Joe Rogan and Joey Diaz critique streaming’s ad disruptions, like The Walking Dead’s forced breaks, while debating how controversy (e.g., Alison Rosen’s firing) fuels popularity. They dismiss UFO claims as likely drones or AI, citing Roswell theories and Operation Northwoods, then mock flying cars and water recycling—condom-tainted "piss water" included. Rogan and Diaz expose comedy club exploitation, from Mark Babbitt’s tape demands to Sarah Knotts’ abuse, praising Wendy of Comedy Works for nurturing talent. Diaz’s uncompromising stand on jokes clashes with industry gatekeepers, while Rogan and Diaz weigh Jon Jones’s UFC drug test against past struggles like Vanderlei Silva’s suspension. The episode underscores media’s shifting power dynamics and the cost of authenticity in entertainment. [Automatically generated summary]
It's really well written, because they set up the first episodes.
I don't want to give any spoilers, but a family moves into this house, and Jessica Lange is, like, the neighbor, or she comes by, and she comes by, like, unannounced.
It's real creepy how she does it, and, you know, you know she's fucking nuts, and so the guy's there with his wife and his children, and you're like, oh, fuck.
And I think CBS just announced that they have something for, like, $5, and you just get all of this CBS, which is silly because you can get it for free already, but I guess the convenience of downloading whatever you want.
It's pretty much becoming of a cart, which is something that I've always wanted in a cable company, being able to pick and choose which channels you want.
Yeah, and when you develop a show, like if you, when I was doing that sci-fi show, you film the show, you edit it, and once it's edited, then it has to wait for, you know, whatever night it's on, Tuesday night at 8 o'clock, whatever it is, and then You wait for it to go on, and then the show broadcasts live, Tuesday night at 8, and they sandwich in a bunch of shit that you don't want to see.
So in between that, you're watching Prilosec commercials and fucking Toyota commercials and all this shit that you don't give a fuck.
You're just being...
They're literally fucking with your experience.
Just, come on, buy me!
Come on, buy this!
Hey, what about this?
I feel better!
Look at my wife!
Look at my car.
Next one.
What about us?
You could buy us, too.
What about us?
Do you have insurance?
Is your insurance run by a lizard?
And they have all this fucking goofy shit, and it ruins your experience.
But then a couple years ago on his radio show, he said something.
I'm sitting there watching Diane Sawyer, and she pops up on the screen, and all of a sudden they pop up the sponsors that left them.
Those sponsors were like, fuck Rush Limbaugh, we just hit the jackpot.
That's what they don't really realize.
If they sponsor Joey Diaz's radio show, and he says, fuck whoever, whatever genre group, and they get rid of him, Diane Sawyer's gonna come up and go, did you hear what happened to Joey Diaz today?
And also they show American Airlines, Delta.
Delta's going, we didn't lose.
We fucking 630, Diane Sawyer.
That's as good as it fucking gets.
That's it.
They didn't lose.
So either way, you don't lose because they mention you.
That fucking plastic surgery those chicks do, it doesn't make them look better.
It just makes them look different.
When you start shooting shit into your face to freeze it up and puff your cheeks up to hide wrinkles, it does not make you look better.
It just makes you look different.
And there's the uncanny valley.
You know what the uncanny valley is?
This is a term they use for video games, where, with CGI, they're really close to being able to completely replicate what a person normally looks like.
All those women, those East Coast women, the fake tits, the fat taking off their body, the tightening the legs, the ass implants, you can put implants in your ass.
By the way, dog, I've been torturing this hooker for about a month.
I've been in that coffee shop, and she walks by, and everybody looks at her.
She's young.
She's young, because she came into the coffee shop once, and she started asking us questions about where this at, like, playing us, you know, like, just in case somebody said, you look good.
Well, it's, you know, you should be able to wear whatever the fuck you want to wear, but when I see, like, a Chinese chick with blonde hair, an Asian chick with blonde hair, or a black chick with blonde hair, I'm like, you look good with black hair.
Well, they also have these wigs that have what, it's like a lace front, so it looks like your skin, like they glue it to your head, and it looks like the hair is coming right out of your skin until you get right up in there, and you're like, What the fuck's going on there?
So much of those shows, they're faking, like, what?
I'm in trouble?
What?
Like, so many of them are set up in advance, and especially ones that make people look bad, because you've got to think, like, how much are they going to pay this person to ruin their life?
What are they going to give you, $1,500?
Like, what scale on one of those shows?
They're going to ruin your life, and you agree to this.
They can't just film you and put you on television.
He has a show where he does hidden camera things, where you make money, the more you get people to do.
Like, you gotta tell your wife you're leaving her for a man.
And, you know, like, and you get, like, 500 bucks for that.
You get more for more things you do.
It's like...
I did that show for CBS years ago, like six years ago.
It was called Game Show in My Head.
And we would put this little earpiece in these people, and then they would go out and we would make them do shit on camera.
We had this guy...
We put him in the middle of Hollywood and gave him a suit and put some news cameras, like it was a news camera show, and had these people come over and you had to tell people that you were there to talk to someone who was a witness for a UFO. And they took off and you got to ask these other people, would you pretend it was you?
Would you pretend that you saw this UFO? And you gotta get them to admit that they were taken aboard the aircraft and that they were probed.
If it's possible for us to put a rover on Mars, it's possible for them to send a ship from another galaxy.
Of course it's possible.
Not only that, we assume that these aliens, that everybody keeps seeing these gray aliens with the big black eyes, we assume that they're living beings.
They could easily be robots.
If we're this close to To crossing that uncanny valley and making some sort of an artificial computer generated image.
If the technology continues to accelerate to the point where you can actually get a ship to go through a fucking wormhole, the real impeding factor, I would think, would be biological life.
Like, why send something living when you can make something artificial?
They're so close to being able to make artificial life.
And when I say so close, within 100 years?
I mean, I don't think anybody disputes that.
They'll have some form of artificial life within 100 years.
Something billion years old, but we're not the oldest planet.
We're not in the oldest galaxy.
Like, not even close.
Like, the universe is 14 billion years old, supposedly.
So that means an extra 10 billion years for things to form and possibly grow.
Even at one billion years, even a million years.
Who the fuck knows what we could do in a million years?
So if these UFOs show up and these little aliens are inside of it, they're probably robots.
I would assume that unless they figure out some incredible way to bypass space and time and to fold space and create a wormhole and punch through like they did in Event Horizon and all these physics documentaries where they talk about the possibility of using wormholes, it's all crazy theoretical shit.
But until they figure out how to do that and send, like, monkeys back and forth for a few years, they're not...
I mean, why wouldn't they just send robots?
Just like we're sending a robot to Mars.
I mean, it looks like a toaster and it's got wheels and it's rolling around, but it's a robot.
If we sent a robot that looked like Tracy Lords and it was walking around on Mars, I mean, that would be what it looked like.
You know, it just so happens that we sent one that looks like a toaster.
But it doesn't.
A thousand years from now, we could send whatever the fuck we want.
We could send Bob Costas to the moon.
You know, Bob Costas, robot Bob Costas would be reporting from the surface and the fucking moon.
Yeah, there was certain aspects of sound and electronics that were invented in Bell Laboratories.
And this website supposedly pulls, this is the big conspiracy, pulls the cover over the creation of these things and says all this shit came out of Area 51 from some shit that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.
It was all about the Roswell, New Mexico crash.
They took all those, whatever those parts of those UFOs were and back-engineered them.
And that's how they created all this stuff.
And this website was totally dedicated to it.
It was talking about how there's a military base that's outside of Bell Labs that they said was to protect New York City.
They're like, why would you protect New York City from way the fuck out there?
You wouldn't.
It would take way too long for everything to coordinate.
But it's right next to Bell Labs.
And during the military days of, I guess this is like, Bell Labs was probably created post-World War II, I think.
So you've got to think, there's the Cold War days and the Russians and there's all this, the technological races to try to get to the moon I mean, we were racing with the Russians virtually everything.
Nuclear power, nuclear weapons, space travel.
And so this Bell Labs apparently played a very vital role in, you know, United States strategic technology advancement, like, for whatever it was.
But this American computer company was convinced that all this shit came from UFOs, from the crash saucer in Roswell, and they back-engineered it.
But there's one story that came in North Bergen, and this is the part of town where it's fucking uppity.
And they interviewed all these people.
And I stayed up one night and looked at it.
There's a tape on YouTube.
There's a video on YouTube.
They show where the thing landed on the baseball diamond and all this shit.
But then they went to all those business owners.
And whenever you see...
Last night I was watching something.
They showed a view of New York.
There's a circular building.
That's the building that complained the most.
That they saw the lights, people landing, taking samples of dirt out.
I mean, it could have been anybody fucking with them.
but not all these people in conjunction.
All right, the liquor store owner, maybe he had a couple cocktails, but all these people in the building saw the lights, the flashing, they heard the landing, they heard the booms.
The CIA came out with this report recently about how many of the UFO sightings that people saw was actually experimental aircraft that they were working on.
And that was real recent.
Like, they admitted this kind of stuff.
But then you also have, like, remote control drones.
I mean, they've had that kind of technology, like radio control technology.
They've had that for a long time.
And they've been able to do things not, like, quite to the level that they can do them now, but they've been able to do things.
Like, they used to have drone airliners.
They could send an airliner with no people on it.
They were going to use that.
That was part of Operation Northwoods.
They were going to blow it up.
They can't land them.
They couldn't land them in, like, 1962. But they could launch them.
So what they were gonna do is they were gonna have this plane take off, and they were gonna say all these people were in it, and they were gonna blow it up in the sky.
And they were gonna blame it on Cuba.
And that was gonna be what led us to go to war with Cuba.
Because that was when, like, the Russians were trying to put military bases there, and they were gonna have missiles pointed at the U.S. from right over there.
That was the Bay of Pigs and all that shit.
Like, it got real hot and heavy.
There was this, like, real showdown between the United States and Russia.
Over Cuba and over them having missiles in Cuba.
And one of the things that we're going to do, they're going to arm Cuban friendlies.
They're going to give, like, people that they had good relationships with, they're going to give them arms and have them attack Guantanamo Bay, because we have a military base in Cuba.
And this blowing up this airliner was a big part of their thing.
Like, everyone's going to make up a bunch of fake people, and they're all missing, and have actors play their parents crying on TV, all that kind of shit.
But they had the capability in 1962 to shoot a plane up.
They couldn't land it, like I said, but they could definitely fly that fucking thing.
It's pretty crazy.
So you gotta think, how many, like, remote-controlled, like, saucers did they have?
How many remote-controlled...
I mean, some of the drones that they have now, they look completely alien.
And they look, they don't look like any plane you've ever seen before.
They look like spaceships.
It looks like a scene in Star Wars where you have some sort of a starport and then, you know, in the background all these planes are landing and taking off into space.
That's what we all thought we would be seeing by now anyway, right?
We would all...
If you were a kid and you said, hey, Joey, what do you think it's gonna be like in 2015?
You'd be like, oh, fucking space travel, for sure, right?
Everybody thought we'd have bases on the moon by now.
The flying cars they do have will fucking kill you.
Actually, there's one that's supposed to be pretty good.
There's a couple different guys who've made flying cars, but one of them has, like, these folding wings, and you drive around like this, and then when you take off, the thing goes clink, clink, and the wings come down, and you fly.
Like, so you're driving around with the wings up, and you can drive around town like a normal, you know, as good as, like, a Prius or something, and then when you want to, you lower the wings down.
I think once they figure out, like, Google Drive, you know, like Google's driving cars, and they figure out how to keep cars in their lanes and have them avoid each other, like, no matter what, they can't collide.
Once that technology becomes, like, standard, then I think you might be able to have some sort of a flying vehicle.
But until they do, you're gonna have people...
Like, you ever watch people in, like, little private planes just fly around?
They just fucking fly around.
I went with Phil Hartman.
He took me up to look at real estate, and we got in one of his...
He had a little single-engine plane, and we took this plane up into the sky, and we just flew...
He went wherever he wanted to.
Like, I'll show you where Malibu is.
He doesn't have to call somebody and say, hey, I'm gonna fly over by Malibu.
Up north, they're taking the water out of the ground.
Recycling it and using it again on all the vegetation that's up north, you know, Bakersfield, all those little towns that have, that live off cherries or whatever the fuck they live off, strawberries and shit.
Do you think in the future we're gonna have our own water?
Like, the water's gonna be so, you know, bad that we have our own, like, I don't know, 20 gallons supply of water that we can use to cook, wash ourselves, then we pee it out, Clean it, but it's our personal water.
Yeah, I think the amount of water we have is finite.
Even though we're like, oh, we're running out of water, I think the water's going somewhere.
I mean, it's still in Earth.
It's like, you might not be able to get to it.
It might be pouring in Seattle, or it might be...
But it's all just water.
Like, somehow or another, it gets reused, it evaporates, it comes down again.
It's all kind of contained in this crazy ball.
And they say that a lot of the water that we drink, you know, it's very likely some of it passed through an animal's body.
And was pissed out and was filtered down through, like, a stream.
Like, have you ever, like, seen a creek where you have, like, crystal clear spring water that's coming down from a glacier?
Like, that is a woolly mammoth dick pissed out some of this water, and that water, like, seeped into the earth or gets sucked up in moisture.
It's very possible that a lot of this stuff actually came from animals' dicks.
So if we get to a point where we're so good at recycling water that you know when you're getting water, even though it was poopy water or piss water or whatever, there's nothing in there but water.
People like to be bohemian and use that city water.
I was watching some news show the other day, I forget what town I'm in, but it was showing, I think it was San Francisco, they were showing all these different blocks where you couldn't drink the water right now.
Like, there was this whole area where they're saying, don't drink the water if you live on these streets.
Like, what?
What are you saying?
Like, I have to just be on Twitter or I have to be paying attention to the news to know this?
What if I'm a guy that just likes to read newspapers and sit at home for a few days and I'm drinking the water?
Are you knocking on my door?
Are you telling people?
Are you assuming they have Facebook?
You're just gonna make them drink this fucking shit water?
They should have stormtroopers knock on everybody's door.
But they say that that's one of the things that is bad for people when you have distilled water.
As you drink distilled water, it doesn't have any minerals in it.
Like, you can actually kind of fuck your body up if you only drink distilled water.
Like, distilled water is something that wrestlers take a lot of times before they cut weight, because when you drink it, it flushes all your system out, it flushes all the minerals in your...
But a lot of people are saying, like, I don't think Dolce fucks with that stuff.
I think a lot of guys are saying, like, that is not good for you.
Like, you need those.
Like, those elements of the water, the minerals, it might make it easier to dehydrate yourself that way, but it's not good.
Like, I think all that shit in water is actually probably good for you.
So it says, in the past five decades or so, evidence has been accumulating about an environmental factor which appears to be influencing mortality, in particular, cardiovascular mortality, and this is the hardness of the drink in water.
Oh shit.
In addition, several epidemiological investigations have demonstrated the relation between risk for cardiovascular disease, growth retardation, reproductive failure, and other health problems, and the hardness of drinking water or its content of magnesium and and the hardness of drinking water or its content of magnesium Which is weird because magnesium and calcium are things that people take as supplements.
There's such a fucking balance to being a person.
If you drink a pound of salt, you're dead.
That's fucked.
In addition, the acidity of the water influences the reabsorption of calcium and magnesium in the renal tube.
Tubule.
I don't know what that is, but it's not good.
Not only calcium and magnesium, but other constituents also affect different health aspects.
Thus, the present review attempts to explore the health effects of hard water and its constituents.
Wow, that's crazy, man.
Alzheimer's disease is linked to Alzheimer's disease, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer.
Maybe it's not good to absorb too much magnesium through your skin.
I know you're taking magnesium, though, is like, especially for men, very beneficial.
There's correlations between magnesium and testosterone and zinc, zinc and testosterone as well.
This is weird.
Oh, so it's a ratio of magnesium and calcium in the water.
It's a crucial factor indicating the hardness.
So I guess it's just like when shit gets really wacky.
There's concentrations of dissolved calcium and magnesium in soft and hard water.
You're dealing with like hard numbers, I guess.
Yeah.
It's weird because, like, minerals are really good for you.
It's important.
Like, if you don't have minerals, that's where osteoporosis comes from, you lack of calcium, your body starts drawing calcium out of your bones.
Like, one of the best ways to prevent it, you take calcium.
But they also say that a lot of our farmlands, like the vegetables that we're getting and the plants that we eat, a lot of them are nutrient deficient because a lot of the farmlands, they've been growing shit on them for so long, they kind of sucked all the good stuff out of the ground.
I do know that when I used to have it in my vials and, like, sell it, and I'd just be like, you got a sugar cube, and I'd just drop a little drop on the sugar cube.
That never had the back Or the bone problems, you know, with the liquid acid.
And the micro dots didn't either, because those were like those little black ones that pretty much just had a bubble of acid.
Anti-drug educators frequently tell their students that some variant of the theme of inevitable strychnine poisoning through LSD use.
For example, that strychnine is commonly sold as a cheaper substitute for LSD by unscrupulous drug dealers, that strychnine is a byproduct of LSD synthesis, that the body produces strychnine as a result of LSD metabolism, or that strychnine is used as a preservative Yeah.
Yeah.
to be propagated by drug users themselves.
In reality, most hallucinogens cause some degree of mental or physical discomfort after the trip is over.
This is an indirect effect of the drug, not strychnine or any other adulterant.
They used to always also say that the old, which always seemed fake, like, ooh, so much strychnine on that, that it collects in your back, and if you ever get in a car accident and hit that part in your back, you're going to trip forever.
It's so funny, those guys that you meet, that follow you, that are fans of you, but the other day, there was a few of them, and we would play this game where one would come up to us and start talking.
No, but Christina Piszczycki was there, and he starts talking to me and Christina.
Christina said something to him, and the next thing she knows, she looks over, and I'm gone, you know, because I'm just kind of like, Hot potato, you pass off the crazy person, too.
You need to move to Denver with Rogan and open up a weed store and when people come, you pick them up at the airport and do a tour of the city and donate half your money to the charity.
I go to my room, I watch all this shit that I can't watch at home because there's a baby around and a wife asking you questions about the hemisphere when you're in the middle of writing fucking something, you know?
But you can't say no to the kid because they don't get what the fuck.
They don't get a joke.
They don't get nothing.
You got to stop what the fuck you're doing.
She runs into the computer room and jumps on my lap.
That's the end of the computer.
It's YouTube and I got to watch fucking something about the window or what's raining or something about animals.
And I love it.
But that's just how it goes.
So when I go to a town, it's to fucking sit down and write a few jokes and fucking focus on the act for tonight and tomorrow night.
I don't want to fucking drive 40 minutes that you tell me.
Then they want to stop and introduce you to their uncle, who's a fan of the Longest Yard.
I don't think people understand how creepy that actually sounds, because they're probably from a small town where it's like, you know, they're bringing apple pie over to strangers, like, I'm your neighbor, you know, and shit like that.
But there's a line that I... You know, when I go out at night, I go out to do stand-up.
Nothing else.
I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
What do you think I did on the way to the show?
Do you think...
I smoked 15 joints.
On the way down Lower Canyon, I already got high.
You know?
And I already ate a fucking pot cookie.
I'm where I need to be.
You know, if I wanna smoke, and there's times I smoke with people, but there's other times that I'm already baked, and I gotta get back on Laurel Canyon.
What if I get pulled over and I got your shitty weed on my fucking breath?
We have videos of it, of all these theaters where there's lines around spiral staircases.
And I'll wait till everybody's done before I go get something to eat.
I do it all the time.
It's not like I don't want to meet people.
I want to meet everybody and be friendly.
But there's a certain line that people cross that just shows they're socially goofy.
They're just klutzy and clumsy.
And those are the exact type of people that are always trying to pitch you something.
Who the fuck have you ever pitched anything to?
Who the fuck have you ever pitched anything to?
I've never pitched anybody an idea.
I've never come up to someone and said, hey man, if there's this project, if we had a name attached to it like you, I really think you could jump off.
I don't even know you.
You're supposed to have an agent.
There's a whole system of things that are in place for a reason.
You have a script.
The script is good.
The script gets read by reviewers.
The reviewers take it.
The agency represents it.
They bring it out.
They contact other people.
They say, hey, we've got this script.
We think that this could be a really good script.
Do you have any actors that would be interested in doing this?
And then they contact the agents and the actors.
You have meetings.
That's how shit gets done.
You don't just show up When Joey Diaz's car is broken down, it's like, hey, I'm trying to break into the business.
Like, well, you're doing it wrong.
It's like coming up to me and saying, hey, man, can I open for you?
Absolutely not.
I don't know you.
You want to come with me on the road?
What a great idea.
A guy I don't know, flying around with me, being fucking weird, and who knows how bad you suck.
You know, you could be terrible.
I've had people that told me they've never gone on stage before, but they know that they would be fucking awesome, and if they could just go up during my show, it would be the right kind of show to go up for, because we have the same sensibilities.
Oh, what a great idea.
You should do no open mic nights.
You should just go directly to a bunch of people that paid to see me and I'll just let you on stage and you do whatever the fuck you want to do and I don't even know you.
Like, who asks that?
Who says, hey, man, I'm the best basically baseball player of all time, and just, like, Dodgers should just let me play one day and just get out there and show what I can do?
Do you want to audition?
No, man.
Just let me hit the ball, bro.
I'll fucking hit a home run, I guarantee.
There's people out there that are that goofy.
There's a lot of them, man.
And this town is like a magnet for them.
Because some of them get on TV. Some of them get on a reality show and they're so retarded that they're compelling and that you listen to them.
I mean, how many fucking...
Look at Windy City Heat.
How about that fucking movie?
That's exactly what we're talking about.
Windy City Heat is a diary of a madman.
I mean, it's a fucking biography.
Don Barris, Jimmy Kimmel put together, took this guy who was out of his fucking mind, and they had this guy convinced that he was a movie star, and that he was something special, and he was a celebrity, and they hosed him the entire way.
I used to make it from San Diego in an hour 35. Yeah, that's nice when that happens.
Not a lot of people could make my records 120. That's when the drug dealer was closing at 1. When that drug dealer was closing at 1, Doug, I used to get off the stage at the Comedy Store in La Jolla.
I would headline.
I didn't give a fuck.
How much time do you want me to do?
Oh, we want you to do 45 to an hour.
Listen, whatever 1140 is, that's what I'm doing.
So all these guest sets and all these people you're putting up, at 1140, I get off the stage and I walk right to the car.
Well, I got to tell you, though, the co-argument, the counter-argument to that is that Mark Babbitt, I think, as crazy as he was, was responsible for creating a scene, like a creative scene.
I sent that jerk off, finally, because the manager I had, Ken Phillips, kept calling me saying, that guy from Houston keeps calling you.
He wants you to send him a blank tape.
I fucking didn't send him a tape for a year.
Finally, one day, I went to fucking Ralph's, bought a tape, put an envelope and sent.
Put Joey Diaz saying there was none on the tape.
You know that motherfucker called me a week later?
And say he loved my tape and he hired me as a feature actor to open for Bobby Slayton.
So fuck all you motherfuckers.
That whole tape thing is a power move.
When you go to a comedy club and you go to his office to get paid, he's got a TV and he's got a thousand tapes on him with dust on him.
He don't watch those fucking tapes.
That's his fucking power move, okay?
Send me a tape.
I sent him the fucking tape.
So the first time he booked me, he asked, I called him, he goes, I don't have a feature spot for you, but I have an MC spot, I'm gonna pay you 300 bucks.
Bitch, the plane ticket's 280. At that time it was 220 or something.
So I took the week, but I was always looking for a better week.
And I got a guy in Toronto to pay me like 800 for a feature week.
Bollywood, whatever the fuck it was called up there.
So I did two weeks.
So I called Babbitt like a man.
I told him the truth.
I go, Babbitt, I got a week up in Toronto.
I got two weeks for 800. Fuck you and your $300 Super Bowl week with David Teller.
Whatever the fuck you're trying to pimp me off with, you know?
I was working on a lumberyard, and an envelope fell down.
And when I went to pick it up, I heard the envelope go...
I didn't say nothing.
I ripped it.
I put it in my pocket.
And then I went home and there was two credit cards and two checks.
One for like 20 and one for like 18. And I was going to use the credit cards.
I was a young kid.
My mom had just died.
I didn't know what the fuck to do.
And I went to a buddy of mine who I knew his brother was a little fucked up.
He knew those people.
And I said, dog, I got these two checks.
One for 18, one for 20. He wrote his brother's number.
He goes, call my brother.
He'll take care of it for you.
He called the brother, brother met me.
The brother had to be like 20.
He came with like three other fucking mafiosis.
And they go, "What do you want from this?" I go, "I want one of the checks and you keep the other one." He goes, "You'll have your cash tomorrow." Done.
Those motherfuckers gave me 20 grand in a bank envelope when I was 16 years old, the week John Lennon got shot.
So then, a couple years later, I go to Houston and tell them, oh, Doug, there's some guy, he's looking for somebody to go to Mississippi tomorrow night for like 300 bucks.
And I go, I'll do it.
And they told me the guy, oh, that's the guy I beat.
Like, he would tell you a guy, I want this guy to open for you.
And you would go, what are you talking about?
Like, are you fucking crazy?
I'm not going to have people pay to hear that guy talk.
Like, he would have guys that were...
They had nothing.
There was nothing there.
This one guy who would just memorize these, like, fake rants.
It was, like, this long...
He would, like, have these big, deep breaths in between the rants and just rant this thing out, like, with all these, like, stats and numbers, and he'd say all this shit, and it was because he had memorized it all that it was so impressive.
But there was no funny in it.
There was no comedy in it.
It was, like, a trick.
It was, like, he memorized all this stuff with this crazy brand, and all of a sudden...
And then everybody go, oh, that was great.
He did that thing.
And that was his whole act, was these rants.
But they weren't like a...
It wasn't like a rant where he had a point, like a Bill Burr rant, where it's a rant, but there's all these jokes in it, pointing shit out, and you're laughing.
No, there was nothing until the end, and in the end you would clap.
He was one of the beginnings of alternative comedy.
Like, people go see him, oh my God, that's such a brilliant, you know, because when Jesus Jones wrote that song, you're like, Jesus, what the fuck are you talking about?
And look, he faded away and he cracked and became a bartender or something.
And that's what, you know, a couple, my breakthrough in my life really came when I did analyze that and I met that director.
When I met that dude that was that they told him to go fuck himself on Saturday Night Live.
No, no, I went to see this lady for a movie, and she goes, "You're not perfect for this movie, but my next movie you're gonna be good for." She goes, "I want you to keep in touch with me." And it was Helen Chenoweth.
That bitch is bad.
Like, that bitch just hangs out with De Niro.
She was just doing-- she did Bronx Count, she did Bronx Tale, those type of movies.
And she really took a liking to me.
So she would tell me, send me everything you got.
I want to push you for this movie.
But I need for you to send me what you got.
So I only had at that time, I only had the mesos.
I had that gay mafia thing.
That's all I had.
So I put stand-up on it.
I had a really good set somewhere and sent it to her.
And I remember Harold Ramis pulling me over and he goes, you're natural.
These pricks I see in Montreal, I ain't got dick on you.
I mean, this guy said shit.
This is Harold fucking Ramis.
And he's the one that looked me in the eye and he goes, don't take shit from these pussies either.
And I go, the competition, I go, the conversation's over.
And he goes, no, it's not, because you just won't work any of our improvs.
And I go, say that again to me.
I go, say that again.
I'm gonna go down and I'm gonna bang your head off that fucking desk.
Joe Rogan, just like that.
I was in one of those cocaine morning moves.
He caught me at like 10, 15. A bad time to catch me in those cocaine days because I was probably broke and thinking of where am I gonna get my next fix from.
And you're calling me, threatening me at 10 and 15 in the morning, telling me I can't work Houston when you don't do dick for me.
And I said, say another word.
I'm three blocks from your office.
I'm gonna go there, I'm gonna bang your head off your...
No, I said, you're gonna say something, I'm gonna say something, you're gonna say something, I'm gonna say something, that I'm three blocks from your office, I'm gonna go there, I'm gonna bang your head off your fucking desk.
And dog, I heard a hang-up, and I went home, and I didn't call nobody, I thought I was done at the improv.
And do you know that two days later, I got a motherfucking call with three weeks from The Improv.
It's a feature spot in Southern California.
So sometimes you got to put your foot down with these creepy motherfuckers, dawg, because they get a pow up to...
In L.A., nothing happens to you till they see you on television.
They treat you like shit.
Once they see you in a commercial, because now they know.
You know what?
You may not be that motherfucker, but you might become that motherfucker.
So they don't give you everything.
They still break your balls.
But they don't...
Now they know that you're real.
This motherfucker could strike.
That's the most important thing with me, that every year I keep throwing jabs at them.
So they can talk all the shit they want, but I'm still alive, motherfucker.
When a company has too many rooms like that, and they want too big of a piece of the pie, and then they want you to stop doing the other rooms that are in town that you've had a relationship forever, whether it's Atlanta or Denver.
Denver, they had a big issue in Denver, where, you know, When you go there, Wendy will tell you the whole fucking story about it.
She had this meeting with people that were going to open up another club in town, and they wanted to tell her they were going to either go into business with her, allow her to buy in, or they're basically going to run her out of town.
She's like, oh yeah, good luck with that.
What are you guys going to do for open mic nights?
It's one of the things she asked them.
And they said, we're not going to have an open mic night.
She goes, okay, so let me get this straight.
It's like if you sold widgets, why wouldn't you make widgets?
You gotta get your widgets from somewhere else?
Like, why don't you make your own widgets?
Like, you're not gonna develop any widgets?
And they're like...
They're not thinking in terms of, like, long term.
Especially, like, someone like Wendy's the best case example.
Wendy, in my opinion, is the reason why there's a Denver comedy scene.
Like, her supporting those two clubs, the Comedy Works, which are two of the best clubs in the country, she's the reason why there's a scene in Denver.
But she's the best-case scenario.
She's a cool person.
She loves comedy.
She's fun to be around.
She does it right.
But then you got, like, a Babbitt that you gotta deal with his shit, or you got a Tom that you gotta deal with his shit.
Well, I didn't have to deal with it, but you had to deal with it.
You know?
And these people, they're responsible for the fucking scene.
They're a big part of the scene.
Babbitt was responsible for the scene.
It's obvious.
Once he left, the scene went away.
He was a key cog in that wheel, you know?
And when you got a person like Wendy or a person like Babbitt that's like a big player in the whole scene, like, they're so important.
Because otherwise, all you have is L.A. and New York, and Chicago barely has a scene.
It would be a huge headache depending on how you did it.
I think that the clubs they're opening now are huge headaches because, A, there's a couple of weeks, a couple of years ago, I was in the mood for Dairy Queen.
I go, Terry, there's no fucking Dairy Queen.
We gotta go all the way to Northridge.
What if the Northridge had the Dairy Queen tasted like dick?
The reason why is because these had these fucking people that never grew up on Dairy Queen.
They bought it as an investment.
They mixed it with Orange Julius, and they don't know nothing.
They're from another country, and they went to somebody, and they thought that was the best thing.
When I go to the Dairy Queen in Tennessee, that motherfucker's owned it for 41 years.
When you go in there, you can tell he knows his ice cream.
Same thing with some of these comedy clubs now.
For some people, they're investments and they come and go.
It's the people who really love comedy.
And I will tell you one thing.
Wendy was there when I walked into that club in 1991. January 18th, June 18th, 1991, when I walked into that comedy club, Wendy was there.
I'm gonna tell you something else.
Wendy was doing things at that club.
24 years ago that nobody else was doing.
She was putting motherfuckers in like Bobby Collins on a Tuesday.
And Wednesday.
Nobody was doing that.
Then having a different headliner come in Wednesday and Thursday.
Then have a different headliner come in Friday and Saturday.
Don't tell me because I was there.
Wendy is really good at what she does.
Wendy is one of the top three comedy people in this country.
Wendy can make a call and shut your fucking lights out if she really wants to.
Wendy deals with everybody.
Everybody likes Wendy.
Wendy loves comedy.
When Wendy dreams at night, she dreams of an orgy, but there's a comedy guy on TV doing stand-up while she's getting fucked.
Okay?
That's Wendy.
Wendy knows comedy.
I respect Wendy.
I never had a problem with Wendy.
Wendy asked me to leave, and I wasn't mad at her.
It was business.
It wasn't my comedy.
It wasn't that she hated me.
It was something that happened.
She's a real...
I never used Wendy.
I'm talking about 50% of these people.
That they actually become the end-all, be-all in comedy, and we're scared of them.
But do you imagine what it would be like to fucking deal with comedians?
I mean, they developed this...
It's like, if you deal...
Like, if you're a woman, okay?
And you're walking down the street, and everywhere you go, men are fucking cat-calling you and yelling shit at you and freaking you out, and you run into a guy in an elevator, you're automatically gonna be like, what?
You know, you're automatically gonna be like, Jesus Christ, another guy?
Like, I'm tired of getting hit on by guys.
If you're a fucking owner of a comedy club, and you're dealing with wacko comedians all day long, constantly, think about all the people that we know that are fucking crazy.
We started going on the road together, and I would bring him to clubs, and they would go, you know, I just don't think your friend is a good fit for this club.
I mean, it's, you know, I'm like, what are you, do you not hear the people laughing?
I go, they're all laughing.
You hear all those people laughing.
Yeah, it's just not our kind of comedy.
I go, what kind of comedy is that?
I go, you don't like funny comedy?
Like, you know, I've had guys tell me that he makes me look bad.
This is, like, way back in the day.
It's before people knew who he was.
And they were like, you know, let's just say we just don't think he's that good and it's just not what we want for our club.
And I'd be like, I'd open the door, listen to that.
You hear everybody laughing?
What's that?
You know, they'd have these ideas, especially in the 90s.
They had ideas of, like, what comedy was.
And there was a lot of pressure to be clean.
There was a lot more push now before the Internet.
Once the internet came along, slowly but surely, it sort of expanded everybody's idea of what's acceptable.
Like, even things on television are so, like, look at the fucking scene in The Walking Dead.
I don't want to tell you, spoiler alert, where they hit the people over the head with the baths and they cut their throats.
That was on fucking cable television.
It's not on HBO. I mean, and they showed it in the most graphic way possible.
I don't think people would have accepted that before the internet had come along.
I don't think people accept that.
But now, like, our ideas of what you can say and what you can't say, they're all so different.
And you can get famous from the internet.
And because Joey's become famous from the internet, you know, I get to say, like, see?
I fucking told you.
I told you.
You were wrong.
You had this idea that everybody had to fit in your cookie cutter world.
And they thought that I was like a sick fuck for thinking that you were funny.
I'm like, I'm not the only one.
Like, you're not hearing the rest of the crowd, but until someone comes along and puts you on a television show or puts you in a movie, then they don't want to take that chance.
They don't want to take the chance on this wild man.
You know, it was you, it was Ari.
Duncan was the only one that nobody ever complained about.
Nobody ever complained about me taking Duncan somewhere.
You know, because he's a good joke writer, but he's also not...
Well, he is now.
He's gotten much more offensive.
Like, lately, over the last, like, three years.
That's a new joke he's got again.
I don't want to spoiler alert it, but he's got some great fucking jokes.
But it was this idea that comedy couldn't...
It couldn't be, like, what goes on at the store.
It had to be, like, what they saw on MTV. It had to be what they saw on Comedy Central.
As an example, as a comedy and magic club, I remember he thought you were too dirty, but then Ari was allowed to go on and Ari was a million times dirty.
That guy from the Comedy Magic Club, I give him the utmost respect because he told me on a Saturday night after I went there and bombed, he pulled me aside and he goes, Joey, I think this is the last time you came down here.
Yeah, they made it hard for me, and now they're not around.
There's so many people who are not around anymore, who I thought would be around forever, including a lot of comics.
Who came to the store fucking barreling through the store, Montreal, deals, this and that, and they fucking disappeared.
And then there's guys like me and Ari.
Let me tell you something.
I'm gonna tell you something to your face right now.
You too, red man.
What Ari did in front of me in Vegas is some of the best material I've heard in the last two years.
I'm going to tell you that right now.
The biggie small stuff, and the thing about shit in China, guys, best material I've heard the last two years.
And for you motherfuckers that had your complaints about it, I remember somebody coming out, a club owner telling me, remember one of his first big jokes is texting and shitting, playing video games?
I'll never forget that owner saying that was the worst bit he ever heard in his life, and me going, another fucking moron that doesn't know anything about what we're doing.
It was like, there was no TV credits, and I would bring you guys to open, and they would just decide that you weren't ready or you weren't good or that I was picking the wrong horse.
And, you know, they would tell me that.
They would tell me that, like, these guys, they're not that talented.
I'm like, you're out of your fucking mind.
Like, I know what funny is.
I've been around funny for a long time.
If I was a talent scout, I mean, my record for picking guys to open for me that are funny, that turn out to be big headliners, it's undisputed.
Every time you try new shit, you run the risk of it not working.
But the guys who try new shit are the guys who are good.
And the guys, you know, sometimes the sets go bad.
Sometimes things go awry.
But that's because you're taking chances.
It's this cookie-cutter, bland, non-offensive stuff.
That's not exciting to me.
What's exciting to me is people that do wild shit and take chances.
But when you don't have credits, man, they automatically assume...
Look, I experienced that.
The difference between...
In my experience, it happened for me really quickly.
But the difference between how people reacted to me before I was on TV and how they reacted after I was on television, like the gigs that I could get, places that I could work, I had the same act.
But all of a sudden, just one or two TV credits, and all of a sudden they let me in.
All those early TV credits that I got, like Caroline's Comedy Hour and MTV Half Hour Comedy Hour, as soon as I got that, I was in.
It's just like they needed a pass.
They needed to be able to say, oh, this guy's approved by a higher power.
I always thought that was the best time for comedy in our lives.
But I gotta tell you something right now.
In the last 100 years, and I'm not talking this out of my ass, you could go home and think about what the fuck I'm telling you.
Right now is the best time that comedy has ever been.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, they gave us greats.
They gave us Gleason.
They gave us this guy.
They gave us that guy.
And how good really were they, you know?
Now, today, what we have is we have what you fucking idiots buy into, the shit that they shoved down your throat.
But guess what's also happened?
The underground has become mainstream because of the internet.
So the shit that they were pushing at you 20 years ago, the shit they're pushing at you at these fucking comedy channels anymore, it's not the end-all be-all now.
You motherfuckers are figuring it out for yourselves that they've been shoving shit down our fucking throats.
Well, you know, what I know is there was this period of time for more than ten years where they were focusing on what they thought, what the agents and the managers thought was clever or inside comedy.
Like comedy that the comedians thought was appropriate.
Or that like certain groups thought was appropriate.
Like you got that alternative movement and they were trying to push that hard.
Like this was the hip guy to be attached to.
This was the hip guy.
How many of those guys did we want just fucking die?
Because somehow or another, you were, you were, because you talked about getting your dick sucked or doing coke, like, oh, he's, ugh.
Who wants to hear that?
It's funny.
That's what you're missing.
You're missing, like...
And that's one of the things that freed us with podcasts, because you don't have to constantly, like, express yourself in a way where people have this, uh...
You know, this idea of you on stage.
You don't have to present who you are.
Everybody already knows you.
They know who you are.
So when you're talking about something on stage, this is what I think is funny about this.
You don't have to, like, what is his philosophy?
How does he feel about the New World Order?
What is his thoughts on chemtrails?
How does he feel about, is he equal rights?
Is he pro-choice?
You don't have to say any of that.
Like, you don't have to establish yourself as a left-wing guy or a right-wing guy.
But that was, like, a big part of comedy for a while.
It was, like, people would do stuff that would establish themselves.
Like, guys would say things that weren't funny at all.
But, like, you know, if you want to...
Like, Bill Hicks had a fucking bit about if you want, you know, if you want people to not have abortions, you fucking raise those kids.
You fucking raise those kids.
Yeah, okay.
Where's the joke?
There was no joke in it.
Because back then, if you had an important point, you wanted to sandwich that point in between jokes.
Because in people, a lot of times to this day, people get upset at that comedy.
And rightly so.
And they say it's preachy.
You're using your time on stage to preach instead of to be funny.
And you can do both.
And if you're not doing both, you're taking a shortcut.
Because you have an advantage.
You're on stage.
If you're on stage and you start talking about something, you have a point of view about Republicans or Democrats, and it's not funny.
It's just your opinion.
If I'm in the audience, I'm like, I disagree.
You know, I think this.
My opinion, it differs.
I don't want to hear your opinion.
How come I can't talk about my opinion?
But if you go on stage with your opinion and you make me laugh, Well, that's different.
Because then, like, you've planted an idea in my head that I might not ordinarily accept ever.
But you've made me laugh with it.
You know?
And, like, Ari says fucked up shit all the time that I don't agree with.
But it's hilarious.
Because he's not necessarily even saying it because he agrees with it.
He's saying it because it's a funnier thing to say.
You know?
You do that, too.
You say shit on stage, I know you don't really mean.
But it's fucking funny.
And I talk about it.
I talked about it in my last special.
It's a very important point that we do.
We say shit we don't really mean because it's funnier.
That's what comedy is.
And for the longest time, there was this idea that comedy had to adhere to, like, Certain rules in order for it to be highbrow or certain rules for it to be considered alternative or sophisticated or, you know, this is progressive stand-up comedy.
But you're missing the funny part.
It's missing a lot of that.
To become this other thing, to fit into this ideology, to be accepted, you're missing a lot of the funny.
It's not in there.
There's certain things you don't talk about.
You won't talk about sex.
You don't ever talk about sex?
Like, you're on stage, you don't talk about sex.
That seems ridiculous to me.
Like, that seems outrageous.
And someone says, like, oh, how could this guy be good?
He's doing jokes about...
I've heard people say that.
Like, you're telling me this guy's doing jokes about jerking off.
Like, yeah, that's really challenging.
I'm not asking him to climb Mount Kilimanjaro.
I'm asking him to tell jokes that are funny, that make me laugh.
I want good stuff, you know?
And it doesn't matter what it's about.
If it's funny, it's fucking funny.
And those people had this idea.
And for the longest time, they pushed that idea.
But now the floodgates are broken.
Now they're like, ah!
Fucking the Brody Stevens are running through.
I mean, everybody's running through.
And Brody could be mainstream.
Brody's like squeaky clean.
But it's like nobody could figure out what to do with Brody.
And then all of a sudden, people realize, like, we got to put him on TV in some way.
Like, he's fucking goddamn hilarious.
Like, how can we figure out a way to get that guy on TV? And you're the same thing.
And Ari's the same thing.
It's like, The internet has allowed people to see what you really are.
You know, it allowed people to see the internet.
And all they had to do was, like, see the numbers of the podcast that get downloaded, and then they go, well, I guess we gotta get on board here.
And it'll be the most important thing that they invest in.
Every comedy club, if you have a local scene, every comedy club should have a podcast.
You should have your own podcast.
How hard is that?
You got a guy coming in for a week, you tell him, hey, come down.
You're going to do this radio station.
You're going to do that radio station.
You're going to do our podcast for an hour.
We'll put our podcast up that day.
Everybody is addicted to the podcast.
They know who the guys are that are going to be on that week.
Hey, Nick DiPaolo's in town.
He's going to be doing the blah, blah, blah club podcast, you know?
The fucking Ice House Chronicles podcast or the fucking Flappers finale podcast.
Whatever the fuck, you know, name it up, the Comedy Store Countdown, you know, whatever the hell.
Every club should have its own shit.
So, like, you have the guy who's, you know, maybe not the store, because it's not like a headline club for the weekend, but any club that's like Zany's in Nashville, they should have an hour podcast.
They release every week with the headliner.
How hard would that be?
You know?
Have a local guy host it.
Have them understand that the idea is to just shoot the shit with the...
You know, if you had a good local guy, you could do it.
And you'd do it under the name of the comedy club.
Or maybe even switch hosts out.
Like, maybe you have the middle guy in the headliner every week do a podcast together.
You would get a lot of people addicted, first of all, addicted to that podcast and excited about going to the club that week.
Hired them, so you would meet at six at the Comedy Works, she'd buy, she'd cater it, get, like, tacos, and you sat around, and you wrote material with the headliner, and then you went and did the open mic, and the headliner graded you.
A lot of clubs, 1994, Matt Woods was the guy who gave me the talk, who told me, get your life together, don't come back here, you're funny, but you're wasting your time.
There was, like, two shifts in bringing you guys on the road with me.
The first one was, like, people didn't want you guys because you were too dirty.
But the second one was, why are you bringing these guys?
They're too good.
There's, like, there was a shift somewhere, like, in the 2000s.
Where, you know, I tell people, you know, Joey Diaz comes on the road with me, like, they're like, you have Joey Diaz open for you on purpose?
Like, why the fuck would you do that?
But it's what you were talking about with this Denver thing, like, people don't want to follow people that are strong, like, funny acts, but doesn't that make it fun for everybody?
But just to emphasize that, you know, a lot of comics listen to these shows, these podcasts, and they walked around like I did, fucking scared, you know?
And then one day I got it.
I'm like, fuck these bitches.
This is my motherfucking playing field.
And if they don't like it, they're gonna go down.
And my life changed.
My comedy changed.
My outlook changed.
You know, I let them scare me the same way I let people scare me about life, you know, when I was young.
And then went there and said, fuck you, motherfuckers.
And it's the same thing.
And I'm happy I did that with comedy.
I would have been running scared.
You know, there's club owners that'll come up to you and go, hey, next time there's a club owner that I worked for years ago that'll come up to you and go, hey, man, you should put something on that joke.
And then after you got off the second show, he's like, you didn't add my tag.
I don't want to hear no misunderstandings about checks or how the green room should be or there should be sodas in the green room.
You're a fucking comic.
If you're a comic and I go to your green room that's the size of a closet, you're not a fucking, you're a scumbag just trying to make money on fucking comics.
If a comic opens up a room, I want that room to be that much better because you're a comic.
You need 250, 200, two and a quarter for a great room, brick, a tremendous sound system, sell hot dogs next door or do something special, but after the show, so you don't have to fuck with the waitstaff, and let them go in there and sling drinks, bro.
Two shows, you know, and get the...
That's what I would do as a comic.
The green one would be paradise.
You know, there's things that you do.
These people now are opening up clubs thinking that 600 people are gonna show up.
You know, last night I saw something interesting.
Again, I was in the room last night and I came out my wife was watching the fucking Emmys whatever the fuck was on last night And who's in the fucking Emmys up there standing killing it but Margaret Cho Dressed as the Korean guy with white powder on her face walking across days like Fidel Castro And I'm thinking about what they put her through 20 years ago and how they did to her and they gave her that ABC show because after the Tim Allen rush After the Tim Allen rush, okay?
After the Tim Allen and Roseanne rush, something happened.
What they're saying is it's not a true addiction because a true addiction, what happens is like you get sick if you don't have it.
True addiction is a compulsive physiological need for and use of a habit-forming substance known to be physically, psychologically, or socially harmful.
What the nasal spray happens is you put that stuff in and after a few days of using it, your nose may become less responsive to the effects of the medication.
As a result, you need to use more and more of the medication to control congestion or your congestion may worsen if you stop using the medication.
That happens to people.
Apparently that happens to people with Xanax too.
They say there's some sort of a rubber band effect of Xanax.
Xanax calms your anxiety, but when you start getting off of it, your anxiety heightens and worsens to a place where it probably wouldn't even be if you weren't on it in the first place.
I think that's what happens with these sprays, too.
They get you coming and going, Joey Diaz.
They get you coming and going, these fucks.
Spraying shit up your nose.
If you get your nose carved out, though, you know, if you ever want to go and do it, my guy retired.
My guy, Feinberg and Encino, he was the best.
He had, like, he was so fucking, he was so patient and meticulous when you would talk to him and take notes with him.
But he would talk about what people did wrong and what people did right and here's the common errors and here's where they fuck up.
He had been doing it for fucking years.
He was like in his 60s when he did my operation.
But he made my nose whiter.
Like if I look at photos of my nose before the operation and after, my nose was all sucked.
I just didn't talk as well.
I couldn't breathe out of my nose very well.
My voice sounded different.
And he stuck these fucking plastic things in there and cut everything out, cut the turbinates out, removed chunks of meat.
I took photos of it.
I've got a video of me blowing my nose with the water pick.
I had photos of the boogers that I would blow out, these bloody, giant hunks.
Well, that's what Vandele Silva, when Vandele Silva had his nose fixed, he had all that facial surgery, they took a piece out of his rib and reconstructed his nose and made his nose bigger.
Like, if you look at Vandele's nose, it's way bigger than it was before, because he had a big chunk in there to open up his nose.
Like, Vandele ain't trying to look better.
He's trying to fuck you up.
When he got his nose fixed, it wasn't good.
He wanted to look cute, but his nose was completely smashed in and flattened.
It was like no cartilage at all.
It was just smashed and flattened.
And if you look at what his face looked like when he started fighting in the late 90s, as opposed to what he looked like in the early 2000s, his nose was just a pancake.
And so he had it fixed And stuck way the fuck out.
Like, way bigger than it was before.
And all just so he could breathe better and smash your fucking face.
Vanderlei got beat by Rampage Jackson knocked him out.
Like, he got beat by a lot of guys.
He's a great fighter and a fan favorite, and personally, like, my all-time favorite guy to watch, I think.
I think if I go back to, like, the Pride days, I love the Pride days for two guys especially.
Well, three.
Minotauro in his prime, four.
Cro-Cop in his prime, Fedor, for sure.
Fedor was the motherfucker.
But Vanderlei was a destroyer.
He was a destroyer.
He was so aggressive and psychotic and...
You would watch a Vanderlei fight, you always knew you were going to see some fucking crazy shit.
That's when they had stomps and soccer kicks, and he's stomping dudes in the head, holding onto the rope, stomping Tamora in the face when he's down.
I mean, Vanderlei was amazing, man.
His fights were awesome to watch.
But you, you know, that hard, hard career and then comes over to the UFC and now he's got, like, really strict drug testing and all this other shit.
And so when he took off from that drug test, man, I mean, that was just a colossal fuck-up.
You're better off testing positive.
If you test positive, they ban you for nine months.
That's it.
They fine you.
They ban you for nine months.
They tell you you can't fight that guy and, you know, you have to go through a suspension.
But when you take off...
They had to send a message.
They're like, this is for life.
You can never fight again.
I personally think that's too much, but the fear of it and the fact that he's going to be out for who knows how many years while he fights it, and if he wins, a lot of people think he will win in court.
The Nevada State Athletic Commission doesn't have the jurisdiction to test him against his will in between contests because he wasn't licensed for them.
Like in preparation for licensing, the idea of random drug testing, a lot of people have issues with that, including like Vandley's attorney.
But the bottom line is they're going to make you go to court.
You're going to have to do battle.
And even if you win, they'll let you fight again.
You still wasted all those years of your life and no one's going to run from a drug test again.
Because they're going to know that the drug test, like running for it is way worse for you than taking it and failing it.
That's the message they're trying to send.
They're trying to clean up the sport.
There's only one way.
You've got to take your test.
And if you fail, well, you have to be punished.
It's that simple.
Otherwise, you're not playing by the rules.
If you're not playing by the rules, you can't fight for us.
You can't just run away.
I don't agree with the suspension.
I think a lifetime suspension is ridiculous, especially since...
Look, Vanderlei's not gonna become a composer.
I mean, you're taking away the guy's livelihood.
I mean, he can teach and he can train guys, I guess, but Vanderlei still has fight in him.
He still wants to fight.
He had some good fights lined up.
That Chael Sonnen fight would have made him a fuckload of money.
That Chael Sonnen fight, I don't know what they were gonna pay him for that, but how much that fight would be worth, especially if he could beat Chael Sonnen and do it in Brazil.
That would be gigantic.
But he fucked up too, man.
When he was on that show, he got embarrassed.
Like, Brazil was upset at him.
There was a lot of people in Brazil that were upset at his performance and behavior on the show where he attacked Chael Sonnen.
A lot of people thought he made them look bad, and Chael Sonnen took him down real easy on the show.
You know, Vanderlei took a swing at Chael, and Chael ducked and took him down.
It's like, are we seeing what's going to happen on the show?
And you're making us look like thug.
You're starting a fight in the middle of a fucking television broadcast.
Talk all the shit you want, but be there when the actual fight goes down.
So both the guys tested positive for shit.
It wasn't just, I mean, Vanderlei might not have tested positive, but essentially did.
And Shale Sonnen, he was positive for everything.
Everything that existed.
Everything other than testosterone he was on.
He was on all these different testosterone boosters and EPO. It's the Lance Armstrong shit that make more oxygen in your blood.
You know, they have to clean up the sport.
It's unfortunate that Vanderlei has to go out like that because the guy was, you know...
I told my wife, me and my buddies were going to Aspen, so she left that afternoon to her parents or something with the baby, and I fucking stayed at the house.
Blasting.
And they called me, they go, when are you leaving?
I go, I'm already at the fucking, you know, I'm going, right now the car's coming, we're leaving.
And they go, okay, we thought you said 5 o'clock.
No, no, no, 1 o'clock.
I'm leaving right now.
I gotta go.
And I hung up.
About 10 minutes later, the guy knocked on the fucking door.
You know what's the most fucked up is drug tests for companies where they test you for weed and you're not even like, it's not even like while you're on the job.
Like UPS, something along those lines.
Like they'll test you to make sure you're not doing drugs while you work for them.
As if someone can tell you what to do with your time.
Like when you leave.
You could start drinking Monday at 5 o'clock.
You could ask everybody at work, hey, you guys want to go do drugs?
Let's go down to the bar and do liquid drugs.
And everybody's like, yeah, we're going to go meet Joey for a couple of liquid drugs.
And everybody's fine with that because it's all alcohol.
It's all legal.
But if you said, hey, you guys want to smoke some joints after this is over?
Everybody would be like, what the fuck?
Fuck, man.
You're gonna get fired from UPS. They're gonna drug test you.
You're fucked.
And they will.
They could.
They could hit you with a random drug test.
And they could fire you.
And you could get drunk as fuck from 5 p.m.
to 10 p.m.
Sunday night, crash, wake up, head pounding, driving to work, hungover as fuck, drinking Pedialyte and Gatorade and water, and you're fine.
Nobody can say a word.
They'll drug test you, you'll pass a flying collar.
As long as you're not actively drunk on the job, you're fine.
Knowing that they were going to throw me in jail, knowing Knowing they were going to throw me in jail if I piss tested.
Knowing I would drink vinegar.
I told this story out here before.
What I went through that year in the halfway house drinking vinegar and putting pool cleaner on my dick and, you know, cranberry juice and vinegar and Gatorade and just letting it go.
When you're addicted like that, nothing means anything.
I mean, Brian, do you think he could be fine with it?
Do you think that if you're a disciplined guy, you know, because you haven't had the problem that maybe Joey's had, you know, you've never been, like, full-on addicted, like, for long periods of time.
So do you think that a guy like him, who's an athlete, who's a strong-minded dude, is very disciplined?
I mean, Jon Jones, when he's training, like, when he trained for this fight, for Daniel Cormier, he was fucking disciplined.
The word on the street, the word from Albuquerque was, this fucking guy is training hard, twice a day, doing everything he can to beat this motherfucker.
And it's also a thing of John is so fucking good that maybe while he's doing it and he's still winning, he's still beating guys, he's so good he can do coke four weeks out.
Listen, you're with a girl, she got a tremendous piece of pussy, a fucking diamond thing studded in her belly button, her ass don't smell like flowers.