Joe Rogan tells Funny Stories from Growing Up

Hello freak bitches. You know what that guy's going through right now? The Rantor. When he's like in the groove and the other guys are like, I got some funny shit to say too. And just shits on his rant. When you see guys at a bar and one guy just starts talking over the other guy. They lift on their toes and get louder and louder. Yeah, because there's a chick there and they're trying to score. That's the worst. Did you ever have a friend that would insult you when girls were around? Oh, yeah. I had a friend fucking knock me down once. With a punch? Well, there was a lake near my house growing up and we used to skate there. It was fucking unbelievable. I grew up in Tarrytown, New York and we had this reservoir that actually feeds New York City. It's like the main reservoir for the water, drinking water in New York City. And so it would freeze in the winter and then they had this shack, this big fucking wooden shack, twice the size of this room. And it had benches and it had a little snack bar, hot chocolate and hot dogs. Then you go outside and there's like a wooden steps going down into the lake with telephone poles. They put out, this is a big fucking lake, telephone poles around half the perimeter of the lake with spotlights and radio speakers. And they would crank fucking pop music and you'd go out there until 11 o'clock at night. We'd hide six packs in the snow on the banks of the lake. We'd go out there. We were in seventh and eighth grade, drinking a couple beers, hitting on chicks. And so I'm out there one night and then during the day we play hockey all fucking day. They had metal nets they would put out and they would use a plow to plow the snow to make rinks out of the fucking snow on the ice. Whoa. It was insane. And this is before global warming. That shit froze by Christmas and we were skating in March every fucking year. March? Well, early March. How do you know when to stop? Well, it's three feet thick. But how do you know when it's not three feet thick? They tell you. They're tested. The town tests it. Wow. There's another shack on top of the hill where they have spotters. There's guys that are rink, you know, guys skating with jackets that are the rink guys. And so anyway, I'm there and I'm talking to this chick from the next town over. Celine was her name. I remember this. Deep voice, brown eyes, real fucking Italian girl. That was my type. Little plump Italian. And I'm talking to her and all of a sudden I get fucking knocked down. This kid, Chris Spencer, had skated towards me and just checked me. Just fucking, and I fell down, hit my head, couldn't get up for a little bit. And I was like, what the, and my friends were laughing. I was like, what the fuck was that? Chris was like trying to break into our little circle of friends and he was this big dude and he lifted weights. And that was his way of like getting into the group was to fucking knock me down while I was talking to Celine. And I tried to fight him later after when I had my sneakers on and thankfully somebody broke it up, he would have fucking killed me. But cut to, oh, and Celine liked me at the time. Cut to, what was it? Halloween the following year. We're running around and somebody sprayed shaving cream in my eyes and so I chased him down and it was somebody dressed as a bum. Knock him down, sitting on top of him, punching him in the face. People start grabbing me screaming, dude, it's a girl. So I fucking run away. Turns out it was Celine. Oh no. And guess what? Guess who had a bigger crush on me now? Her? After you beat her ass? Tell me about her fucking childhood. Whoa, really? Yep. So what happened? Did you have to apologize? No, she was in the next town so I didn't really, I just ducked out of seeing her. How many times did you hit her? I think a few times. She's a girl. Jesus Christ. You know. She couldn't fucking ... Why did she spray you in the face? Did she know it was you? No, we used to all run around with, we would take shaving cream and we'd put aerosol tops on a barbersaw can and then we'd spray each other. You know, when you came home and you were covered, you were a snowman when you came home. Right. And then we'd slap each other in the forehead with an egg and we'd run around. There's always one ass all the way to Nair and then you have to go home early because he sprayed fucking Nair on your head. So she sprayed shaving cream in my eyes. I couldn't see that well. Wow. And I knocked her around a little bit. Wow. Yeah. My first domestic abuse charge. I heard a girl punch me in the bus once. Really? It's like a weird thing, man. When I was 14, I got on the bus for the 13-year-olds, like the junior high school bus. And there was this guy who actually became a buddy of mine later. He was young back then. Muggsy Malone. Shut the fuck up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was a tiny little dude. At the time, he was ... I think he's two years younger than me. And anyway, some girl was mad at me for something. I don't remember what happened. But she started throwing punches at me. And I'm like, what the fuck? And I block her punches. And then I looked down and the dude was right behind her. And he said something to someone else, said something to them. And he looked at me and he goes, yeah, I ain't afraid of you either. And I was like, all right. I'm like, just what the fuck ever, man? He's like ... Can I fight this girl before I fight you, Muggsy? Well, I just fucked up. I was new to the town. And I don't know what happened, what she was mad at me for. But I remember blocking punches by some girl trying to beat my ass. Like, what the fuck are you doing? This little dude mad at me too. Muggsy, was he wearing a little newsy cap? No. Was he from the 1940s? I'm super lucky I never hit that girl back. Because it turned out she wound up dating my friend Mark, who was the captain of the wrestling team, like afterwards, like after this. And he would have killed me. He was an animal. And he was a couple of years older than us. Like, I was 14. He was 17. He was a senior. And he was like one of the best wrestlers in the state. He was an animal. He would smoke cigarettes in between wrestling practice. He would be in wrestling practice. And that girl that tried to beat my ass, she would open up the door and he would go outside in like winter time out. And he would like take a couple of drags of a cigarette. Really? Yeah. While he was wrestling, like at a really high level, he was smoking cigarettes. He was like a thug slash athlete. Interesting. Like a legitimate bad motherfucker. Like an animal. He was an animal wrestler. Made me realize like real early on, like wrestling practice made me realize like how hard some people work out. I had no idea how hard some people work out. Yeah. Because I had taken like karate classes before and I had played baseball, but I never did anything like wrestling. Yeah. And my first days of wrestling class, I remember thinking, what the fuck? You guys work this hard. We have to go upstairs. We have to carry someone on our back and climb up stadium stairs. What the fuck are you talking about? Yeah. Like what? We're doing endless drills where firemen carrying each other back and forth across the fucking gym and racing each other and constant live drills with wrestling. I would leave there. I could barely walk. I was so tired. I didn't do any homework while I was wrestling. Then I just wound up doing no homework ever. That's true. With wrestling, it really fucks up your grades. You come home annihilated. Annihilated. You're hungry as shit. I just want to sleep. And then did you have to try to lose weight for mates? I did, but I wound up stopping doing it because my friend Steven was wrestling at 128 pounds and he was a better wrestler than me. So I went up to 134, which is basically like what I weighed when I was 14 or 15, whatever I was. So it was pretty easy. I didn't have to cut any weight at all. But then I cut weight for Taekwondo. When I stopped wrestling and I started fighting in Taekwondo, I cut a lot of weight up until I was 17. And then when I was 17, I was still trying to make 140 pounds, but I'd be walking around at like 150 something and I would just starve myself and dehydrate myself. It was terrible. I really fucked with my performance. And then I stopped doing it and I went up to 154. And when I went up to 154, I became way better. That was when I got better. I was holding myself back by the dieting. And I think that's a big factor with wrestlers. But one thing with wrestlers is that their mental toughness because of that weight cutting, it's almost worth it because the mental... It's super bad for your health to cut a lot of weight, but those guys who can do it and still compete, they have the ability to push through discomfort and just have a drive to win that very few sports can match. Because very few sports will the athlete compete in a state of uncomfort as much as wrestlers do. They're just dieting, starving themselves, dehydrating themselves, and still going out there like fucking savages. So it's just a different kind of sport, man. Different kind of sport. That girl basically beat my ass. I mean, she didn't really beat my ass, but part of me is thinking... And she was younger than you too. I think she was my age. She was on the bus too. She was taking the bus back. But I was thinking, I better not punch this girl. And oh my God, so glad I didn't. I got smacked by a gay kid in eighth grade. Oh shit, you got pimped slapped? I got pinched this black kid Keith. He was really effeminate and so we used to tease him. I'm not proud of it, but at that age, you just kind of did. It was like, I'm embarrassed by it. I used to whatever, cock your wrist and say shit. And he turned around and fucking smacked me across the face and he stunned me. I was like, holy shit. And I didn't know what to do because he was part of a family. There was projects in Tarrytown and there were cousins and there were families that had a lot of cousins. And his cousins were some bad ass motherfuckers, the Davises. Oh no. This isn't to say I necessarily would have hit him after that for a number of reasons, one of which I was not that tough. I was pretty tough with girls on Halloween. But I think I was just so shocked. Did you know that you deserved it? Did you have a feeling? I deserved it. I got hit a lot as a kid and I deserved it most of the time. I got punched in the face in Times Square when I was about 14. Oh my God. Drinking Southern Comfort. I walked past some guy who was like some fucking homeless drug addict who was like coughing up a loogie and so I started coughing really hard too, making fun of him. He came back and punched me right in the face. Whoa. You don't want to get beat up by a junkie when you're a teenager. No, not in the days of AIDS. Oh that's right. It could have been an AIDS-y punch. No I used to get smacked around. It's a good day to be punched. I was such a fucking asshole. I was such a wise ass. Because I was the smallest kid. So that was how I fit in. I was the funny guy who made fun of everybody. I would pick fights because my friends would fight the fights. I was that guy. Well certain things that kids like when they're growing up and one of the big ones is things happening. We like action. We like something happening. If Fitzy's gonna go fuck with that guy then we're gonna kick his ass. Because we're bored. We had no fucking internet. People love doing stuff like that. We had no phones. We stood on a street corner for five hours. That was Saturday night. My friend Kenny would just start fights with people. He would just go find someone like at a bus stop and just start beating his ass. No shit. Really? Come on we're fighting. He was crazy. Whoa. Yeah I watched him fight. I watched him get his ass kicked. He did it once with this guy and the guy knew how to fight. The guy was beating his ass. Good. He's just crazy. What's the kid's name? Kenny. What was his deal? It was just nuts. He was older than us. He's like one or two years older than us. Big guy? Nope. Nope. Not particularly big. Just fucking tough as nails. He had a boxing tattoo in his arm. I think he had a Tasmanian devil with boxing gloves on. But he didn't really box. It was just one of those things. Never made it to an actual gym maybe a couple of times. But we'd just start fights. It wasn't really that good at it. He was just crazy. He was crazy and he wanted to fight. He realized that with his limited mentality and view of the world that the most fun that he had was when he was fighting. So he was like, well that means we fight. He just would want to fight all the time. One time my dog got hit by a car. It was really sad man. I lived on a busy street and my dog, I opened the door and she got super excited to go for a walk and I didn't have her on a leash and she ran out into the street. I just didn't anticipate her running. She was usually pretty good about it. And she ran out and she got nailed by a car. Jesus. It was so sad. She died right in front of me. I carried her back into the house and she shit herself. That's when I knew something. I still didn't know something was wrong but looking back I would have known. She just shit all over the kitchen. I was like, I can't believe she shit herself. Like what? Like why? She never shits in the house. And then she just slowly slipped away. Just lied down and just stopped breathing man. Just bled from the inside, internal bleeding. She got hit by a Volkswagen bug. What kind of dog? She was a mix. She was boxer and I think she had some German Shepherd in her too. Sweet dog. Sad shit man. It was sad shit. It was a real bummer man. It was a real bummer. But anyway I told Kenny I'd never had it. I mean I'd had dogs die. We had a dog that we adopted. It had distemper. We went up having to put it to sleep. It started going crazy. It was an adult dog. Not adult but it was over a year old. And it was a Doberman and it just started barking at us and snarling its teeth and it just started losing its mind. And we got it to calm down enough we could get a leash on it and brought it to a vet. And the vet said I had distemper. We had to put it down. So I'd had that happen before but I'd never seen a dog die in front of me. Sad shit. So I tell Kenny he's like we're fighting. That's it. Come on out. We're fighting Rogan. You're fucking fighting. No excuses tonight. And we drove around and he like wanted me to pick fights with people. I'm like I'm not fucking fighting anybody. Because that's the way he would deal with his emotions. Yeah. Sure. Sadness, fight. Anger, fight. Looking for excitement, fight. And then it's also there's a thing about young guys where young guys always want to be the crazy one. Like oh Mike's the fucking craziest. Mike's fucking crazy. Mike doesn't give a fuck. And it becomes like a social status among young especially we were talking about this before the podcast. Everybody our age was like a latchkey kid. Everybody our age had a mom and a dad that worked and they opened the fucking door in the morning and you were off to the races. You went to school. After school they weren't home for hours. Right? You did a bunch of shit by yourself. And most of the time we're around other fucking savages our age. So it's the abstract influence of the parents on the children that is really like giving you your experience for who you are as a young person. Yeah. You're experiencing how these people taught their kids and what the result was. Because you're around the kids all the time. You're not around your parents. No. You're raised by your peers after about the age of 12. You're basically your parents are out. You're raised by your peers. Yeah. You're constantly with your friends in school. You're constantly with your friends in any activities you have. You're looking for their validation instead of your parents' validation. Exactly. And with my friends it was always who's the sickest fuck. Oh Mike's a sick fuck. You know oh Steve's the sickest fuck. He doesn't give a fuck. He's crazy. And there was like a value in that because everybody was scared. That was really at the bottom line of it. We're all young men and we're on our way to becoming adults and no one knows what the fuck they're going to do. We have a few friends that have graduated high school and they're losers now and like shit that might be me. Like that was the big cloud that was always hanging over everybody's head. What are you doing after high school? What are you doing after high school? And it was like this impending date of doom that was coming up. So everybody was scared all the time. And everybody wanted to be a man. They wanted to prove themselves. They wanted to be something special and no one felt special. You know everybody felt like a fucking loser. You know we're all like waiting to become an adult so you could get a job like all these other people you knew that were around you or escape or figure out a way to escape. Yeah and then there's always the community college. Like people go well you know I'll probably end up when you hear I'll probably end up at the community college that's going to be one semester and out. I did that. I went to Mass Bay. Mass Bay Community College. I did it after a whole year. I took a whole year off. I only went back to school because I didn't want people thinking I was a loser. So I did like maybe one semester at Mass Bay. I don't even think I finished a semester and then I left and went to UMass. UMass Boston had this like adult education program where you didn't have to have a GED or a not G-A-D S-A-T because I never took my S-E-Ts. So when I graduated from high school I'm like I am never going to school again. Like fuck this. But I got so tired of feeling like a fucking loser. Like when I tell people I was taking I would always say I was taking a year off. But it really I just had no direction. All I was doing was like doing martial arts and competing. And I just was so terrified of what the fuck the future laid. And so I went to UMass for like three years but not like three full years. It was like there was still a lot of credits to be acquired if I was going to graduate. And I just was wasting my time. I was barely paying attention. I wasn't doing I was completely half-assing whatever project we had. And then I was realizing like what am I why am I wasting my time. And then I got some letter saying that I couldn't come back with the grades that I had unless I came up with some very compelling reason. So they wanted me to make an argument for why they should include me back in the class. And I wrote out in handwritten because back then no one had a fucking typewriter this total bullshit letter. This ridiculous like persuasive bullshit letter about how important education is to me and how important it means. And then I realized like the amount of effort that I put writing this bullshit letter to keep these people from kicking me out of their school which I wasn't paying attention to far exceeds any effort that I ever put on any project ever in class. Yeah. And then I realized okay whatever I'm going to do with my life it's not going to involve doing this. Yeah. It's not going to involve someone else dictating my schedule. Yeah. Like for whatever reason. And you're like clearly I can write. Yeah. Clearly I can think. Maybe comedy. Yeah well I had a conversation with a science teacher. The science teacher and it was the same kind of thing. I mocked him in class not necessarily mocked him but I brought up something that was contrary to what he was teaching. He was talking about Lake Erie being a dead lake and I said listen man they had a documentary on PBS last night about Lake Erie making a resurgence and these scientists have figured out these new ways to minimize water pollution and all this shit. And like other kids are looking at me like what the fuck. And he got pissed at me. He got really pissed at me and he said you're undermining my class and this and that. I go hey man you're teaching old shit. Yeah. Are you teaching old. This is on TV man. This is on TV like yesterday. Yeah. And I had a conversation with him afterwards and because I had to talk to him in order to get back in the class he kicked me out of the class and he said two things. He said one he said first of all I don't know whether or not that was the case whether or not it's true and if I allow you to just interrupt my class and chime in something like that and it's not true. I haven't fact checked it. You're telling the whole class and I don't know if you're right or you're wrong or you're making things up but you're interrupting my class. That's the point. If you have something to tell me about it maybe you could tell me about it after the class and then I can go and look it up and then maybe I can correct the class. It was but two in interrupting the class you showed yourself to be more articulate and more intelligent than you ever showed ever in the entire semester. So you're totally half-assing everything you do. You're writing everything in paper you turn in every test you do every time I call upon you for a question totally half-assed that but when you wanted to correct me on something all of a sudden you knew all the words you knew how to form the sentence correctly you got to say it with the right impact. It's like you just your focus is off. I was like god damn that dude's on the money and I realized I'm like yeah so I'm not stupid right I just can't I can't listen. I can't do it their way I gotta do it my way. But I could I just didn't I grew up not having any direction. So someone doesn't tell you what to do all your life like essentially you just out free I would go fishing I'd hang out my friends in the fucking woods we just go find shit to do and then all of a sudden you're in school and they're telling you everything you have to do all day like I'm not ready for that. Not only that like you're sitting I'm fucking shocked when my kid tells me about it I go who's your schedule today. Well you know at 815 we sat down for 15 minutes for homeroom then at 830 I go to my first class which is an hour and 15 minutes then we get five minutes off and we go to another class that's two hours they got these long fucking class and it goes like that till three o'clock they get like they get like 25 minutes for lunch and they're sitting be boys with fucking chemicals racing through their bodies and girls at the next desk with fucking short shorts and cleavage and little brown titties sticking up you know when the breeze hits them and they get a little bit of goosebumps on the inside of the cleavage and that cross Jesus is just wedged right in between those two brown. Oh the Italian horn. The Italian horn. And it's got glitter on it. You remember the people who wore the Italian horn? Yeah. Oh my god. How about charm bracelets? Charm bracelets. Yeah. The fucking flip flops her little toes. And then the abs are. She just painted them. Ooh the toes very important. The girl doesn't take care of her toes. No. Can't trust her with her pussy. Oh fuck yeah. Show me your feet. Sorry ladies I hate to do this on equal pay day. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.