sleep.
00:45:51.000
If I go to jiu-jitsu, I do the blue belt class, I need a nap jack.
00:45:55.000
I need a little nap from five to six, you know?
00:46:01.000
But when I started popping the Xanax, the high point was maybe May of during the pandemic.
00:46:09.000
Like, I couldn't leave the house without popping the Xanax, and then when I get in the car, I pop another one.
00:46:23.000
I can't take sleeping pills, and I can't take the strong Xanax, so I have to take the little footballs.
00:46:29.000
But I was taking eight to ten of those motherfuckers a day.
00:46:33.000
And then when I landed in Jersey, what had happened was, you know how you and Tom had that conversation about my tolerance?
00:46:41.000
That tolerance, dog, I think, as you can tell, I think a lot about this shit.
00:46:46.000
You had a conversation with me a couple years ago about your Romero getting punched in the face in his eye socket.
00:46:52.000
And when he got into the green room, when the doctor saw him after the fight, his eye socket was healed.
00:47:01.000
I think about what you were talking about my tolerance with the edibles and stuff.
00:47:08.000
When I was a child, the doctor would have to come to my house two days in a row for years.
00:47:14.000
They'd have to shoot me with penicillin on Monday and then come back on Tuesday and shoot me again because I would never take the penicillin.
00:47:22.000
You know, I had a lot of problems with my throat as a kid and whatever, fucking tonsils and shit.
00:47:33.000
All those years, Joe, they would always have to shoot me two or three times with penicillin.
00:47:37.000
The same penicillin they would give you one shot of.
00:47:48.000
Because I could drink something with Jamie right now and I won't fall over.
00:47:52.000
But that's what's always pissed me off about alcohol.
00:47:54.000
That I could drink a few alcohol shots, feel okay, but then if I push the envelope, that's when I feel shitty.
00:48:01.000
But my tolerance with alcohol and with cocaine and alcohol, shit.
00:48:05.000
I could drink a case of Budweiser, you know, cans.
00:48:11.000
I always used to have to take him to the corner store, the liquor store, to get 40 ounces.
00:48:17.000
He would calm himself down with like a big malt liquor.
00:48:27.000
But I realized when I got the jersey that, yeah, I got the jersey August 9th or something on your birth, August something.
00:48:34.000
Two days after I got the jersey, I had something like a weird, mild heart attack.
00:48:45.000
I didn't realize that until I went to the knee surgery.
00:48:48.000
And one of the assistants caught it because I couldn't sleep.
00:49:17.000
You can't quit alcohol, and you can't quit benzos.
00:49:23.000
So what I had to do was take whatever I was eating, which was eight of those things a day, and work myself backwards.
00:49:44.000
You don't have no idea what life is till your central nervous system is fucked with.
00:50:11.000
So your body's just freaking out that it doesn't have it in the system.
00:50:20.000
So even the six months slowly transitioning off, even that was rough?
00:50:26.000
Because I had to break them into two parts, the Xanax.
00:50:29.000
So I would get up in the morning, eat breakfast, workout, and then pop a Xanax.
00:50:33.000
And then go the whole day, I'm gonna tell you why I did six months.
00:50:38.000
I would go the whole day without a Xanax and then pop one at night and deal with it just to help me go to sleep.
00:50:44.000
But that whole time, I would go to the pool every day.
00:50:47.000
I would put my feet in the grass and try to, you know, just get me back because it was central nervous system shit.
00:51:12.000
Rich Voss told me to go fucking do a parking lot.
00:51:25.000
There's a little stage, and you can see the bats flapping behind the comics and shit.
00:51:29.000
And I told Rich the next way, Rich, what's with all those bats?
00:51:43.000
So when I was going through all this, I used to just sit on my bed.
00:52:12.000
And I always noticed that after I took the pill, that feeling would start again.
00:52:16.000
So when I went to the gym in the morning and did all that shit, I was fine.
00:52:23.000
And once I took that nighttime Xanax, I felt like shit.
00:53:02.000
They can give you prescriptions, but they're not really a doctor.
00:53:05.000
I signed up with one of those, and she put me on this plan, like just what to eat and do all that stuff.
00:53:12.000
And one day I called, and I said, listen, man, I got a funny feeling that every time I take these pills, it makes me feel worse.
00:53:19.000
I go, because when I go to the gym, I'm feeling great.
00:53:27.000
Because I take clonidine already for blood pressure, and that stops strokes.
00:53:37.000
But I'll, dog, I will never, the withdrawal, the withdrawal, the withdrawal was horrible, Joe.
00:53:51.000
Listen, if I was buying this shit on the street from some kind named fucking Pedro or something, then I would have a problem.
00:53:58.000
When your doctor gives it to you, you think it's normal.
00:54:06.000
It's for short periods of time until they figure out what to give you.
00:54:10.000
Whether they give you whatever the fuck they gotta give you.
00:54:13.000
How long does it take before your body gets addicted?
00:54:19.000
There's so many of these creepy medications out there, Joey, that people are just taking.
00:54:24.000
You know, there's some medications that people kill themselves.
00:54:29.000
Well, there's definitely medications for the side effects of suicidal thoughts.
00:54:32.000
I just didn't want to feel like this ever again.
00:54:38.000
Like, I never really drank, but when I moved to Jersey, I was drinking sangrias when I went out.
00:54:43.000
And one night I thought I was bad Joe Rogan and I got an Italian Old Fashioned.
00:55:03.000
You know, I always feel bad that I don't drink.
00:55:09.000
I wish I could be sociable and have a red wine, Joe.
00:55:20.000
Where you walk into somebody's house and people just gave you a drink.
00:55:36.000
Do you know when you do the Tonight Show, they would have a cart?
00:55:38.000
They would pull a fucking bar cart into your green room?
00:55:45.000
When I did the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, he gets you booze before you go out there.
00:56:11.000
And you got your own bag with the Joe Rogan experience on it.
00:56:23.000
I have people that are non-comics hitting me up.
00:56:27.000
This is just a lot of noise on the microphones.
00:56:29.000
I know, I'm trying to figure out what to get to smoke next, bro.
00:56:50.000
They're gonna open up an AC. They've got to fix the laws in Texas.
00:56:55.000
Basically, marijuana is decriminalized in the city of Austin, but the fucking law is dumb.
00:57:01.000
And these people don't realize it's dumb because they've got it connected to leftists and hippies.
00:57:08.000
There's a lot of ranchers and farmers that like to smoke weed.
00:57:13.000
It makes you love your children more, makes you stare at the stars, makes food taste better, makes sex feel better.
00:57:19.000
You fucking idiots that are making it illegal are ruining the world.
00:57:23.000
And they say that it's gonna ruin people, yeah.
00:57:26.000
It's gonna ruin people, just like cheeseburgers are gonna ruin people, and gambling is gonna ruin people, and alcohol is gonna ruin people.
00:57:33.000
All those things that are legal and should be legal.
00:57:35.000
Because you gotta give people the opportunity to fuck up their own life.
00:57:39.000
Work on counseling, she'd give people advice, she'd give people some sort of resources where they could get out of any sort of hole they're in, whatever addiction they might have, but you gotta leave people the fuck alone.
00:57:55.000
And if you don't have the freedom to choose what you put in your own body, especially when we're talking about something that is Beneficial, medically, psychologically, physically, not physically addictive, doesn't kill anyone.
00:58:10.000
The only way you die from it, you literally have to do something stupid because you're high.
00:58:16.000
If I haven't died from it, ain't nobody gonna die from marijuana.
00:58:21.000
The only time you die is a fucking brick of marijuana falls out of the sky and hits you in the head.
00:58:31.000
But, we're still dealing with a bunch of goofy laws.
00:58:33.000
And I think they keep these laws goofy on purpose.
00:58:35.000
They keep the culture war going because it's an easy distraction from other things.
00:58:56.000
You know, when you go to those casinos in Lake Connecticut, they're like, Jesus Christ, there's so many people that are just sick.
00:59:01.000
A lot of people having a good time, just out on a date.
00:59:04.000
Let's go to the casino, play a couple of hands of blackjack.
00:59:07.000
But there's a lot of just sick fucking gambling junkies in there.
00:59:13.000
When you see them and they have their wheelchairs and they got the oxygen mask and they're smoking a cigarette in the casino, you're like, wow.
00:59:22.000
Hey, you gotta let people do that if that's what they want to do.
00:59:25.000
How about the chick last week that was winning so much money she just started pissing at the casino.
00:59:43.000
Even me, when I pee in the bottle, I have a little tissue to dry the helmet off.
01:00:05.000
Regardless of the video's legitimacy, urinating on Casino Florence isn't as uncommon as one might think.
01:00:18.000
This guy said that Arnie Wexler, a recovered problem gambler who operated a New Jersey-based gambling hotline and counseling service at the time, told the Louisville Courier Journal that many heavy gamblers don adult diapers to avoid having to leave a slot machine or gaming table.
01:00:35.000
If they don't come prepared, he said, they just pee in the seat.
01:00:42.000
Imagine walking into a casino, you just smell piss.
01:00:45.000
You just know so many people have been pissing on the floor, you can smell it.
01:00:57.000
If you pee in your pants, you gotta leave that shit on?
01:00:59.000
What would you rather have, diapers or be paralyzed?
01:01:10.000
You're going to tell me you're going to shit in a diaper and sit in it for two hours?
01:01:13.000
I don't think the shit thing is as big of an issue.
01:01:20.000
You might be shitting your pants a little bit, too.
01:01:24.000
Depends on your digestive system and your diet.
01:01:31.000
There's a lot of problems out there in the world, though.
01:01:39.000
We're alive and kicking in 2023, one of the most interesting times to be alive.
01:01:43.000
And you and I grew up in a time where there was no internet.
01:01:47.000
We got to experience this whole wave of change over the world.
01:01:51.000
The erosion of faith in politicians and media is at an all-time high.
01:01:59.000
Just started to wake up to how fucking insane this world is organized and run.
01:02:04.000
And we're starting to realize that, hey, you know, this is almost over for whoever is listening to this.
01:02:08.000
If you're listening to this and you're in your 40s, you're halfway there, kid.
01:02:13.000
If you're listening in your 20s, if nothing terrible happens to you, you don't accidentally overdose on fentanyl, you got a solid 60 years left if everything goes great.
01:02:22.000
If you're taking care of yourself, maybe you'll make it to 90. Maybe.
01:02:34.000
I was hoping for like 100. After that, what do you want?
01:02:44.000
I think if you could stay alive for longer, you'd make less mistakes, you'd understand yourself more.
01:02:49.000
They'd be like a value that you could give to other people if you have energy.
01:02:53.000
Like, people can learn things from other people that have already experienced life.
01:02:56.000
That's why we love hearing stories and hearing wise people talk about things.
01:03:00.000
The more I experience life, the more I understand me and other people, and the more I talk to people, the more I understand people, the better I get at it, the better I get at life.
01:03:22.000
If you could just stay positive and stay around loving people and be a good person and be someone that people like to be around.
01:03:39.000
You said that your biggest fear was turning old.
01:03:48.000
And my biggest fear all these years, honest to God, was not dying or anything.
01:03:55.000
I hate to say this to you, and you're going to understand what I'm saying right off the bat.
01:04:01.000
I didn't want to become one of the comics at the store when we got there.
01:04:09.000
I didn't want to call you when I was 60 and go, dog, I'm taking this cruise.
01:04:13.000
I need to come on the podcast to change my life, as we both heard from people.
01:04:18.000
I did not want to be one of those guys, and that is what I'm proudest of the most.
01:04:25.000
I'm very proud that I found alternatives that I have to keep bothering people at clubs to put me on.
01:04:41.000
Yeah, but those guys, they're always going to exist.
01:04:51.000
Where we got very lucky, Joey, is that we both experienced, like, you did movies, The Longest Yard, we did a bunch of stuff.
01:05:02.000
We did a bunch of stuff, but then the internet came along right when we were, like, fully developed, like, real comics.
01:05:12.000
And then when everybody transitioned into podcasting, and everybody transitioned into like, YouTube became like the best platform for putting out a comedy special.
01:05:20.000
And we all learned who's the great comics from listening to each other.
01:05:25.000
You know, people would talk about, have you seen Shane Gillis, holy shit, Mark Norman, oh my god, that guy's funny.
01:05:29.000
And then everybody here, and it becomes this organic network.
01:05:33.000
But it all happened, we got so fortunate that we caught that wave every step of the way at the right time.
01:05:44.000
Take the mainstream stuff to use it to transition into putting your stuff online.
01:06:06.000
Joey, I was not going to open up a fucking club.
01:06:14.000
We need these crazy people that are willing to deal with stand-up comedians every week and hoping that they don't have a fucking overdose after the Friday night show and hoping that they show up for radio at 6 o'clock in the morning to promote the gig.
01:06:30.000
Anybody who wants to do stand-up comedy is out of their fucking mind.
01:06:39.000
I want to look forward to seeing them and hugging them.
01:06:42.000
I don't want to think, this guy's fucking me out of money, and my bonuses are short, and all that.
01:06:48.000
I just want to give everybody a hug, say hi to the waitstaff, what's up, what's up?
01:07:04.000
First of all, COVID, me looking at all the chaos in LA going, this ain't getting better.
01:07:20.000
Joey, I was driving through, I think it was Burbank.
01:07:30.000
So I was like, I'm getting the fuck out of here.
01:07:32.000
And when I got to LA, or got to Austin rather, I was like, shit, I need a club.
01:07:37.000
We were working out the Vulcan, which was nice, but it wasn't set up as a community.
01:07:40.000
It wasn't set up that was like, where we could all be together and hang like we did at the store.
01:07:46.000
I was like, Jesus, that's so important for the culture of stand-up.
01:07:50.000
It's so important for the comics to have a sense of community.
01:07:53.000
And so I was like, all right, I gotta open up a fucking club.
01:07:56.000
And at the same time, everybody had been fired from the Comedy Store.
01:08:03.000
So I got all the best people from the store to come here.
01:08:07.000
When I got Curtis and Adam and Eric and Jody and Jesus Christ and Carrie Mitchell to run the bar, I was like, holy shit, man.
01:08:16.000
And imagine how many people were ready to leave.
01:08:18.000
Bro, and Adam Egott, that guy's the fucking man.
01:08:23.000
They come here, and it's so beautiful, and people are so nice.
01:08:27.000
And it all, like, every step of the way, it's like I rode this wave perfect.
01:08:31.000
This building that I got, they didn't even want to sell the building.
01:08:37.000
They didn't want to sell it, but they decided, they offered me a price, I didn't even negotiate, they said, I'll take it.
01:08:43.000
And they were just happy that it was going to stay a live entertainment venue.
01:08:47.000
They were worried it would maybe become a hotel or something, or a restaurant.
01:08:50.000
They wanted it to be a live entertainment venue like it always was.
01:08:53.000
I want you to go back to what you were talking about in L.A. with your liberal friends asking you.
01:08:57.000
That's a good topic you brought up because I always feel that the beginning of my downfall with the fear just wasn't the pandemic.
01:09:07.000
I'm not scared to fucking die from a fucking cold.
01:09:11.000
It wasn't the pandemic, but the pandemic was fucking with me.
01:09:14.000
The thing that fucked with me the most was what my neighborhood had become.
01:09:37.000
I saw a guy hitting people with a 4x4, not a 2x4.
01:09:48.000
I saw a white guy and an African-American hooker fighting at CVS at 10 in the morning in Studio City.
01:10:00.000
I've been going to that fucking thing for five years, that CVS. That's why I got all my prescriptions and shit.
01:10:10.000
So I kept feeling that they were going to kick the front door in.
01:10:20.000
And he brought me like a fucking.45 with a bazooka and shit.
01:10:29.000
This motherfucker came back three days later with like a fucking AR-15 in a suitcase with a violin.
01:10:36.000
So now one thing I don't like, I do not like weapons.
01:10:44.000
You don't want to want to have a weapon, right?
01:10:46.000
You don't want to feel that you need to have a weapon, though.
01:10:51.000
I don't ever want to feel like I have a weapon.
01:10:58.000
And I always said that when I put weapons on, I met more people that had weapons on.
01:11:05.000
When I was a civilian, hugging people, I never felt a weapon.
01:11:08.000
But when I put a weapon on in 86, for three years after I got arrested, most people I dealt with had a weapon, so I considered it a magnet.
01:11:17.000
For me, in my mind, it felt like a magnet of fucking bad shit.
01:11:22.000
Those two guns I had in the house, that didn't feel right with me.
01:11:26.000
You weren't gonna bust into my house and hurt my daughter or my wife.
01:11:32.000
But having those two weapons in the house did not feel good with me.
01:11:35.000
California has very creepy laws when it comes to that, too.
01:11:42.000
Get rid of that gun before the cops even get there.
01:12:04.000
And then on the day I flew back here, I'll never forget that I had that.
01:12:13.000
And the people called me, and they're like, are you bringing a weapon with you on the plane?
01:12:18.000
During COVID, I had the cats and shit, you know?
01:12:21.000
So I go, yeah, I'm going to bring the gun with me.
01:12:29.000
I called him next month, I go, come pick up this fucking 45 from me.
01:12:40.000
When I saw Latin Kings spray paint on my daughter's school, Koufax Elementary, same school, Bert sent his kids, that wasn't good.
01:12:49.000
I just saw a lot of shit up there that I would never saw in the valley.
01:12:53.000
You see it in Hollywood, you know, shit like that.
01:12:57.000
So that's good that you brought that up because I forgot how scary it was.
01:13:16.000
And these people had blocked the door of the Target with a dumpster and lit the dumpster on fire.
01:13:23.000
And they were telling everybody to get out of the building, put down whatever you're purchasing, run out of the exit right now.
01:13:36.000
And after the George Floyd death, when it was the riots and they lit the cop cars on fire, there was this real feeling, this real fuck the police, we're gonna do whatever the fuck we want and no one's gonna stop it.
01:13:48.000
And the police seemed hesitant to do things too.
01:13:58.000
You've got to recognize when things are changing and when they're not going to get better because there's no resources in place.
01:14:07.000
If you're defunding the police, that is a totally wrong approach to deal with an excess of crime.
01:14:13.000
What you need is better funding and you need better training and better people as police officers and better respect for police officers.
01:14:21.000
You need to have an understanding that they're very, very necessary.
01:14:24.000
And one of the things that people found is that as soon as crime starts fucking scaling up, in every city people are calling for the cops.
01:14:31.000
Even politicians in San Francisco that were actively, like, saying we should defund the police.
01:14:37.000
They were tweeting we should defund the police.
01:14:38.000
Then crime starts kicking up, they're like, we can't even get the cops to come out.
01:14:47.000
Like, do you think that somehow or another having less police equals less crime?
01:14:54.000
Like, how would you think everybody's going to get kumbaya on you?
01:14:57.000
No, you're just going to embolden criminals and you're going to terrify people.
01:15:01.000
And then things are going to scale worse and worse.
01:15:04.000
And if you keep doing the same thing to try to fix it, it's never going to get better.
01:15:14.000
You ever go to a fucking club, like a club, and they're playing disco music, and all of a sudden some fat fuck like me yells, put on Skynyrd!
01:15:26.000
When I heard the term, debunk the police, that's what it felt like.
01:15:31.000
Until people started saying, that's a great idea.
01:15:36.000
Too many people were yelling, put on Skynyrd with different ideas at that point.
01:15:44.000
You're going to hear this from me one fucking time.
01:15:48.000
Somewhere along the line, I lost my fucking way.
01:15:50.000
Somewhere along the line, when you suffer a traumatic experience when you're a young man, you stay stuck for a few years.
01:15:58.000
That's why women become, you know, they become, what is that word?
01:16:06.000
When you like to fuck, the prostitutes, whatever that fucking word is.
01:16:13.000
You know, when you suffer a dad or a mom or a grandmother you were tight with, You get stalled for a couple of years.
01:16:23.000
You just don't grow until the reality comes to you of what happened.
01:16:28.000
You're still in shock when your mom dies or your father dies.
01:16:31.000
And somewhere along the line, I went off the rails.
01:16:38.000
In all the stories I tell you, you never hear any disrespect of a police officer.
01:16:51.000
P.A.L. P.A.L. Believe that's Ledif League on 88th Street in Amsterdam.
01:17:02.000
They took you to the 25th precinct, and you shot at targets.
01:17:10.000
Fucking baddest PAO boxing coach, Cuban coach, Mr. Gamio.
01:17:19.000
But PAO, Mr. Marino, that dude used to drive us everywhere.
01:17:28.000
Once I got to Jersey, I hung out with a rough crew or something.
01:17:30.000
At that age, they didn't like me in bitty basketball, so I didn't play in Union City.
01:17:34.000
But I always had respect to the PAL. And all those years, I always knew they had a job to do.
01:17:49.000
In fact, in 60 years, the only cop I've had a problem with is one of the guys that arrested me in Boulder.
01:17:57.000
In fact, the other dude, I just wished him a happy birthday.
01:18:09.000
So for a guy like me to only have problem with one real cop in all those years, gotta tell you something.
01:18:20.000
You're the same motherfuckers that are gonna be crying for the same cops to come to your house in five years.
01:18:26.000
And then they were talking about having people come over to your house and just talking to you.
01:18:34.000
And now this shit that they're doing with bails, it's crazy.
01:18:38.000
It's almost like they want everything to fall apart.
01:18:41.000
This is like something that you hear, yeah, we're going to have bail reform.
01:18:45.000
You're like, okay, yeah, I'll put on skin again.
01:18:49.000
So what you're telling me is right now they have a huge problem in New Jersey with stolen cars.
01:18:54.000
And these motherfuckers got it down to a science.
01:18:56.000
They're stealing them, and they take them right to the port in Newark.
01:19:01.000
You know, in L.A., they got the Armenians chopping up cars?
01:19:16.000
They take them to whatever, Brazil to start a new currency.
01:19:21.000
But my point is that when those guys get arrested, they're out the next day.
01:19:27.000
And half of the shit that's going on, people are out the next day.
01:19:30.000
Did you see the thing, the shoplifting statistics about New York?
01:19:35.000
Of all of the shoplifting, it's like 600 people.
01:19:43.000
See if you can find the statistics, because it's so crazy, you can't believe that that's really it.
01:19:54.000
Only 327 people, collectively, they were arrested and re-arrested more than 6,000 times.
01:20:02.000
Some engage in shoplifting as a trade while others are driven by addiction or mental illness.
01:20:07.000
The police did not identify the 327 people in the analysis.
01:20:14.000
Hey, maybe you should lock those folks up and you'd stop all of the shoplifting.
01:20:20.000
The idea that you shouldn't do that is so fucking...
01:20:31.000
If you don't have peace officers, bad people are gonna run amok and they're not gonna listen.
01:20:36.000
This has been the case in all of human history.
01:20:46.000
And they should be exposed, and they should have better training, and they should be better funded, and they should be appreciated.
01:20:52.000
And maybe if they're more appreciated, there would be less of this.
01:20:55.000
And maybe we should figure out why the crime is happening in these cities in the first place.
01:20:59.000
Maybe figure out why these disenfranchised communities are the same every fucking year, decade after decade, with no federal funding, why we ship billions of dollars over to Ukraine.
01:21:13.000
It's not like you can't, like, make some real steps to fix this nationwide as a country.
01:21:43.000
They let me run amok from 1983 to 1988 when I got busted.
01:21:51.000
I wish I would have got arrested once and for all.
01:21:54.000
But all those stupidity things, you know, that I was doing, whether I was in San Francisco, I got arrested in all those places.
01:22:08.000
You know, stupid shit, theft of over $200, possession of stolen tools, possession of this, you know, only one weed possession.
01:22:18.000
That was my second arrest, was weed and I got a six-month probation, which had a half ounce on me.
01:22:25.000
I paid a fine, a buck and a quarter or something like that.
01:22:33.000
You know, I wish they'd nail you, and that sentence that that judge gave me, that's a sentence they gotta give people.
01:22:43.000
Zero to four years, uh, reconsideration after a year.
01:22:56.000
If after a year I don't reconsider you, pretty much you're gonna be in there for the rest of your fucking life.
01:23:03.000
You take somebody, you punish them heavy the first time, and then you see what direction they go.
01:23:08.000
One thing, when I walked out of that prison cell, I knew I was gonna still do coke and show.
01:23:14.000
I just knew I had to change my ways a little bit.
01:23:22.000
When you shoplift, they have theft over $200 and theft under $200.
01:23:27.000
And in different states, different counties, it's all different.
01:23:35.000
So people are just walking out of stores and no one's stopping them.
01:23:38.000
So it used to be that I could go to a place, a supermarket, and try to rob a fucking lobster tail for $100, and they'd give me a ticket.
01:23:52.000
It's me going down to the station, getting processed, fingerprinted.
01:24:05.000
Listen, when you go to prison in this country, all you're doing is warehousing me and put me back out.
01:24:10.000
You warehouse me with guys that are smarter than me and now gave me new ways to make money.
01:24:18.000
If I was stealing with a gun before, now they taught me how to steal with a computer.
01:24:33.000
There's no fucking tons of things in prison, so I didn't belong there.
01:24:41.000
But think about the people who weren't as lucky as me.
01:24:46.000
The percentages of most men who grow up in crime-ridden neighborhoods are horrible.
01:24:57.000
You gotta find something, whether it's music or entertainment or sports or something.
01:25:03.000
You might have a wild idea for a business that catches on, but Jesus Christ, the odds are stacked against you.
01:25:09.000
And what happens when you do get convicted with that felony?
01:25:24.000
I can't get a volunteer's job at a fucking rec center, maybe helping, taking old people out to a movie or something like that just to give back to the community.
01:25:38.000
I found out the last three years how worthless I really was.
01:25:48.000
Like what else can I do in my life that would maybe, you know, whatever.
01:26:02.000
So you're just thinking about doing it just as an interesting thing to do, like a new adventure?
01:26:06.000
Yeah, like maybe go back to school or something, take online classes, something.
01:26:11.000
I love to fucking learn all this shit I blew away the last 30 years.
01:26:16.000
You know, I didn't read what I used to read as a child.
01:26:19.000
I didn't read geography, I didn't read history, I read, you know, books, you know, fucking stupid books.
01:26:25.000
So I'd love to take classes again or something like that, but anything.
01:26:33.000
Is that the fucking thing you should be sending?
01:26:40.000
If someone pays their price and does their time, I feel like they should just...
01:26:44.000
As long as they're not doing anything else, as long as they're not committing more crimes, they should be a regular member of society.
01:26:52.000
In my world, for me to get to where I got, when I walked out of that prison cell, I became a regular member of society.
01:26:58.000
But imagine if you're 20 years old and you do something stupid and you get locked up for it, and then you are no longer a voting member of society.
01:27:22.000
Thank God I could fucking sell ice to a fucking Eskimo.
01:27:27.000
At least you could sell cars or insurance or whatever.
01:27:36.000
I could always make cold calls for your shit like that.
01:27:45.000
That probably makes a lot of people go back to crime.
01:27:51.000
When I found out that I didn't do background checks at comedy clubs, how fucking happy was I? And I was still skeptical.
01:27:59.000
And then it was one guy that saved my life, Tim Allen.
01:28:16.000
I don't want to go on NBC. Let me ask you this.
01:28:19.000
What happened to you where you figured out how to be funny on stage?
01:28:25.000
Because you were always okay on stage, but you would have some rough sets.
01:28:33.000
It was one day in the OR. You were telling stories backstage.
01:28:38.000
You know, we had to have that little back parking lot area.
01:28:40.000
You were telling stories and you went on stage just fucking guns blazing and you murdered harder than I'd ever seen you kill before.
01:28:56.000
And you go into another joke, and you had a joke and a joke, and then one day, you went on stage just guns blazing, and it was not...
01:29:06.000
I always tell everybody, it wasn't like it was a slow, gradual, he got better.
01:29:14.000
Bro, you get punched in the face one too many times.
01:29:20.000
And I just want to tell you something, because I talked to Ari about this.
01:29:26.000
Well, I'm definitely going to do ten minutes tonight to fuck around with you.
01:29:31.000
If you know anything about me, you know I always got a plan.
01:29:37.000
For me to do stand-up again, I don't want to travel.
01:29:41.000
I'll come down here, do a residency down here for you.
01:29:54.000
For the first time, if I go back to comedy, I told Ari this.
01:29:58.000
I go, Ari, because Ari says you might not do a podcast no more.
01:30:07.000
Just focus on stand-up for the next five years.
01:30:11.000
I go, just do stand-up for the next five years.
01:30:17.000
And he goes, you know, you got a good point because I wrote the new special when I couldn't edit no more, that fucking This Is Not Happening show.
01:30:30.000
When I got to L.A., I was there just to do stand-up.
01:30:33.000
But then everybody started throwing all these things at me, and I got confused.
01:30:54.000
It's great, but it takes away from who the fuck we really are.
01:30:59.000
Well, when I was doing Fear Factor, I didn't tour hardly at all.
01:31:11.000
And I remember hearing about people that were doing the road and I'd get jealous.
01:31:15.000
I was hearing about people just doing stand-up and I would get jealous.
01:31:22.000
I also knew like, hey man, not a lot of people get a hit television show.
01:31:28.000
This is money that you could literally do whatever the fuck you want now.
01:31:33.000
You could literally not ever worry about money.
01:31:40.000
But I remember thinking, man, all these guys are just doing stand-up.
01:31:44.000
I would talk to dudes after they did Thursday, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, and they'd come to the store on Tuesday.
01:31:59.000
And, you know, like, oh, your hour gets so tight.
01:32:02.000
You know, you roll in Thursday with a new joke.
01:32:04.000
By the time Saturday late show, it's fucking crack.
01:32:09.000
Yeah, but all I was able to do was do weeknights and weekends occasionally at the store.
01:32:17.000
Think of all the guys that came to LA as good stand-ups, got a job on a TV show, and say, fuck stand-up, fuck stand-up.
01:32:25.000
And they got caught up in the TV show, and then they never did stand-up again.
01:32:29.000
And that's one thing I always really respected about you.
01:32:31.000
And I told people all the time, I go, In the height of his game, this motherfucker would still do his 1045 on a Friday night.
01:32:39.000
After he just grabbed a huge paycheck all week on some TV show that was news radio or the other one.
01:32:44.000
You'd never be late for your Friday night spot.
01:32:53.000
Like, this guy doesn't give a fuck, because 9 out of 10 comics, they'll tell you how much they love comedy.
01:33:06.000
But you didn't really love comedy the whole time.
01:33:16.000
I could just shoot into the stand three nights a week, do 15. And you know how you prove it, it's really the stand-up?
01:33:21.000
It's because, like, the store wasn't even giving you any money.
01:33:37.000
You accept being broke for the fucking honor to come here four or five nights a week.
01:33:48.000
Think about, for people watching this right now, how much does stand-up mean to you what you don't even care about?
01:33:59.000
When I would go on the road, we'd think I had a fucking, you know, who shows to an open mic on a Lamborghini?
01:34:09.000
Nobody shows up to an open mic on a Lamborghini.
01:34:13.000
One kid, when I started with, he had a rich, what do you call those rich hot mamas he had?
01:34:24.000
His resume, you opened it up, his bio was a living 3D resume.
01:34:28.000
She had made like a hundred copies of this fucking book that came out.
01:34:33.000
It was him as Tony Montana and him as like Charlie Chan and all these people.
01:34:39.000
He's probably even not in the business anymore.
01:34:42.000
But his name, it was like, ding, the man of a thousand voices.
01:34:46.000
But in Denver they said, but you only heard one.
01:34:50.000
And I still remember him going down to the Comedy Works, one of the best clubs in the country at that time.
01:34:55.000
This is 94. And him doing an open mic and me doing an open mic.
01:35:00.000
And me, like, doing OK. But he'd just go and bomb.
01:35:07.000
And he would have his tape recorder, the old ones, and he would be pounding it.
01:35:19.000
You know how many times this guy would call me up after that?
01:35:29.000
And then after the first night, he booked me to a feature.
01:35:36.000
Because in coconuts, you had to seat people if you were the emcee.
01:35:41.000
Those chains in Florida, I don't even think they're still open.
01:35:45.000
So when you worked at Coconuts, if you were the MC, you had to seat people.
01:35:50.000
When he got there on Tuesday, he was the headliner.
01:35:53.000
He ate such a bag of shit on Tuesday, they made him the fucking feature on Wednesday.
01:35:58.000
He ate such a bag of shit on Wednesday, they made him the MC on...
01:36:04.000
The chick would get him suits and lights and...
01:36:09.000
He had a guy on stage already as an open-miker.
01:36:18.000
The people you fucking meet in this struggle, my friend.
01:36:22.000
It's interesting when you stay with them the whole time.
01:36:25.000
One of the interesting things about being good friends with Greg Fitzsimmons is that we literally started out a week apart from each other.
01:36:35.000
We were there in a car once, and we were driving to this gig, and we were with this guy, and we're just talking about different stuff.
01:36:42.000
And this guy was this little feeble guy with glasses.
01:36:47.000
You know, we're talking about like one guy was complaining about his girlfriend.
01:36:51.000
He goes, well, my woman insists that I put a dildo in my ass.
01:37:07.000
And to this day, Greg and I will talk about that and just fucking cry laughing.
01:37:21.000
The open mic world is a fucking fantastic world.
01:37:33.000
Let's just talk about the Sunday nights at the store when we were there.
01:37:37.000
When I used to host, the 7 o'clock, the 9. The open mic.
01:37:42.000
And I quit because there's too much walking up and down the stairs.
01:37:49.000
So then she gave me 10 to 12. But that helped you a lot, too, because you got loose, like fucking around in between the acts and making fun of things.
01:37:58.000
Well, right there I was working really close with Mitzi.
01:38:07.000
If you went up with her and killed, you got better.
01:38:09.000
Because the first couple times in front of Mitzi, you were always, like, kind of gawky.
01:38:13.000
So the more you go up in front of Mitzi on a Sunday, the more confidence you get.
01:38:17.000
And I still remember going somewhere in, like, 2002. Like, uh...
01:38:28.000
They used to have a comedy club there, Funny Bone.
01:38:30.000
And I was dating that crazy chick from Misha Walker from Michigan.
01:38:34.000
And I'll never forget like 2000, maybe like 2000. And I'll never forget that I went there for a fucking showcase.
01:38:42.000
And I'm not the type of guy that would open his mouth like that.
01:38:46.000
He told me, come on Sunday and do 10. And if you're funny, I'll bring you back.
01:38:54.000
But afterward, he was like, well, I don't like him.
01:39:01.000
I perform in front of Mitzi Short fucking three times a week.
01:39:06.000
You ain't gonna give me no fucking note, Tarzan.
01:39:17.000
But in my mind, I had that confidence in my heart.
01:39:30.000
You know, when you're in front of her a lot, and she don't have to say nothing to you.
01:39:39.000
She also was the very best at taking comics and putting them in dangerous spots.
01:39:45.000
Taking people and putting them after people that they really probably shouldn't be following.
01:39:51.000
She would put me after Irera or that fucking dude.
01:40:07.000
I can't even figure out what to tell Jamie to find him.
01:40:17.000
I could pull his name out if I didn't have the weed in me.
01:40:20.000
Two alpha brains, I'll fucking pull his name out.
01:40:27.000
I was dying of laughter with that motherfucker.
01:40:33.000
I remember T.K. Kirkland from the store early days.
01:40:51.000
If he was in front of you, he'd give you a big hug.
01:40:55.000
Listen, I think that you and Eddie, regardless of what you might say, could be a good podcast for two hours.
01:41:05.000
Dog, how about the night we were behind the comedy store?
01:41:10.000
How much that Bruce Lee fought a thousand guys?
01:41:14.000
You can repeat this, because I was there with you.
01:41:19.000
We walked the pink dot, and you're like, I don't know.
01:41:25.000
And it didn't even matter if the story was true.
01:41:28.000
Did Bruce Lee fight a thousand guys to the death?
01:41:35.000
The whole thing is happening while I'm working for the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
01:41:38.000
He's telling me about how Bruce Lee fought a thousand people.
01:41:41.000
I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about, man?
01:41:45.000
Bruce Lee is an innovator in martial arts, a hero.
01:41:57.000
But I would listen to that speech all day long, man.
01:42:00.000
Eddie Griffin would describe to you in detail how they built the pyramids.
01:42:05.000
I introduced myself to Eddie Griffin the first night I walked into the originals.
01:42:09.000
The first night I ever walked into the store was on Monday, and Eddie was there with Tupac.
01:42:29.000
Wheels was there, and that was it on a Monday night.
01:42:33.000
And Don Barris put me up out of a favor to nobody, to himself, and Eddie saw me.
01:42:41.000
Didn't say nothing to me, but then I got a showcase.
01:42:44.000
And Eddie was there, and he told me that night, I'm going to sit next to Mitzi.
01:42:49.000
He sat next to Mitzi when I was on stage, so no motherfuckers would talk to her.
01:42:59.000
Like, if guys you knew that were gonna showcase, you'd sit next to Mitzi and laugh.
01:43:04.000
And then I bumped him to him on a plane one time.
01:43:06.000
This is before 9-11 when you could do whatever the fuck you want on a plane.
01:43:15.000
Stay here with me, and that was how I met Eddie, and I gave him a picture of Bruce Lee's grave that I had taken, and ever since that we just hit it off.
01:43:25.000
And he would always throw me little bones, and he would bump me for fucking six hours, but I never really got mad at him for that.
01:43:32.000
His set on Def Jam to this day was one of the best.
01:43:35.000
At the time, I remember thinking, God damn, this guy's talented.
01:43:50.000
Yeah, it'd go like, how high you gotta be to be like, I want to talk to someone who's not even here.
01:44:16.000
I think I watched it on HBO, and I was like, holy fuck, is this guy good.
01:44:21.000
Who I was a fan of when I first got into comedy, and I'm a fan of them still to this day.
01:44:40.000
Joe was the warm-up for Death Jam when we were coming up.
01:44:43.000
Joe was the only guy that I ever saw kill and be yoked at the same time.
01:44:48.000
This motherfucker would go on stage with like a vest on, built like Mike Tyson, just jacked, and he would kill.
01:45:02.000
Jamar Neighbors goes on stage shirtless, and he's fucking shredded.
01:45:38.000
If you go on his Instagram, I think he's got all his crazy workouts he does.
01:45:49.000
He's got a video put up of him doing stand-up with a mohawk.
01:46:09.000
I thought he was a little younger than that, right?
01:46:25.000
So it's very rare that some, but Guy Torrey was the first guy that I ever saw that went on stage with like a vest on.
01:46:43.000
I'm telling you, he goes on stage looking like that and he kills.
01:47:05.000
Dude, that was my worst bombings of all time when I had to follow Martin Lawrence at the store.
01:47:11.000
And I'm going to tell you who the best performance on.
01:47:13.000
I'm going to tell you the best performance ever on fucking Def Jam.
01:47:36.000
I got a brother who's one of those Save the Whale motherfuckers.
01:47:44.000
I could see me with a gun hanging outside an ATM machine with a tuxedo on.
01:47:51.000
Something about fucking buying a gun and he wanted to shoot somebody so he would hang out at an ATM with a tuxedo on every night.
01:48:01.000
And one night I said it to him and he's like, man...
01:48:09.000
You ever think about dudes who didn't make it where you can't understand how?
01:48:13.000
Like, where you're like, God damn, that guy was good.
01:48:28.000
But Reggie McFadden in like 1992, when I was living in New York, my friend John, John Tobin was opening up for Reggie at the Champagne Comedy Club.
01:48:39.000
The Champagne Comedy Club was this dude who was hilarious.
01:48:46.000
He goes, you don't say the bitch had a big ass.
01:48:50.000
And he would like tell guys how to talk comedy.
01:48:55.000
But it didn't matter with Reggie because Reggie's act was clean.
01:48:59.000
And I'm telling you, this motherfucker murdered.
01:49:11.000
I mean, to the point where I was like, I'm looking at the next Eddie Murphy.
01:49:19.000
He had this joke about meeting a pretty girl and she's got an ugly friend that you can't shake.
01:49:26.000
He has the ugly girl smash through his window, and he's physical, so he bursts through the window on stage.
01:49:56.000
I know somebody saw him at a college and he said to say hello to me.
01:50:03.000
You know, you think about the two dudes who were in Guns N' Roses, the one guy, Izzy, that just left.
01:50:11.000
You know, didn't you have a guy on from Soundgarden here?
01:50:18.000
He was in Nirvana, and then he got kicked out of Nirvana, and he was in Soundgarden, and then he got kicked out of Soundgarden.
01:50:41.000
He did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, multiple tours in Afghanistan, went to Columbia, got a degree at Columbia.
01:50:50.000
So, like, I think he's a very thoughtful person, and his path was a great path for him.
01:50:59.000
They just honored the guy from the original bass player, from Soundgarden.
01:51:05.000
I always wondered, what happened to that fucking dude?
01:51:08.000
And how they feel now that they had an opportunity to be in this monster of a band, you know?
01:51:17.000
Guys like Chris Cornell, who is so fucking talented and so universally loved and still takes his own life.
01:51:27.000
That just shows you how fragile mental health is and people's states of mind.
01:51:33.000
And how, you know, you could just not see the thing.
01:51:51.000
I remember one time you and I were listening to Spoon Man.
01:51:54.000
Remember I had that Suburban with all the big speakers in it and shit?
01:52:02.000
And we were sitting in the Denali in the Comedy Store parking lot just jamming to Spoon Man.
01:52:12.000
If you don't like this song, you're not real, cocksucker.
01:52:20.000
And I still remember the night you came up to me out of the cold and you go, how can somebody listen to the Beatles after they listen to Blow Up the Outside World?
01:52:33.000
And I said to you, I go, you know what's crazy?
01:52:35.000
You could tell Chris was a Beatles fan when you hear that chant, but I get what you were saying that day.
01:52:48.000
But back then, look, Blow Up The Outside World is a masterpiece.
01:52:55.000
It's a masterpiece of sound, everything about it.
01:53:02.000
And if you're high, if you're like sitting in your living room and you smoke a joint, you put the headphones on, you listen to that.
01:53:37.000
Especially if you're high and you listen to this, Joey.
01:53:45.000
There's some music that's just accentuated by weed.
01:54:45.000
I like it towards the end when they do the drum thing and he says that he holds that one note.
01:56:24.000
Now, talking to the Beatles, after we didn't have appreciation for the Beatles growing up, not because I didn't like them, because everybody always broke my balls on how good they were.
01:56:37.000
But the day John Lennon got shot, it was the happiest day of my life.
01:56:43.000
Because every time you couldn't fucking say nothing with Beatle people.
01:56:46.000
Every time you said, like, oh my god, I went to see The Stones last night.
01:56:54.000
Some motherfucker would say, yeah, it's a great album, but wait till the Beatles get back together.
01:57:02.000
Yeah, it's great, but wait till the Beatles get back together.
01:57:07.000
You gotta walk away like, yeah, he got a point.
01:57:09.000
The day John Lennon got shut, that argument went out the window.
01:57:19.000
In fact, they had a Beatle mural at my high school.
01:57:22.000
Somebody put an extra John Lennon the day after he got shot because we didn't want to hear that argument no more.
01:57:27.000
Everybody got sick of that fucking argument, all right?
01:57:32.000
I love all those albums, fucking Shave, Fish, and all that stuff.
01:57:41.000
Once they did the Aston and started smoking dope, I like all that shit.
01:57:55.000
When they went to India and smoked with that Maharishi and started playing all that shit and opened up their horizons, they were good, man.
01:58:01.000
Isn't it interesting that the kids that grew up that were into like ACDC, Led Zeppelin, those are not necessarily kids that were into the Beatles.
01:58:20.000
That was like the current band that everybody was into.
01:58:27.000
Or if somebody wanted to get crazy, you play Freebird.
01:58:30.000
When that guitar solo goes on in Freebird, when you're 16 years old and you listen to that song, you're like, holy shit!
01:58:39.000
To this day, in my opinion, that's the greatest guitar solo of all time.
01:59:05.000
Like, I got an album now, it'll take me back for a week.
01:59:08.000
Like, I'll play the album when I'm writing, when I'm doing shit, you know?
01:59:15.000
That's why I don't like doing music reviews and shit.
01:59:19.000
Because I learn more about the music the more I listen to it.
01:59:26.000
But you're in your car, you're headed back, you crank it up, you always hear something you haven't heard and go, wow.
01:59:32.000
I used to always crank a whole lot of love when I was on my way to the store.
01:59:38.000
That was the song that I wanted to hear when I was on my way to the store.
01:59:51.000
And then there's like a minute and a half of fuck sounds in that song.
02:00:01.000
Zeppelin II is very interesting because it's dirty.
02:00:21.000
This was the get ramped up to go to the Comedy Store song.
02:00:29.000
You gotta listen to this on, like, real speakers.
02:00:32.000
Something about the way it's coming through my ears sounds like dog shit.
02:00:36.000
No, it's some songs on YouTube for some reason.
02:00:43.000
Maybe it's because they don't want you to be able to do that.
02:00:45.000
Maybe they want it to distort so that you can't just take the music down.
02:00:54.000
Sometimes some things sound fine and other things don't.
02:00:57.000
I don't know why some things sound perfect and other things don't.
02:01:06.000
But wouldn't it be nice if we could hear it really good?
02:01:12.000
It also could be like I have to find a good source.
02:01:33.000
I had a 2002 Toyota Supra Turbo that I got the craziest sound system ever put into this fucking thing.
02:01:43.000
This was like when I was on Fear Factor and I was like, what can you do?
02:01:48.000
And they said, we can engineer a sound system just for your car.
02:01:54.000
And they put, like, there was a subwoofer under the front seat, or under the back seat, like, you couldn't push the back seat back, and these crazy speakers in the dash, and put speakers here and speakers there.
02:02:05.000
You have to put a microphone in your seat, so they can, like...
02:02:10.000
I don't know how they did it, but when I would play this in that car, the music would dance around the car.
02:02:18.000
Like, you could hear the guitar from over here.
02:02:24.000
When you kiss by a rose, there's sound coming from all over the place in that song.
02:02:34.000
Because even when you listen to it when you were a kid, and you had two sets of speakers, ah, ah, ah!
02:02:42.000
What I was saying is, do you remember that Toyota 911 Turbo?
02:02:54.000
And that sound system, the sound would bounce around with that song.
02:03:01.000
When I was listening to that song and I was driving down Sunset It was like coming and all the with the humping sounds like It's like drifting around the car.
02:03:13.000
So when you do acid or something like that, that's what you start hearing those little speakers.
02:03:18.000
I've always thought that they recorded Like thinking that you were gonna do acid like Pink Floyd.
02:03:24.000
I know recorded Thinking that you were gonna be tripping.
02:03:28.000
They fucked with you like that, you know, you got it What was the name of the kid speaking of with?
02:03:37.000
When you got to LA you bought a nice car and then you didn't want it no more.
02:03:44.000
Yeah, he disappeared out which it wasn't that was a Volkswagen I had a Volkswagen Corrado.
02:04:07.000
Man, some of them just, the pressure, the overwhelming pressure of constantly performing is just, it gives them anxiety and they never survive it.
02:04:27.000
I would start playing it when you hit that store.
02:04:29.000
You know that little country store on Laurel Canyon?
02:04:31.000
When I hit that, that's when I would start the song.
02:04:33.000
And by the time I'm snaking all the way down Laurel and I get to the bottom and I take that turn...
02:04:58.000
This was the way I would come over from the valley.
02:05:12.000
This was just like the perfect Let's Fucking Go song.
02:05:43.000
Can you hear in the background, you can hear his voice?
02:05:46.000
Yeah, that's part of what happened with the tape.
02:06:47.000
And there'll never, ever be anything like this ever again.
02:07:08.000
That was the second album that put me over the top.
02:07:21.000
When I first got Led Zeppelin to, I would play Dancing Days.
02:07:29.000
Then it's supposed to be No Quarter and then The Ocean.
02:07:45.000
And that's what really shows you every album, they kind of changed it up.
02:07:58.000
Yeah, can you ask Jamie to put on and listen to the beginning of this chant?
02:08:04.000
We used to eat Quaaludes with a bottle of Pupoff.
02:08:15.000
In fact, I still got a busted eye thing, a vein, from the Quaaludes.
02:08:24.000
I think I see my friends coming, riding many miles.
02:08:55.000
That does have a country kind of influence to it.
02:09:17.000
I think I see my brother coming right in many miles Brother, you give me some silver As you get a little gold Here
02:11:27.000
I used to get fucked, and this album's got Immigrant Song, this, and the best Led Zeppelin song after all those songs.
02:11:35.000
Jimmy Page's best work since I've Been Loving You.
02:11:41.000
I'm telling you, they came up with something different every fucking album.
02:11:45.000
I can't also believe I just saw that picture for the first time of James Brown's mugshot.
02:11:53.000
Yeah, that was 91. He hit her and they chased him in the truck and shit.
02:11:58.000
My favorite thing is when he got in trouble, then he was on some talk show, like right afterwards with sunglasses on.
02:12:12.000
So the other one was a different time he got arrested.
02:12:27.000
There's a hilarious James Brown interview where he's like, clearly high as kite.
02:13:25.000
Now, James, this isn't the first time you and your wife have had a problem.
02:13:29.000
Are the two of you going to be able to work this out?
02:13:32.000
You want to talk about music and you don't want to talk about what happened?
02:13:46.000
Your fans will have read all about this, James.
02:13:56.000
And what are you going to say to your fans when they ask you some questions about it?
02:14:06.000
Well, that's the second time we've heard that in two days.
02:14:14.000
Well, tell us a little bit about what you're going to be doing on this tour.
02:15:10.000
Now, you're involved in publishing a gospel magazine.
02:15:22.000
Joseph P. Young is the editor, and James Viner, one of the advisors.
02:15:28.000
The Second Coming, it features, on this week, I think we have the Pope and, I believe, the Williams brothers.
02:15:38.000
And next week we're going to have Reverend Al Sharpton, I think, on the cover.
02:15:43.000
And we'll be doing a lot of good things, and hopefully we'll get Brother Ted Turner on the cover.
02:15:51.000
James, we want to thank you for being with us today and giving us an opportunity.
02:15:55.000
Oh, is there something more you want to say that we haven't covered?
02:16:04.000
It sounds to me that you're not troubled by any of this at all.
02:17:14.000
If you will, let's all welcome the world's godfather of soul, soul brother number one, James Brown!
02:18:02.000
You know Joe, this guy was the real deal to me.
02:18:17.000
After a cop shot a black kid and the city was in a riot and they told him not to perform.
02:18:35.000
Two days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, singer James Brown performs at the Boston Garden.
02:19:00.000
You know, they were running against different...
02:19:01.000
I watched that fucking thing again a couple weeks ago, The Green Mile, whatever, The Green Book.
02:19:26.000
How about Ali changing his name in the middle of it and then not going into the Vietnam War?
02:19:31.000
They won't let him fight for three years and they're in the middle of his prime.
02:19:37.000
So you really got to nod to these guys, because, man, they came up in a tough time.
02:19:43.000
I always see those pictures like him, Jim Brown, and Muhammad Ali, and they all got together.
02:19:56.000
Imagine being a kid in the 1960s when you see Hendrix for the first time.
02:20:05.000
If you were 15 years old, five years before Hendrix, there was nothing like that?
02:20:11.000
Nobody prepared anybody for anything like that?
02:20:33.000
You can order it now on Amazon, like pre-order it.
02:20:46.000
Yeah, a book is a lot of soul searching, too, I'd imagine.
02:20:55.000
You did it while you were getting off the benzos?
02:21:03.000
I didn't even know I was withdrawing, like I said, until I did the knee surgery, and something happened with my heart.
02:21:11.000
And one of the doctors came in, and we started talking, and he kept looking at me weird.
02:21:17.000
And I fucking, he gave me his card, and I called him when I got out, and he goes, come see me.
02:21:24.000
And he did a physical, and I went back to see him, blood, that type of shit, and he goes, everything was right, you know, everything was okay.
02:21:32.000
I don't know, he put me on a heart monitor, and he goes, your heart's fine.
02:21:36.000
I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
02:21:38.000
And his assistant said, are you still taking the Xanax?
02:21:52.000
I've just been using them since the pandemic started.
02:21:55.000
And that's when she goes, no, you've got to stop withdrawing.
02:22:02.000
How long do you think it takes when you're on those things before you're addicted?
02:22:09.000
See, I would take them and then forget about them.
02:22:11.000
I would put them in my top pocket and then go to the store and not take them.
02:22:17.000
There was a lot of times I would take them, I would bring it with me in case I got, like, a little fucking, you know.
02:22:23.000
But, Joe, the funny thing about this, if I tell you, this goes back to when I was a kid in the simplest way.
02:22:31.000
I was a little fucking fruitcake when I came from Cuba.
02:22:34.000
Do you know I sucked a pacifier after I was six?
02:22:38.000
So after, like, I was three, they took them away from you, but I'd hide them in strategic places.
02:22:47.000
I'd go over suck it, put it down, and then I'd fucking go back to what was going on here.
02:22:51.000
So when I lived in 88th Street in New York City, my mom had a jukebox at the bar.
02:22:57.000
So every week, the guy comes in and he gives you the old 45s.
02:23:06.000
Spanish music, you know, black music, rock music.
02:23:18.000
And if you go to 205 West, even today, you pull up to it, you'll see where I live, where I grew up right there on the third floor, but you'll see that there's like a parking garage there.
02:23:36.000
So whenever I had anxiety, I would go upstairs to suck on the pacifier.
02:23:40.000
I wasn't cool enough to put him on the street yet.
02:23:44.000
Later in time, I would put him on the street and I would suck on him when I was playing basketball or something.
02:23:49.000
If they called a foul on me and I would panic, I would go upstairs and I had a window that they couldn't see from below because it was the back of the building.
02:24:00.000
So it was like an indentation and all our windows.
02:24:04.000
So I would take those 45s and I would whip them.
02:24:11.000
I would just sit there for 10 minutes and just whip them, whip them, whip them.
02:24:20.000
And then I'd run downstairs, and all these kids would be holding on to their heads and shit.
02:24:25.000
And I go, I went upstairs to go to the bathroom.
02:24:40.000
But back to it, that's how I started going upstairs to suck on the pacifier.
02:24:49.000
I always had something to smoothen the humps and the bumps.
02:24:55.000
When you do coke, that's when people give you those things.
02:24:57.000
Oh, you're gonna have a hard-on, take two of these, and you'll get a hard-on, you'll fall asleep.
02:25:02.000
I never knew they were treated for anxiety or whatever.
02:25:06.000
When you're on the street doing drugs, what they're treated for.
02:25:11.000
And getting off of that seems like it's one of the worst things you get off imaginable.
02:25:20.000
No, I'm talking about the withdrawal, the shit you went through.
02:25:24.000
But it's funny now when I do shit, I always remember.
02:25:28.000
Like, I had to do something in the city a couple weeks ago.
02:25:48.000
I would take in Xanax to go to jiu-jitsu for a while.
02:26:09.000
I went back to my boulder roots and I meditated a little bit, which helps.
02:26:13.000
I don't get on the computer in the morning anymore.
02:26:19.000
I fucking get a cup of coffee and I sit on my balcony and look at the mountains for 20-30 minutes.
02:26:29.000
I do a little grateful shit, what I'm grateful for.
02:26:38.000
I got my little faults, but I'm still like that bolder Buddhist shit has always...
02:26:43.000
I can't cop to being a Buddhist, but sometimes I think about it, you know?
02:26:48.000
So before I do anything, I make sure I'm good in the mornings.
02:26:52.000
I used to get up and go around the fucking computer and start doing bong hits.
02:27:04.000
As you get older, you start learning about what works, and you try to share it with people.
02:27:09.000
You're like, listen, man, don't get up anymore and put that TV on.
02:27:13.000
And don't get up and open that fucking computer.
02:27:18.000
For the last year, I've been eating a fruit bowl for breakfast.
02:27:22.000
Raspberries, bananas, pears, cherries, whatever.
02:27:36.000
Because I got rid of that sugar crave in the morning, I think.
02:27:40.000
Well, it's definitely the healthiest way to get sugar.
02:27:44.000
I don't think anybody says fruit's bad for you.
02:27:50.000
Listen, if you take 22 aspirins a day, you're going to die.
02:27:52.000
But one aspirin ain't going to fucking kill you.
02:28:07.000
Oh, you're going to see me in a couple of hours.
02:28:43.000
I know it's one of those that she gets pissed off at.
02:28:56.000
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