Artie Lange Reveals What Happened to His Nose | Joe Rogan

I mean, okay, I did a I did a podcast in my living room. I was late 18 times. Puerto Rican comedians were beating me in my kitchen. That's hilarious. That's hilarious. I was late 18 times. That's hilarious. I would not. You know, people are waiting outside and I caught traffic by the bathroom. I would say. So that's how out of control it was. My friend Jay is one of the producers of the doctors and they were going to fix your nose. Yeah. But they were worried that if they did it, they'd have to give you painkillers. Right. Well, that's that's a big thing too. Like with the drug court thing, if you get any type of surgery, they got to do paperwork. Also, the guy from botched wants to do it too. I'm actually in a bidding war to fix my nose. What happened to it? A bunch of things. 30 years of drugs. Right. And I'm like, okay, you want to hear stories? First of all, a bookie I was dealing with a few years ago, had a guy who used to work for him who got this idea to try to get money out of me. And he he sucker punched me at my, this kid was a 19 year old boxer and he can't, I was going to my car one day and he thought I was like, he saw me on TV. He thought I was like a billionaire and I'm going to my car and I hear, are they, and the kid hits me with a right hand. Right. I mean, like you could never get off on a regular fight, you know, like, like the way Carson hit Trevor Burbank, you know, right here, right here, right on my and collapse and collapse the bone right here. Knock me out for 10 minutes, at least 10 minutes. And, and, and, you know, that situation got solved the way it got solved. But, you know, I, I mean, well, I just had to deal with it in my own way. I made up with the guy through, you know, intermediaries on the street and everybody's fine. And we moved on. But the kid laid me out. The kid, I mean, it's a 19 year old guy just boom. And so that's one thing. 30 years of drug use. But this is one of the craziest stories. So there was this stripper I used to go on the road with and she would meet me in city. She's actually from Boston. She was from, she was from Southie and she was hopping. But when she talked or in sex, she sounded like Mark Wahlberg. That accent's so gross. Fuck me, you wicked heart. Fuck. You know, but she was beautiful. And over the years, like I would meet her at hotels. She would call me on the road and she was a drug addict. We used to snort drugs together. So we're at a hotel in St. Louis. It's about, it's about five years ago now. Not now, less three, four years ago. And we're snorting OxyCote. So to snort the pills, you got to crush them up. So we're in this hotel room, this nice hotel room. I got a show that night at a big theater. And I go, I take a shower. She takes out like about five pills and starts crushing them. Now it was a nice hotel so we had room service. The room service had a salt shaker that was glass. So she couldn't crush one of the pills. She takes the salt shaker and starts hitting the pill with it. And the salt shaker breaks. Glass breaks. So she takes a credit card and makes it into a fine powder, a fine dust. Not knowing there's all glass in the powder. She cuts out like four lines. She gets cooled down to the desk to go, I brought her a gift so she goes down to get the gift. I come out of the bathroom and I see the lines and I take a pen that I cut down and I snort one of the lines and there's glass in it. I snorted glass and oxygote. Holy shit. So it sounded like a zipper. I just went like. I saw one picture of your nose where it was enormously swollen. That's after the kid punched me. That was after he punched me. That was after the kid punched me, yeah. Yeah. He tweeted it out. He was trying to be a jerk. Well, if he took a picture of me with my phone and tweeted it, he had a bad plan, put it that way, to try to get money out of me. And the bookie, who, that's a long story. But anyway, that was after I got punched. Yeah, so that got out all over the place. And again, that's my life. That's the chaos that was my life. But I snorted a line of oxygote and that all glass, fine, cut up glass. It sounded like a zipper. I just went. And then my nose just started to, it just went nuts. It was bleeding. And I went to the hospital. I had to cancel the show and I wanted to strangle the girl. And that's what it caved in? It all, that started the process. If you watch the show crashing, I'm on that three seasons. You could see my nose morphing into what it is now, like from a regular nose to like what it is now. And again, part of me, I tell young kids, part of me doesn't want to get it fixed because every time I look in the mirror, I go, this is a life. This is what happened to me. It's a reminder maybe to not fuck up again. And maybe it tells kids that too. It's just such a dangerous thing to get it fixed and then to be in that kind of intense pain and then have the temptation to take a pill. The premise is while you're in the hospital, you get what you need because you can't get, it's an operation, so they gotta put you out. They put you out. Yeah. But then afterwards, look, I had my deviated septum fixed and they gave me a couple different painkillers that I didn't use. I got out and I didn't use them when I had knee surgery either. Now as a guy, okay, let me ask you something. See, this fascinates me. So as a guy who gets obsessed with stuff, right, and you feel that euphoria at that morphine drip, the obsession over that feeling is not as strong as you not wanting to fuck your life up. Not even close. Yeah, I know it feels great, but my brain is like, uh-uh, get out of here, cover your hand, tuck your chin, bob and weave, get the fuck out of the corner, get out of there. Okay, here's what a drug addict is. This is where they claim it's a disease. I'm smart enough to realize that too, but I do it anyway. I'm the direct opposite. I never got into the drugs at a young age. But still, you feel that feeling. You know what I mean? Like, you know, that's something like, to me, the sick person is, oh, why don't you wanna feel like that all the time? You know? It's crazy. Like some people have a painkiller prescription, all these pills in a bottle, they don't finish it, I think that premise to me. Yeah, I sold mine. I took Percocets, I think it was Percocets when I had my first knee operation, after the morphine drip, I got out, they gave me Percocets. I took it one day, and it made me so stupid. Okay. I remember sitting on my couch going, God, I'm so dumb right now, I can't think. Okay, I got to, I took, in one day I counted, because I was obsessed with it, I took 123 Percocets in one day. 123 Percocets. So I got pancreatitis. Jesus Christ. I was on the liver list, and then my liver came back. Holy shit. Again, you talk about, you were on the transplant list? They were about to put me on the list. The doctor said to my family, he said to my mother and sister, he's gonna need a liver. This is like, this is five years ago, because I got out of control with the Percocets, which is why I went back to snorting, I was trying not to snort, I was taking them. Oral. For your health. Yeah, right. It's better for your liver. So once you snort the glass, how do they get it out of your nose? Well, I went to the emergency room, I was in high school, for like four days. What do they do? Yeah, they had to go in, they do a surgery where they knock you out, they gotta go up and they clean it out. And then I had surgery again a couple years ago to do it. So there's no, like I can breathe good and everything now. I don't know, you know, but again. They would take a piece of your rib, that's what they would do. They'd take your cartilage from in between your rib, which will eventually grow back, and then they would prop it up. They'd do it to fighters when the tail smacked. I met the guy at the doctors, I went to go see him. The guy who does that. And he was like, I don't know. He goes, he never saw, he goes, he never saw a worse nose. He looked in the nose and goes, I never saw a worse nose. That's incredible. Congratulations. Yeah, I'm very goal oriented. But if they did fix it, you know, the real issue would be what it feels like when you get out of the hospital. Right. And you know, how, whether or not that would disrupt your progress enough, the point where you would slip right back. Well, again, I'm making more mature decisions now because I could have went right into this. But, and again, the doctor at Botch was cool about it too. He said, you need more clean time. He at least a year before you even try. Yeah, well good for him for thinking that way instead of just a big episode for them. And again, if I couldn't breathe, it'd be one thing, but I can breathe all right. And like, you know, I never looked like David Beckham. Anyway, what do I care? It's gotta give you some material on stage as well. Absolutely. I say, stop the smell of roses in life. And they had cocaine on them. It's been an odyssey of craziness.