Joe Rogan on the Roseanne Controversy

Talked to Ben Shapiro about it today on his show, but it won't be out until Sunday. What is, have you ever encountered her in the world? I know Roseanne. I talked to her on the phone and I believe every word she said. She told me that she was taking Ambien and that she was drunk on Memorial Day weekend and she tweeted a bunch of stupid shit and she's out of her fucking mind. And she said, you know, in her words, I need to adjust my meds. You know, I'm not thinking straight. And she was talking about how exhausted she got doing that television show and she got bronchitis and she was overworked. I think she's stressing the fuck out. She also told me that she did not know that that lady was even black. She thought that lady was Jewish. And she said to me, like, do you really think that I would make a joke about a black lady and say plant a vase? I wouldn't fucking do that. She's like, I thought she was Jewish. Look at her. So I did look at her. I could pull up her Wikipedia page. This lady. She I mean, she most certainly pull it up so we could see it. I mean, she most certainly could be African American for sure. But she also most certainly could be like Hawaiian or Native American or point being the Italian maybe she thought Jewish. That's what Roseanne said. Jewish. This is what she said. I do not know. She's lying to me. I don't think she's racist. Have you ever taken Ambien? No, I've never taken Ambien. But I talked to a good friend of mine about it today. And he got up in the middle of the night, cooked himself a meal, ate it, went to sleep, got up in the morning and had no recollection of it. He had to be told that he did. He was trying to figure out who put the plates in the sink, who ate this food, where this food come from, couldn't figure it out. He got up in the middle of the night, doesn't remember a thing. He cooked himself a meal, sat down, ate it, went back to bed, has zero recollection of it. I hate to be this guy, but during that meal at any point, did he get racist or anything? I wonder. You know what I'm saying? Like he's literally like it's one thing. It's a spooky story to be like I took Ambien and I made myself some food. It's an even spookier story to be like I took Ambien and I fucking killed somebody. But it's a stretch to be like it is. I took Ambien and I said something I would never say in a million years. It heartens me to hear you say that she said that she wasn't aware of the ladies race. Yeah. Because it, you know, I don't know her. All I know her from is Roseanne. All I know her from is decades of watching her in media. Her TV show. I followed her before the TV show. It didn't seem like the Roseanne that I've watched for 30, 40 years. Well, see, that's the thing. I'm not close to her on a daily basis. Right. I have tremendous respect for her as a comedian. I think she's she was a real pioneer in a lot of ways. She was this brash, like really confident lady who shit on stupid men and she did it in this like really bold way and stand up that was very unique for the time. Right. If people go back and you watch like some of her early stand up when she was coming out of Denver, the domestic goddess, she was a beast man. She was a beast. She was crushing. She was crushing, you know. And then she got that sitcom and it's absolutely one of the greatest sitcoms of all time. But now she's 65 years old and it's fucking hard for her. And that schedule she was telling me was absolutely brutal and that they were killing her with all the work. I don't know her very well, but I do know there was another time where she said something about Susan Rice, who is another African-American woman. And she she said something about her and compared her to. Swinging balls. Yeah, something like swinging ape balls. You know, so that's two for two. It's two. Yeah. Well, this one for sure. Right. Because this one, there's no excuse for. This is one from the past that there was no, you know, like, oh my God, I was on Ambien. I tweeted this. No one said anything. Susan Rice is a man with big swinging ape balls. And that wasn't meant to be a compliment. That's 2013. Okay. So that's a long time ago. That's five years ago. Oh, and you can. I mean, I don't know if it's still available, but you can go through a timeline and see a bunch of things. Yeah. Or not like a comedian being funny, but right. You know, beliefs. Right. That one is that's a rough one. That to me is a way rougher one. It's way rougher. Like that one is like, that's what you said. I mean, it is what it is. You know, if you said that the other lady looked like Planet of the Apes just because of her haircut because she looks like the lead woman in the era. Yeah. She looked like zero. There was like a photo of her back of it. It was just like the way her haircut was and her outfit was. I think some people, you know, would, but if you didn't know that she was black, it's a totally different thing. Do we know that for sure? You know, only she knows for sure. You know, it's, uh, you surprised at how quickly it all ended. Yeah. That was the part of the story that, again, I have no skin in the game other than I watched the old Roseanne and I was enjoying the new Roseanne as well. But I came home from like, I was Vegas the other day and I flew home yesterday morning and then I had a meeting over the studios like at noon. So I took a nap when I got home, like, and also my wife wakes me up and she goes, you got a meeting. Don't forget. Like it's 11 30. Oh, and Roseanne's been canceled. And I'm like, that's, that's impossible. Like I was groggy, but I'm like, that's impossible. It's like 20 million people are watching that show. And she said, uh, she tweeted something racist. So I fucking pick up my phone and I look at it and stuff. And by the time like this had happened in the span of like the hour I took a fucking nap, they, the, the network acted so fucking incredibly fast. There was no pre-varication equivocation. No, dude, they had that act sharpened and ready. It was nuts. Like all of a sudden they were just like, we're done. We don't know her disavowed. And it was, I think it was so surprising because it's been a while since somebody did something even, uh, superficially, uh, um, moral. You know what I'm saying? Like I've read a lot of articles online where people are like, Hey man, ABC didn't own the show. So of course they fucking had, they didn't have as much skin in the game. So it was easy for them to cancel it. Would they have canceled it as fast if they own the show and dot, dot, dot you can, you can make a bunch of kind of caveats, but at the end of the day, something bad happened and then the network reacted a major company, fuck the network, a major company, major corporation reacted and acted as the right way to handle it, to just immediately cancel the show. I personally would have maybe fired her and kept everybody else done like the, you know, Valerie die off or just use computer animation. I, you could replace her with a Pixar character, but I think you can sell equally compelling stories like without her, honestly, like the nine episodes that they've done this season, she really hasn't been the driving factor of the stories. It's been more about Darlene. That's who I felt bad for when this whole thing imploded. Cause I'm like, she's, she put this show together, uh, Sarah Gilbert. Uh, and she was like crushing on it. She was like really good showing off like what a great actor she is, but now everybody's out of job. Feel bad for John Goodman. I've worked with him before and he was wonderful on the show. They could have sustained the show without her. I think can she be forgiven? Sure. I mean, can't, I mean, Mel Gibson get forgiven. Isn't he working again? Well, Mel Gibson, it was also a case of him being intoxicated, right? He was yelling some anti-Semitic stuff at a cop. Well, I mean, nevermind that. Didn't he also punch his ex wife? Like there's a more violent action than him just getting it saying, Hey, sugar tits. Like there was some, his wife had recorded him or she recorded him yelling at her on the phone. So nobody knows if he truly hit. I don't know. All right. My bad. I thought that was, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know even the specifics of any accusations. And also, I also didn't follow it that closely and not because I'm like, man, that's Martin Riggs and I don't want to hear that. I just didn't follow it because I'm like, um, yeah, man. It's can she be forgiven? Sure. Will she be forgiven? I don't know. I mean, look, she should have tweeted what you said instead of, uh, oh my God, I took a Gambian. Like, you know, that turned into an opportunity for a major pharmaceutical company to like put out one of the best zingers Twitter's ever seen. I mean, like this is a company they're not normally used to like, Hey, what should we say to be funny? Like they have to put out very staid information. And for once they were like, how about this guys? We say racism isn't a, you know, a byproduct of our drug. Really well said. It was well worded. It makes you sit there and go like, why didn't I tweet that? Whoever wrote it, it was pretty, whoever wrote it rather is pretty slick. Um, the thing Ambien does do though, it definitely makes you act bizarre. You did. There's, there's some people that's the one that's supposed to make you go to sleep. I mean, if you just, there's a, there's a website dedicated, eat edibles that would help. Right. There's websites dedicated to people that have had crazy experiences on that stuff. I've seen a few of those. The one that you told me about your friend cooking dinner is about the fourth time somebody's commute kid. That story now drive could have been cause they've been listening to your show and you may have sold said that story. Probably have, uh, people drive cars on it. They go places without realizing they don't know what they're doing to get places. It's like the serpent in the rainbow man. You become zombified and you're like, I'm not dead. You're Bill Pullman in a fucking casket. Well there was a, there was a guy that got pulled over a few years back who was famous. And I forget what he said something about. Like I gotta get to the dance or something like that. And the cops were like, what the fuck are you talking about? And they realized like he was kind of out of it. And then after it was over, it was revealed that he had been on ambient and that he had gotten in his car and really had no idea what the cops were pulling him over. Like literally the guy was in a dream. It reminds me of when I was a kid, this was not, not drug related, but I was a kid, I was asleep. I fell asleep on the couch watching TV. And before my, like my brother had lost his fucking wallet at a school dance and my mother was like, I'll drive you up there and try to find it. And my father would get up for work at about nine o'clock at night and then had to work at 10 o'clock. And I think he started working at 11 o'clock at night. He worked at the post office canceling fucking stamps. So he, my mom tells me that and I fall asleep on the couch watching like fucking Dynasty or some such shit. It was the eighties. And then my dad wakes me up because he woke up and nobody was home. Like my mom wasn't around. Nobody was there. And he's like, where is everybody? And he fucking startled me awake. So I was like, what? Oh, Donald, Donald, they had to go to the school because Donald lost his thriller. And my father goes, what? And I was like, Donald lost his thriller. And he was like, I don't know what you're saying. And I was like, what? Don't mom said that Donald lost his thriller. And I kept replacing the word wallet with fucking thriller. My father looked at me and literally set me aside the next day to be like, are you using drugs? And I was like, no, I said, you woke me up. I guess I was in some sort of, maybe I was dreaming about fucking thriller. It was 1982, you know, like, Yeah, your brain just never clicked back over into waking life. Right. You stayed in this weird zombie land. Your wallet meant thriller. Did you find that? No, what were you looking for? It got pulled over and I'm trying to remember what he told the cops where they realized that something was going on. I think it was it was in one of the articles that I tweeted. The story was in one of the articles that I tweeted. What happens in that instance? You get in trouble. But here's the thing that I should say for people. Can they arrest you for being the ambient driver? It's a rare reaction because a lot of people take that shit. Right. You know, a lot of people. You don't hear this story all the time. There's not a wet page. There's not a wet page. Just a couple of those pills a day. Right. And there's no wet page devoted to stories of people who took Ambien and got fired for being racist. Right. Well, even better, there's no stories of people that took Ambien and, you know, became addicted to it and became some sort of a, or is there? Is that addictive? Is Ambien addictive? Yeah, I would say probably. Yeah, I think they'd like getting addicted to falling asleep or needing it to fall asleep. Probably. I guess if you're somebody who's like, I can't go sleep without that. I wonder if it's addictive, like maybe like a heroin is addictive. No, right. Or like a speed, you know, like people get like physically addicted to things. Where it kind of changes the receptors. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if it dulls the senses to the point where like when you, I mean, that's what the way I, heroin was always explained to me was when you're on heroin, the senses are get dulled. The nerve receptors like just don't take in as much. When you're not on heroin, that pain of withdrawal, part of it is the receptors coming back to life all at once. And it was like, yeah, Jason, Jason Muse, long time ago, I have problems with that shit. So it was one of the rehab doctors communicated at Thusly. He said, you know how when you sit on your hand and it fucking falls asleep? I'm like, yeah, totally. He's like, imagine that was your whole body in times of by a million. That's what he's going through. Wow. And I was like, oh, and then I, you know, up until then I was always like, just fucking stop doing heroin. Just stop it. And then meanwhile, I was eating a lot of sugar. Just stop doing your drug and eat my fucking drug. But once that dude explained it that way, I was like, oh, that would be, that would be fucking painful. No wonder the kid doesn't want to get off heroin because he's like, I know the path to not being on heroin is full of pins and needles, but you never die from it. That's the good thing about that. Like you don't die from heroin withdrawal. We know from Amy Winehouse and other cases that you can die from alcohol withdrawal. Like you can, you can get off, like when you're in jail and you're kicking heroin, you know, the cops just be like, you know, here, just keep throwing up and pissing. But if you're kicking booze, they have to give you booze because your heart could stop. What do we look at this fucking article? He pulled up an estimated four hundred and forty six thousand people in the United States were current misusers of Ambien. Now what does a misuse mean? Dangerous dependency onto Ambien can develop after just two weeks of use. Don't attempt to quit without proper knowledge and before putting a medical treatment plan into place. Wow. Two weeks is all it takes. Two weeks. And you're Gonsville son. Maybe not. Maybe you're driving around having conversations with a cop. Maybe one of those guys that uses Ambien and gets a good night's sleep and, you know, or the worst performance at the job in the morning. You kind of where you're like, you just lose a word. Like you're like Donald lost his thriller. And that's the lowest, mildest form. Yeah. Every now and then you skip a word, which I do now. I call that hitting a pothole. You know, Roseanne is she's an older lady. She's in her sixties and, you know, she's had some mental problems and and she's drinking and she's taking that stuff to go to sleep. And she's not taking it for just two weeks. She's taken it a lot, you know, and she said she needs it to go to sleep. And I think there's a lot of people that feel like they need something to help them go to sleep. That's fine. But then for me, I think it fucking works. Yeah, I don't think at the end of the day, it's not like she took Ambien and that makes her bad. Like, no, it's that she fucking tweeted what she did. And it's like, if you think for a second that if in using this drug, which I need to go to sleep because I'm late sixties, woman and I need my rest or whatever, um, or you just deserve fucking sleep, like, you know, I've mercifully, I've never suffered from a lack of sleep, but I know people who have and it's fucking mind bedding. So, but if you know you have to do that and you know, there's the slightest chance that you could become somebody else or say things that are not in your character, give up your fucking social media, man. Like, don't think she probably realized that she was obviously going to do that. I think she had tweeted ridiculous shit in the past before and it flew under the radar and nobody cared.