Best of the Week - March 1, 2020 - Joe Rogan Experience

Did I ever tell you a story about my friend Phil Hartman when he was a kid? He was a roadie for Jimi Hendrix for one night. He was like, whatever you would call it, a grip, someone who's on the staff. A stage tech guy. Yeah, stage tech. Yeah, yeah. Stagehand. Yeah. And he was a teenager. And Hendrix is at the whiskey. And he's there putting his hands on the speakers, making sure they don't fall over. Because they were kind of perilously close to the edge. And Hendrix is just fucking going off. He was just going off right in front of him. Right in front of him. Right in front of him. And he said, dude, he was feet away from me. I could have touched him. Hendrix. Phil Hartman told me with great... Me and Phil Hartman got high a couple of times. When we did News Radio together. It was one of the only couple of times that I got high during that era. It wasn't much. He got high. He got high a lot. As a matter of fact, I might not have even gotten high. I definitely got drunk. Anyway, he was telling me about when he was a teenager that he worked with Jimi Hendrix. He was a stage tech at the whiskey. Wait, so how old was Phil then? He must have been... When I met him... I want to say he was 46. When I met him, coming off of Saturday Night Live. So like 90s? 94s when I met him. And I want to say he was like late 40s. So when he was a teenager... Jimi died in late 70s, right? He died in 1970, I think, right? Oh, early 70s. Oh, early 70s. Yeah. Oh, early 70s. Oh, early 70s. So how old was Phil? So when I met Phil, it was 94. That was 24 years later. That makes sense. If he was like 19 at the time or something like that. Wow. So anyway, he's a kid. And Hendrix is right in front of him. And his job is to make sure that the speaker doesn't fall into the crowd. So he's standing there and he's looking up at the stage. He's standing in front of the stage and fucking Jimi Hendrix is right in front of him in this prime. You know, when everything is going down, you couldn't believe he was real. You couldn't believe he's standing right in front of you. Like a Hendrix didn't exist before. There's no pre-Hendrix. There's just Hendrix. And everything else is like... You read about Eric Clapton, like Eric Clapton's quotes about seeing Hendrix play for the very first time. It's fascinating. Yeah. Because you realize, like with his top of the food chain guitarists go to see Hendrix and they go, what the fuck are we doing? What are we doing? What is he doing? What the fuck is happening here? Yeah. And then Phil said it was happening right in front of him. Phil, you know, would dabble in music for fun. He really enjoyed like playing guitar and fucking around. Wow. So for him to be a kid and to be standing right in front of Hendrix performing was like, whoa. That's a new one, right? Dog whistles only been around for like two years. People calling something transphobic or homophobic or sexist dog whistle. Like, holy shit. Like you can't say anything anymore. Well, let's go back to the basics. I was on the internet very early, 1987, before the World Wide Web. And you may remember we had something called Usenet groups. Yes. And the Usenet groups and the way it used to work, because, you know, we didn't really have a widely spread internet back then except in universities. And I was on MTV and when I saw the internet, I'm like, holy fuck. I'm emailing with my audience, who were not counted in the ratings, by the way. College audience don't count in the Nielsen ratings, or at least didn't at the time. And they want something very different from what MTV is playing. So I was like, wow, this is interesting. So I got into these Usenet groups and the way that worked is you'd post something and then overnight it would be copied all around the internet and you had to connect to a special server and you pulled in the groups that you had subscribed to. And so really it was kind of a, it wasn't an immediate conversation, but you'd post something and then people would reply back. And I just kind of jumped in two feet and immediately, fuck you, commercial MTV asshole. What are you doing here? Fuck off. You're not supposed to quote like that. You're supposed to quote at the bottom and the top. And I was like, whoa, what's going on? And what that was is the minute you have the opportunity for people to say stuff anonymously, they turn into giant dick bags. Almost everybody. This is just an easier way to do it. Now we've made it so easy and with all the little, the blips and the blooms and the rewards that you feel when something is posted or someone goes against you. And it's like, and again, I think amigulas have swollen because of this. So then you get this, you respond differently to what you think is an attack and the attack, you know, this shit, the registers in your brain is something really dangerous. I'm going to go back at them, but they're anonymous and that's the best thing. Then the blue check mark became a little more interesting, which I don't have. And I tried to get one for a long time and someone over there hates me and now... Really? Oh yeah, they wouldn't know. That's what it is. They hate you? What else could it be? I've never gotten a blue check mark. I don't want one now. Now to me, it's the mark of the beast. You got a blue check mark, you know, I'd be looking over my shoulder, man. So now that's become kind of those, those are the people that now risk being deplatform because you have status. And so it's fun to bang against these people like fuck this guy, I'm going to bang against him. So it's some human nature that just exists within us. Like, you know, it'd be really easy for me to go online, you know, under whatever Twitter handle, that Joe Rogan you dick, I wouldn't say that to your face. Look at you, you know, beat me the fuck up. So no. Both my parents converted from Judaism to Catholicism before they met each other. Whoa. Yeah, it was very unusual. How did that happen? It's a long story. I'll tell you if you really want to know. But anyway, I'll do the short, what I'm getting to. And this was during the, during the Second World War. They were both in New York, both first generation American Jews. That makes sense. They converted for different reasons from each other. And then they met. My father's family was Orthodox. And his father, a guy named Shepsel Dubner, who'd come here when he was in his maybe late 20s from Poland. He still lived his every day in Brooklyn, as if he were still in Poland. He didn't change at all. When my father converted and his father found out, my father was in the war. He was overseas. He was home on leave. And his father was cleaning up. And from my father's pants that he'd left over a chair, Rosary beads slipped out and fell on the floor. That's how his Jewish father, Shepsel Dubner, found out that his son had become a Catholic. So what he did is he proceeded to sit shiva for him. The Jewish morning ritual where for seven days you mourn the dead. He declared that he would never again speak to his son. And he forbade everyone in his family from speaking to his son. So by the time I was born, I was the youngest of eight kids in this family because they'd become very Catholic. I didn't know this whole family of my father's was unknown to me entirely. So they did exactly what you're saying now. Holy shit. Yeah, that was what I thought too when I... Holy shit. And my mother's did the same thing, but it was less dramatic because her family was less religious. So they still didn't like it all that she had converted. Do you have any children? Yeah, I got a couple. I'm Jewish again, though. The first book I wrote, long before Freakonomics, was called Turbulent Souls, although it got then republished under a different title called Choosing My Religion. And it tells this story of my two parents and then me. I would love to hear that, but I just want to put in your head that what I was going to ask you is, could you imagine a scenario where you would be capable of doing that to your children? So, no chance. No chance. No chance, but... It's so scary. Yeah, it's scary. It is. But on the other hand, I mean, this is what Freakonomics is... What I try to learn through doing Freakonomics is, you know, to measure the what and try to figure out the why, but then not be the judge who says, that was terrible, this is wonderful because, you know, different people are going to be like, you know, different people have... Look, if Shepsil Dubner were here, we could ask him, what's your side of the story? He could tell us a story that might convince us that, you know what, this son of his did a terrible thing to the family. He did a terrible thing. You know, he would say, how could it be that we Jews existed for generations and generations and generations when everywhere we lived, there was always someone trying to, you know, get rid of us. And then we finally come to America, you know, the land of freedom, religious freedom, economic freedom. And here, after generations and generations of forefathers fought to stay Jewish, here my son decides to become Catholic. What are you thinking? So, you know, everybody's got a perspective. Everybody's got an emotional experience. So I try to respect that. But no, I would not do that to my children. That they're pulling it back with fishing wire to keep it up on his head? It just seems... He seems oddly stiff. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Like, it seems like everything's pulled. Like, there's not a... I expect a certain amount of laxity in a man's face when he reaches a certain age, particularly around the forehead area. I'm just not seeing it. I'm not seeing any movement either, which makes me wonder about that. Like, I want to see expressions in your forehead. My worry is his lack... He has a very big... He lacks the ability to have, like, a cohesive story. Like, he's not good at being... Like, have you ever seen him talking to the kids by the pool? It's the weirdest fucking clip. Talking about his hairy legs? What the fuck? He's like... To a bunch of little black kids, he's like, and the black kids would come up and they'd see my hair go up and bubbles come up. And they'd touch my hairy legs. What the fuck? I just think his brain is... He's losing a lot of... I tweeted something this morning, because there was... Someone put up a video of models on a runway, on a catwalk, and they're all tripping and falling in the same spot, these dumb shoes they're wearing. And I was like, this is Biden's brain cells. It's like, they think they're on the right path until they get to the spot, and then they just can't fucking... Did you see the thing that he was talking about? God creating women? No. And then... He called his wife his sister or some shit. And then he did by, you know, the you know... I forget what it was. I forget what the gaffe was. But it was one of those... We listened to him, like, what are you saying? It's like he has no brakes. His car is going down the hill, it's like, ah, jeez, I hit a fucking tree. He's like, hit the wall, fuck it. There it is. Can't remember the word creator. Refers to God as the thing. Hey, actually, I like that more. That's funny. No, you know what? I think I have a different take on it. Let's play it, because I want... I have a different take on it. Because when I listened to it, I said, oh, I know what he's doing. Which is one you think it is. The bottom one, the second one. He doesn't want to... Here, let's play it. We know these truths to be self-evident. All men and women created by... Go, you know the thing. Stop. Pause. You can't be president. Stop. Pause. Pause. Listen, we can't play any games here, folks. This is a really old man who can't talk. Like, this is not a joke. Like, that right now, you know the thing? Play that again. Play that again. This should get you into a mental hospital. Right. They should be like, hey, Joe, are you all right? We owe these truths to be self-evident. All men and women created by... Go, you know the thing. He had three strokes while he was saying that. The first one, what was that word? Self-evident? Is that what he said? We hold these truths to be self-evident. But it didn't even sound right. Hear it again. Listen to it. We owe these truths to be self-evident. Self-evident. Self-evident. He's drunk. That dude's either drunk or he can't talk. We owe these truths to be self-evident. He shouldn't be doing this anymore. Self-evident. And then he says, when he goes, he could have just said, all men and women are created, and he could have just said, equal, and gotten out of there, and been like, fuck it. And instead he goes, the thing... See, I think he didn't want to say the creator because there's a lot of people... The religious thing. There's a lot of people that would say, well, what are you trying to say? Do you believe in evolution or not? Are you a science denier, Joe Biden? Joe Biden's a science denier.