Everlast joins Joe Rogan to discuss his unscripted, visually inspired music blending hip-hop with blues and R&B, like "What It's Like" from a spontaneous guitar riff. He reveals surviving 1998 emergency heart surgery with a St. Jude’s valve, crediting weed for post-trauma insomnia relief. Rogan marvels at medical progress while Everlast muses on life’s fragility—from alien theories to civilization’s reliance on unseen systems. Their conversation contrasts modern dependence with Da Vinci’s genius under primitive conditions, touching on art (Shepard Fairey, Banksy), sneaker culture, and even a past feud with Eminem, underscoring how trauma and creativity shape identity. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, the Shroom Tech Immune is a really fascinating one, because what it is, is somehow or another, I don't know the total science behind it, so I don't want to speak out of school, but...
From what it's explained to me is that when you eat these mushrooms, your immune system reacts to them as if there's an issue, like there's a bacterial infection, a cold or something, but there is no cold.
So it jumps up your immune system, so your immune system builds up this big crazy army, but then there's no war.
So if some other punks come along, your immune system is ready.
Do you like having, like, that kind of a space in between records where you really get to work on your shit and really get to, like, put it in a form you like?
Well that's also why I keep a separate area like you know I'm talking about like a good hour away from the house.
I got a drive to go to the studio and I usually spend a day or two there and you know just lock my mind out of everything and try and you know it's there's no windows so it could be two in the morning and you know Are you always writing shit down too?
Yeah, I mean, trust me, there's times I wish I could do that, like, take that and write it on a piece of paper in a way that I thought was beautiful and artistic, because I'd love to write a movie.
But I can't do that.
I'm saying it's this thing about music and the way it lives in my head.
I don't really know how to make music, man.
I've been faking it for a long time, dude.
I've just been picking up things and making sounds that I'm like, I like this sound.
I'm going to make this sound.
That's the realest way I can put it.
I mean, I've learned along the way how to become a musician and how to produce a record.
but I'm saying it started with me just kind of being like, I'm just going to rap or whatever it was I was going to do, you know, and then pick up the guitar.
I was just, I'm just going to play this little thing I wrote.
That's kind of brilliant, though, in a way, because it's so uninfluenced and influenced at the same time.
You know, instead of being influenced by, like, classical instruction and, you know, structure and all that stuff, you're influenced by just what you enjoy and imitating that, you know, and then expressing it in your own way.
I mean, a lot of them really trip on the way I do what I do.
Especially when I bring...
Because I always bring in cats to help produce records.
I think, even though I could probably accomplish the deed on my own, you need people to challenge you in the course of creating something just to make it that much better.
So, it's just, you know, All of them go to school.
That's what I'm saying.
I steal everything I can from all of them.
I'm always the worst musician in the room in my mind.
Even though I'll get up and play with anybody and it'll work, I still have this thing in the back of my mind that's like, I don't know what the hell I'm doing.
It's like, man, okay, I'm just kind of sneaking on stage.
Seeing if I blend.
I'm like the soy bomb guy from the Grammys.
Remember that guy who came out during Dylan with the soy bomb written on his chest?
I'm just sneaking onto the set trying to get something.
You're still in a chord, watching the videos real close, and VHS pausing them, and the thing's shaking, and you're trying to see where his fingers are on the thing.
I took a few guitar lessons when I was real young, maybe six or eight guitar lessons, and then kind of lost interest in it, because hip-hop kind of stole my mind away.
And then later on during the House of Pain days, there's actually a bunch of stuff on House of Pain records that are just little things that I played that we looped up and put, you know, like little country riff for that shit kicker song.
Every time I go to town, people start kicking my dog around.
There's a guitar piece under there that I played.
So there's little bits of it, but it's like after...
I left House of Pain, I had a guitar around me all the time, and I just started really actually saying, let me see what I can do with this thing.
And the cat who helped me produce Whitey Ford Sings the Blues, or I should say produced the record with me, Dante Ross, we were just working on hip-hop music.
And I was just kind of crashing to his place and playing guitar all the time.
And he'd be like, what is that?
And it was this thing.
And I didn't even know what it was yet, but that's what turned out to be what it's like.
He's like, we're going to record that tomorrow.
And I was like, I don't even know what it is.
So now I'm thinking I got to record this thing tomorrow.
So I stay up all night and I like write lyrics to it.
And, you know, it turned, we put it into a little beat and we were sitting there listening to it and we're like, that works.
But how does it work with all this stuff?
You're doing this rap record and That's how the other songs in Whitey Ford just kind of started happening.
Like I said, the music just started surrounding me.
I listen to the music more than, let's say...
I have this definite idea of what a song is.
I'll get a lyrical idea or a little riff idea, and I'll start working on that.
And then once that takes a little bit of life, it'll start telling me what it wants.
It'll be like, I'll hear a slide guitar on it, or there should be a piano right there.
I can hear it in the space that's in between.
It's telling me.
I'm not this dude who's like, I know what parts and what, but I'll be like, I know what sound should go right there because I can hear it.
And then you add that sound and it will sub-harmonically create this other ghost sound in there that you're like, oh, that's a violin I can hear.
Let's put a violin in there.
And it builds itself into what it's supposed to be.
I have to keep an engineer around all the time on duty and ready to go, because I'm...
So I can get on the laptop and go on YouTube and find some stupid videos that'll make me laugh.
I can get on the Facebook and the Twitter and whatnot.
I could probably get two tracks recorded at the studio on my own before I just turned in for the day.
That would take me probably about six hours, which would take him about eight minutes.
The technology has helped By making it easier to have your own studio, you know what I mean?
Instead of spending a million dollars on a studio, I spend $40,000, $50,000 and I have a really beautiful studio, you know what I mean?
But I'm still with just, it's all about, 90% of what I do is, you know, either at my studio or late at night in a room by myself with the acoustic guitar, banging on it, trying to think of something funny or witty or What you really nailed was this kind of bluesy, smooth, hip-hoppy sound that nobody had ever done before, like what it's like.
I just kind of walked a line between Brad from Sublime and Wyclef Jean.
I saw what Wyclef started doing with all his R&B and island-influenced music, mixing that with hip-hop.
I was just kind of starting to record this guitar stuff, the What It's Like song, and I was a big fan of Sublime and how he always injected these little hip-hop phrases into lyrics and things.
I knew he had to be, never really knew the dude, but knew he had to be kind of a b-boy to a certain degree and those kind of things.
That's kind of how we saw that it would all work when we were looking at the record, me and my friend Dante.
My label thought Whitey Ford Sings the Blues was a horrible idea.
Nah, see, because what happened to me was I woke up in the hospital and had emergency heart surgery like 98. So it was like, I was like, oh, I'm done smoking.
Wow.
I didn't even, I mean, like, I still smoke some weed now and then, but like, you know, even for like three years, two years after that, no, about two years after the surgery, I didn't, I was like on some, hell no, I'm alive.
I'm trying to, but I could never sleep because What happened was I went to bed.
I'm real tired.
I'm not feeling good.
Went to sleep and woke up in Cedars.
Like, after surgery.
So, like, my mind was on this, like, don't go to sleep kind of, like, trip.
During the day, the guys that were making the record with me, we had the studio in my house.
I had a house up in Mount Olympus in Laurel Canyon, and I just built the studio up in there to record the record, and Everybody was living in the house.
And apparently just all day, I just didn't feel well.
And I didn't look well.
And when I went to lay down, I guess somebody came and checked on me just to be like, hey, you alright?
And I guess I was breathing funny.
And they just panicked.
Called the hospital.
It was my extreme fortune to live in a neighborhood that the closest hospital was Cedars-Sinai.
And it was also my...
Irish luck that the best heart surgeon in the world, Dr. William Tranto, who's chief of heart surgery over there, I think maybe even of all surgeries, saw my case and told somebody else, you can't do that, I have to do that.
What happened to me is the same thing that killed John Ritter in like 30 minutes.
That's why I love watching your Twitter, dude, because there'll always be some crazy tweet, like some fan will tweet you like, yo, aliens dropped off the cure for cancer at, you know, whatever it is.
The way I try to explain it to people is like most people Unless you're really, you know, highly intelligent and enlightened, which is not what I'm saying I am when I'm about to say what I'm about to say.
I'm just saying some cats just reach death at this point where they're just ready for it and they're ready to cope, you know what I mean?
But most of us probably see death, you know, coming at us.
And, you know, I look at it like a roller coaster, like, you know, going on this roller coaster, you told us the scariest roller coaster of all time and you're waiting to go on it.
And probably the whole time you're waiting to go on that motherfucker, it's probably really scary.
Then you get on it and you ride it once and it's probably really scary.
But then, you know, if you get off it and get right back in line, you know, the wait in line isn't so scary.
And then you get back on the ride again.
It's like, that's what I compare death to.
It's like, I've gone through all the terrifying parts of death thinking it was upon me.
I was like, you know...
Woke up in the hospital, like, you did what to me?
There's this, and I got this scar down my chest.
I'm thinking, you know, it's a wrap.
You know what I mean?
I vaguely remember, like, people talk about a flash of your life flashing before your eyes, but to me it was more of just the some realization of, wow, man, that whole...
28 years was that long.
That's kind of what it was for me.
It wasn't like all these moments.
It was just like the realization that my life was like a second long in the scheme of things.
I can't testify either to any lights at the end of any tunnels, but I do also remember hearing, the only way I can describe it is hearing a very familiar voice.
I never really knew any of my grandfather's, but it seemed like a grandfather's type voice.
You ain't ready yet.
It's not your time.
But that didn't go along with a light or a vision or a figure.
All I remember, other than this realization about how short my life was, And my life could have been 90 years and that realization would have been exactly the same, you know what I mean?
But then this kind of blackness and this voice being like, nah, it ain't time or something of that nature.
I can't even say it was words as much as just something communicating that feeling to me.
I don't get in no chamber, but I get in my pool often late at night with the lights off and just lay there with it over my ears in silence for a couple...
I don't think there's that much profit, to be honest with you.
A lot of it is steel components.
You have to get it manufactured and built.
There's this super fucking jacuzzi system with this incredible filtration system to make sure that no microbes can get in there and fuck with your skin.
And then on top of that, you have to make sure the water stays exactly the same temperature.
It's a lot of technology into it.
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You know how you could do it?
You have to get it, like, $200 on Amazon, like a portable system that you make out of, like, a box.
Yeah, I knew this dude who had this giant pool and he had some crazy fucking slide system built into it like water slides and everything built into the side of his hill.
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Yeah, but just like a floaty thing where it just goes around and around.
So you can just sit in a little raft and just go in circles.
Well, it sounds stupid, but there's way crazier parasites that exist in the world.
You know, every single human being is essentially a symbiote.
Every person has a conglomeration of all sorts of different organisms living inside their body.
And without those, you can't even be alive.
And when you get a parasite, like when a parasite fucks up a body, what that is is a failed symbiote.
It's like it's trying to have a symbiotic relationship with the organism, but it's failing, so it's sucking out too many resources, so it becomes a parasite.
It's not contributing to the overall system.
It is possible that they could come up with something that would hijack your shit so bad that you would be like one of those 28 days later motherfucker.
There's been threats of it for, you know, who knows how long.
I mean, every time.
One of the things that hits everybody, like when the swine flu came out, or the bird flu, or anything that comes out, is like, this might be the one we're all scared of.
I mean, like, I look at it like the cats who, like, you know, if you want to even take the 9-11, there's cats that'll be like, there's no way we did this.
I was like, well, there's proof that the very least we knew something was supposed to happen just like that.
Hijacked airplanes.
There was reports that they were going to try and do this, and nothing was done extra to stop it.
That's kind of a passive participation at the very least.
So, I don't see past anything.
All the horror and all this, I love it.
I love reading about it and learning about it and giving it just enough consideration to be like, it could be true.
I'm not living by it, but I'm watching to be like, okay, if some crazy scenario breaks out in the world where people just can't breathe anymore, there might be something to these stories.
Well, in the Midwest, or I guess in the suburbs, not in Los Angeles, they used to have these green boxes that were like energy plants or something like that.
They would test us out burgers, and I would talk to my cousins that live in a different state, and they're like, we don't have that kind of weird burger at McDonald's.
Another thing that happened to him, he was living in an apartment, and there was a duct overhead, like a heating duct, where the hot air would come through.
Turns out that wasn't what that was.
Somebody had hooked up the wrong thing to the gas furnace, and it was blowing straight carbon dioxide from the gas furnace.
Just think of what you must be feeling when you're above one of those things and you know that just touching it, just reaching out and touching it, you just essentially explode.
One time, when I used to do Fear Factor, I would eat pot candies or something before the show just to kind of keep me in a chill but happy and fun mood all day.
Sometimes you're sitting around all day and it's boring.
And if you don't got a buzz, it doesn't feel as good.
It sounds interesting.
But one of the days I showed up, every now and then when something would freak me out, I would show up at work and I'd be a little baked, and they'd tell me what we're going to do.
And one of the things they told me is we're going to have these people ride bulls.
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And I was like, oh, this is a terrible, terrible, terrible idea.
The only time when we ever did that show where I felt like we were totally rolling the dice, hoping nobody got hurt, that was the only time, was we made them ride bulls.
Because, like, you can't protect them from that fucking animal.
You can only, you know, you can only say so much.
We're going to try.
We're going to try to keep it from stomping you.
But we can't guarantee you.
We'll give you a chest plate and a helmet, but you've got to let it, imagine you're letting the bulls bore you.
A lot of them, they do it just, you know, there's people that do it and they think that they're going to be able to eventually get some sort of a career in reality TV. That's even more funny to me.
It would be a dude eating her pussy for like a half an hour.
That's it.
That's a sex tape.
And then she releases that one.
Whoopsies.
That got out.
And that would kick her back up to the next level.
If she was like crying at a press conference, I can't believe this.
This was so personal.
I used that image to masturbate to when I'm on the road.
My assistant stole it from my laptop.
You know?
That could be her next level shit.
She might have to do that in about two years.
Because now people are making...
Kardashian jokes are probably the number one joke on Twitter.
If you're going to make a joke about the Kardashians...
It's so low-hanging fruit.
It's so easy.
I saw that movie Young Adult last night.
The Patton Oswalt.
Throughout the whole movie, you know what it's about?
Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt.
It's fucking really funny.
And really brilliant.
Like a brilliant movie.
But one of the things is the chick who's the crazy chick, Charlize Theron, all she watches is Kim Kardashian.
She just watches it.
Every time you're seeing her at home, she's just sitting in front of the TV watching Kim Kardashian and her sister talk with this mindless glaze in her eye.
Those people are responsible for that fucking signal that they're putting out there, man.
If anybody's turning people into zombies...
But this whole movie, throughout the whole movie, this crazy bitch, Charlize Theron is obsessed with her high school boyfriend, is just watching the Kardashians on TV. It's a good movie, man.
Like, out of nowhere, you'll find our friend Brody Stevens.
He's friends with Zack, so every time Zack does a movie or does anything, Zack throws him in as, like, these little roles and stuff, and every role, it's almost playing, like, where's Waldo for Brody Stevens?
Like I said, that's going to be up to the investigators to decide.
The point you're making is that it's because of information in the book, information that you're bringing to them, that they would be reopening this investigation.
Is it your charge that in fact Robert Wagner...
He essentially tried to make this a low-profile investigation, did not do everything he could to try to find her once she went missing after their argument?
Yes, it was to be kept a low-profile investigation.
So you're saying that Wagner did not do everything he should have done to look for her after she went missing?
Exactly.
Was he responsible for her death in some way?
Well, like I said, I think we all made mistakes that night.
Mr. Daven, that wasn't my question.
Was he responsible for her death?
I'm not asking about your story.
Yes, I would say so, yes.
How so?
I really don't want to get involved in answering that question right now.
Well, how can you come on national television, sir, and accuse him of something like that, but not back it up?
Well, that's up to the investigators.
That's actually not the video I was talking about, but that's still pretty interesting.
Sometimes he says some real outrageous shit, right?
And he gets under people's feathers, but, like, he'll say something about, like, when Kim Jong-il died or something, and, like, I love him because he just retweets every stupid, hateful thing that gets sent to him.
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But it's like these people are really saying, like, how could you say something like that?
Well, one of the things that was catching news was that he was accusing Will Ferrell of stealing the movie Anchorman from him and talking about the really bad, bad drugs that Will was doing.
Well, Colin's style of smart-ass-y, really smart comedy is so unusual, man.
I hardly ever get the sense...
It's hard for us to see each other unless we're like...
If I just happen to be in a town where someone's doing a set, I'll stop in and watch them do a full set, or if I catch a special...
But other than that, you know, I'm in one town, they're in another.
It's hard to see him, so I did a tough crowd once, and it was like one of the first times I got to see Colin do like a long set, and he did it in front of all of his fans, you know, because they're all...
So he would like warm up the crowd.
God damn, he was good.
He was really good.
Like, it's like when you see him like tight, like...
Colin Quinn's a bad motherfucker.
He doesn't get nearly enough respect.
He's so self-deprecating that people just, for whatever reason, I don't know what it is.
He's too smart.
It's whatever it is.
His frequency, it's too good for some people to figure out.
The special was out in 2005. Idiocracy was 2006. But I had been redoing that bit for a couple of years.
That bit came from one mushroom trip.
One mushroom trip where I just sat and looked at the whole progression of the human race and that it was some sort of a crazy fight between overpopulation of stupid people and like packets of really intelligent people figuring out matter itself to the point of You know, total, complete complexity where they blow up the whole universe and we restart all over again.
But that all came from a mushroom trip.
Then I started thinking about how ridiculous it was that I put all my faith, my food, the warmth and the cold of my family, all in the hands of things that I totally don't understand.
I just hit switches.
I haven't researched them.
I don't know what the fuck powers them.
I have no idea the science behind it.
I don't know.
I just open the refrigerator, take some milk, pour a glass.
I don't know how the fuck this milk has been able to sit in my refrigerator for a week and not turn it into rotten cheese.
You know what I mean?
But it's been pulverized through some crazy machine that I'll never be able to understand.
Gotten to the point where all the bacteria is broken down so you can store it in your refrigerator that you don't understand.
Some box that keeps shit cold.
And that's the only way we can all live like this.
The only way we can all live like this and nobody understands it.
It just seems ridiculous to think that there wouldn't be.
It seems like we've already figured out that things are recreated all over the galaxies, like gas giants, rocky planets, planets in the Goldilocks zone, planets with water, planets without water.
We can apparently read their atmosphere somehow or another.
They can figure that shit out.
I don't know how.
But they can figure out what temperature a planet is...
Thousands of light years away.
It's a strange, strange thing.
I don't know how the fuck they do it, but they found a lot of planets like this.
You know, it's funny, but all we do by ridiculing any of that shit is we're just trying to control reality.
Even the ridiculous part that we understand as is, the ridiculous part of us being a part of a galaxy, and that galaxy is a part of the universe, the universe being one part of one universe, and there's an infinite amount of universes, like just all these nutty, nutty, that we know to be true, like wrapping our heads around infinity and the ideas.
We know that to be true.
We don't want to go any further than that.
You start introducing new shit.
You start introducing aliens.
I got no room.
I got no room for your crazy alien talk.
It's almost like the reality that we're absorbing as it is is so baffling and so fucking crazy that we're almost unwilling to look at anything that's more confusing.
It would be interesting, like, who would, like, jockey first to try to, like, get cool with the aliens, like the Catholic Church, and the aliens have made peace, and, you know.
Could you imagine if you were from another planet and you had some super dope technology and you want to come out and you knew the history of the religions.
Okay, what's the number one religion most popular?
Is it Christianity, Islam?
It's one of those.
Okay, well this is what we do.
Then we're going to come down with one guy that has both of those religions in his history and he's going to do some fucking magic and he's going to take over the planet.
Can you imagine just landing a helicopter a thousand years ago, just going back and landing a fucking helicopter and seeing people freak out and run for cover?
What kind of a world are we going to be living in in just another decade, just another 20 years, just another 50 years?
I came into music, actually, I was a graffiti writer, like, with a bunch of cats, and some of them started making some music for fun, and I kind of followed suit, and it just became, you know, something that, you know, somebody within that group knew Ice-T, and that's how that whole thing took off.
And lately, I've been just buying up so much posters, like original prints, because it's like 1 out of 20. We're only printing out 20 pieces of this.
And so for 15 bucks, I'll just, alright, I'll have one of those 15 or one of those 20. And now I'm just out of nowhere started collecting art because of this one website.
I won't even show it anymore because it's shameful.
Man, that's incredible.
It's shameful.
The reason I even brought it up though is that I'm compulsive like that.
I was doing the sneakers and like I said, I collected these toys and then when I stopped doing both of those, I kind of sank all that energy into collecting paintings.
I have paintings now in a couple different houses.
I have paintings like, there's too many to even hang on walls.
They're like in stacks, just leaning up against walls.
He had a crazy house on a glass wall that faced the city.
The whole deal.
And a whole long wall of his house was a gallery.
It was set up for rotating pieces of art.
And he would, you know, literally, like, harbor some of the best artists in the world and buy their shit and rotate new stuff from there to his, like, he had warehouses where he would store the pieces that he wasn't showing.
And I just have been trained like that, but I owe that to like actually a lot of the like Cypress homies and them cats when we was all coming up together because they kind of came, I came from suburbia, you know what I mean?
Not rich suburbia, you know, lower class, lower middle class, but middle class nonetheless.
And these cats came from, you know, like I was with Ice and all them.
Like I ran with the syndicate for a while, but I never was like dipped into like he was already a grown man into the entertainment business.
His big gangster and all that days were right behind him.
Cypress guys were fresh off the street.
You know what I mean?
Like when they first made that first record.
So I learned a lot from them about like how to roll like places.
And, yo, they were always worried about who was following them when they were leaving.
So it kind of, even though it didn't apply to me always, it stuck with me to be that alert about things.
And also because I tend to wear a lot of jewelry.
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I have a really nice car. - It has to suck though, that constant paranoia almost.
Like you're at Olive Garden and you think somebody's going to shoot you.
What I'm saying is I've been alert enough that I know that I have actually avoided a few times of actually being...
robbed or this or that or the other by just by circumstances and how I reacted to them and how I was alerted to them.
There was times when I was in New York at certain clubs where I definitely knew I was being stalked and about to be preyed upon and I would happen to bump into some cats that I knew and I'd be like, I'm already alerted to these dudes and it'd be like, just the fact that now I'm with some peoples I know and then they just the fact that now I'm with some peoples I know and then they know You know what I mean?
You're by yourself.
You know what I mean?
And then you're oblivious.
I mean, like, that's the worst thing is being oblivious to what's going on around you.
I got a little mad at him because I went to shake his hand somewhere and he kind of, before he was Eminem, who he is now, Elvis, you know, as big as Elvis type character.
This was like when he was first coming in and I just went to shake his hand and he kind of, I felt disrespected.
Found out later that, you know, he didn't really see it the same way.
He didn't realize it was that kind of situation after the fact, like I said, we haven't had a problem for 10 years.
One of the things I've found, and it's pretty easy to grab upon this, is that whenever you're around anybody who's really creative or really out there, really dynamic in the way they perform, They're also almost always very emotional.
And some of them have a good handle on it, like you.
You're always a pretty relaxed, mellow, in a certain groove dude.
As much as I feel like, yo, it's what I'm meant to do.
I feel like to a degree it's what it's meant to do.
It's a lot of luck, dude.
How many guys do you know that you feel personally are as smart as you and as talented as you that for one reason or another without being like they didn't get convicted of rape or nothing stupid like that but just it just something doesn't click like something doesn't happen for them and it's like you I got a bunch of musician friends of mine that are geniuses that I'm just like why why you know what is it about them why why what and that element is whatever that planets lining up that just You're at the right place, right time, and you know how to react.
You know what I mean?
We all are responsible for our fates.
I believe I made a choice somewhere along the line that contributed to what I'm doing.