Comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan joins Jemele to talk about his early days in comedy, how he got his break, and how he almost got a sitcom. Joe and Jemele also talk about what it's like to be a stand-up comedian in the late 90s and early 2000s, and what it was like auditioning for sitcoms.
00:03:46.000I remember him saying, he's dropping on the set, and he goes, my friend Don told me, On my gravestone, it should say, it's not a great plot, but Larroquette's in it.
00:04:52.000The stress of it, it was just like, I just wanted to do stand-up.
00:04:56.000You get to, because you're getting a little famous, and then you have eight lines, and you said you could do whatever you want, and then you're like...
00:05:27.000Yeah, I didn't have to deal with like the whole thing.
00:05:29.000Like the whole thing of the schmoozing and the, you know, going to these award things and these parties and these press junkets that you had to do.
00:08:01.000Like, McConaughey, that fucking dude loves, like...
00:08:04.000Pouring himself into a role, getting psychotic about who the character is.
00:08:09.000I wish I, if I could go back, I wish I looked at those as like, someone said this, as like an opportunity to perform instead of like, I'm trying to get something.
00:08:17.000Right. I didn't, I was just desperate, like I had no money and I was like, I have to get this.
00:08:21.000I will say though, if you're on a sitcom that has really good writing, it's fun as shit.
00:08:28.000I had a development deal with NBC, and I was going to do my own show, but they had a sitcom that they were already greenlit, and Ray Romano was on it, and Ray was the maintenance guy.
00:08:42.000And Ray got fired during the pilot, which is the best thing that ever happened to him.
00:08:46.000He goes on to do the Everybody Loves Raymond, and it's fucking huge.
00:10:42.000I had just a sketch show, one of the rare things I got, and the guy, I was so out of my mind nervous, and I could hear in the door this guy not doing good, panicking, and I just got calm, and I was like, I got this.
00:12:33.000So then, we were about to go on right after American Idol, which was like the biggest show in the world.
00:12:41.000So we're like, get ready for the rocket ship.
00:12:44.000And then this guy put Wanda's psych show, took Cedric off the air for like six weeks to put Wanda's psych show, not off the air, but like, yeah, to move the spot.
00:12:54.000So Wanda's show was after, and then Wanda's got amazing views, so it gave them an excuse to cancel Cedric, even though Cedric was a hit, it was like a FU.
00:14:31.000That Cedric show was also, I had like an episode where it was like my episode, you know, where it was like, I had like three sketches I wrote that was going to be, you know, it was my big coming out.
00:14:57.000Sold my cars, back to my studio apartment.
00:14:59.000Couldn't you think that studio executives would be wise enough to go, look, we got Louis C.K., we have Cedric the Entertainer, we have a fucking show.
00:15:07.000Let's figure out a way to promote this correctly.
00:15:20.000The first set of SNL cast, they already worked together.
00:15:24.000And that's why they were like gelled right away.
00:15:25.000I mean one of the reasons but all these sketch shows they put together and they'll say don't pitch a sketch show they never work it's because they like pluck people who don't even do sketch It's like putting together a boy band.
00:17:21.000Luckily, I didn't get a good swing on him.
00:17:25.000I see those guys that like do those power swings on the internet, like where they loop their arm around and fucking drive through and like, so imagine getting hit with one of those balls.
00:17:35.000It's like getting hit with like a fucking, like a shotgun shooting a rubber bullet at you.
00:17:40.000Yeah, yeah, they're really, yeah, if you get a nice skull worm burner, you could kill a duck if you just, you ever see those videos of pieces of head just snapping?
00:17:49.000No, but you ever see that one where the pitcher catches the bird in mid-flight?
00:20:24.000It's something that I've actually been consistent with, and that's why I partnered with AG1 for so long.
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00:23:18.000There was a lot of that, particularly in the 90s, where the teachers were Scientologists.
00:23:24.000Insert, by the way, it's not to pick on Scientology, insert whatever religion.
00:23:27.000There was a lot of Scientology that was in Hollywood, though.
00:23:31.000But what they would do is they would get people to join the acting class and they would try to recruit them into Scientology because the teacher was a Scientologist.
00:23:38.000He would talk about how important it was.
00:24:10.000But anyway, this guy, he was really into show tunes.
00:24:13.000And he would do a big show at the end of the class or whatever, the end of the quarter, whatever it was.
00:24:19.000He had this big show at this local theater and Brian's like, you have to come and watch a guy with the tiniest feet you've ever seen in your life.
00:24:28.000He had these little, I couldn't take my eyes off his feet because he had loafers on and they were like that big.
00:24:33.000And this guy would sing like so passionately these show tunes.
00:34:13.000That does happen, man, where people don't pay attention and they're on their phone and they're fucking off in the background and they're right in the eyeline.
00:34:21.000The thing I found interesting about that was his accent didn't...
00:34:25.000Because he kept an American accent when he was screaming, so...
00:34:28.000Interesting. I found that quite interesting.
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00:38:50.000Well, no, because at this point in my career, like, the shock and all, like, these things happen to me over and over again where I'm just, like, kind of laughing, and it's like, okay.
00:38:58.000I remember I was, yeah, there's been a bunch of situations where, like, get ready for the rocket ship, Kyle, because things are about to take off, and I'm always like, okay.
00:39:30.000Like, whenever I tell, like, young comics that are just starting to, like, headline now, and, you know, they've got some, like, viral clips, I'm like, dude, listen to me.
00:40:06.000I wish someone told me, because I really did not get this advice for...
00:40:11.000Some people that are super successful still don't do that.
00:40:16.000There's guys out there that are super successful that are paying attention to the ticket sales of other super successful guys and comparing themselves.
00:40:23.000I'm talking about arena acts that do that.
00:40:43.000I like a lot of people that think ridiculous things.
00:40:46.000But it's just, it's a trap that, you know, the struggle that led you to become successful at something in the first place, that becomes like your mentality once you're in a different stage of it.
00:42:36.000Yeah. And so doing, when I saw Anthony Cumia started doing this thing live from the compound, he would do it in his basement, where he'd play karaoke with a machine gun.
00:43:36.000It's just like the opportunity to talk to cool people seems like what a great thing that would be because it's always fun to talk to cool people.
00:43:45.000If I was ever on those shows and I ran into someone who was interesting, I was like, wait, how'd you start this?
00:43:50.000Yeah, you having a lot of interest helps.
00:49:04.000Like, imagine, I was thinking about sports guys, you know, like you're a baseball player and that's your identity and then you're 30 and you're like...
00:49:38.000Or not all of them, but a large amount of them go bankrupt.
00:49:41.000It's also just like, you think about your identity when you're a kid, and you probably get all that, you know, identity as an athletic person, then you become like a professional.
00:49:51.000And it must be difficult to just, you have to really never...
00:53:27.000I've hit my head so many times in my life, I'm a little worried about it.
00:53:30.000So Hopkins broke his own record by winning the IBF Light Heavyweight title from Tavares Cloud in 2013, and again in 2014, we won the WBA Super title from Bay Boot.
00:53:43.000Shumanov at ages 48 and 49. That's fucking crazy.
00:57:06.000Okay. People that are more health conscious, especially if they haven't read into it enough, where they really understand what's nutrient dense and what causes problems with your health and what are the real issues with high sugar diets.
00:57:21.000Those people, they hear meat is bad, so they say, you know what, I'm just going to eat vegetarian.
00:58:16.000So in the people that avoid meat, you get a healthy user bias.
00:58:20.000Because these are people that, even if it's not correct, I know people that truly believe that you can become a better athlete on a vegan diet.
00:58:27.000I'm like, okay, but there's no pros who have ever done that.
00:58:30.000No pros have ever gone vegan and been, especially at an explosive sport.
00:58:35.000There's only like a few people out there.
00:58:38.000Like there's a guy named Martin Bokole.
00:59:33.000All your vitamins correctly, and then you gotta make sure you're not taking too many vitamins, and which ones are water-soluble, which ones are fat-soluble.
00:59:42.000I just caught myself in the camera here.
01:05:17.000Eventually. All you gotta do is get out of the way.
01:05:21.000Just get out of the way, put a point of camera at it, let him, tell him you're supporting him.
01:05:26.000Yeah, eventually there was a show on, yeah, I was doing, like, full-on, because that was, like, I was just kind of doing little videos, and then it became, like, I was crafting, you know, we would do, you were in one of them, Time Canceller.
01:09:22.000That Tom Brady roast was so important to comedy because it was the most watched thing ever in Netflix and it was the most unwoke thing that's ever been on television.
01:10:33.000You're breathing into this fucking cloth that's an inch from your face and bacteria is going to accumulate there and moisture and it's probably going to be worse for you.
01:10:42.000Don't you hate it when you're doing stand-up and you accidentally mouth it?
01:11:16.000You ever see her movie that's like weird because it's like some of it's funny then all of a sudden it's serious and you're like it goes back and forth from mixed genres they call it.
01:15:02.000Like... Complete recall of dates, times, who was involved, who they worked for before this happened, who Kennedy had fired, why they were on the Warren Commission report, what the Warren Commission report's objectives were, who was influencing it, who saw the gunshots in the grass, you know, how did they die in mysterious circumstances.
01:15:26.000He'd rattle it all off, off the top of his head.
01:15:31.000He tells Congress to reinvestigate the 1963 assassination starting at the scene of the crime.
01:15:37.000Like, I'm telling you, man, the movie he did is, you know, great movie, Kevin Costner, wonderful movie, but talking to him about it is where you really freak out.
01:15:46.000Like, this guy has been studying the JFK assassination forever.
01:16:16.000Certain details that weren't available before for national security reasons or for whatever, but if they had made some sort of a declaration that Kennedy was a problem that needed to be removed, that would be as close to a smoking gun as you can get.
01:16:32.000But they could probably get away with saying things like that in 1963.
01:17:14.000They were going to literally kill American citizens.
01:17:18.000And the idea was, do this false flag, blame it on Cuba, then we have to go to war with Cuba.
01:17:26.000Kennedy was like what the fuck are you doing no and then there's the other one which is the Bay of Pigs so they informed Kennedy about the Bay of Pigs apparently they have informed him about it like late in the process and he denied them air support so the whole plan of invading Cuba the Bay Bay of Pigs was dependent upon air support they didn't get air support because Kennedy said no to it so all these What the fuck are you doing? All these people died that didn't have to die.
01:17:54.000All these American soldiers died that didn't have to die.
01:17:57.000And my friend Evan Hafer from Black Rifle Coffee, he had a very good point.
01:18:00.000He said, like, if you wanted to look at someone who had a bone to pick, who was like a hardened killer, like, those guys who got stranded at that beach, those would be the kind of guys that would want to kill Kennedy.
01:18:11.000Like, there's probably a lot of people that wanted to kill Kennedy.
01:18:15.000You know, there's probably the mob wanted to kill him because they got, the mob got him in.
01:18:21.000You know, the whole thing that happened with Illinois, like him winning Illinois.
01:18:58.000He's talking about how secret societies are repugnant, and that he's essentially calling out the shadow government.
01:19:07.000He's calling out all these people that are involved in these organizations, literally from like Yale, like the skull and bones that they're all in.
01:19:15.000All these creepy frat boys join the skull and bones, then one day they wind up ruling the world.
01:19:55.000But in Oliver Stone, he was like, back and to the left.
01:19:59.000But someone was saying, no, your head would go, would do that because it, like, From the shot from the back, your head would, like, recoil back.
01:20:13.000The speech that killed him about secret society.
01:20:18.000The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society.
01:20:23.000And we are, as a people, inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.
01:20:33.000We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.
01:20:46.000Even today there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions.
01:20:55.000Even today there is little value in ensuring the survival of our nation.
01:21:01.000If our traditions do not survive with it.
01:21:04.000And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.
01:21:19.000That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it's in my control.
01:21:24.000And no official of my administration whether his rank is high or low civilian or military Should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes, or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know.
01:21:45.000For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covet means for expanding its sphere of influence, on infiltration.
01:21:59.000Instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day.
01:22:11.000It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific, And political operations.
01:22:30.000Its preparations are concealed, not published.
01:22:34.000Its mistakes are buried, not headlined.
01:22:37.000Its dissenters are silenced, not praised.
01:28:41.000DARPA-funded researchers accidentally discover the world's first warp bubble.
01:28:46.000Warp drive pioneer and former NASA warp drive specialist Dr. Harold G. Sonny White has reported the discovery of an actual real-world warp bubble.
01:28:57.000And according to White, the first-of-its-kind breakthrough by Limitless Space Institute's team sets up a new starting point for those trying to manufacture a full-sized warp-capable spacecraft.
01:29:16.000Help us identify a real and manufacturable nano microstructure that is predicted to generate a negative vacuum energy density such that it would manifest a real nanoscale warp bubble.
01:31:38.000I think some of it has got to be ours.
01:31:40.000And I think if I had some shit that I did want the general public to know that I had, and I wanted to protect it from, like, espionage, didn't want enemies to find out about it, I would say it's not mine.
01:34:06.000Meaning is meaning to us because we think we're super important.
01:34:08.000But if we get surpassed by a superior life form that we actually create...
01:34:13.000Meaning. What does meaning mean anymore?
01:34:15.000It doesn't mean anything anymore if you don't have emotions.
01:34:17.000If you're the superior life form and emotions don't exist anymore because you don't have a human reward system that's built in through thousands and thousands of years of evolution.
01:35:02.000It only means something to us because we need meaning.
01:35:05.000What do you suggest people do, though, if they start to get, they don't have a good job, they have to do, the robots do everything, we have universal income, and you're just, like, I went on vacation for three days and I was miserable.
01:35:16.000Yeah. You have to find something you enjoy.
01:39:54.000Story goes, he did not take the time to have a meal during his long hours playing at the cards table.
01:39:58.000Consequently, he would ask his servants to bring him slices of meat between two slices of bread, a habit known amongst his gambling friends.
01:43:03.000Like, look, if you can go fucking play cards, if you could figure out a way to three card money people on the streets of New York, like, okay.
01:49:44.000And I was like, I don't know if I could live there.
01:49:45.000But then when the shit hit the fan and we started doing shows in Texas and putting it on Instagram, then all these guys were like, fuck that.
02:05:10.000Yeah, but if I want to have a conversation with someone, if I don't mind having a conversation with them, I just don't want to explain the whole thing.
02:06:32.000He thinks it ignores something that everyone knows.
02:06:36.000There's this enormous water table that's underneath the pyramids.
02:06:39.000So the pyramids, there's water underneath the pyramids, and Mr. Beast apparently on his YouTube thing that he did with the pyramids went into the water.
02:06:48.000So they were all in the water, splashing around the water.
02:07:58.000His name is Michael Button and he had a very good point.
02:08:01.000And his point is that there's this linear path between cave person and what we are today.
02:08:08.000But he's saying, but human beings in the form that we exist in today have essentially been around for at least 315,000 years.
02:08:17.000And there's all these large peaks and dips in the historical timeline of the temperature of the Earth.
02:08:29.000And in these peaks of temperature, you have all this growth and change, and then you have ice ages, and you have drop-offs, and then there's cataclysms and natural disasters, and he brings up the volcano eruption, the Toba volcano eruption.
02:08:42.000But what he's essentially saying is, human beings in this form, with the minds that we have, have existed for 300,000 years.
02:08:54.000Only over the last few thousand years have we seen all this progress.
02:08:59.000And he thinks, what he's proposing is, if there was a super advanced civilization a hundred thousand years ago, there would be almost nothing left.
02:09:09.000So we're supposing that what we find is all that's ever been.
02:09:13.000What he's saying is, if you imagine 200,000 years of development of technology, of tools, of agriculture, all the different things that could have happened in those 200,000 years, that you could have had an insanely advanced society 200,000 years ago, and then it gets completely wiped out, and then 115 to 150, depending on who you ask, 1,000 years later, you start seeing what we've seen in the last few hundred years.
02:10:00.000It all just gets absorbed by the earth.
02:10:03.000You know, there's very little metal that is going to, like any forged, like if you have a knife and you leave that knife under the ground, just the earth will erode it.
02:10:12.000You know, a few thousand years, it's gone.
02:10:14.000Oh, so they probably had combustion engines and stuff?
02:10:18.000Here, look, steel takes probably 50 to 500 years to decompose, depending on the type and environmental conditions, with stainless steel potentially taking over a thousand years.
02:10:28.000So just imagine something that's 100,000 years old.
02:11:57.000Explain the collected acoustics from deep in the ground, including seismic waves, noise from human activity and photon interactions to map newly found shafts and chambers that extend more than 2,000 feet below the surface.
02:12:10.000Biondi said these waves were collected by radar, specifically by analyzing Doppler centroid abnormalities, shifts or distortions in frequency patterns used to detect underground structures or changes.
02:12:23.000However, Professor Lawrence Conyers, a radar expert at University of Denver who specializes in archaeology and was not involved in the study, still raised doubts.
02:12:33.000He said photon interactions, this is science fiction, and frequency shifts of what?
02:12:37.000He said we now have three different energy sources moving.
02:13:12.000But if it is under the water table, that's even crazier.
02:13:16.000So, if they're using the water, if the pyramid, there's a guy named Christopher Dunn that believes that the pyramid is a gigantic electrical power plant.
02:13:24.000Oh yeah, like a Tesla coil kind of thing.
02:13:26.000So if they're using the water for energy, and they actually have these columns that extend into the water.