Interview: Joe Rogan
The face of genre fandom is a kaleidoscope of different people, backgrounds, and perspectives. A person’s love for all things spooky need not necessarily mean that they fit a certain aesthetic or sport a specific wardrobe choice. Genre fans are a collection of unique individuals who all come from a wide variety of vocations.
Celebrity genre fans are no different. Some of them are actors. Some are musicians. Lena Headley (300) cites films like Session 9, Black Christmas, and Martyrs as favorites. Eddie McClintock (“Warehouse 13”) is another actor who supports the genre. Tina Turner reads Anne Rice. Richard Christy (Howard Stern Show) is a major horror fan. Hell, even Vanessa Hudgens (High School Musical) refers to herself as a fan with The Exorcist and Poltergeist topping her list.
Another name that might surprise you: that of actor, comedian, UFC commentator Joe Rogan. Since coming to the public’s attention in 1995 when he began a four-year run as eccentric electrician Joe Garrelli on the immensely popular show “NewsRadio”, Rogan has surprised and entertained audiences the world over. As his comedy reputation continued to grow through the late 1990s, Joe branched out and added “mixed martial arts commentator” to his resume and massively broadened his already large fan base. While the gig surprised many, to others, it made a lot of sense. After all, Joe won the US Open Tae Kwon Do Championship at the age of nineteen and, as the lightweight champ, went on to beat both the middle and heavyweight title holders and take home the Grand Championship. Then, from 2001-2006, hosting the network challenge show “Fear Factor” solidified Rogan as a viable commodity and made him a household name. Once the popular stunt show’s run ended, Rogan returned to his first love – stand-up comedy – and proved that his was a voice that was insightful, contemporary, and utterly hilarious.
Now, with his sold-out comedy shows, continued involvement with the highly successful UFC, and hugely popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe sits at the forefront of the world’s attention. He continues to speak openly on topics many other people in the public eye would shy away from such as psychedelic drugs and marijuana use, conspiracies, and alien/human interaction. His is a considered and informed voice unlike any other in the media.
I spoke at length with Joe Rogan, and what I discovered may – once again – surprise you.
To be fair, it should be said that the following interview includes some of the notorious “7 words” George Carlin warned you about. Life’s tough, kids… wear a cup.
Dread Central: Ok, I’m going to start this recording, so everything you say from here on out will be held against you…
Joe Rogan: Holy shit!!
DC: Let’s start by me asking some easy questions. You play a lot of music in your podcasts. What are some of your favorite bands?
JR: That seems like it should be an easy question, but I never really fucking know what I really like. I’ve always loved classic rock. I’m a big fan of music from the 70s. I love The Allman Brothers and Hendrix and shit like that, but I’ve never sat down and quantified it or put together a Top 10.
DC: I was a buyer for Tower Records for like 10 years, so my tastes tend to run all over the place, from old school jazz to rock to whatever.
JR: I tried hard to get into jazz, but it is the one thing that, for whatever reason…
DC: I would think though that someone like yourself who does jiu-jitsu would really like it because it’s so freeform and improvisational.
JR: I don’t know. It just seems to me that they’re just kind of banging away on their instruments and I appreciate that and everything, but…
DC: Sometimes it feels like “Ok, this is everything I learned while I was at The Berklee School of Music” in three to five minutes. I used to take my wife to jazz shows and she’d always end up looking at me like, “What the fuck is this shit?!?!” Just a room full of guys all nodding their heads and laughing because of some technical thing the band was doing.
JR: [laughs] I wonder if there are a lot of female jazz fans? Is it more of a male-oriented thing?
DC: Well, I think there are a lot of female fans of things like “Quiet Storm” or “soft jazz” stuff like Kenny G.
JR: Is that really jazz though?
DC: Not really… But when you get into shit like Thelonius Monk or Coltrane, a lot of women tend to just look at you like you’re nuts. Now, I know you’re a reader and you’re kind of all over the spectrum on what you read…
JR: As far as fiction, I love horror books. It’s practically all I ever read. I don’t read anything about war or romance or politics, that’s all nonsense to me. I’m enjoying books by Joe Hill like HEART-SHAPED BOX and I have a copy of HORNS. I love King. Didn’t you and I talk about Guillermo del Toro’s THE STRAIN on my message board before?
DC: Yeah, we did…
JR: I liked it in the beginning. It was like, “Wow, this is kind of cool. It’s interesting,” but… I think we both talked about how, at the end, it was like he was just trying to finish it.
DC: I think that happens a lot. Writers will have this great idea and they’re cruising along and then they look at their word count and think, “Oh, shit! I’m getting to 170,000 words… I need to wrap this up.”
JR: How is the new one supposed to be?
DC: I’m so swamped with reading other stuff that I ended up thinking, “Do I spend a few days buzzing through something I know might be flawed or do I take a chance with some unknown quantity?” I’m hearing good things about King’s new book, Full Dark, No Stars.
JR: I haven’t picked up a King book in a while. I’m kind of skeptical since he laid off the drugs. [laughs]
DC: I think getting off drugs and getting hit by a car can change your perspective a bit. [laughs]
JR: Uh… Yeah… not just getting hit, but having your whole body ruined.
DC: You also read a lot of stuff that is non-fiction, stuff like Terrence McKenna, and that seems to have affected you pretty profoundly. I mean, a lot of the expanding consciousness stuff.
JR: Well, obviously I’m a huge fan of McKenna’s work. His books are very entertaining. His lectures I think are more entertaining. He was almost a better talker than he was a writer. His writing was very information-filled, but it was a bit flat as far as entertainment value. You had to really be into the subject matter, but I’m obviously fascinated by anything that has to do with the psychedelic experience and he was one of my favorite “psychonauts,” I guess you could call him, because he was such an intelligent guy and so brave about his quest to make people aware of the power of the psychedelic experience knowing very well that a lot of people were going to consider him to be a silly person for taking this on. It’s such a controversial topic. Whenever you get into the topic of psychedelic drugs, immediately you’re thought of as a nut.
DC: Or a hippie…
JR: Or a hippie or just a silly person… a person who’s not to be taken seriously. And I think that’s really a shame. I mean, it’s really a by-product of a bunch of different things. The actual accounts of real people who’ve done psychedelics… a lot of them are as silly as shit. There’re a lot of silly, knuckle-headed people that are into psychedelics, but there are also a lot of really brilliant people who have used psychedelics and changed their lives. But, for the most part, when we think about… even today, people who are really well known intellectuals or the flavor of the month like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens… you never hear of them expanding on the psychedelic experience. It’s one of those things that puts you in this weird sort of hole. It’s really odd to me that those guys don’t talk about psychedelics. I don’t know what kind of experience they have with them. I know Hitchens likes to drink, but… If your whole thread is about religion… If that’s what you’re constantly talking about and putting it in perspective for people who are zealots and trying to enlighten them, how do you not know or how do you not bring up psychedelics? That really is the elephant in the room.
I think the root of almost all real, true religious experiences is probably psychedelic drugs. I mean, that IS the connection to the Afterlife. It IS the connection to the higher power. It is the road map to the center of the mandala. It really is. What I’m saying is that it really is what all these people are looking for. All these people who are looking for this being touched by a higher power or this feeling of being in the presence of something divine or something indescribably wise… like really being in the presence of God. That really is what a true psychedelic experience gives you. It’s very humbling. You come out of it very loving. You come out of it feeling like you have a responsibility to do something about this experience and make it have a positive effect on your life. That is what all these people are looking for… all these people who are talking in tongues and throwing their arms up in the air and crying out for someone to come down and give them the wisdom. That’s what psychedelic drugs are there for, man. They’re there for you, but, for whatever reason, it gets left out of the debate because it’s thought of as a frivolous topic. If you’re the type of person who is into psychedelic drugs, you’re like… me. I’m an easy person to be dismissed.
DC: Well, look at someone like Ram Dass… It’s like, “You’re ok. Yeah, you’re a Harvard academic, but now that you’re openly talking about these drugs, you’ve gone way off the rails… and here’s an easy answer for sidelining you and, by extension of that, the debate.”
JR: Sure… and Timothy Leary as well.
DC: I wonder if by trivializing it, it diminishes its appeal… I mean, here’s a solution to everything people are looking for… and it’s easy… but there’s no cash in it. There’s no church-based economy inherent in it. Instead, we’ll trivialize it and say, “no…no… no… listen to the guy on the pulpit who talks about the Ten Commandments and Leviticus and blah blah blah…” because there we can tap into a revenue source and exert some control.
JR: There’s a little bit of that, but I think there’s also what you said – it’s too easy. I think, for a lot of people, the idea that you can just take a gigantic dose of mushrooms and have this insane, religious, powerful, all knowing experience… it just seems like a cop-out to people. You should be meditating on a mountain for thirty years to have that. You should earn that, you know what I mean?
DC: Staring at your navel…
JR: Yeah! The fact that you can get there with the same method that some goofy high school kid who just watched SOUTH PARK and giggle off of a few caps and stems… that’s the method you’re going to use to change your whole life? Whoa, you sound like a nut!
DC: You’ve kept to the organics, true? You’ve never done LSD or…
JR: I try to avoid anything that I know has completely wrecked people’s minds. A lot of that has been because I’ve been very fortunate to meet people who have fucked their brains up. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet people with cocaine problems early on when I was really young, so… I was always terrified of coke. I had seen what it had done to people. I’d met people who’d had heroin problems and seen what that had done to them. So, I’d had some real clear evidence stuck in my face at a very young age that there is a lot of stuff that’s just not good for you. But, you don’t really hear that about marijuana. You don’t really hear that about hash. You don’t really hear that about mushrooms… Although, there is a depiction in the book TRUE HALLUCINATIONS where McKenna and his brother, Dennis were somewhere in South America and they took mushrooms and Dennis had some sort of a schizophrenic episode for a couple of weeks where he’d really lost his marbles. But, who knows what they were taking. They might have taken so much stuff…
DC: And you never know if there were already cracks in Dennis’ foundation before they dosed, you know? The trip might have just sort of brought those flaws to the surface.
JR: Yeah, absolutely. You just never know what kind of psychological state he was in when he took that stuff and that has a big effect on it.
DC: A lot of people know you as an actor, a standup, a martial artist, and a sports commentator, but you’re also a big horror fan and monster fan. Was that interest sparked early on? As a kid, were you gobbling that stuff up?
JR: Yeah, man… When I was really, really young, for as far back as I can remember, I loved monster movies. My mom used to be a horror movie fan and she used to watch movies with me when I was really young – like 5 and 6 – like vampire movies and shit like that. It was something I always really enjoyed. And still to this day, I always get really excited when a monster movie comes out. There’re just not enough of them, man… and the ones that are out all suck.
DC: While reading your message board, I sensed the outrage you had at Splice when it came out. You could tell you really wanted it to be good …
JR: It sucked SO hard. [laughs] The way I described it to people was, “Here’s how bad it was… they made this artificial human and they put this artificial human in a basement where it grew to full adulthood within a couple of months and, a couple of weeks after that, Adrien Brody fucked it. So, it’s not that he just fucked a monster, but he’s a pedophile monster fucker!” He fucked a baby monster. The whole thing was so wrong on so many different levels and so stupid and at the end when it changed sexes…
DC: What got me was… as soon as it got a dick, it went out raping.
JR: [laughs]
DC: It was like in 28 Days Later, where the soldiers were capturing women to have sex with them. I’m like, “Dude, it’s been 28 days!” It’s not even been a month. I’ve gone a year without getting laid. Calm down!
JR: I know. It’s pretty ridiculous. I get upset… I got upset at THE WOLFMAN. It was so weak. I was really disappointed in Rick Baker because I was a huge Rick Baker fan as a kid. At one point in time in my life, I actually contemplated being a makeup artist when I grew up. I loved The Cantina scene in STAR WARS and how Baker would talk in great detail about how he fabricated all these masks and what he did with AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON. I mean, AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON was awesome and was really a great werewolf movie even though the technology was a bit limited at the time. Like when he had the werewolf moving through Piccadilly Circus, moving through the crowd, you see him for a second, two seconds, you just see this thing on four legs and it’s fuckin’ awesome. It was terrifying. It looked menacing. It looked powerful. It looked like a real monster. And then you have this Benecio Del Toro thing where it’s a stupid mask and it looked so hokey with the bottom teeth sticking out like the old Lon Chaney, Jr. I guess they were trying to do a tribute to that, but god what a letdown. It wasn’t even remotely scary.
DC: When we sat down to watch it, as soon as Del Toro starts reciting Hamlet, we were like, “Oh boy…” [laughs]
JR: [laughs] “Here we go…”
DC: [laughs] But Baker goes from American Werewolf to Harry and the Hendersons . I think he just likes putting hair on people.
JR: You may be right there. HARRY AND THE HENDERSONS… you gotta kind of give him a pass on that. He was just trying to make a kid’s movie, but fuckin’ WOLFMAN… there’s no pass on that. I mean, the fuckin’ scene where Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins are fighting… Jesus Christ! It looked so dumb. It was awful. It’s like, “You guys have made a movie with 2010 technology and 1980s sensibilities. So hokey and shitty.
DC: When you say that you and your mom used to watch a lot of horror films, was this when you lived in San Francisco?
JR: No, it was even before then… when I lived in New Jersey. My whole life I’ve always been a huge, huge fan of horror movies, horror comic books. I just recently bought a bunch of the book versions of the CREEPY and EERIE comic books. I love those. They brought back a lot of memories.
DC: Do you remember the film that really hooked you?
JR: I was always a big fan of werewolf movies for whatever reason. Those were always my favorites. I loved THE HOWLING… I just loved the idea that some regular guy who was just going along in his life and all of a sudden he gets bit and now he’s fucked. And now, he’s got to figure out what to do because he turns into a monster. I just loved that.
DC: I think it taps into that whole “beast within” thing.
JR: Absolutely!
DC: From what I know of you, I notice there are a few things that are sort of touchstones. One is werewolves and the other is apes. You really seem drawn to those creatures. I mean, your special was called Talking Monkeys in Space and you have a production company called Talking Monkey Productions…Is your interest in apes part of that same thing that drives your interest in werewolves?
JR: Definitely. I mean, there’s a part of all of us, especially if you’ve experienced as much violence as I have, where you realize that there is a certain line that gets crossed in the human mind or the human psyche. There’s something in the consciousness that gets crossed where you literally are exactly the same as an animal. There’s no difference at all. There is no language. There’s no contemplation of the consequences of your actions. It’s just pure primate violence. I’ve been very close to that my whole life with martial arts and I’ve just seen a lot of fucked up shit in my life. I’ve always been fascinated by the origins of human beings and I have always had this deep, deep fascination with all sorts of primates. I find it amazing that these things, which are so similar to us, are all around us at zoos and, in some parts of the world, people actually live around them. It’s a really interesting thing. Any time someone gets fucked up by a monkey… Like if I go to the news or some shit like that and I see something like that guy in India who was a mayor of a city and he got killed by a monkey… that’s the first shit I want to read! [laughs] I wanna read it. Like “Whoa, what happened to that guy?”
DC: Or the woman who got her face eaten off who was on Oprah. What the fuck was that all about? [laughs]
JR: I’ve been telling people for years that chimps are super fuckin’ violent monsters. If chimps lived around us, we’d have to shoot them all the time. They’re really dangerous. They’re the closest things to us and they’re some of the most brutal and vicious animals in the animal kingdom because they’re intelligent and they have a plan. They go for your genitals. They bite your fingers off. They pull your face apart. They’re not trying to kill you. They’re trying to fuck you up and that’s a scary, scary thing.
DC: I remember a National Geographic documentary I watched once that showed an orangutan that was handed a coconut. He held it in his hand and suddenly you see coconut milk start leaking through his fingers and then the coconut just collapsed in his fist. There weren’t any grimacing or any visible signs of exertion. It just held it and crushed it – no problem.
JR: We can’t wrap our heads around how strong they are. They could literally pull your arms right off your body. POP! We were on the set of NEWSRADIO back in the day and there was a baby chimp on set for some scene and it was only two years old. This little guy got on my back and started beating on me. I was holding on to him and it was like he was made out of wood. He felt like he was carved out of ebony wood, just solid and dense. You can’t imagine how strong they are and this was a baby. A little tiny baby. Imagine a hundred and fifty pound grown male… my god! The strength those things have. And now, they’ve found those super chimps in the Congo called Bondo Apes. I am constantly fascinated by that. These are huge six foot tall chimpanzees that the locals call “lion killers.” They have two different names for chimps: “tree beaters” and “lion killers.” These enormous chimps… they sleep on the ground in nests like gorillas because no one fucks with them. They don’t even have to climb up in trees. They are so loked out, they just get to sleep wherever they want. They’re like, “Fuck you! Come get some!” These are giant chimps, man and they’re real. This was like a myth for the longest time… The book and the movie CONGO was a big part of that and it was based on mythology, based on some really old photos from the early 1900s. Someone had shot and killed one and they had it propped up on a stick, their arms were hanging from a stick and they had it standing at its full height. I remember it was a really controversial photo where people were like, “Is this a mutant gorilla? What is this thing?” As it turns out, it’s not a mutant gorilla. It’s an entire sub-species of huge chimpanzees that lives in one particular area of The Congo.
DC: But we take something like a chimpanzee and put it in a suit and put it on a tricycle and give it a smoke… just bizarre.
JR: I know, right? We have this weird thing that we do with all dangerous animals where we make them like our cute little buddies. Tony the Tiger… “They’re grrrrrreat!” Klondike Bars are sold by polar bears. Polar bears are fuckin’ ruthless cunts. They’re the most vicious animals. They live in the harshest climate. Have you ever seen videos of the polar bears trying to kill pilot whales that are stuck inside an ice patch? The whales get stuck and there’s only one hole where they can go to get air. There was too much ice for them to swim and get out to the open sea. So, they kept popping up in this one area. The polar bears recognized this and they started just clawing at them as they were doing that, just biting junks of them as they come up. You’d see these poor whales popping up every couple of minutes or so covered in scars and open wounds and every time they’d pop up, the polar bears were there grabbin’ them.
DC: I imagine the polar bears couldn’t image what it was that is underneath the ice… or the size of it.
JR: They don’t give a fuck.
DC: They just see a potential food source.
JR: They’re pretty ruthless, man. There’s a terrible story I read once where these guy’s boat hit an iceberg and was taking on water, so they had to get off the boat and onto an iceberg… or ice island… and they called for help, but help was hours away. So, as help is coming, they see a polar bear and the polar bear starts getting closer to them. Then, the polar bear dives off of one particular ice island that he’s on, dives into the water, comes onto their ice island, and kills one of the men. He then grabs him, swims through the water, pulls the body onto the other ice island and start eating him in front of everybody. Whoa…
DC: You once showed some drawings on your podcast that you did back when you were younger, and they were quite good. Was drawing something you lost interest in and replaced with something else?
JR: I had a bad high school art teacher who was kind of a dildo. He was one of those guys who was always telling you that life was going to suck. “You’re not going to be able to draw what you want.” He was a failure, you know? And he was promoting failure. He wasn’t saying, “If you work really hard, you can have a job as a comic book artist. You can do it. You can live your dreams.” He wasn’t that guy. He was the guy telling you, “Well, not that many people get that job. You probably won’t. You’ll probably wind up doing diaper ads.” That’s what I remember him saying… that you may have to draw diaper ads. That was like a big thing that he was pushing. I don’t know why it was diaper ads or why it really stuck in my head, but it did. I was like, “What the fuck, man?” All I wanted to draw was monster shit. I wanted to draw like CREEPY and EERIE type comic book shit. I used to make my own comic books and it was all that kind of stuff… and some Marvel stuff, too. I was really into THE PUNISHER and THE HULK and things along those lines. I really got into it, but this guy was just such a drag that, in my senior year in high school, I didn’t even take Art. I just stopped taking it. I kept drawing on my own. I still did it, but really I was just doing it for my own fun.
DC: As this was happening with the art thing, was this also around the time you found martial arts?
JR: Well, the art thing started really, really early. It started so early I don’t really know when. My mom just sent me a box of drawings and stuff from way back when I was like four and five, so… There was never a time in my younger years when I wasn’t doing art. It was as I got more into martial arts and as my art teacher started bumming me out… He was just really negative. He just never saw potential. It was like, “Why do you want to draw this all the time?” All my drawings were like axe murderers or werewolves or dragons or some Conan-type dude fighting off some three-headed beast. It was all that kind of shit because that’s what I was interested in, man. I was fucking fourteen years old and instead of nurturing that, he was the doom and gloom guy.
DC: Isn’t that always the way? “Those who can… do and those who can’t… teach.”
JR: It’s horrible, man. It makes me sad when I stop to think about it… Yeah, I know, it’s a really minor thing. “Boo-hoo to me… I had a douchey teacher.” Nobody raped me or anything. It’s pretty minor, but… It’s fine though. He actually probably did me a service because my life turned out really fun. This was my thought at the time, “Well I could always do art on my own. I don’t really need to do it for a living. I could always just do it for enjoyment.”
DC: It’s funny how a good teacher can elevate you and vice versa… I had a guy in junior high school who taught Hamlet and really made it come alive. That’s one polarity. The other is this art teacher who just shit all over everything.
JR: Yeah, man… you can get lucky. I had a really bad math teacher, too, which is the same thing; just doom and gloom and negativity. It was like, “You’re gonna be a loser.” You know, when you really stop and think about that, it’s almost criminal – telling kids that they’re going to be losers. You fuckin’ asshole. You’re a grown adult and you’re putting that seed in a child’s mind. But, they’re really doing that because they’re incredibly weak human beings. It’s so sad that that is what we’re left with in a lot of the public schools. We’re left with these people who don’t have this massive passion, for the most part, to be educators. They just don’t have a lot of options and this is what they’re doing. What they’re doing in teaching kids is… they’re providing these kids with their first sort of real view of the world. This is the real view of how you’re going to perceive mathematics and history and life and future careers and options as far as what you do for the rest of your life, and they’re idiots. It’s the weirdest thing. It’ll never make sense to me how teachers don’t get paid exorbitant amounts of money. I mean, martial arts teachers get paid really well. You can get a lot of money by teaching martial arts. I know guys like Renzo Gracie who probably makes a million dollars a year teaching jiu-jitsu. And yet, there’s these fuckin’ teachers who are really shaping the future of all these kids and they’re garbage.
DC: There’s nothing as depressing as when you go into a public school teacher’s lounge. Just broken people sitting there smoking, dreading their next class… and all for like nineteen grand a year.
JR: Ugh… can you imagine? It’s so hard to believe that that’s what they get paid, but those are real numbers. You can barely get by if you’re a fuckin’ teacher, and it’s such an important thing to provide for children.
DC: You look at the political arena and hear how everything is “about the children,” but then you start talking about raising the education budget and people flip out.
JR: I know, right? Think about all the money being spent on these wars, and even more so, how about the war on drugs? What about all the nonsense money being spent on that and they can’t come up with shit when it comes to education?
DC: Look at the prison system…
JR: Well, there’s a lot of money in the prison system now. The most frightening thing about the prison system in this country is that it’s being privatized. That is terrifying.
DC: How do you lock people in cages for profit?
JR: And no one says anything about it. No one’s clamoring for this to stop.
DC: You’ve talked in podcasts and interviews about how you have something of an obsessive personality… like the videogame Quake (which is where I first ran into you online). So, when you got into martial arts, did that come into play? Did you just jump into it with both feet?
JR: I’ve always been obsessive about pretty much everything from the time I was a little child. Anything I got into, whether it was drawing or anything, I got into it like crazy. Martial arts was really the first thing that ever gave me hope that I wasn’t going to be a loser. So I really, really gravitated toward it.
DC: Not being a loser… that’s a big thing for you.
JR: Yeah, well… I grew up around a lot of losers and one of them was my dad. There was a lot of desire to not be like that guy and not be like all of these people around me who had no hope and no future. And when you’re insecure and your parents break up when you’re really young and you grow up poor, there’s this overwhelming desire to make sure that this never, ever happens again. When I was young, I wasn’t concerned with “Hey, I just want to go and have some fun and hang out with my buddies.” It was “I don’t want to be a loser when I grow up.” That was the number one theme in my head. Martial arts was really the first thing where I was a clear winner at something. Like, “Hey, I’m good at this. I have an identity now. I am somebody. I can be good at something.”
DC: There’s obviously this positive aspect of training, but have you ever encountered anything negative?
JR: To training?
DC: Yeah, for instance… you’ve talked about how you’ve blown your knees out.
JR: Well, overwhelmingly it’s been positive because even the knee surgery thing… I still practice martial arts and I have no knee problems. Fortunately, they have surgery now and they can fix things. There are always injuries and there are psychological setbacks and things can be very, very difficult. But those things – those setbacks – are good because you rise above them and you learn. “Hey, when things are bad and when you fuck up, you can actually take that fuck up and grow because of it.” You can use it as a tool and learn from it. So, I would say that it was overwhelmingly positive. It’s a huge learning experience. I think for kids one of the most important things for them is to do something really difficult so that they learn that they can do something difficult. That something that seems insurmountable like when you’re first learning martial arts and you take your first class and you throw a kick and you’re all off balance and you feel goofy, you will never imagine that one day you’ll be throwing three-sixty spinning wheel kicks in the air. It’s like, “There’s no way I’m going to be able to do this, no way I’m going to win tournaments against some of the best guys in the country. There’s no way that’s going to happen.” It seems like it’s impossible. It seems so far away that it can’t be reached. But it can be reached. You can make it. You just have to believe in it and you have to keep growing and keep going and keep moving forward.
I have this new tattoo that’s of this samurai Miyamoto Musashi fighting this tiger and it’s my whole right sleeve. One of the reasons I got it is… pretty much my whole life… I read this Miyamoto Musashi quote when I was young from THE BOOK OF THE FIVE RINGS and it’s that once you understand The Way broadly, you can see it in all things. What he’s saying is that once you understand what it takes to get good at something, once you understand what it takes to get Zen, to fall into whatever it is – the mindset, the discipline plus energy plus focus – all those things to get great at something, you can do that with ANYTHING. You can do that with music. You can do that with writing. You can do that with anything. It’s just a matter of time and focus and energy, and it is truly all the same thing. It all comes from the same place. It’s all focusing on whatever that is and then channeling the energy of the universe to create something. And that, to me, was the biggest lesson in martial arts. It was that I could DO this and, if I could do THIS, I can do anything. It’s really the same thing that got me good at standup comedy. It’s the same thing that gets me good at every aspect of my life.
DC: Some of the best lessons I’ve ever learned have been found in failure and getting my ass kicked both figuratively and literally. And as painful as those lessons were, they all taught me something which, in the long run, made me a better person. Failure can either make you or break you. You learn from those mistakes and those defeats, and it all helps to hone the blade. So, because you do live – what with working for the UFC and with your own training – in a world of violence, and considering that a lot of things in life come out in art, do you think that violence in art can go too far?
JR: Not too far… I mean, it can go too far for me where I don’t enjoy it or it might go too far for you. But my “too far” might not be as far as your “too far”, and your “too far” might not be as far as another guy’s “too far.” It’s all subjective. For one person to say that a violent movie is too violent… No, it’s too violent FOR YOU. The person who created this movie obviously enjoyed it. There are a lot of films that are very disturbing. Look at SE7EN… that was a fuckin’ deeply disturbing movie. To some people it was too much. To some people it was like, “What is the point of making a movie like this?” But not to me and I’m going to assume not to you. It might not be good to you, but what is it? Whatever anybody’s done in a movie, it does not come close to depicting what must have been experienced by real, live people during The Holocaust. All the shit that you hear about experiments that were done on people, some of the crazy shit that the Japanese were doing… Art often mirrors real life and, if that’s the case, then there is no line that you can cross because every fuckin’ horrific thing imaginable has actually been done by someone. You might not want to see it and that’s understandable, but that’s your choice. It’s not like someone’s going all CLOCKWORK ORANGE on you and propping your eyelids open with toothpicks.
DC: You always have the remote to shut it off. Do you think your experiences with things like DMT and other psychedelics have opened up your imagination to certain genre films and literature? I mean, once you’ve seen reality take a distinct and mind-expanding bend, are you open to more expressionistic art and concepts?
JR: That’s an interesting question. I think once you’ve seen what you can see in a full-blown DMT experience, it does sort of open you up. In your mind or in your imagination, there’s a fence somewhere where everything past this fence is preposterous and the DMT experience is so preposterous, but so real, that you kind of go, “Do we need these fences anymore? Let’s just knock these down, because even if I don’t go there, we don’t need these fences.”
DC: I equate it to pain tolerance. I mean, you talk to a young girl and she cuts her finger and it hurts. But then, you talk to a woman who’s given birth and that cut finger is no longer a concern because, as you’ve said, the fences have been moved. Now, her concept of pain and your concept of what is preposterous have been altered.
JR: I think it certainly changes. I think your perception of everything changes when you have such a mind-blowing experience. People have talked about how much being abducted by aliens has altered their view of the world. They don’t feel as if they live in this innocent world anymore. They feel like everyone around them really has no idea. They’re almost like children who are insulated from this brutal reality. The reality of what alien abduction probably is… I don’t know what people are experiencing, but it’s most likely that they are having a DMT experience which is happening organically. Almost all alien abductions take place while people are sleeping. We know that when you’re sleeping, you’re brain is producing psychedelic chemicals. People can have panic attacks. People can have adrenaline rushes. You could easily be having some sort of DMT rush and you can have it while you’re sleeping. You can have some incredibly intense experience that feels real. And you know what… this whole idea of discounting it by saying, “Ohhh, it feels real that you went to some other dimension and were taken aboard a spacecraft, but it’s really a hallucination.” I’m not even sure about that. I’m not sure that it, instead of a hallucination, is not possibly a real experience. Like what you’re experiencing is not a chemical that perturbs reality, but in fact the chemical that opens up a gateway to another reality. That’s just as possible.
DC: Someone on your messageboard asked a question about “sleep catalepsy” or “sleep paralysis” and, because I happen to work a regular job in sleep medicine, I tried to explain what was going on. But what was interesting was that my post explaining this was sort of dismissed because the idea that something spooky was going on was sexier, you know what I mean?
JR: That’s a good point.
DC: People really want to believe that something otherworldly is going on.
JR: They want to believe SO much. It drives me crazy because I want to believe, too, but I recognize what it is. I have a lot of friends that have real fuckin’ issues with UFOs. Some of them WANT to believe. I’m not saying that UFOs aren’t real. What I’m saying is that you shouldn’t take a position unless you’ve had personal experience, and even that personal experience should be evaluated as objectively as possible. “Was I hallucinating? Did I have some sort of schizophrenic experience? Am I looking at this from a realistic point of view, or am I just tricking myself into thinking this is really happening?” Critical thinking is really lacking from people who are looking for that “sexy” experience.
DC: Have you ever gone to a UFO convention?
JR: I haven’t actually. I’m sure they must be fuckin’ crazy.
DC: Some of them are crazy. They’re so intent on it all being real. It reminded me of this documentary I saw that talked about how we make up our minds on a visceral level and then we begin to accept or reject information filtered through that emotional decision we’ve already made in our minds.
JR: Absolutely. We look for validation to confirm our ideas and it’s not objective. That is my problem with a LOT of people when it comes to this goddamn UFO experience. I’ve talked to people that say, “I’ve done research, man! I’m watching these YouTube videos… All these people can’t be lying!” Oh, yes they can! Is it possible that there is a liar? Yes! I know liars. Do you know liars? Yes. We all know liars. So it’s possible that there are a thousand liars. Or a million. And some of these people might not even be liars. They might be crazy or imbalanced. You’re telling me that you can’t find a hundred imbalanced people? I can find a hundred unbalanced people in a day. If you just let me drive around Los Angeles and just stop people on the street and ask them a few questions about Life… “What do you think about this? What do you think about that? Has this ever happened to you? Do you believe that you’re psychic?” I guarantee you… You give me a full eight-hour day and I can find a hundred unbalanced people easily. A hundred people where you couldn’t trust a goddamned thing they said. If they said the sky was blue, you’d need to double-check on that. If they said that the water is wet, you’d say, “I’m not sure! If you say water is wet… we might have to check.”
DC: And yet these are the people that get held up as “authorities.” Art Bell used to do it and now George Noory does it on Coast To Coast AM… They have these people talking just crazy shit in an authoritarian manner and people believe them. I mean, the guy may be a little sketchy, but the fact that he’s preaching to the choir, he gets a pass.
JR: Preaching to the choir is really dangerous. You need people to step in and question what is going on because these people really don’t want it to be fake. They don’t want these people to be crazy. It’s a belief system that’s just as rigid and silly as Christianity or anything else.
DC: Look at Jesse Ventura…
JR: Yeah! Everything, man… “9/11 was an inside job.” Do you know for sure, man? Is it possible there was incompetence? Is it possible that it was a combination of incompetence and SOME PEOPLE knowing? Did they maybe know something was going to happen, but didn’t know the extent?
DC: I wanted to talk to you about your messageboard. I’ve been a member there for seven or eight years, give or take, and I am fascinated by it. Not only because it is such an eclectic collection of people, but it’s become my number one news source… as weird as that sounds. [laughs]
JR: Mine, too.
DC: It’s a place where I can get instantaneous spin in both directions. And… where else can you get hard news backed up against World Star Hip Hop videos? [laughs] So, how did it all come about? Was it an organic thing?
JR: Yeah, completely organic. It was started in 1998. It was some free EZ Board software. Andrew, the guy who created my website and has created every single incarnation of it except the latest one, said, “Hey, maybe we should have a little messageboard where we could all post shit.” We were thinking it would be like ten people, and that’s what it was at the time. A lot of it was the guys we played Quake with. It was just all of our friends online, just a small handful of people. Then, somehow or another, it got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and before you knew it, there were thousands of people… and before you knew it there were a million posts… and before you knew it there were MILLIONS of posts. And it just got crazier and crazier. It’s one of the weirdest things I’ve ever experienced.
DC: I’d been online for a long time when I found it and was pretty hardcore… You know, getting in people’s faces, “flaming,” etc., but when I encountered your board, that was the one place I felt like I needed to step back and lurk a little. I just found almost everyone there not only really funny, but really smart and well informed. They were also amazingly adept at taking someone’s argument and pulling it apart. Almost immediately I was hooked and being there got me into your comedy and your outlook, and I’ve been there ever since. That said, I can’t help but feel like it’s also a huge promotional tool for you.
JR: I guess so, but I very rarely use it as a promotional tool. The Board is pretty much The Board. I think if I went on there and was like, “Hey, guys… come support me and vote for me on this and buy my shit and do this here and do that there…” If that was everything I did… Even on Twitter, every now and then, I’ll say, “Hey, I’m performing here” or “Hey, this is going on” and I’ll get all these people saying, “How about using Twitter for something other than marketing?!” People just douche on you left and right over stuff like that. If I had done that, I don’t think The Board would have become what it is. I think what it is is… it’s The Board. It’s its own thing. I mean, it has my name on it and I guess I have to take some sort of responsibility because I’ve nurtured this environment where you can post photoshopped pictures of people with dicks in their mouths and the next post is about the Large Hadron Collider and its effects on humanity and then right after that is a post about how many dicks has Sasha Grey sucked in her life and it’s a real debate… [laughs]
It’s the strangest board ever. It’s like religion and philosophy and psychedelic drugs, but really what it mirrors more than anything are my own personal interests and my mind and the personal interests and minds of like-minded people. That’s what we’re getting at the place. There are so many people who think so very, very similarly and all of us together are in this group and we found sort of a home where a bunch of other people think that way as well and we can meet up online. There are a lot of silly people on The Board. There are a lot of people who are Conspiracy Theory people. There are a lot who are hardcore vegetarians and vegans and they want to argue about shit. There are people who are Conservative and they want to argue about Liberals. There’s just a lot of shit going on that is not necessarily along the lines of how I think, but just having them all there in this sort of big group hive, I think it provides a chance for everyone to evolve and see all these different people’s experiences and different points of view and get a feeling for it. It’s just a very, very rare environment, very rare opportunity we have to have all that together in one meeting spot where you kind of know what you’re going to get. You’re going to get freedom. You don’t know what you’re going to get as far as topics. Any day you can click on Shit Talking 101 and be blown away by some new, weird revelation, discovery, or scientific innovation. There’s always something going on or someone who has a point of view that you disagree with or agree with or someone who posts a video that makes you rethink your whole life. That happens EVERY DAY on that board.
DC: What I find interesting is that without too much intervention by you or the moderators there’s an equilibrium that gets established. The community supports the people who make good points but also squashes down the radical goofballs. And, in the end, if you read everything and you keep in touch, you get a really good barometer of how people are thinking… especially people who are pretty smart. I think even the “dumbest” person on your board could probably be the “smartest” person on somebody else’s board, you know?
JR: It’s intimidating and I think it keeps really, really dumb people from expressing their opinion because they read all the shit that people talk about. A perfect example… there was a recent thread where two guys were having a debate on the pros and cons of growth hormone therapy and they started getting into all these fuckin’ crazy details about science and it got really heavy. Really intense, intelligent discussions, breakdowns, and scientific analysis… and I thought, “What a weird board this is!” It’s such a weird place that such a really deep and intelligent discussion can take place right next to “scat porn.” You can literally scroll down to the next post in that same thread and see a guy on his keyboard covered in shit with a log of shit in his mouth. [laughs] There’re no rules, man. It’s like your mind. At any moment you can be standing next to some old lady and the thought comes into your mind, “I could, if I wanted to, kick this old lady into traffic.” You don’t do it, but that thought is there and it’s like that on this board. Somebody might be debating the UFC and out of that – BOOM! – there’s a photo of two guys fuckin’ each other in the mouth. [laughs] It’s like, “Why is that there?!?” [laughs] I don’t know, but that’s how it goes there.
DC: I see the board and your involvement on Twitter and the podcast you do as part of this new model of interacting with one’s audience. Your access to your audience is amazing and you’re really free about it and you’re really giving in how you give out information. I’m now seeing other people in the public eye adopting what you’ve been doing for a long time. Did you at any time say, “This is the way of the future. This is the way that we ought to go” or was it, again, more organic?
JR: Totally organic. The Twitter thing was organic as well. I’m looking at my Twitter right now and here’s this guy that has an Albert Hoffman/Alex Grey portrait as his avatar and he’s letting me know that there’s a NOVA special on fractals coming up. Then there are people from the UK who want to know when I’m coming to do a show there, and then there’s another one that wants to talk about some shit that’s going down with the Wikileaks papers that are being released about the Iraq War. It’s really very similar to the messageboard. I post things that I find interesting. I post up things on my Twitter that, to me, are intriguing and things that I think are something I would like to know about if somebody else had this information… Show me! Tell me what’s up. Here’s a study on psilocybin at John Hopkins Medical Center about how psilocybin leads to spiritual realizations. So I put this up on my Twitter, and then all these people thank you and they retweet it. It really becomes just like the messageboard. It’s very, very similar. But there are more people on my Twitter than are even on the messageboard. I mean, how many members are there? I think it only has forty-five thousand or something like that, but my Twitter has like two hundred plus. So it’s really the same thing. It’s like “build it and they will come.”
DC: And the weekly podcast came about the same way?
JR: Yeah, same thing. The podcast was totally organic. It started out with me and Brian Redban sitting in front of laptops bullshitting. It’s kind of beautiful in that respect. It’s almost a year old now and, in that year, you can see the full evolution from sitting in front of a laptop to professional microphones and a mixer and a soundboard. For a long time people were complaining about the sound issues so… we figured it all out. We got it all together slowly over time. Now, it’s not just me and Brian… Now, I’m getting guests and every day I’m getting emails from people who want to promote their books or their thing, some guy from Vegan.com wants to come on and debate me about eating animals… There are all sorts of different things that are happening with it now. Again, it’s totally organic. It just sort of happened. I didn’t sit down and say, “Hey, what I’m going to do is that I’m going to create my own radio show. Since nobody wants to give me a radio show, I’m going to make my own.” No. It just sort of fuckin’ happened.
DC: Did I hear something about the podcast being picked up by Sirius satellite?
JR: Yeah, it’s picked up. We’re working out the details right now as far as revenue and advertising and stuff, but yeah… it’s going to be on Sirius. It should be cool. But honestly, I don’t know how many more people it’s going to reach on Sirius than it’s going to reach on iTunes. We’re getting hundreds of thousands of downloads every week.
DC: You said recently that when you were abroad people were coming up to you and saying, “Your podcast is really changing the way I’m thinking.”
JR: A LOT of people are saying that.
DC: How heady is THAT?
JR: It’s very heady because it’s something I never considered. I just thought we were entertaining, but… We’re stoned as fuck and we start talking about Life and Philosophy and I start talking about how I really and truly feel and how I think about things… I take a lot of time to consider my opinions. I don’t have flippant opinions on things, and if I do, I’m more than willing to reconsider those opinions and talk about them. I’m not married to any of the ideas that I keep in my head. So when I talk about this and my critical objective reasoning that I use when I’m thinking about something or when I’m considering a subject, those methods, that way of thinking and communicating… There’re a lot of people who don’t get that. They don’t have that around them. They’re surrounded by the same sort of knuckleheads that they grew up with or work with or whatever and they don’t have… you know… drug-addled weirdos around them or whatever it is. [laughs] Or people who are open-minded or free thinkers or someone who’s not chained-down to a job where they can’t be free to express themselves. That’s a lot of it, too. The reason why people think a certain way is because they kinda have to, man. If you’re in a fuckin’ job where you work for Verizon in Corporate Sales, you can’t be running around talking about DMT.
DC: I also think the podcast – like your Twitter and your board – is this cornucopia of topics where you can go from an informed MMA discussion to, in my opinion, a Master’s Class on comedy. You guys talking about the nuts and bolts of constructing bits… it’s amazing. People can’t get that kind of thing anywhere.
JR: You don’t get that anywhere. I mean, most other comedy podcasts even don’t talk about that stuff. I think, for some people, they don’t want to… I don’t know. Maybe they’re self-conscious, maybe they don’t think about it that much, maybe they have an opinion that the show should be more professional or something. You know, I’ve been on other people’s podcasts before and I kind of get disappointed when we start talking and it’s so regimented. Their questions are very much like, “Here comes another question that I have prepared.” When I get people on my podcast, I don’t prepare at all. I mean, I do… I know who my guests are, I know what they do, so I have things that I find interesting that I would like to talk to them about, but it’s not like I have a sheet of paper with thirty questions that I have to ask. That’s not how it goes. It’s more open-ended. What’s cool about the podcast is that it’s a conversation and what people get out of it is that it’s just… I ran into this nineteen-year-old kid from Ireland in Boston who was telling me, “You’ve changed the way I look at the world. There’s no one like you near me in Ireland and because of you and your friends on the podcast, it’s really making me reconsider my entire life.”
DC: That’s got to be amazing.
JR: It’s pretty intense, but it’s awesome. I love it. I have formulated my philosophies over a long life, over a life filled with very extraordinary experiences. I’ve gotten a lot out of that by taking chances in life, by developing my character, by doing very difficult tasks and learning from them and understanding my motivations and understanding my desires, my thought processes, and objectively looking at Life in general, Life and the universe. All of these big pictures that a lot of people just don’t get the opportunity, the chance, they don’t get the time to consider all of these things. I think it’s great. It gives me a certain amount of responsibility, but no more responsibility than I have for myself. I mean, I have a responsibility to my own mind to consider things in a certain light. So I don’t think there is any more responsibility having all of these people that are into the podcast where it’s influencing their lives. I think it’s beautiful. I think it’s great. I’m happy for it. I don’t feel any additional pressure though. It’s just… It’s all good.
DC: Speaking of life experiences… I know you’re writing a book. How is that going?
JR: It’s going great. It’s fun.
DC: Is the way that you’re writing the book the same way that you write your blogs?
JR: Yep! It’s all disconnected and fucked up. [laughs] It’s written just like the blogs. It’s all longer blogs connected together, a series of essays, and thoughts on life. My tentative working title is “Irresponsible Advice from a Man with No Credibility”, and a lot of it is shit that I’ve learned about life and a lot of it is half tongue-in-cheek where I give advice. Advice like you should forget the economy. It’s nonsense. It doesn’t make any sense to hope it doesn’t fall apart and if it does, even if you plan for it, what are you going to eat, dried fruit in your fuckin’ basement? How are we going to get through this? Instead of thinking about all of these things, just concentrate on what you do enjoy and enjoy your life. Don’t worry about what money is because money really isn’t anything. Forget about it. Just make enough so you don’t have to worry about it. That’s it. That’s my advice. Politics? Fuck them! Fuck them in their asses. [laughs] Move to the place where you can get the most freedom. Vote local politics… they’re probably still real. National politics are a gigantic clusterfuck of corporate interests and special interest groups influencing politicians and creating laws that are designed to make other people more money. Period. That’s exactly what it all is. Stay the fuck out of it. Stay out of these Republican versus Democrat arguments. Stay out of these silly arguments about what we should be doing in Afghanistan. Just get out of there. Just stop. Stop with all of that. Concentrate on what you enjoy. Concentrate on your own life. That’s a big part of this book. It’s like trying to explain to people that this life is really a transient experience and you can waste a massive amount of it just doing what other people want you to do, playing their game. I know so many intelligent people that get caught up in politics and they want to talk to me about it. “Did you hear what happened with Nancy Pelosi in The House?” Why don’t you just talk to me about fuckin’ what happened with The Undertaker and Triple H? It’s the same shit. You’re talking to me about nonsense, man! You’re not talking to me about anything real.
DC: Any discourse in which the likes of people like Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnell are major players… Yikes!
JR: The whole Sarah Palin thing…Every time I watch Glenn Beck talk about her running for President or any of these fucking pundits that actually treat her seriously, to me, that’s like, “There’s a string above that puppet, ok? I’m looking at the string and you’re not addressing the fact that there’s a string there. How come there’s a string right there and you’re not saying anything about it?” I can’t take that shit seriously. I have to change the channel. It’s like crazy nonsense. What they’re doing now is recognizing that Sarah Palin gets ratings so they’re pretending that Sarah Palin would be a good President. No one is stepping up and saying, “You crazy bitch, you haven’t read a book… ever! And you want to be President? You’re a dingbat!”
DC: Recently, she said, “We have to support our North Korean allies.” [laughs]
JR: I heard that! [laughs] Hilarious! You fuckin’ clown! You fuckin’ clown-shoe!
DC: Is there an editor on the book, or are you writing everything?
JR: Sort of, but… I’m not really going to listen to them to be honest with you. I had one guy and it was really gross. They had one guy who was a writer who was assigned to work with me, and after I sent him the first thing, I got these notes back from him and it was so ridiculous. I was like, “Dude… we can’t work together.” He wanted to change this and add that and make things much more obvious, and the way he wanted to start the chapters was clunky. It was like we were doing it for idiots. It’s really how I felt. It was too intrusive. I was like, “I’m just going to give you a full book. I’m going to give it to you and it’ll be done and hopefully you’re going to love it.”
DC: And if not…
JR: And if not, then I don’t need ya. I’ll just release the shit online. I don’t give a fuck. This whole Internet and what’s going on right now in the world with the access the average everyday person has to things… to sell their things, to push the things… any information that they have or any product that they’ve created… You have this weird access to other human beings to market to that was never available before. It’s really fascinating. It’s a beautiful time, man.
DC: Look at a guy like Andre Dodson. There’s a guy who now has kind of a career going and that was only from him being on the Internet.
JR: He really does. He’s doing commercials and shit. I don’t know how long he can keep it up, but he’s trying. He’s riding it. We live in very, very unique times where the average person no longer has to rely on the established media companies like a newspaper or a magazine or a publishing company. You can just publish a blog. You can put an eBook out. You can make your own music. There are people and bands that have become very successful just because of the Internet now. Like Die Antwoord… that South African band that I’m really into. That guy got famous from the Internet with millions of hits on YouTube and now they’re selling out arenas. It’s amazing! It’s an amazing, amazing time.
DC: Explain a bit about Higher Primate.
JR: Oh, the clothing company? That’s sort of an organic thing, too. I had an idea for a shirt that I wanted to get done and I found some artists and we collaborated on an idea. They drew it up and I wore it for my special, TALKING MONKEYS IN SPACE. Once I had that done, we started talking about putting together a store and putting together a bunch of different designs and shirts. We have a bunch of new ones that we’re working on now. We put them out and they sold out SO fast. We then said, “OK, well… it looks like we got something here. Let’s make some more.” I’m taking the same approach that I did with the website and Twitter and everything else – just letting it develop on its own. It’s the same thing I did with the podcast. It will become much bigger than it is and I’m going to keep going with it and let people get into it. I didn’t do any advertising. I mean, I told people on Twitter, “Hey, here’s my thing,” Brian Redban posted something on the messageboard, and that’s all it took. It sold pretty much all of the units that I had initially and now we’re ordering new ones, and like I said, we have some new ideas. It’s really kind of cool, you know? It’s just something that happened on its own.
DC: Where are you finding your artists?
JR: We got them through a connection that my manager has. They’re these really cool guys who are weird and have tattoos on their knuckles and shit. Just a bunch of strange guys from Silver Lake who have done a lot of stuff for a lot of bands like Foo Fighters and a bunch of different movies and shit. They’re doing some stuff for COWBOYS AND ALIENS right now. They’re really good artists and really cool guys with the perfect sensibility. They know where I’m coming from so we kind of sit down and talk about stuff and it’s really interesting.
DC: Is the clothing line a sort of Plan B?
JR: It’s just because I think it would be cool to have a bunch of shirts like that.
DC: So, no real business plan… [laughs]
JR: Yeah. No plan… Not with anything I’ve done. Ever! [laughs] My entire career… there’s been no plans. I just kind of go.
DC: The book is coming soon. You continue to perform stand-up. You’ll continue to do the UFC… which seems to be like the greatest gig ever.
JR: Fun gig, yeah! I’m just enjoying what I’m doing. Ultimately, I’ll probably just do stand-up comedy. That’s where it will go eventually. I’ll probably stop doing the UFC someday. When? I don’t know. The traveling and everything… I prefer to travel just for the comedy.
DC: I know that you’re married and have kids, which is something you seem to be ferociously private about. That seems to be the one part of your life that you put up some pretty solid walls on. I imagine that the traveling inherent in doing comedy… and then you throw the UFC in there… that’s got to be tough.
JR: Traveling when you have kids is not fun. You miss them, but you have to make a living. It really makes me appreciate them when I’m away from them for a couple of days and I come back so… There are some good things to it. I definitely think that traveling flavors your life and it gives you more insight into the human animal and it makes you a better comic. Stand-up comedy is ALL about your perception and, if your perceptions are very limited or very local, that’s what you’re going to have. You’re going to have this limited perspective, this limited point of view, and I think that’s a terrible thing for your art. But, ultimately, I do think that I will be traveling just for stand-up comedy. I’ll eventually stop doing the UFC, When? I’m not sure. I don’t have any immediate plans. It’s something I toss around in my mind and it’s also confusing for some people sometimes that I’m a stand-up comedian/cage fighting commentator. I mean, everything I’ve done in my career has been… none of it seems like it makes sense. When I was a stand-up comic, FEAR FACTOR didn’t make any sense. Like, “This guy is a comedian and a fuckin’ FEAR FEACTOR host? That doesn’t make sense.” And the UFC makes even less sense. I’ve done a lot of weird stuff.
DC: But I think when you scratch the surface, it kind of does make sense once someone gets to know you a little better.
JR: Yeah, ’cause these are my interests. Well, FEAR FACTOR maybe no… The only thing about FEAR FACTOR that made sense was my experience with competitive athletics. I knew how to motivate people and help them and get them goin’. There were a lot of times on that show where I was genuinely entertained and enjoyed it and really was happy for the people who won and it was a positive experience, but… For a lot of the other parts of the show, it was just a job. A good job, but… a job.
(Interview ran on Dread Central in January of 2011)