Joe Rogan on Danger and Standup Comedy

How does it feel to be a martial arts expert? Somebody that can fight? Like do you feel more confident going outside? Do you like, you know, because I'm always looking around like, okay, make sure that guy doesn't fuck me up. He can, he can totally kill me. Like, you know, whatever. People can always shoot you. They can always shoot you. They can always stab you. They can always hit you over the head when you're not looking. There's always danger in being a person, especially when you're around bad people. Right? But if I'm in a situation where there's some guy who's a dick and, you know, I think like I've seen people get beat up, man, that couldn't defend themselves. And it's horrible to watch. It's sad. I mean, we've seen many videos online of people just getting beat up by somebody. Yeah. Because they don't know how to fight. And you see some person who really doesn't even know how to fight and they're beating the fuck out of someone and hurting them really bad. Yeah. That's not going to happen to me. I like that. I like that if some asshole tries to do that to me, I can hurt them. I can detain them. I could submit them. Yeah. But it doesn't ever get to that point. Have you gotten in fights lately? I'm not a fighter. I mean, I know how to do it, but I'm a nice person. So it's just knowing that, having a self-confidence. That feels good. It helps. That feels zen. It helps. But there's a lot of sketchy people out there, man. We've all seen videos. And I watched a video yesterday of some guy punching some girl in the face for like no reason and not going to run conscious. I'm like, what the fuck? People are assholes. There's a bunch of people that are abused and they come from horrible backgrounds. They're abused by their parents or their family. They're a mess. And they walk amongst us free until they commit crimes and they get locked in jail. So if somebody wants to fight me, what do I do? I just run. Yeah, get the fuck out of there, bro. You got to see it coming. Seeing it coming is real. That's a real important part of it. Seeing it coming right away. Seeing sketchy people and knowing you got to have that spidey sense. You got to get the fuck out of there. But it's exciting to be around danger. For you, not me. It's exciting to be in weird areas and be around weird people. It's like when things are a little bit, a little sketchy, a little seedy, people enjoy that. It's like, what would you rather have? Would you rather have everything be fucking boring and vanilla and just everything is Hermosa Beach? Every now and then you want something to be just a little bit fucking dirty. It makes you feel a little alive. When you do the shitty mics or random spots here and there, there's a grittiness to it that I think especially standups, we really gravitate to that. Yeah, I think- It feels live. We lack a little danger. Yeah. Also, what you're doing when you're doing standups is you're kind of exposing these truths that everybody kind of knows about but doesn't talk about and it frees them in a way like, yes! Yes! There's thoughts that are there but you got to unearth them. You got to dust them off and show them to people and they're like, yes! Yeah. There's a danger to that, right? There's a riskiness to what we do. Yeah, for sure. There's something, it's a weird job, man. And everybody does it different, right? You get the hedgeburg, he does it, Mitch does it, did it one way, you do it a different way, Joey Diaz does it a different way, everybody's got a different way of doing it. But it's ultimately you're trying to find those points, find those perspectives, use those comedy weapons to pop through on these people and break into their mind and get those sparks flying.