Best of the Week - June 21, 2020 - Joe Rogan Experience

I contacted you right when the looting hit. That's racist. No, because there were a lot of white people looting. It was a thing where I recognized that there was a giant shift in people's perception of the Second Amendment. And I said, this is a good time for you again. Appreciate it, brother. Yeah, because you're out there beating the drums and sounding the alarms and all these people that are anti Second Amendment people where a lot of these motherfuckers that were lined up in California trying to buy a gun last minute. Because as soon as the lockdown hit, people started getting really nervous. When people started getting locked in their homes, and then people, when they realized they weren't going to work, people started to worry about people stealing and things along those lines. I heard about people getting carjacked or getting their groceries jacked rather, where they headed to their car from the grocery store. Things got real weird. And then you saw these giant lines at these LA gun stores. And that's when I got a hold of you. I think it's a really important conversation. I think you're the best at explaining it from a very rational perspective that people during the times before COVID, they didn't think that this was important. But you were always one of those guys where it was like, hey, what if shit goes down? Well, guess what? Shit went down. It did. It's kind of like me carrying a firearm. A lot of people ask me, they're like, when I started carrying a gun, I'm like, why do you need the care gun? What do you think you're a drug dealer or something? I'm like, look, it's nothing for me to take my phones, my wallet, my keys, and then put my gun on and go about my life. It's nothing for me to do that. It's normal. Yeah. And it's not much of a, it's not much of an encumbrance on my life where it's like, okay, it's not worth the day to day of me carrying a firearm. But if I ever needed it, that's going to be the most important thing I have on me to protect that life. So it's a small price to pay for something that has such a huge upside if it ever happens. Yeah. You're a best case scenario though. You're a lawyer. You're super intelligent. You're a really nice guy, but you also love guns. What people are worried about is worst case scenario. They're worried about someone who's a criminal who just wants to rob people who has this ultimate power over folks. And that's what everybody's worried about when it comes to guns. They're worried about a school shooter. They're worried about a mass murderer. They're worried about a guy who breaks into a mosque and starts gunning people down. That's what they're worried about. And that's, I totally get it. Like I really, truly honestly get it. I know you do. I can empathize and sympathize with that. But my whole thing is this. Once we move past that understanding of, so you know you have the best case scenario, which you pointed out was, theoretically me, so to speak. And then you have the worst case scenario where you have, you know, criminals, you have crazy people, mass shooters, things of that nature. Once we get out of that realm, so let's talk about the reality because you know there's overlaps, right? So I usually ask people, well, what law are you going to come up with that's going to completely stop that? Here's a deceptive one that I read. It was really fucked up. They were talking about this kid who was, I think he was 17, who died from COVID. And they said he was, they said he was healthy. No under, no other health issues, they said. But then you read the article deeper, it turns out he had diabetes. He had type 1 diabetes and he was 400 pounds. And it's like, wait a minute, that's not no issues. These articles are full of shit. And they write those articles just so that you click on them because they get the fucking ad revenue from clicks. So they're incentivized to trick you into being scared. You're like, oh my God, a 17-year-old died? My 17-year-old can die. Holy fuck. And then you click on it. And if you don't read, you know, six, seven paragraphs into the article, you don't find out that this was a 400-pound diabetic kid that, you know, has a- Could have died from the flu three months earlier. Yeah. It would have been the same shit. Oh yeah, yeah. You know? So the numbers are fudged. So I don't want to believe your numbers. Don't come to me with more scared tactics about like the numbers are spiking. Well, you already said that 50% of the positives are false positives. Well, at least finally they're saying, when they say that the numbers are spiking, I haven't heard the 50% are false positives. I haven't heard that. In that video, there was the chick that is with Fauci, the other one. She was saying 50%. Yeah. I don't know how old the video was. It's probably pretty old. We said that our testing is, we're coming up and if you have 1% of whatever and we test it then 50, you know, 50, about half of the positives are false positives. Jesus. And then don't wear a mask and you have to wear a mask. And they said the whole reason we have to flatten the curve is because you can live on anything for up to like nine days and even an asymptomatic person can still transmit it. Then it comes out, they say the exact opposite. Yeah. Now they're saying asymptomatic people very, very rarely transmitted. I don't choose to believe that Joe. I'm going to believe what they told me the first time. There's a lot of people that do say that. Not the new facts that they have now. So we're still going to wear masks all the time. Yeah. People get mad at you if you suggest differently. There's a lot of people that like being scared too. And they're like, fuck you. Love it. You're your goddamn mask. Love it. We need to protect people. Love it. But meanwhile. If there's no police, who's going to protect you and you? Who's going to protect your family? Me. Meanwhile, there was no, these people weren't freaking out when you've seen these mass protests. And the spikes, guess what happened right after the protest. And at least they're saying that now. At least they're saying, they're being forced into saying is probably connected to the protests. Well, of course. I miss you on TV right now. I really do. It's a perfect time for you. It's kind of crazy that you're not hosting that show anymore. But there's so many people doing that. You know, I was, I really did burn out. Like I, I felt like it's just redundant. You know, the nice thing for what you do is you get to curate and kind of be more active in to follow your own rhythm for it. I was really tied to that rhythm of the 24 hour news cycle. Right. And how fucking redundant it is and how cyclical. And at a certain point, I was like, I don't know what else to do with this. And so I didn't want to stay just because I could. I just done it long enough. And so I thought, well, let me just, it was just time. I thought like the audience needed a fresh perspective. I needed a fresh perspective. Like I just, I just felt done. Like I was more, I was more mad about shit than, than inspired. You know, I appreciate that you decided to go out at the literally at the very top, but it seems like, especially right now, like John Oliver's killing it and Trevor Noah's doing your show. And it's like, this is, this is the, there's so much to mock. It's almost like an overload and doing real commentary on politics today. And my, it's almost like you're doing commentary on pro wrestling. Like this is a rig game and you're on here pretending like this shit makes sense. Yeah. It really is. Right. Well, it's also because that's the economic system that's been set up around politics is the very same that Vince McMahon set up around wrestling. You create, I mean, it is a kind of, you know, kayfabe. This is sort of like, there are characters, you know what it's like when you're trying to produce something every day, you're going to go with kind of a boiler plate structure. So you're going to say, all right, our show revolves around, you're from the right, you're from the left, whatever comes in, we're going to filter it through that. We're going to keep it produceable, but it starts to, like you say, it becomes, you know, authentic. Anything would happen to me sometimes with like, I'd be doing shows and you would know you weren't necessarily feeling the outrage of something or that the commentary was going to be as spicy or as deep as you might want it, but you might kick it up a notch anyway, because it was performative. And I always had to fight that instinct to not, to not give into the gravity of like, what was expected of people.