Comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan stopped by Austin, Texas on his way home from a comedy tour to perform at the Austin Center for the Performing Arts (ACL) to talk about what it's like to be a stand-up comedian, his new show on HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher, and his new podcast, Club Random, where he talks to random people about anything and everything. Joe also talks about how he got into comedy and what it s like being a podcaster, and why he thinks it s a good idea to smoke pot in your own home. He also takes a shot of tequila and talks about his new book, The Other Side Of which is out now, if you haven t already checked it out, you should do so! Joe is a great guy and I really enjoyed getting to know him a little bit more and I hope you do too! Enjoy this one! -Joe Rogan and Bill Maher Check it out! The Joe Rogans Experience is a podcast by day, by night, all day, all the time all the way through. -The Real Time with Bill Maher is a comedy and standup comedy podcast by night. Check out his show on HBO on Real Time on HBO, Real Time, on HBO and the New York Times Magazine. on Comedy Central on HBO. and HBO on HBO and other places where he does stand up comedy and other things. If you like what he's doing, then you should check out the show out. Thanks to Bill Maher for being a good friend of mine, Joe's work and I'm looking out for you! Thank you, Joe. I really appreciate it. Cheers, Joe, I really do appreciate you, I'm glad you're a good guy. XOXO, Joe XO -JOE ROGAN - J.R. R. JOGAN, J. J. O. RYAN, BOBBYE, JOSEPH, R. MAYO, JOE R. CASTILLO, P. M. AND I LOVE YOU, SONGS, JEANCHE CHEERIE, JO SCARLYNNE, BABY, JAYE P. D. AND KELLY PODCAST AND MORE! --
00:01:38.000That's a lot of the people in this country That would describe.
00:01:42.000They're not involved in politics or what goes on in the world or don't ask them what the ACLU is or NATO. These things are just not on their radar.
00:01:53.000And that certainly also describes a lot of celebrities.
00:01:59.000You know, their intelligence is artistic intelligence, generally, I would say.
00:02:04.000You know, it's a different kind of intelligence.
00:02:07.000Not worse or better, it's just different.
00:02:09.000So, to be able to talk to a lot of people on Club Random in a setting where I can just be high as a kite and constantly blowing pot smoke in their face, first of all, it's just a joy.
00:02:28.000To think that I used to sweat bullets going through every airport in this country because I had this much little pot that I was hiding under my balls.
00:03:09.000You also you can kind of let them breathe a little because sometimes you really want to let someone talk for a long time to try to before you try to interject and pick apart their conversation their argument you really want I don't know what you're really thinking I don't want to be confused again that's kind of what you pioneered yeah and we're grateful for it and I do like that I also find It's interesting.
00:03:36.000The setting makes a big difference as to what arouses the furies on the left.
00:03:44.000If I said so many of the things that I've said on Club Random, on a podcast, on Real Time, on HBO, they would have had my head.
00:05:51.000They believe race is first and foremost the thing you should always see everywhere.
00:05:56.000Which I find interesting because that used to be the position of the Ku Klux Klan, that we see race first and foremost everywhere.
00:06:04.000So, again, you can have that position, but don't say that's a liberal position.
00:06:10.000You're doing something very different.
00:06:12.000I think the idea behind it – I think I understand their idea.
00:06:16.000The idea is that the society is imbalanced.
00:06:20.000And so in order to address that imbalance, you're going to prop up as many minorities as possible, make as many opportunities for minorities as possible, and get it to a position where there are like white people are minority.
00:06:37.000And that through that somehow or another, you'll achieve equality.
00:06:42.000I think the way to achieve equality is your way.
00:06:45.000I think the colorblind way is the way to really truly achieve equality and to truly judge people just on their merits.
00:06:51.000But also recognize that if we don't address the problems in this country as far as like how disenfranchised some people are and how horrible some communities are that people grow up in, And people find themselves stuck in with no recourse,
00:07:06.000no way out, no role models, no nothing, no financial opportunities.
00:07:12.000That's what our real problem is in this country more than it is race.
00:07:15.000It's extreme poverty, extreme poverty and extreme crime and that these things don't get addressed over and over and over again.
00:07:23.000A lot of the policies that you see coming from places like San Francisco and Portland, they just exacerbate it.
00:07:28.000You're just seeing stores close because, like, okay, you can't just steal.
00:07:31.000You can't just have everybody just walk into Walmart and steal.
00:07:34.000I was watching a video where they were showing a Walgreens and they had everything chained up.
00:07:52.000Liberalism was never shoplifting is progressive.
00:07:58.000And we weren't interested in legalizing shoplifting, or I guess we should call it justice shopping.
00:08:06.000But, you know, in Minnesota, for example, I think it was Minneapolis, And after the George Floyd murder and the riots, I think there was a movement to disband a lot of the police and they did.
00:08:26.000I think a lot of the police were let go or somehow the police force was a lesser force than it was.
00:08:33.000And what happened was, of course, crime went up in certain areas.
00:08:37.000And a lot of the officers who had been fired or let go or quit or for whatever reason, they weren't on the force anymore.
00:09:50.000I mean, not just the places where, I mean, murders have been happening way out of control in Chicago among the African-American community for far too long and not really reported in the way that they should be.
00:10:07.000It's amazing how black lives don't seem to matter when they're taken by black lives.
00:10:15.000But, I mean, now Chicago My friends who live there say it's not safe anywhere.
00:11:17.000But I think some of it is just bullshit.
00:11:21.000And I don't understand why there isn't a more concerted effort to shine a spotlight on that.
00:11:27.000And where are the leaders of the community?
00:11:31.000The people who would have such cachet among those young African-American men, because that's who's killing each other, young African-American men, to say, cut it out.
00:11:43.000What the fuck are you doing killing each other?
00:12:07.000I'm not the guy to figure out what needs to be done, but something needs to be done.
00:12:13.000It should have been done a long time ago.
00:12:15.000I don't know what that answer is, but no answer is not the answer.
00:12:19.000And continuing the same policies that got in the same problems and just Defunding the police officers and making things far worse and then not course correcting.
00:12:46.000I mean, they are the easiest people to target because, of course, they have to kowtow to what the voters want, and the voters are completely contradictory.
00:12:57.000So I do have some sympathy for politicians.
00:13:00.000Because if you ask the voters what they want, they will basically say they want every sort of goody that the government can provide on an Arizona tax base.
00:13:12.000They want a Swedish social net on an Arizona tax base.
00:13:26.000Well, I mean, I think that's why you moved here, wasn't it?
00:13:29.000No, I moved here because they were locking down the city and it didn't seem safe and it seemed very sketchy and I just didn't agree with what they were doing.
00:13:39.000The more I talked to doctors that were experts in respiratory diseases, the more they were convinced there was no way to stop a respiratory disease.
00:13:46.000They're like, this isn't going to do anything.
00:13:48.000In fact, it's probably going to damage people's immune systems because they're not going to be around other people.
00:13:52.000They're going to be filled with anxiety.
00:13:57.000No, I was always making this case on real time and, you know, people thought I was crazy and I'm sure they think you're crazy, but they're crazy and they don't know anything.
00:14:08.000If you talk to virologists and epidemiologists that aren't captured, that don't have to deal with whatever Fauci and the NIH tells them what to say, and if you talk to those people, they're like, well, first of all, you should be telling people they have to lose weight.
00:14:28.000I think something like 75% of the people who were hospitalized or died, yes, were obese.
00:14:35.000But of course, in this country, we're so through the looking glass on the obesity issue that even mentioning it is some sort of a hate crime.
00:14:55.000You're just not allowed to talk about this.
00:14:58.000And it's preposterous because, first of all, if this is truly a life and death issue, we can't talk about the one thing that more than anything else is causing the death.
00:16:15.000To me, like the pie wagons of the 50s, like Marilyn Monroe, those hippie girls, like the ones on Mad Men, you know, the big redhead on Mad Men, that was like, ugh, that's my father's era.
00:16:29.000That's, ugh, I couldn't raise an erection with a Derek looking at those girls.
00:16:34.000I liked the, and I kept that my whole life.
00:19:06.000But even Weight Watchers is out of style because now we've given up on the idea that That obesity is something that can be contained by exercise and diet.
00:20:02.000There's no biological free lunch either.
00:20:04.000I have friends that are on that stuff and one friend who just got off of it because he was having some serious gastrointestinal issues that are apparently one of the side effects.
00:20:36.000They actually had a higher percentage of body fat because they were primarily losing muscle tissue and connective tissue.
00:20:44.000They were losing so much of that that even though they lost like 20 pounds, they actually went from like 15% body fat to maybe 20% body fat or whatever the number was.
00:20:54.000But what I find the most alarming is the way in just a matter of a few years, the group think That this is a disease now that cannot be controlled by what for 50, 100,
00:21:09.000a million years before this, it was the scientific consensus that of course you can control it with diet and exercise.
00:21:19.000Just in a couple of years, that went out the window.
00:21:22.000And you cannot read, you cannot find an article on the front page or in the op-ed page of the New York Times in the last couple of years that has any other belief than this one, that it is a disease, it is not within a person's control.
00:21:39.000So they're all in on a Zempick or whatever else because we certainly can't leave this to people themselves to control it.
00:21:46.000That's a giant sea change and the way they sheep-like just go right...
00:23:30.000And the idea of calling it a disease, it's interesting because we kind of agree alcoholism is a disease, but it is similar because you are addicted to food.
00:23:40.000Like, people are absolutely addicted to food, especially high fructose corn syrup products and things where there's, like, you're getting that big sugar rush and the insulin spikes.
00:23:53.000I mean, all these food companies have labs where they go in and they test how much fat and sugar and salt we can put in this thing to make it as addictive as possible.
00:24:08.000You know, they don't want you to just eat one.
00:24:19.000But again, look, I always have the most sympathy for the obese when I'm high because I get the munchies, as most of us do, not in the first hour.
00:24:33.000Like, it goes to my head first, which is great.
00:25:58.000The push is always in what is going to make us the most money, which is why you're seeing this push for these diabetes drugs that people are taking to lose weight.
00:26:08.000You know, it's like, there's a lot of money in that.
00:26:10.000There's a lot of money in, what is it called, Wagavie and Ozempic, whatever these ones are called.
00:26:22.000And look, if that's the only way you can lose weight, and you lose weight, and that's what starts you along the way, I kind of feel like that, the same way I feel about SSRIs.
00:26:30.000I've had friends that have had disastrous situations come up because of SSRIs.
00:26:37.000And I've had other people that got from being suicidal to getting their life in order and then slowly getting off of them and then saying it was overall a good thing for them.
00:27:55.000Like, I know what it feels like to be doing something I don't want to do.
00:28:01.000Some people call that work, and we're lucky we like our work mostly, but there are things I don't want to do that I do, and I know what it feels like to be doing things I do want to do.
00:28:12.000When I was on this drug, it was like neither.
00:28:29.000I know I think it was Mike Wallace who suffered for a long time from this and also maybe it was Dick Cavett, somebody like that who said, you know, I was in therapy for years and years and years and then they gave me this drug and I was all better.
00:28:49.000And it was never anything that they were going to fix in therapy.
00:29:24.000I mean, if you have a shitty job and a shitty life and shitty friends and a shitty house and a shitty neighborhood, you probably feel like shit.
00:30:52.000People are lining up to see him in fucking arenas, and he's depressed, and it's, yeah, because that doesn't solve the problem when it's a chemical problem.
00:31:01.000Yeah, and I think also for some people, they worship this idea of success as being the thing that's going to get them out of it, that that's going to make them happy, and then they get success, and then they get accustomed to that success, and they're still not happy, and then they get really depressed,
00:31:16.000like, oh my god, I'm at the top, and it sucks.
00:31:39.000You know, are they doing anything to mitigate it, to put themselves on a path?
00:31:44.000You know, that gives them some sort of a feeling of accomplishment in life, a feeling of like, and I don't mean accomplishment in terms of like material possessions, but like you're doing something.
00:32:28.000But, I mean, back in 1980. Yeah, and yes, you could name them all.
00:32:35.000Or, like I always like to point out to people when they get into these discussions about the strike and show business and what kind of business this is and is it different than other businesses, yes, if you look at the credits of any movie, especially ones that are a few years old,
00:32:53.00010 years old, 20 years old, 30 years old, Look at the credits as they go by at the end of the movie.
00:32:58.000Outside of the two or three stars of the movie, you'll see a list of 20 or 30 people who were in that movie.
00:33:05.000All of them thought they were going to be stars.
00:34:27.000That's just the way it is in movies, or at least it has been.
00:34:32.000So as you get into those upper ages, those parts are not going to be there.
00:34:38.000And look, that's partly what the audience wants.
00:34:41.000I mean, you can hate the studios for doing that, but studios are always just reflecting what the audience wants, including the women in the audience.
00:38:43.000Like, you might want to kill someone, but you don't do it because it's a sin.
00:38:49.000I was like, but imagine if you were just, like, rabidly attracted to women, and culturally things were reversed, and for some reason, like, women caused reproduction, and you don't want more people because we're overpopulated, and gay is the only morally right way to pursue sexual activity.
00:40:20.000Okay, now offensive amongst Native Americans, a person who identifies with any of a variety of gender identities which are not exclusively those of their biological sex.
00:40:31.000Yeah, but gender identities which are not exclusively, how many of them are there?
00:42:28.000But what I was saying was it's odd to me that they grouped them together because in a fundamental way, trans and gay are almost exact opposites because gay is all about I was born this way.
00:43:06.000I was like, Jesus, Bill, you just went hard.
00:43:09.000But I'm so glad you're doing that because there's no one else on late night television that's ever going to fucking do that other than you.
00:43:15.000But it's terrifying that they're calling it gender-affirming care when it's really childhood mutilation before you have the ability to figure out what permanent means.
00:43:37.000And this idea that you should be able to make life-changing choices like hormone blockers Which are, A, not reversible, no matter what the fuck they say.
00:44:23.000Now, as with all of these things, if this country wasn't so ridiculously polarized, we could come up with some reasonable view on it, which is, is trans a real thing?
00:44:36.000Are some people born in a body that For lack of a better term, you're born in the wrong body or your sexuality doesn't match what's in your mind gender-wise.
00:44:57.000But even if I was – now, this is just me, but I'm allowed my opinion.
00:45:02.000If I was 100 billion percent convinced I was born in the wrong body, I still wouldn't do anything to my body because medical – Considerations come first.
00:45:16.000The idea that you can just take some sort of puberty blockers or just snap on, snap off organs without really hurting myself medically and taking years off my life is ridiculous.
00:45:33.000And so I would somehow make it work with the equipment I was born with because we're just not that advanced medically to make it work and still be healthy.
00:45:44.000Yeah, but the woke perspective is they have these terms like gender-affirming care, and it sounds so wonderful.
00:45:52.000Gender-affirming care sounds like something hugging you.
00:48:11.000But he's like the husband, you know, who doesn't really understand what the kids are into, but he doesn't want to start a big fight about it.
00:48:18.000So when the wife says, honey, the kids want to cut their dicks off and tear down a statue of Lincoln, he's like, yeah...
00:49:11.000It could, if you want to talk about in terms of an election, but you talk about in terms of the guy who's in office right now, like, why don't I like him?
00:49:18.000Well, one of the things that I don't like has nothing to do with any of his choices is that he's mentally compromised.
00:51:43.000The crowd at my inauguration was the biggest ever and I'm gonna make an issue of this for the first two weeks of my presidency despite photographic evidence to the contrary or I'm going to steal these documents that I don't even know what they are and I don't care and I'm gonna put them next to the toilet at Mar-a-Lago and then I'm gonna fight you to take them back or not conceding the election those things are crazy or thinking I can somehow charm Kim Jong-un in Korea,
00:56:41.000The idea that he could be president again, as opposed to Joe Biden, again, Joe Biden, not my first choice, not my hundredth choice, but the other guy is a crazy, stupid criminal.
00:56:55.000Do you like anybody on the right that's opposing?
00:57:34.000I wouldn't abolish the Department of Education, but considering how stupid our kids are, there's a lot of answering to do there.
00:57:47.000I'm not sure that a national department of education has done us any good because kids have just gotten stupider and stupider and stupider.
00:57:55.000It used to be that they didn't know anything, but they could read about things if they wanted to.
00:58:49.000And that these would be ingrained in younger people and then they would go into the workforce and then they would slowly but surely ruin The society through this.
00:59:19.000Former KGB Asian named Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmanov claimed in 1984 that Russia had a long-term goal of ideologically subverting the US. He described the process as a great brainwashing that is four basic stages.
00:59:34.000The first stage, he said, is called demoralization, which would take about 20 years to achieve.
00:59:55.000He used the example of the 1960s hippies coming to the positions of power in the 1980s in government and businesses in America.
01:00:02.000Besminov claimed this generation was already contaminated by Marxist-Leninist values.
01:00:06.000Of course, this claim that many baby boomers are somehow espousing KGB-tainted ideas is hard to believe, but Besmanov's larger point addressed why people who have been gradually demoralized are unable to understand that this has happened to them.
01:00:21.000Referring to such people, Besmanov said, they are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern.
01:00:29.000You cannot change their mind, even if you expose them to authentic information.
01:00:33.000If you prove that white is black and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and logic of behavior.
01:00:40.000Demoralization is a process that is irreversible.
01:00:43.000Besminov actually thought, back in 1984, that the process of demoralizing America was already completed.
01:00:49.000It would take another generation and another couple of decades – here we are – to get the people to think differently and return to their patriotic American values, claimed the agent.
01:00:58.000In what is perhaps the most striking passage in the interview, Besbinov described the state of a demoralized person.
01:01:04.000As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore.
01:01:07.000A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information.
01:01:13.000Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures, even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him a concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it until he has a kick in his fan bottom.
01:01:26.000When a military boot crashes his balls, then he will understand.
01:02:58.000And sadly, because colleges turn out nothing but America-hating...
01:03:07.000We're hysterics these days, ignorant, just ahistorical students who are not taught any of the things I used to be taught up in school, partly because we had the sin of learning what white people did.
01:03:24.000I mean, I'm sorry, but John Stuart Mill was white.
01:04:35.000There was no greater nightmare visited upon humans than communism.
01:04:40.000And by the way, the reason Russia is still such a basket case is because the legacy of communism.
01:04:45.000When you fuck with people's minds the way they did...
01:04:50.000Russia today is like a kid who was abused as a child.
01:04:54.000They're just not going to be whole as an adult for quite a while.
01:05:00.000I just can't understand how the institutions of higher learning wouldn't understand the value of rigorous discourse, the value of even having conservative speakers come in where you could debate with them.
01:05:17.000When I was a kid, when I was 14 years old, Barney Frank had a debate with a guy from one of those, like, hard right America, I forget what it was called, I forget what organization he was in, but it was, you know, some sort of tea party type thing.
01:05:36.000And it was fascinating because they allowed these two people to speak and, you know, the America First guy or whatever he was, whatever the company, whatever the group he was a part of, spoke.
01:06:44.000And the fact that those aired on television, they got an enormous audience back then.
01:06:50.000It's a shame that today anybody who has differing opinions than you, you shun and you never platform them.
01:06:59.000And the problem is it just makes them more convinced they're being silenced and it makes their supporters – like every time they arrest Trump, he gets more supporters.
01:07:08.000More people are more interested in it.
01:07:46.000And I remember the first time I had George Will on, and the first thing I said to him was, you know, reading you all these years has kept my liberalism honest.
01:07:58.000Because he's such a brilliant writer and thinker, and he's so precise, and he's a master of the telling detail.
01:08:05.000And I don't think he ever wrote a column that didn't make me think.
01:08:09.000You know, and sometimes change my mind.
01:08:12.000Like, because the way he puts it down, it's like, how can you argue with that?
01:09:46.000Their hosts know that they get ratings sometimes taken by the minute.
01:09:55.000But certainly I think by the 15-minute mark, you know, they know exactly how much the audience is liking or not liking what they're saying.
01:10:03.000And the audience does not want to hear something that they don't think they already know and they already believe.
01:10:09.000So are they going to cover that story that might get people to question what they say?
01:12:40.000I mean, what about the way they demonize the ivermectin thing?
01:12:44.000I mean, it's a drug, not a politician.
01:12:48.000I mean, why that, something like that would ever become politicized, especially a drug that I believe when it first came out in 2015, was it?
01:12:57.000I think it won the Nobel Prize, the guy?
01:13:06.000It's an anti-parasitic, but it stops viral replication in vitro.
01:13:11.000It does have some sort of an effect, and I'm actually going to have a debate about it with this scientist and another guy who doesn't believe in it.
01:13:24.000It's like if it works for you, and it plainly works for some people and works on a lot of things...
01:13:31.000I just don't understand that mentality.
01:13:33.000Well, you know why they did it, right?
01:13:35.000Well, I mean, it certainly was important if you wanted to create a monopoly for the vaccine.
01:13:42.000Well, not just a monopoly, but the Emergency Use Authorization Act.
01:13:45.000In order to utilize the Emergency Use Authorization, they had to have no other remedies.
01:13:52.000There was no other effective treatment.
01:13:56.000And so any effective treatment, specifically one that was I mean, at the time, COVID, or ivermectin rather, had been around long enough that it was generic.
01:15:00.000Billion dollars, I think, for selling their hillbilly heroin to people, knowing that they were hooking people, and they wound up killing hundreds of thousands of people.
01:15:11.000So, it's not that we don't know that they're capable of this shit.
01:15:16.000So, to throw your lot at, and then for the media to be basically the...
01:15:23.000The trumpet of government on this issue.
01:15:26.000So we didn't have a watchdog on government and what they were telling us.
01:15:30.000We just had somebody who amplified what they said.
01:16:40.000Because if it is true, if he is accurate and he's not getting sued for it, it's fucking terrifying that they're willing to do that, to make that kind of money.
01:19:00.000Do you think that if he didn't do that, they would have had a solution to this?
01:19:03.000I don't know, but I think if we had a little team over there keeping an eye on those people, which we didn't, it might have gone a little better.