Joe Rogan Podcast: #2471 w/ Mark Normand (Transcript)

In the cafe. This one’s nuts. Like, this one, I would assume that some kid made, f*ing around on his computer. All right, I saw it. I was like, there’s no way they’re really trying to pass this off as an actual video of Netanyahu at a cafe in the middle of the war. Like, everything is calm and peaceful.

MARK NORMAND: That one?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. This one? Well, that’s just a clip. Show the actual

MARK NORMAND: BB.

JOE ROGAN: It’s on the Israel website or the Israel Twitter page.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, really?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. No, they released it.

MARK NORMAND: Holy moly. He did? That’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Well, his brother’s dead. His brother got killed in a missile strike recently. Yes.

MARK NORMAND: What?

JOE ROGAN: Yes, they struck his. Are you just not online? What’s going on?

MARK NORMAND: I just watch funny stuff and goof around.

JOE ROGAN: Pour some of that. Let’s go. Come on, give me some.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, hey, I thought you quit the sauce.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, no, I got back on.

MARK NORMAND: Hey, I thought you turned Muslim or something. I didn’t know what happened.

JOE ROGAN: I’m back.

MARK NORMAND: Hell, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Alhamdulillah. Pour me one easy.

MARK NORMAND: Zoran. Bodega cat.

JOE ROGAN: Cheers, sir.

MARK NORMAND: Cheers. Hey, good to be back with Ari’s dead weight holding us down.

Joe’s Eight Months Off Drinking

JOE ROGAN: I don’t get drunk. I might off this stuff, though. But I have started drinking again. I took like eight months off. It was a good reset.

MARK NORMAND: I mean, you’re so disciplined. I’ll take a week off, and I’m like, limitless.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, I realized that because of the club, I was just drinking too much. And I was just tired all the time. I’d go to workout the next day and I was like, God, I feel like shit. Why am I doing this to myself? And then I took eight months off. Then I had a glass of wine with dinner. I was like, oh, I like it. And I had a margarita, and I was like, oh, I’m back.

MARK NORMAND: It’s a great time.

Back to the Netanyahu AI Video

JOE ROGAN: This one. So look at this. This is AI.

MARK NORMAND: That’s fake.

JOE ROGAN: Well, people have zoomed in on the signs and stuff, and it’s not even real writing. He’s saying, “Look, I have five fingers.” He’s joking around, you know, because there was an AI video before that people were criticizing because it looked like one of his fingers had grown an extra appendage.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: I think that just looked like the crease of his hand, honestly, to me. Yeah, this looks fake as f*. First of all, it’s weird because he sips out of the cup, and yet the cup stays exactly the same level. And no matter where he moves the cup around, it doesn’t spill.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Like, there’s a moment where he turns the cup almost sideways. It moves way too much for it to not spill at all.

MARK NORMAND: And why would he just be doing. It looks like an ad for this coffee shop. Just hanging out at a coffee shop during the war.

JOE ROGAN: And also, like, how’s everybody so casual?

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, he didn’t tip, though, so that’s. That’s the Judaism coming through, but. Yeah. No, this is crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Looks like AI. Like, he looks like he’s got a beauty filter on. That doesn’t look like a human being.

MARK NORMAND: Totally. This is silly.

JOE ROGAN: Let me hear what he’s saying. What is he saying? Is it in Hebrew? Look, everybody’s happy to see you. Imagine if you were in that coffee shop. Be like, “Please leave. Please leave before the bombs come. Please leave before they target you.” They’re trying to find that guy everywhere he goes. Yeah, but the.

MARK NORMAND: Look at that. See, we got the Ayatollah in there, too.

JOE ROGAN: They faked that one. Look at that. They’re just showing you how easy it is.

MARK NORMAND: There’s some really good AI platforms now. And to know what they would have that they’re not showing is.

JOE ROGAN: Who knows?

MARK NORMAND: This is. He’s got. Come on. He can’t be dead.

JOE ROGAN: He might be dead. His brother’s. See, that’s like. Look at this. Yeah, like, the coffee. Look how turned it is.

MARK NORMAND: Right?

JOE ROGAN: It doesn’t spill at all. It just wiggles to the edge. And then they’ve also shown that on the register and in some of the signs, the writing’s not real. It’s very, very weird.

MARK NORMAND: Well, RIP. We’ll drink one for Yahoo.

JOE ROGAN: He hasn’t been seen publicly in over a week, so he might be gone.

The Strait of Hormuz and Escalating Tensions

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, there’s a lot of crazy shit going on. I can’t keep up with the Hormuz. I don’t know what that’s about.

JOE ROGAN: That’s completely closed now. They even bombed. Like, the Saudis had another way to move oil out into another direction, across the Red Sea, I believe it is. And the Iranians bombed that yesterday.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s getting hot, dude. It’s scary.

MARK NORMAND: Speaking live as we. Oh, in front of people. He’s alive in front of people. I don’t know. Let’s open Twitter back up. And this was there.

JOE ROGAN: I wonder. So if he is alive, I wonder why they would release that clearly AI video. Because this looks like a normal human, right?

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, kind of.

JOE ROGAN: This doesn’t look. They said that privately.

The White House Fight & Political Musings

MARK NORMAND: It’s a little glossy.

JOE ROGAN: “The world owes a debt of deep indebtedness, deep indebtedness to President Trump for leading this effort to safeguard our future.” Yeah, but this guy’s been trying to get war with Iran for decades, man.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. Oh, yeah, he’s loving this.

JOE ROGAN: And if he’s not, by the way, if he’s not in war, he’s not in office anymore. And then he gets indicted, like, right. He’s in the middle of at least one case, one corruption case.

MARK NORMAND: Well, this is his Super Bowl. He’s in heaven.

JOE ROGAN: So there’s people in the audience, right? So this is real.

MARK NORMAND: I mean, that’s. They’re not. This angle doesn’t show them. It’s like a static angle. But you can hear people’s voices, which, you know, if we’re going to be…

JOE ROGAN: Oh, they don’t show the people.

MARK NORMAND: You could say that’s fake.

JOE ROGAN: But I need to see the people. I need to see somebody hug them.

MARK NORMAND: So wait, why aren’t you…

JOE ROGAN: I need to see somebody jerk them off. I want to know it’s real.

MARK NORMAND: Let’s see that. No foreskin.

JOE ROGAN: You imagine if they did show that? They just show him just blasting like 12 foot arcs of rope. Just fire hose of jizz to show how virile he is.

The White House Fight Card

MARK NORMAND: Manischewitz, now why are you not looking forward to the White House fight?

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s kind of a gimmick. Of course there’s that, and people are criticizing the card, but if it was any other card, it’s a great card. They’re criticizing it because they said it was going to be the greatest card of all time. And it’s also just going to be a security nightmare.

MARK NORMAND: That’s true.

JOE ROGAN: You’re on the White House lawn. Also, they’re fighting outside. What if it rains? What if it’s hot? You’re in the middle of June, right? June in D.C. can get pretty warm.

MARK NORMAND: Yep, yep.

JOE ROGAN: That affects fighters. Like, we only did one outside fight that I was a part of and that was in Abu Dhabi. And it was a nightmare. Yeah, it was really hot and there was bugs flying around the size of birds. It was crazy.

MARK NORMAND: It’s like stand up. You got to do it indoors. Outside is hell for stand up.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s terrible.

MARK NORMAND: Most shows are bad outside, but here’s my idea. We do White House fight, but we fight politicians. Huh? Boebert versus AOC. Now that’s a fight.

JOE ROGAN: I like that.

MARK NORMAND: But I think RFK would win everything.

JOE ROGAN: I think Jasmine Crockett whoops them all.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah, she’s feisty. She’d take a shoe off.

JOE ROGAN: She pulls a wig off, stuffs it in your mouth, takes her earrings off. I’m terrified.

MARK NORMAND: Well, she’s not a politician anymore. She lost, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but she’ll be around. They never leave. They go forever, these guys. Maybe Bernie’s still cooking.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, but he’s the senator. He’s been a senator forever. I mean, she lost, so who knows what’s going to happen?

JOE ROGAN: Hillary’s around. What is she doing?

MARK NORMAND: She’s probably eating.

Hillary Clinton & The Clinton Body Count

JOE ROGAN: Ah, you think? I hope. I mean, she needs a relief. This lady. I kind of like Hillary just because, you know, she got cheated on publicly with the whole Monica thing. Now she’s doing the Epstein’s island stuff. She lost the presidential race and she’s still out there. She’s kind of a badass. I would kill myself at this point.

MARK NORMAND: Well, she’s also got, like, a list of people that have mysteriously disappeared.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, is that right?

MARK NORMAND: That are attached to her and Bill.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, really? Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: You don’t know about that? No, for real. You don’t know about the Clinton body count?

JOE ROGAN: I know Norm was on the View years ago and he said Clinton killed a guy.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, he said killed a bunch of people.

JOE ROGAN: I think that’s where I get my information.

MARK NORMAND: It’s a good way to get it, from the View. Solid, detailed information.

JOE ROGAN: But she’s getting, like, grilled by the Epstein people, or about Epstein, and she’s just, like, going off and Bill’s reminiscing.

MARK NORMAND: Well, she walked. She stormed out. Because Lauren Boebert took a picture of her and posted it online. Like, that’s it. I’m leaving.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, how are you allowed to leave? Yeah, exactly.

MARK NORMAND: Somebody should have said, sit the f down. You’re not even in office anymore. You’re just a civilian. Sit your fing ass down and answer the questions. Yeah, like it’s just an excuse to leave.

JOE ROGAN: But you got to hand it to Bill. He’s denying till he dies.

MARK NORMAND: “I was only there for humanitarian purposes.”

JOE ROGAN: Photos and everything.

MARK NORMAND: “I was just getting massages and hugging nice people.”

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

MARK NORMAND: “Nothing untoward was done to me or anyone else that was there, as far as I know.”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, this is pretty good.

MARK NORMAND: “I didn’t see that side of Jeffrey Epstein.”

The Epstein Island Discussion

JOE ROGAN: You got to bring this back.

MARK NORMAND: Hey, look at this guy. We got photo evidence.

JOE ROGAN: That lady’s smiling. If she claims victim, I call horseshit. She looks like she’s having a good time. Also, that’s a woman. You know that’s true once you’re a woman.

MARK NORMAND: Okay?

JOE ROGAN: Unless someone’s holding a gun to your head. If we’re talking about children, we’re talking about a different thing. But there’s a lot of these ladies that were grown women when they were doing this, and the emails that were exchanged between Epstein and these women — like, they were well aware of what’s going on. At least some of them were.

There was this Russian lady. She was recruiting girls, saying things like, “This one’s a fat ass, she needs to lose some weight.” Like, she’s trying to get these girls to work with Epstein, right?

MARK NORMAND: Who, Ghislaine?

JOE ROGAN: No, it wasn’t just Ghislaine. It was some other Russian lady.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, damn.

JOE ROGAN: Some of these ladies, at least — look, the real criticism, the real legitimate criticism is where there are underage girls involved. Now, clearly, they were in Epstein’s past. He went to jail for it. The whole Palm Beach thing with the underage masseuses. But some of these are just ladies who did bad things, they made bad decisions, and they probably wound up on that island for money.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. Okay. A couple of horror moves.

Charlie the Dog Makes a Break for It

JOE ROGAN: Oh, hey, where you going, buddy? Charlie. He snuck out. Little f*er. I’m a little worried about him. I was hoping — he looked like he was totally calm just sitting in that chair. Oh, Jamie’s got him now, bro. You’re locked up. Jamie’s used to having a little dog in his lap. Oh, he’s giving you kisses.

MARK NORMAND: Damn. Not a Rogan fan, huh? Doesn’t like the pot. He’s bored.

JOE ROGAN: No, he just doesn’t know this environment. I think he’s a little weirded out. And then he was out there with the mountain lion — stuffed mountain lion, alligators, like the werewolf. He’s like, “What the f* is this place?” He’s never been here before.

MARK NORMAND: Then there’s weed smoke, there’s dogs.

JOE ROGAN: I think he’s a little freaked out.

MARK NORMAND: Cigars, right?

JOE ROGAN: Everything. Whiskey in here. He probably smells that.

MARK NORMAND: Speaking of which, you got any of those stogies?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, let’s bust them out.

MARK NORMAND: I would love a stogie.

JOE ROGAN: Let’s go.

MARK NORMAND: Hell yeah, boy. See, I can’t keep up with all the news. You know about Epstein, you know about Iran, you know about Israel, you know about Hillary. This is…

JOE ROGAN: I barely know. I’m off social media. I’ve been off social media for a while. The only time I’m on is when someone sends me something funny.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I go and check it and then I find myself scrolling for like 30 seconds and I stop.

MARK NORMAND: That’s how they get you.

JOE ROGAN: Stop f*ing scrolling.

MARK NORMAND: It’s impossible. They’re so good at it.

Guy Fieri Cigars & Celebrity Chefs

JOE ROGAN: Where did these come from?

MARK NORMAND: Mmm.

JOE ROGAN: Knuckle sandwiches. That can’t be the same place — isn’t there a place? There’s Knuckle Sandwich, which is the sandwich truck in Austin, which is awesome.

MARK NORMAND: Chris Brown’s album.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, these are Guy Fieri cigars. All right, let’s hope they’re good.

MARK NORMAND: Did you see that bachelorette who got kicked off for beating the sh out of her husband?

JOE ROGAN: Yo.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, my wife’s a big reality lady and that’s healthy. I know, right? She loves it. All those 90 Day Fiancé — love that. They love it. That and true crime.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, right? Weird.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I get the true crime because they don’t really commit those kind of violent acts, so they probably need to understand, like, the male mind.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: That makes sense to me.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: What I don’t understand is…

MARK NORMAND: Thank you.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they say it’s biological. They’re like, “Oh, I’m learning how to avoid these scary moments.”

MARK NORMAND: No, I get that. Because it is — like, my daughters, young daughters, they all love it. Everyone loves it. Their friends love it. Yeah, it’s like the number one show with ladies.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

MARK NORMAND: Like, the number one podcast with ladies is true crime.

JOE ROGAN: It’s great.

MARK NORMAND: You know what the number two show for ladies is?

JOE ROGAN: What?

MARK NORMAND: You’re on it.

JOE ROGAN: Hey, get out of here. Really?

MARK NORMAND: Number one with black people, too. Hey, take that.

JOE ROGAN: Shay. Shay.

MARK NORMAND: Holla.

JOE ROGAN: All right. Shout out to all my African American friends.

MARK NORMAND: Hell, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: These are not bad, Guy Fieri. Let’s go, Guy.

MARK NORMAND: I love Guy.

JOE ROGAN: He’s a fun dude.

MARK NORMAND: Cool dude.

JOE ROGAN: Got a bunch of yellow cars, though. That’s odd.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. Not the best fashion sense. You know, shirts with flames on it, frosted tips.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but you’re paying attention.

MARK NORMAND: That’s true.

JOE ROGAN: You want to be a chef, and you want to be, like, a celebrity chef. You got to either be a great narrator and a great writer, like Bourdain.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Or you got to be, like, angry, like Gordon Ramsay.

The Art of Street Food and YouTube Rabbit Holes

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. That’s true. But what happened to chefs? When I was a kid, chefs were like fat guys with beards, and now they’re all jacked with tats.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, they all look like artists, because they

MARK NORMAND: are artists, I guess.

JOE ROGAN: But I didn’t really think of that until I watched Bourdain’s show. And then I was like, oh, these guys are making temporary art.

MARK NORMAND: That’s true. Then you have to eat it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but it is art.

MARK NORMAND: It is art. Yeah. They’re mixing oils. There’s a lot of chemistry. But they kind of went the same path as porn stars. Porn stars used to be, like, voluptuous and hairy bush. And now they’re all like MMA fighters. They’re jacked and taking it in the ass. It’s wild. They’re all tatted up and pierced and shit.

JOE ROGAN: One of the things that I’ve been watching a lot when the world is going completely crazy, I watch people making street food in other countries.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, that.

JOE ROGAN: With no language, no talking. It’s all ASMR. It’s all them cooking.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah. And no regulations either.

JOE ROGAN: Bring them over here. Bring them over here.

MARK NORMAND: Come on. They’re not washing hands over there.

JOE ROGAN: Have a seat.

MARK NORMAND: And they’ll use roadkill, whatever. They don’t give a shit.

JOE ROGAN: No, they’re using good food. It was Afghanistan. They were making roast chicken.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, come on, dude.

JOE ROGAN: I’m telling you. I’ll send it to Jamie and you’ll watch.

MARK NORMAND: All right.

JOE ROGAN: It’s exciting.

MARK NORMAND: I mean, I ate halal trucks for 10 years when I was broke. They’re great. They are great. But I could be eating pigeon and children.

JOE ROGAN: Not children, but definitely pigeon. Probably pigeons made it into your mouth a couple of times. All right, let me find these motherf*ers. I watch so much. YouTube is my number one thing off social media.

MARK NORMAND: I love it.

JOE ROGAN: It’s my number one thing for distraction.

MARK NORMAND: Whoa.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. This is exact. Jamie, you’re the best. This is it. “Most cheap food in Afghanistan.” This guy, he sets up, they cook all this stuff and you watch. I mean, it’s like a 40 minute video or something. How long is it? Yeah, it’s like a 40 minute video. I watched the whole thing. Just like at home, chilling after a long day’s work, just watching people cook. Street food in Afghanistan. It looks f*ing delicious.

MARK NORMAND: Look at those spices. My God.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, and they have meat in this stew pot and it’s like a big wok, it looks like.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: They boil it up with all the salt and all these herbs and spices, and then they got these roast chickens, and they take these chickens and they stick them in spikes. If you back up the video a little bit, it’s earlier in the video you can show. They take these chickens and they just have this big flame in the middle, and then they stick these chickens all around the flame.

MARK NORMAND: This is hell for a vegan, the shape of that. Fun fact, I think if this is true, that’s because they used to flip their shields upside down.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

MARK NORMAND: Sort of like with the Genghis Khan stir fry.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, hell yeah.

MARK NORMAND: I love it.

JOE ROGAN: That makes sense.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, man. Wouldn’t it be great at the end? This is a big drone strike.

JOE ROGAN: Well, we don’t bomb Afghanistan anymore. We send them money. Is that right? Now we send the Taliban money? Yeah, we send them a ton of money.

MARK NORMAND: We hook up everybody. Ukraine should go to—

JOE ROGAN: Back to the chickens, though. If you back up. Whoa.

MARK NORMAND: He’s got a little brush.

JOE ROGAN: No, yeah, there it is. So this is how he does it. So they have this fire in the middle, and they just take these chickens on a stick and they just rotate them and they put the fire in the center and the chickens all around them, and they rotate them. I got so hungry, I had to go in the kitchen and make myself food afterwards.

MARK NORMAND: This is a chicken holocaust. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Looks good, right?

MARK NORMAND: Man, it does look amazing.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, dude, it looks f*ing delicious.

MARK NORMAND: I mean, you ever get the rotisserie chicken at the grocery store? There’s nothing better.

JOE ROGAN: Pretty good.

MARK NORMAND: It’s good. You eat it with knife and fork? No, no, no.

The YouTube Rabbit Hole: From Street Food to Horse Hooves

JOE ROGAN: That’s a good thing to do when you just want to be completely distracted. That’s what I like. I like watching people make, like, tables.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Furniture and shit.

MARK NORMAND: The horse hoof cleaning is great. I watch that too. Farriers. What is that? Is that something innate in us?

JOE ROGAN: It must be.

MARK NORMAND: It must be.

JOE ROGAN: Like there’s a nail in his hoof.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. Get it out. Get the gunk out.

JOE ROGAN: Help the horse.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, the horse loves it. That’s a good one. What else is good? The pressure washing is kind of fun. That’s what I’m really high on. I take an edible. I just watch a guy, he’s just washing a wall. It goes from black to cement.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. 32 million. Okay, so what is that? Why are we so interested in watching people clean up horse hooves?

MARK NORMAND: I think part of it is it doesn’t hurt the horse, and it looks like it would. So that’s kind of fascinating because it’s all — what is that, like, cartilage or—

JOE ROGAN: That’s all, like, fingernail stuff?

MARK NORMAND: I guess so.

JOE ROGAN: Giant fat fingernails.

MARK NORMAND: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what it’s like. I mean, that’s what a horse hoof is. And if they don’t take care of the hooves, they get real weird, and they look like Arab shoes where they curl up at the tips.

MARK NORMAND: Right. Right there like that.

JOE ROGAN: Like that.

MARK NORMAND: There it is.

JOE ROGAN: So this must be somebody who just completely neglected that poor horse.

MARK NORMAND: But what did horses do in the—

JOE ROGAN: They wear off from running around.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, I see.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Just like a dog’s fingernails.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: You have to trim dog’s nails. Unless the dogs run around outside a lot. Then you don’t have to do anything.

MARK NORMAND: Got it.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, the dogs all have—

MARK NORMAND: It’s like rat teeth. They never stop growing.

JOE ROGAN: Rat teeth don’t stop growing. Beaver teeth don’t. Right.

MARK NORMAND: Is that right?

JOE ROGAN: I didn’t know. Shearing. She—

MARK NORMAND: This is good stuff. Wow.

JOE ROGAN: Is it amazing how many views? How many views does that have?

MARK NORMAND: Guess.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. 23 million.

MARK NORMAND: I’m going to go million subscribers on the channel. I’m going to go 80 million.

JOE ROGAN: Three million subscribers. 3.7 million.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, wow. This is just a Greek guy.

Wilderness Cooking and the Joy of Simple Living

JOE ROGAN: Look at that. There’s another guy that I love. The channel’s called Wilderness Cooking. And this guy lives in Azerbaijan and he cooks in the mountains. It always looks delicious. And then at the end of it, he has a bite of it and he looks at you and he goes, “Super.” He puts — gives you a thumbs up. Yeah, it’s a great channel. And that guy’s got millions and millions. So he’s always like — he catches fish and he does all the things. He makes his own fire. And he’s always cooking in weird ways.

MARK NORMAND: This guy’s way happier than all of us.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, yeah. He’s having a good time. Well, he lives in peaceful mountains. He’s making delicious food.

MARK NORMAND: Imagine him on Cameo, just saying “Super.” He could make a billion dollars.

JOE ROGAN: “Happy birthday. Super.” Wow. Who still makes the most on Cameo? They’re still doing that?

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. Really? Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Who’s like the number one earner on Cameo?

MARK NORMAND: That’s a great question. Napoleon Dynamite had a run. It’s got to be somebody with a catchphrase.

JOE ROGAN: Is Jimmy Walker still alive?

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Is he still touring?

MARK NORMAND: I’d imagine. I don’t know how he pays the bills. These old guys, you wonder how they have money, right? Can that last? Like, how long does “Dy-no-mite”—

JOE ROGAN: You know what I worry about? Guys who were, like, middle-axe, like, 20 years ago.

MARK NORMAND: And yes.

JOE ROGAN: Faded out. Like, what are you doing?

MARK NORMAND: I assume Uber. John Kiriakou.

JOE ROGAN: John Kiriakou is number one. Yeah. That’s crazy. So he does Cameos.

MARK NORMAND: Who’s that? I don’t know what that is.

JOE ROGAN: Over all the — John Kiriakou.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Former CIA guy, went to jail. Yeah, they put him in jail. A golfer.

MARK NORMAND: That’s my buddy Bob.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, you know him?

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And he’s number two. How much money is he making?

MARK NORMAND: I mean, he does a lot of these. He was always in a fight, like, with Santa during Christmas time. And John Gruden’s been up here for a while, but he’s not currently on here.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that dude Soy Tiet, the guy who sings.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah. He’s fun.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And then who’s Red? Is that one of the Island Boys? Who’s that guy in the lower left corner?

MARK NORMAND: Oh, wow.

JOE ROGAN: Those guys are still at it.

MARK NORMAND: Then the rest of these, I don’t know who they are.

JOE ROGAN: So John Kiriakou costs $179.

MARK NORMAND: Bam.

JOE ROGAN: For one of those.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, Bam Margera’s good for him.

JOE ROGAN: Who else is in there? Anybody you know?

MARK NORMAND: No names I recognize. Mick Foley.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, Red Dead Redemption guy.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, Mick Foley, the wrestler.

MARK NORMAND: There you go.

JOE ROGAN: How odd. What an odd thing.

MARK NORMAND: Who’s buying a Rapaport?

JOE ROGAN: “President Donald Trump Parody” is number 37. Michael Rappaport.

MARK NORMAND: He’s screaming enough for free. Why would you — Oh, Buffer’s got to be up there. Of course.

JOE ROGAN: Buffer?

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. I’ve seen people in a hotel. They’ve, like, heard him doing them.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, I’ve seen him do them. I’ve been with him. He’s doing them.

MARK NORMAND: How crazy. His story with his brother.

JOE ROGAN: Crazy.

MARK NORMAND: Isn’t that bananas? Yeah, that kind of shit blows my mind.

JOE ROGAN: Didn’t even know his brother till they

MARK NORMAND: were, like, 30, and they just found each other with the — with the voice, both fighting.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, he was like the budget Buffer in the beginning. Like, he was like, if you couldn’t afford Michael, you got Bruce. But now Bruce is way better than Michael. No disrespect to Michael, but Michael gets — you know, Michael’s smooth.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: “Let’s get ready to rumble.” Which is perfect for boxing, but Bruce is perfect for MMA.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, he’s got more flair. Oh, yeah. He’s got the suit on.

JOE ROGAN: He’s going to drop dead doing that one day.

Bruce Buffer, Dennis the Menace, and Strange Coincidences

MARK NORMAND: We’ve all called it.

JOE ROGAN: Because he gets beat red. And now he’s deep in his 60s.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know how old he is.

MARK NORMAND: And he parties too, I think. Bruce parties? Oh, yeah?

JOE ROGAN: How do you know?

MARK NORMAND: There’s a bunch of videos of him. He got into a fist fight in an elevator with an MMA fighter.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that was Frank Trigg?

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Kind of a fist fight. Like a little bit of a pushing, shoving, probably. Frank Trigg would literally kill him.

MARK NORMAND: I know. That’s why I’m impressed, because he stood up to him.

JOE ROGAN: Frank Trigg was an animal when he was young.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. I would not.

JOE ROGAN: This was, like, I think it was when Frank was still fighting.

MARK NORMAND: That’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think Frank really fought him back. I think that would be a very quick encounter.

MARK NORMAND: But just the fact that he was up for it.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know what really happened.

MARK NORMAND: I think the story’s online somewhere.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s Bruce’s version of the story.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, it’s true.

JOE ROGAN: You know what I mean? I don’t know. Not that Bruce is lying. Bruce might have thought he was in a fight, and Frank might have thought it was hilarious.

MARK NORMAND: Right? Right.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know. Yeah, but Bruce did martial arts most of his life.

The Dennis the Menace Coincidence

MARK NORMAND: The craziest coincidence of all. And get your fingers ready. Dennis the Menace — the cartoon was invented in England and in America on the same day. What? Put that in your pipe and jizz on it. Oh, yeah, because they were like, “Oh, you must have stolen this.” So they went back and researched it. They were both invented — same character, same name — on the same day and the same year.

JOE ROGAN: That makes no sense.

MARK NORMAND: Isn’t that bananas? My brain blew up.

JOE ROGAN: That literally makes no sense.

MARK NORMAND: It’s crazy. So that’s a fun one.

JOE ROGAN: How is that possible?

MARK NORMAND: I don’t know. Just, you know, monkeys writing on a typewriter eventually get Shakespeare. Two guys thinking of the same thing, same day, across the pond.

JOE ROGAN: Maybe that’s one of those things — what is that called? Like Berenstein Bears. The Mandela Effect.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah. That’s not the same thing. Because that’s when it’s not real. This is something that’s real. That’s true.

JOE ROGAN: Right. That’s right.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: No, I’m thinking of the wrong thing. What does Perplexity say? Perplexity says there’s actually two completely separate Dennis the Menace comic strip characters that debuted almost simultaneously in 1951, created independently in the UK and the US. So how would they even know about each other back then?

MARK NORMAND: Oh, sorry. It’s the 17th and the 12th, so they’re five days apart.

JOE ROGAN: Who started first? British was the 17th?

MARK NORMAND: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: On sale, issue dated the 17th of March. On sale the 12th of March. Created by these guys. American on the 12th of March. No, basically the same day. On sale the same day.

MARK NORMAND: Unbelievable. Blonde hair, overalls.

JOE ROGAN: And it said — go back to what the saying was again. It said, “Your son is a menace.” Did they both say that? No.

MARK NORMAND: I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. Both mischievous little boys, but they look different. UK Dennis has black hair, red and black jumper. US Dennis, blonde hair, overalls. They live in different fictional worlds. Creators worked entirely independently. No evidence either knew about the other before publication. So it’s treated as a famous coincidence rather than copying. Wow.

MARK NORMAND: Unreal. There they are, side by side.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

MARK NORMAND: That kind of sh*t is kooky.

Morphic Resonance and Animal Communication

JOE ROGAN: It’s weird. That’s like when rats — if you teach a rat how to get out of a maze on the east coast, rats on the west coast get out of the maze quicker.

MARK NORMAND: No f*ing way.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. There’s a guy named Rupert Sheldrake. He calls it morphic resonance. He thinks there’s some sort of communication that all animals have with each other all over the world that we can’t quantify, that we can’t measure, but it seems real.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. Well, apparently I got caught in an ant pile when I was a kid and all the ants swarmed on me and they all bit me at once. I felt it. I was like, “Ah!” It was just one big wave of pain. Oh, yeah, they communicated well.

JOE ROGAN: Ants just immediately attack, though.

MARK NORMAND: Yes. You get on the ant hill, but ants — they’re on another level.

JOE ROGAN: You hear about the lady that fell? Her parachute didn’t deploy, but she landed in an ant pile of fire ants. She survived because she was bit like a thousand times by these fire ants. And somehow or another the ant bites and the adrenaline that caused it helped. “Hey, don’t jump down. Stay up there, buddy,” is what kept her alive.

MARK NORMAND: What? Yeah. Wow. That’s when you start going religion sh*t.

JOE ROGAN: I know.

MARK NORMAND: Like, how did that happen?

JOE ROGAN: “Stay up here, buddy. Stay up here.”

MARK NORMAND: Ant bites.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. 1999, her parachute malfunctioned. She fell 4,500ft. Her backup parachute opened at 700ft, but quickly deflated. She continued to plummet towards the ground at 80 miles an hour. Miraculously, she survived the fall thanks to the fact she landed directly on a mound of fire ants. Doctors believe the intense shock of being stung over 200 times by the ants released a surge of adrenaline which kept her heart beating.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, it’s like she got cleared by ants.

JOE ROGAN: Isn’t that nuts?

MARK NORMAND: That is kooky. It’s like when those guys jump off the Golden Gate Bridge — a guy jumped off, broke all his bones, and a seal pushed him to the shore. Whoa. That’s in the documentary The Bridge.

The Golden Gate Bridge

JOE ROGAN: And a friend of mine did that.

MARK NORMAND: Really? Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: He killed himself.

MARK NORMAND: It’s the number one spot to kill yourself.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. RIP Tony Anagoni. He’s a buddy of mine that was a professional pool player that I did commentary with on a pool match in the 90s. He was in a book called Playing off the Rail — a great book by this guy, David McCumber, who was Hunter S. Thompson’s editor.

MARK NORMAND: Ah.

JOE ROGAN: I want to say Seattle, something like that. I forget what newspaper, but when Hunter was off the rails and out of his mind too. It’s perfect. Another different kind of off the rail.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: So he followed my friend Tony all across the country gambling. It’s a great book about pool hustling.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Tony was a world class professional pool player and they went around the country gambling. I don’t know what happened with them, but I lost touch with them. And then —

MARK NORMAND: Was he Golden Gate?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, damn. It’s like they all know to go there.

JOE ROGAN: Well, he was a San Francisco guy. He lived up there his whole life. And I got this message from a friend of mine: “Tony jumped off the bridge.” I was like, “No.”

MARK NORMAND: Crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s weird because I watch matches sometimes on YouTube and he’s doing the commentary for the matches.

MARK NORMAND: That’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so strange because he seems so happy. He’s enjoying himself. They’re cracking up, and I’m like, “What is it that makes someone want to end it?” You know, what is it? I guess he had some failed business ventures and he was going bankrupt.

MARK NORMAND: Well, depression was way more under-researched back then. You know, he probably just thought, “Ah, something’s wrong with me. I gotta end this pain.”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: But damn. But yeah — everybody who lived, they said, each of them said separately, “When my hand left the rail, I regretted it.”

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

MARK NORMAND: Every single one.

JOE ROGAN: They all said that. Yeah, everybody who lives.

MARK NORMAND: So don’t do it.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a terrible idea.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

Disturbing Moments on Live TV

JOE ROGAN: Do you remember the one in downtown L.A. where the guy was on — I think he shot himself with a shotgun. He was standing on the edge of a bridge and it was live on TV. Do you remember that one? It was a standoff. They were trying to get him to not jump, but he had a shotgun. I think I’m conflating it.

MARK NORMAND: Pull it up.

JOE ROGAN: But I’m pretty sure he blows his brains out on TV.

MARK NORMAND: Damn. I knew about the fat guy with the gun in the mouth.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

MARK NORMAND: Politician guy.

JOE ROGAN: Was he a judge?

MARK NORMAND: Was he maybe a judge?

JOE ROGAN: A dirty judge.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, that’s that song.

JOE ROGAN: “Hey Man Nice Shot.”

MARK NORMAND: Exactly. Yeah. And that was a hot video when I was a kid. Oh, yeah. What is it? Faces of Death. That’s it.

JOE ROGAN: That was one of the first ones where you got to see a guy die. Like a viral video. He put a giant gun in his mouth.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: .44.

MARK NORMAND: And everybody goes, “No, no, don’t do it.”

JOE ROGAN: He’s like, “Relax, everyone stay calm.” He just shoved it in his mouth and boom, the top of his dome off.

MARK NORMAND: And now we just see people getting shot on Twitter every 10 seconds every day. I mean, the Kirk thing — I remember waking up and being like, “Good God.”

The Kirk Shooting and Unanswered Questions

JOE ROGAN: The Kirk thing’s weird. The Kirk thing’s weird because now there’s video footage from behind.

MARK NORMAND: Is that right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I mean, the round that he was supposedly shot with was a 30 odd 6, which is a big round. That’s a round that you kill a moose with.

MARK NORMAND: Uh huh.

JOE ROGAN: And it doesn’t even have an exit wound.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Don’t make no sense. It makes zero sense.

MARK NORMAND: Well, you hear about this Joe Kent? Yeah, yeah. They told him not to research or investigate.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

MARK NORMAND: So what’s up with that?

JOE ROGAN: He said that they were told to stop their investigation.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And that they were going to handle it.

MARK NORMAND: And he just resigned.

JOE ROGAN: And meanwhile, have they handled it? Like, we haven’t seen that guy — the guy who loves furries who supposedly killed Charlie Kirk — Tyler Robinson. Yeah, yeah. We haven’t seen him talk. No, he hasn’t said he did it. He hasn’t said he didn’t do it. There’s no independent video of him talking about it.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then there was footage of him at a yogurt shop way across town, like 20 minutes later. The whole thing is super sus.

MARK NORMAND: It’s similar with the guy that shot Trump, whatever his name was. He had three names.

JOE ROGAN: Oh yeah, that kid — that kid was in a BlackRock commercial two years before.

MARK NORMAND: He had no silverware.

JOE ROGAN: And his house was professionally scrubbed.

MARK NORMAND: And no one can ask questions about that. We can’t deep dive on that.

JOE ROGAN: If you do, you’re a conspiracy theorist.

MARK NORMAND: I shot a presidential elect.

The Trump Assassination Attempt & Government Fraud

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, not only that, but isn’t that a f*ing conspiracy? Like, that’s a conspiracy aspired to murder the President of the United States. Yeah, it seems like he had help.

MARK NORMAND: Of course.

JOE ROGAN: How the f* did he get up onto that roof? How did they not have people on that roof? They said the slope was too steep.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Meanwhile, there were snipers on another roof that had a sharper angled roof.

MARK NORMAND: Oh yeah, yeah. Then he has no social media, no history. It’s all kooky.

JOE ROGAN: Super suspect.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, we can’t ask questions or else we’re assholes.

JOE ROGAN: Well, not only that, the kooky people online now think that that was staged and that Trump had that guy shoot his ear. Like, you don’t know jack shit about guns if you think that that was staged.

MARK NORMAND: I will say the flag going up with the photo op was pretty, was pretty perfect.

JOE ROGAN: But sometimes that’s like Dennis the Menace shit, just lines up perfectly.

MARK NORMAND: I guess so.

JOE ROGAN: You know what I mean? Sometimes weird stuff happens.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like, how is this so perfect?

MARK NORMAND: Right? Right.

JOE ROGAN: You know?

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, we got to get to the bottom of that.

JOE ROGAN: He got shot in the ear, man. I saw his ear. He had like a little mark on his ear.

MARK NORMAND: I remember that. Get Nick Shirley on this. He’s cracking all kinds of cases, bro.

JOE ROGAN: The stuff that he just found in California is bonkers.

MARK NORMAND: If you see that guy in your town, he’s a persistent little queef.

Nick Shirley & Government Fraud in California

JOE ROGAN: Did you see what the governor posted? Newsom’s press office posted a photo of Nick Shirley. Like, a fake Nick Shirley. Like a meme. Like, Nick Shirley peeking into windows. Like, hey, he’s doing your job. He’s uncovering fraud. And what you’re doing is mocking him.

MARK NORMAND: Right. You should go, “Oh, shit. This fraud.”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: “I’m the governor.”

JOE ROGAN: They should just open up the investigations into all these places immediately, if you cared. But all they want to do is just obfuscate. Cover it up. Make it look silly.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Make it look like he’s something. Whatever he is. White supremacist.

MARK NORMAND: Right. Right. MAGA.

JOE ROGAN: Whatever. MAGA. Come up with a name.

MARK NORMAND: I don’t want to get to it. My kids at a Somali daycare right now, so I don’t want to say anything crazy, but. Yeah, that was all kooky and I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t anymore, you know? And if you ask questions, you get labeled. I don’t know. It’s a wacky time.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s a time where we’ve never had more information and no one’s less sure about it.

MARK NORMAND: Yes. And the same with loneliness. We’re more lonely than ever and we have more connectivity than ever.

Information Overload & Social Media

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but it’s the kind of connectivity that people have. It’s just not good for you. I hop on to post things and I get the f* out of there.

MARK NORMAND: But you seem to know a ton of stuff, so I’m like, how are you off social media but also knowledgeable?

JOE ROGAN: Google News feed. And then things that informed people send me. I rely on people sending me things now, which is way better because everybody’s always sending you things. You’ve seen this shit. Holy f*.

MARK NORMAND: I saw something yesterday about that. Always. YouTube deleted him.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think they did.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, really?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I think it’s back. Or if it was deleted, it was pulled back up. The Nick Shirley thing.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: Okay. Yeah, good.

JOE ROGAN: Because other people said, “I found it. It’s right here.” So it might have just been a glitch.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Or it might have been they thought about deleting it, and someone said, “That’s going to make it worse.”

MARK NORMAND: Exactly, exactly.

JOE ROGAN: It definitely makes it worse. But.

MARK NORMAND: But if it is true, I don’t know if it all is true with the fraud and everything, but I’m like, can we stop it? Can we get the money back? Can we help people who are paying taxes who are not getting anything out of it, and it’s all going to some guy in a cybertruck? Like, where’s the redemption? Where’s the comeuppance?

Medicare & Medicaid Fraud

JOE ROGAN: Well, this is the thing that Elon Musk told me about during the DOGE stuff. He said the biggest fraud in this country is Medicare fraud, Medicaid fraud. He’s like, “If that gets—” He goes, “I don’t even want to talk about it because I don’t want them to kill me.” He literally said that. He’s like, “We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud.”

MARK NORMAND: But don’t we have the worst health care or whatever? Yeah. Huh?

JOE ROGAN: But it doesn’t matter. It’s not about actual health care. It’s about using the system to extract money. Pretending you have a daycare, pretending you have a hospice, pretending you have a this and that, and really, you’re just lying about who’s there and collecting checks from the government.

Because if you have a bunch of clients, like, there was one place in Minneapolis that was saying they were feeding, like, 5,000 people a day. They never saw more than 40 people there. They investigated. Like, this is just. They’re just taking money.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And they’re getting millions and millions.

MARK NORMAND: Millions.

JOE ROGAN: It’s crazy. But you gotta think, if this thing has been going on for so long, they probably have a whole system. No one’s ever investigated it. It’s been happening for over a decade. And they just, like, this is what we do. And they’re all just cashing in.

Tim Walz & Minneapolis Fraud

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. But I don’t know. Like, my friend lives in Minneapolis. He’s an old pal, and he’s like, “I’ve known Tim Walz my whole life. He was always the governor, and he’s a nice guy.” But then you see this shit, you’re like, so is he stupid or is he corrupt?

JOE ROGAN: Well, you can know someone and think they’re a nice guy because they’re a nice guy to you. You know what I mean?

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Like, I know a lot of people, and people say, “That guy’s a piece of shit.” I’m like, maybe. But to me, all I can judge is how he treats me and how he talks to me. But he’s going to talk different to me than he’s going to talk to people that don’t matter to him.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. And you only know of his online perception.

JOE ROGAN: Tim Walz just seems weird. There’s no humans that I know like that. That wave like that, that walk around like this. It’s just not normal behavior.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And he stopped his run for reelection, I saw. Because of this Minneapolis fraud. So there’s something to it, but—

MARK NORMAND: You just want some acknowledgement. You just want them to go like, “Geez, that is crazy. Holy shit.” But instead, it’s like, “Shut it down. Don’t listen to that guy.” I just. Just stop making me feel crazy.

JOE ROGAN: You’re not crazy. It’s real. It’s real. I mean, maybe not 100% of what Nick Shirley uncovered is fraudulent. Maybe some of it’s legit, but there’s definitely some fraud involved. And it’s enough that you realize, like, you’re talking about enormous amounts of money. And how long has this been going on?

MARK NORMAND: I know.

JOE ROGAN: And also, who’s getting paid? Is anybody getting backdoor deals? Is there any offshore accounts that other people have access to?

MARK NORMAND: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: And they’re funneling money and no one knows about it.

MARK NORMAND: Well, let’s paper trail this shit and get to something. We don’t make any arrests. Like, all the Epstein guys are out there in England and Norway. They popped a few guys.

DOGE & Government Spending

JOE ROGAN: Well, that was what the DOGE stuff was all about. That was the whole purpose for it all. Yeah, the whole purpose for the DOGE stuff was to try to uncover a lot of this stuff. And they found tons of it. Hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud. And what happened to those guys? Those guys are getting questioned now.

MARK NORMAND: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: And the DOGE guys are having to give testimony. They’re like, “You shut down important government things.” Then, no, nothing was getting done. And these people were making enormous amounts of money.

MARK NORMAND: Mm.

JOE ROGAN: Did you see that f*ing bridge that they’re building in California?

MARK NORMAND: I did.

JOE ROGAN: The wild mountain lions.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s over $100 million.

MARK NORMAND: I know.

JOE ROGAN: And they need more money for a f*ing bridge.

MARK NORMAND: I know.

JOE ROGAN: Meanwhile, Colorado built one, a similar one, for a fraction of the cost.

MARK NORMAND: I think it was 5 million.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Fraction of the cost. And completed it, and it’s done. And in California, like, “We need more money to save the fox.”

MARK NORMAND: Well, there’s so many regulations that you can’t. There’s so much red tape, you can’t get anywhere.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a little bit of that, but they’re blaming tariffs in the government. Shut up. I doubt that’s what it is. I doubt it’s $100 million and you can’t finish it because of tariffs. That don’t make any sense.

MARK NORMAND: We’re still waiting on the bullet train that started 25 years ago.

JOE ROGAN: That was billions, billions, billions.

MARK NORMAND: Still not done, nothing. Meanwhile, Japan is whizzing all over the place at light speed.

High-Speed Rail & Virgin Influencers

JOE ROGAN: Have you ever seen — I think it’s in China — there’s one that they debuted. They showed it in China. And it’s just wizzing by these people. You get to see how fast it is in real time. You’re standing next to it. It’s bonkers, dude. And you just think, the problem with that is how much track is there? There’s a lot of track.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: How many psychos are out there? They could just lay something on the track.

MARK NORMAND: Well, that’s more American. They don’t do that shit. They’re raised better.

JOE ROGAN: Someone can do it.

MARK NORMAND: They could, but they’re Japanese. They’re repressed. So they get it all out with those trains. Right. It’s like Nick Shirley, he’s a virgin. So he’s motivated. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That’s weird, right?

MARK NORMAND: It is a little weird, but I’d rather that an incel do that shit than, you know, shoot up a place.

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s a lot of these virgin influencers now.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Nick Fuentes is a virgin. Allegedly.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: This guy’s a virgin.

MARK NORMAND: I don’t trust. I don’t know about these virgins. That feels unnatural. You’re young, you’re very normal. Very, very strange.

JOE ROGAN: Very.

MARK NORMAND: It’s like Zoran. I don’t trust an Indian who never had a job.

JOE ROGAN: Is he Indian?

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, Mamdani, I believe he’s Indian.

JOE ROGAN: Is he?

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So what is he?

MARK NORMAND: I think he’s from Africa. But he is Indian.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, he’s from Africa.

MARK NORMAND: But have you — you never had a job? Every Indian guy I know is the hardest working dude on the planet.

JOE ROGAN: He’s never had a job at all?

MARK NORMAND: No. I think he’s a rapper.

JOE ROGAN: Mamdani’s never had a job.

MARK NORMAND: No, I don’t believe so. This is his first gig.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

MARK NORMAND: I know.

Cults, Religion, and Political Discourse

JOE ROGAN: It’s magic. Your first gig. You’re the mayor of New York City. On one hand, super impressive.

MARK NORMAND: Very impressive.

JOE ROGAN: First gig. Way to go. This guy’s. The sky’s the limit for this guy.

MARK NORMAND: I know.

JOE ROGAN: His first job he was the mayor of New York City.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. It’s like losing your virginity to Heidi Klum.

JOE ROGAN: I think he won because he said he’s not going to Israel.

MARK NORMAND: That was smart. And affordability.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: New York, so expensive also.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. People are like, we’re tired. Well, the narrative is the rich people are causing all your problems and we tax the rich people. But meanwhile, the rich people in New York are responsible for more than 50% of the taxes.

MARK NORMAND: Sure. Well, Hochul just said, “Please come back.” Did you see that clip? Good luck.

JOE ROGAN: Good luck, good luck.

MARK NORMAND: And I think he seems like a nice guy. I think he’s got good intentions. But you need some experience and you need money, because he keeps saying free. Free buses, free health care, free child care. And you’re like, stop saying free. That should be illegal because someone has to pay for it.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Nothing is free.

MARK NORMAND: Nothing is free.

JOE ROGAN: You’re just adding to the bureaucracy. You’re adding to the government waste. You’re adding to the possibility of fraud. While you’re just releasing people on the streets.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. And I think I have a theory that Muslim is cool. Muslim is like the new black. It’s cool. Muslims are hip now. It’s different, it’s exotic, it’s fun.

JOE ROGAN: I think the problem is people conflate Muslim and Islamist and there’s two very different things. I know a lot of Muslims, they’re great people, totally. But Islamists are people that want a global caliphate and they want death to the infidels. This is the difference between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia are Muslims, the Iranians are Islamists. State sponsored terrorism, the whole deal.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, yeah. Well, any extreme, like a Hasidic Jew versus Paul Rudd.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

MARK NORMAND: Paul Rudd’s a fun guy. Has a cocktail, he’s in a funny movie. And then a Hasidic Jew is like, “All right, let me cut your foreskin off and suck the blood.”

JOE ROGAN: Give you herpes. Or these crazy f*ing right wing radical Christian nationalists that think that we’re supposed to be over in Israel so that Jesus can come back on a white horse. Have you seen that?

MARK NORMAND: Oh, no.

Christian Nationalism and Military Briefings

JOE ROGAN: Oh, Jamie, pull that story up that I sent you. Or I could resend it to you if you want. There’s a crazy story that was on Yahoo about a guy who’s a non-commissioned officer that went to a military debriefing. So it was like an operation readiness meeting or a war meeting. And one of these f*ing guys, one of these high level commanders says, “Don’t be worried because Trump is anointed by Jesus Christ to bring back the return.”

MARK NORMAND: Oh, no.

JOE ROGAN: To bring back Jesus’s return on earth. Commander claimed Trump was anointed by Jesus to cause Armageddon to justify the Iran attack.

MARK NORMAND: Wow. See, that’s like up there with “Allah will protect me.” Same shit.

JOE ROGAN: It’s the same shit. It’s just coming from a different religion. But it’s the same mindset. Look what he said. See what he said? Did you find the actual quote? He urges to tell our troops this is all part of God’s divine plan. Specifically reference numerous citations out of the Book of Revelations referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. And he added the superior had a big grin on his face when he said all this, which made his message seem even more crazy.

MARK NORMAND: Wow, bro. Scary. That’s just as scary.

JOE ROGAN: Those are just as scary as suicide bombers. It’s like people that are true believers in something that, objectively, sounds a lot like nonsense.

MARK NORMAND: I would say there’s less blowing up shit.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: With the extreme Christian guy.

JOE ROGAN: Sure. Because they won. Go back to the Inquisition. They were torturing people.

MARK NORMAND: And that’s a good point.

JOE ROGAN: For God’s word, in service of God, people have done some wild things. But it’s just people — when they get into positions of radical belief, they just go nutty.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, it’s like a cult. The cult is just a microcosm of a full religion.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

MARK NORMAND: It’s just some crazy guy who’s like, “I’m going to f* all of you and then we’ll drink Kool-Aid.”

Cults vs. Religion

JOE ROGAN: I used to do a joke about it where I said a cult is a thing where a guy creates it and that guy knows it’s bullshit. In a religion, that guy’s dead.

MARK NORMAND: Wait a minute.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, I see.

JOE ROGAN: In a religion, the guy who created it is dead.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, right, right.

JOE ROGAN: So everybody just believes. But in a cult, you know, like David Koresh, or the Moonies, whatever it is —

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Some guy created it and he knew it’s bullshit. Scientology. That guy is a science fiction author.

MARK NORMAND: Completely.

JOE ROGAN: L. Ron Hubbard. But now he’s dead. So it’s a religion. They have tax exempt status.

MARK NORMAND: No.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

MARK NORMAND: That’s how they can afford all that real estate in LA. They have so much real estate. Crazy buildings.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: Right downtown.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s the nuttiest thing about L. Ron Hubbard — he was one of the worst authors of all time.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, he stinks. Terrible. And he’s a weird looking dude. I think he beat his wife. Did he? Oh yeah. He was troubled. I watched a little documentary on him. He’s a troubled individual.

JOE ROGAN: Well, he was definitely troubled, which is why he came up with Dianetics in the first place. Trying to self-diagnose. He was trying to fix his own brain.

MARK NORMAND: But it also shows how sad and sheep-like people are, because we’re like, “We need something. I need something to believe in, something to go for. I’ll support you.”

JOE ROGAN: So lost that anybody who comes along and confidently claims they have the answer, people just follow.

MARK NORMAND: Yep. Every time. Very odd.

JOE ROGAN: I think it’s programmed into us, just from the time that we were in tribes and we had to count on the chief to be correct.

MARK NORMAND: Right. But I’m sure you’ve got some psychos who are up your ass who believe everything you say.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Because you’re so big. You’ve got such a big umbrella.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. But I’m very clear that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

MARK NORMAND: That’s the key.

JOE ROGAN: And if I do, it’s very specific things. So I’m like, “I can tell you for sure that this is a fact.” Because I’m an expert in a few things, but other things, I’m like, “Don’t listen to me. But this is what I think.”

MARK NORMAND: Well, you’re one of the few guys who will go, “You know what I said last week? I was wrong about that.”

JOE ROGAN: You have to.

MARK NORMAND: Nobody does that.

Admitting You’re Wrong and COVID Credibility

JOE ROGAN: Well, because they all just want to be right all the time. And they all connect their identity with being correct — whether it’s COVID. COVID ruined a lot of people’s credibility, because they were all in on the vaccine, all in on the lockdowns, all in on the masks. And then once it was revealed that all that stuff was bullshit — the vaccine didn’t really prevent infection — those people just never came out and said, “You know what, I was wrong.”

MARK NORMAND: I know. And that would go so far, but nobody will do it. And then the right and the left, they both just want their side to win. So they’re just —

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

MARK NORMAND: It’s like when the ball goes out of bounds on your team, you’re like, “I didn’t see shit.”

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

MARK NORMAND: And then the other team’s like, “What are you crazy? We got video footage.”

JOE ROGAN: It’s cheating.

MARK NORMAND: It’s cheating.

JOE ROGAN: You’re cheating in the game of discourse.

MARK NORMAND: Right, right.

JOE ROGAN: The game of discourse is you’re supposed to say what you really think, and then when you think something differently, you say, “Okay, I was wrong.” You have to be able to say, “I was misinformed. I thought it was this, but it’s actually that.”

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. That’s why those videos are so fun when they go to a college campus. Like, “Can you believe what Trump said?” And they go, “That’s racist. He’s a piece of shit.” And they go, “Actually, that was Biden.” And then they go, “Oh, well, what are you going to do? I got class in a minute. I gotta go.”

JOE ROGAN: “You don’t vote for me. You ain’t black.”

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. He’s got a couple N-words out there too, by the way.

JOE ROGAN: Does he?

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah. Pull it up. Biden had a few.

The 1994 Crime Bill and Obama’s Deportation Record

JOE ROGAN: Well, remember when he called African Americans super predators? That was during the 1994 crime bill, which he was really responsible for a lot of. The 94 crime bill. People forget about that. Like, during the Clinton administration. Clinton was a great president.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: What he did. Balanced the budget. Great. Got head in the office, but, you know. Let it go.

MARK NORMAND: Oral office. Let it go.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, let it go. But other than that, he did a lot of things that were really good. But one of the things that he did that wasn’t really good was the 94 crime bill. So many people wound up going to jail.

MARK NORMAND: That’s true.

JOE ROGAN: They ruined so many families, so many lives lost. People that could have turned their life around never got a chance. Locked up forever.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. And deported a lot of people, too.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. Not as much as Biden. Excuse me. Not as much as Obama.

MARK NORMAND: Well, yeah, he was the king of that.

JOE ROGAN: Not only did Obama deport more people than Trump, they arrested more Americans accidentally.

MARK NORMAND: Really?

JOE ROGAN: Than Trump. Yeah. The percentage of Americans arrested was higher. And also the deaths were higher. Also, he had two terms. Think about that.

MARK NORMAND: True. Yeah. But nobody got shot in the street. What do you mean? Like, his ICE didn’t shoot anybody that I know of.

JOE ROGAN: No, they did.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, come on.

JOE ROGAN: People? Yeah. They killed people.

MARK NORMAND: Civilians.

ICE Custody Deaths and Obama’s Record

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know if it was civilians or if it was actual illegals that they were trying to deport. But there was definitely a bunch of people that were killed. I want to say it was somewhere in the range of 30.

MARK NORMAND: 30.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: Well, no social media back then either, right?

JOE ROGAN: That’s big.

MARK NORMAND: Big.

JOE ROGAN: That changed everything. They could cover up everything back then.

MARK NORMAND: But wouldn’t you like to talk to Obama and go, “Ah, come on, that was crazy, right?”

JOE ROGAN: Well, Marin talked to Obama and he just kind of softballed him. He just was like… he let Obama just kind of talk.

MARK NORMAND: Well, he did it recently.

JOE ROGAN: He did it twice. And both times it was kind of the same thing.

MARK NORMAND: But he is an icon and he was a good president, and he seems like a cool guy.

JOE ROGAN: He was a very good statesman.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: The way he talked was great. But he also said he was going to protect whistleblowers. And he went back on all that. They even removed that part of the Hope and Change website. The Hope and Change website, when he was running for president, was all about protecting whistleblowers.

So what does it say here? “No documented cases of ICE agents directly killing anyone, such as through shootings or excessive force during Obama’s presidency. However, 56 individuals died in ICE custody over that period.”

MARK NORMAND: Well, he did the case.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, so that’s how they died. “Primarily from medical issues.” Like they had lead poisoning from bullets, inadequate care, or — whoops — “he hung himself in a two foot cell.” With reports highlighting substandard medical treatment, contributing to at least eight cases between 2010 and 2012. “Most custody deaths under Obama were attributed to natural causes. Heart disease.” Well, you’re definitely dealing with a lot of people that snuck in. “Not suicides, hanging, or violence, by aging.” Interesting.

MARK NORMAND: Interesting.

Michelle Obama Conspiracy Theories

MARK NORMAND: And what’s up with that wife dick levity, folks?

JOE ROGAN: I wish that was true.

MARK NORMAND: I know.

JOE ROGAN: It’ll be so fun.

MARK NORMAND: Just a goof.

JOE ROGAN: I think the French one’s true.

MARK NORMAND: The chef?

JOE ROGAN: No. Candace Owens, when she was saying that.

MARK NORMAND: No, get out of here.

JOE ROGAN: Wife is a man.

MARK NORMAND: Come on.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: No way. I don’t think so.

JOE ROGAN: I might be wrong.

MARK NORMAND: I mean, she’s a little…

JOE ROGAN: Something’s odd.

MARK NORMAND: She’s odd. She’s a little transy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but you see the way she sits.

MARK NORMAND: Pull it up. I have not.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like a dude.

MARK NORMAND: No.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Man spread. Odd alignment of the hips. Seems very masculine. That’s why men sit like that. It’s not because we’re dicks. It’s like your legs go out like that.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Women’s legs go inward.

MARK NORMAND: Sure.

JOE ROGAN: Because they have birthing hips and the angle is different.

MARK NORMAND: I thought it was the ball bag. Yeah, well, I see a little bit of it. You airing it out a little bit. Whereas a woman is a clam, so there’s no resistance.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s why you don’t trust guys who sit like Ari, with that leg over the top, that cross legged thing.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. And ironically, he’s got a huge bag.

JOE ROGAN: He’s got a big bag and a big cock.

MARK NORMAND: Crazy Jew shoe hog on that guy.

JOE ROGAN: Little baby arm.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Big old f*ing sack.

MARK NORMAND: He’s doing good.

JOE ROGAN: He’s doing good down there. Watch how she sits. Boom.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah. Wow.

JOE ROGAN: That’s how a dude sits.

MARK NORMAND: That was a manly sit.

JOE ROGAN: Even the walk, even the stature, the skeletal frame, everything looks like… it looks like a guy with tits. Boom. Look how it sits. But that’s not the weirdest thing.

MARK NORMAND: Come on.

JOE ROGAN: The weirdest thing, that everybody accepts the fact that they started their relationship when she — air quotes — was 40 and he was like 14 or 15.

MARK NORMAND: That’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

MARK NORMAND: If that was reverse, guy to girl, that would be a headline.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

MARK NORMAND: Big time.

Macron and French Culture

JOE ROGAN: But it’s French. It’s in France. “We are different in France.”

MARK NORMAND: They’re sexual people. They didn’t do MeToo in France. They were like, “No, no, we like being…”

JOE ROGAN: Take the whole country down.

MARK NORMAND: That’s men and women.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a woman.

MARK NORMAND: Supposedly. Italy.

JOE ROGAN: Take her down. Take them all down.

MARK NORMAND: Italy’s like, “We hit the ladies and we cat call. That’s our thing.”

JOE ROGAN: Oh, they’re animals.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I was in Rome with my kids in a taxi. It was just me and my kids, and this driver of the taxi stopped the car in the middle of an intersection to cat call some lady who had a big ass, who was walking across the street. “Look at that ass.” And he just kept driving. I was like, these people are animals.

MARK NORMAND: It’s kind of charming with that voice, though.

JOE ROGAN: It is. But you got to realize, if you’re in Rome, these are the descendants of the people that were there when the Coliseum was running.

MARK NORMAND: Sure.

JOE ROGAN: These are the people who were there when the f*ing Roman games, when Rome was conquering the world. Of course they’re savages.

MARK NORMAND: Right, right, of course.

JOE ROGAN: They’re the direct descendants of some of the most savage people that ever walked the face of the earth.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. Those gladiators.

JOE ROGAN: The Roman Empire.

MARK NORMAND: They fought lions.

JOE ROGAN: They took over everything, right? And then they got the Vatican right there, which is a weird f*ing country that’s in the middle of their city.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I think that’s good balance. They got it with the orgies, the wine, and then the gay stuff, and then they got the Vatican. To me, that’s kind of healthy.

Confession as an Intelligence Tool

MARK NORMAND: Jesus gives you a free pass. You just got to say you’re sorry, right? You got to confess.

JOE ROGAN: Best loophole of all time was that confession.

MARK NORMAND: I think they did that just to get information on people in the town, find out what they were doing.

JOE ROGAN: That’s true.

MARK NORMAND: “Hey, God says it’s okay, you still go to heaven. You got to tell the priest.” And the priest immediately went and told the mayor.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

MARK NORMAND: Informing. 100%.

JOE ROGAN: Never thought of it that way.

MARK NORMAND: Of course. How else would you get people to tell all the dirty s* that they’re doing, all the crime they’re committing?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, God.

MARK NORMAND: That’s the way you get them.

JOE ROGAN: I went to Catholic school. I told those f*ers everything. I was in the box going, “I jerked off to my aunt. She’s got huge tits.” I really went off in there. It was like a podcast.

MARK NORMAND: I never got to sit in one. I went to Catholic school, only for one year, but I was first grade.

JOE ROGAN: Did you make it out?

MARK NORMAND: Oh, I made it out. And I was like, I’m never going back again. It queered me off of religion forever.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a weird term.

MARK NORMAND: This is not real.

JOE ROGAN: Of course.

MARK NORMAND: This lady… I don’t remember anybody’s name from the time when I was six, but Sister Mary Josephine, I’ll remember that c* till the day I die.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

MARK NORMAND: She was so mean. And I was so confused because I had only been with my mom and my dad and my grandparents, who were all nice to me.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

MARK NORMAND: I’d never been around anybody mean to me.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MARK NORMAND: And then all of a sudden, I’m around this vicious bitch who’s supposed to be the person of God.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. But they’d rap your knuckles. I think they were all repressed or something.

MARK NORMAND: 100%.

JOE ROGAN: They needed some vitamin D. Yeah, get that dick.

The Celibacy Rule and Predators in Schools

MARK NORMAND: That’s a crazy rule, too. You can’t… and you know why they came up with that rule?

JOE ROGAN: No.

MARK NORMAND: Because all the priests were with everybody. Because they were the rock stars.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

MARK NORMAND: They were the guy who talks to Jesus. He’s the guy on stage. And then they decided, “Hey, you can’t, if you want to be a priest.”

JOE ROGAN: But then they went to kids.

MARK NORMAND: Of course that’s what happens. You’re only going to get gay guys or pedophiles who are interested in that. Gay guys, each other. The pedophiles try to get the kids because you get isolated time with the kids.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MARK NORMAND: Like teachers. Like how many teachers? One of my kids’ schools, they just busted a guy out in Calabasas.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

MARK NORMAND: Viewpoint. My kid went and took this guy’s classes for I think two or three years.

JOE ROGAN: What?

MARK NORMAND: Yep. He was taking upskirt photos, inappropriate photos. Was jerking off to them. Admitted that the photos made his heart race, and seeing these kids — full on pedophile — was a part of this very nice private school for I think six or seven years.

JOE ROGAN: Did you meet him?

MARK NORMAND: I must have.

JOE ROGAN: Oh my lord. You shook this guy’s hand.

MARK NORMAND: I must have. He was my kid’s teacher. I must have met him. I don’t remember him.

JOE ROGAN: You got daughters? Oh yeah, mama.

MARK NORMAND: Luckily nothing happened. But they remember he talked too much.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting.

MARK NORMAND: My daughter said he just kept… he just wouldn’t shut the f* up. “You talk too much.”

JOE ROGAN: Spitting game. But what about these Florida teachers who keep banging the students? There’s something there, like an epidemic going on.

MARK NORMAND: Give them a pass.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, look, I’m not knocking it, but that’s different. I think that beats priest.

MARK NORMAND: Now it’s only okay if they’re hot.

JOE ROGAN: Sure. But some of them are like, “Damn, I’d her.” Exactly.

MARK NORMAND: Those are okay.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know about okay, but if it’s some big troll looking lady with no neck, her chin starts at her… her neck goes straight down to her chest. Some Jabba looking beast. You’d be like, “You monster. What’d you do to that boy?” Yeah, but if it’s some blonde lady with big tits and glassy eyes, like she’s probably on SSRIs, didn’t know what she was doing.

MARK NORMAND: Sure. And maybe the husband can’t get it up and this is a viral 14 year old basketball player or something.

Zach Galifianakis and Hollywood Friendships

JOE ROGAN: How about that lady who was a mayor? She was a mayor at some town in like Louisiana. And she was some 16 year old.

MARK NORMAND: That was crazy. And they show the husband all over the news. I’m like, this poor guy, what a poor guy, man.

JOE ROGAN: Her f*ing wife is getting banged by a high school basketball player.

MARK NORMAND: And she was pretty.

JOE ROGAN: She was not very pretty. Kind of milfy.

MARK NORMAND: Kind of milfy for sure. But that’s the thing. I have a bit about it. They never show the kid. I want to see that kid. Yeah. What’s he. Is he some kind of young stud? Yeah, a lot of them are okay.

JOE ROGAN: You just can’t see them because they’re in a. It’s inappropriate.

MARK NORMAND: Sure.

JOE ROGAN: Underage. And they’re victims.

MARK NORMAND: Of course.

JOE ROGAN: You ever hear Zach Galifianakis joke?

MARK NORMAND: Died of high fiving. Yes. That’s a great joke. Great joke. He was a great joke writer.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, he’s a great comic.

MARK NORMAND: Great comic.

JOE ROGAN: Live from the Purple Onion.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Great f*ing special.

MARK NORMAND: Great special. He had that thing where you get fake angry and play the piano.

JOE ROGAN: He’s a good dude, too.

MARK NORMAND: Good guy.

JOE ROGAN: He’s a really good dude. Like, every time I’ve had interactions with him, I’m like, this is a. So he’s like not Hollywood at all?

MARK NORMAND: No, no, he’s a South Carolina guy.

JOE ROGAN: Bought a farm. Lives on farm now. Yeah. I mean, barely works. Yeah, he just kind of lives his life.

MARK NORMAND: I mean, he’s kind of a phenom. The stand up was good. And then he just, you know, Todd Phillips fought for him in the Hangover. They’re like, “We don’t know this f*ing guy. He’s a nobody.” And he’s like, “I’m telling you, this guy’s good.” And he stole the movie.

JOE ROGAN: Stole the movie.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: No, he’s a great comic. And that Between Two Ferns thing. Oh, brilliant. Amazing.

MARK NORMAND: Brilliant.

JOE ROGAN: No, he’s great.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, he just gets you on. He had Seinfeld on. He’s trashing him. He’s trashing Paul Rudd. He’s got like all these. That’s great.

JOE ROGAN: He was a great friend to Brody, too.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: When Brody was going through one of those moments where he got off medication and he got a little crazy, we started noticing it at the store. Like, instead of being funny, he was on stage. He would actually get angry. It was like really weird. And he came back, but for a while, we were like, he really lost it. And Zach reached out and he’s like, “Don’t interact with him. We’re trying to get him treatment. We’re trying to get him back on his meds. He went off his meds.”

MARK NORMAND: I love it.

JOE ROGAN: He’s a good dude.

MARK NORMAND: Good dude.

JOE ROGAN: Solid dude.

MARK NORMAND: There’s a video on you there. Yeah, they’re out there.

JOE ROGAN: Solid, solid people are out there.

MARK NORMAND: He’s a normal guy. And you could tell these Holly. I feel like Hollywood, it’s like Covid, where it f*s your brain up eventually. And he got out and moved to a farm.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: So that’s how you know he’s sane.

Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Staying Grounded

JOE ROGAN: But there’s people that are in Hollywood that stay solid. Like, when I had Matt Damon and Ben Affleck on, I was like, I’d be friends with these guys.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, I listen to that one.

JOE ROGAN: They’re normal. Off the mic. Yeah, on the mic. They’re cool.

MARK NORMAND: Like, they’re cool over there in the lobby.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they’re regular. They talk to everybody. Like, I’ve met Matt Damon a few times. I actually ran into him in Italy. It’s really crazy. In a restaurant where he was sitting below a photo of him. Oh, there’s photos of all these celebrities that come and eat at this place.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And he was one of them. And he was there. He was sitting there like. And then I walked. I had met him before. So I go, “Hey, Matt.” He’s like, “Oh, what’s up?” I was like, but he’s cool. He’s normal. He’s like a regular guy.

MARK NORMAND: Well, he hit the lottery with that script.

JOE ROGAN: I know, right?

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. And they’re both like, good looking. They’re nice, they’re cool, they’re smart. Smart, yes.

JOE ROGAN: They’re really like, Ben Affleck is underrated intelligence. Like, when he’s talking about AI and what AI is actually promising versus what they’re actually capable of, what they’re really trying to do is increase their market cap and get more money invested. I’m like, oh, clever, clever.

MARK NORMAND: And I think he sold. Signed some deal with them for millions and changed the game with Netflix big time.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: Giant. Giant deal. Big deal.

JOE ROGAN: That.

MARK NORMAND: For $600 million.

JOE ROGAN: I said, was that for the rip?

MARK NORMAND: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. He sold an AI company.

JOE ROGAN: Oh.

MARK NORMAND: So much about it.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that makes sense.

MARK NORMAND: He kind of broke it down on here, and then like, two weeks later he sold it.

JOE ROGAN: That makes sense.

MARK NORMAND: He’s ahead of the curve, that guy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, both of those guys are good. And they’ve stayed friends forever.

MARK NORMAND: And banging JLo for though that many years has got a.

JOE ROGAN: He gave it his best. I mean, tame that horse.

MARK NORMAND: She sucks. She’s quite a glide still.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, I bet she’s so fun, though.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, but I think she’s a malignant narcissist.

JOE ROGAN: Duh. But by the way, that’s the only way you stay that hot when you’re 80 years old.

MARK NORMAND: Smoke show.

JOE ROGAN: She’s a smoke show.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, that rump is.

JOE ROGAN: She could completely be a granny. And she looks amazing.

MARK NORMAND: I want to put a blue ribbon on that hiney.

JOE ROGAN: You got to be a narcissist to keep that up.

MARK NORMAND: I guess so.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, the skin. Her skin’s perfect.

MARK NORMAND: Everything.

JOE ROGAN: And it doesn’t look crazy like filler.

MARK NORMAND: No.

JOE ROGAN: Nutty. It just looks like pure. Yeah, she’s just not aging.

MARK NORMAND: I know.

JOE ROGAN: Nuts.

MARK NORMAND: It’s the Puerto Rican blood, I guess.

JOE ROGAN: And maybe it’s that. It’s good genetics for sure, but it’s also just upkeep and care and awareness. Being aware of what you look like and taking care of yourself.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

How People Used to Age

JOE ROGAN: Like, I saw one of those Instagram things where they showed people from like the 80s how old they were. Like Archie Bunker. When he was playing Archie Bunker, when Carroll O’Connor was playing Archie. He’s 10 years younger than me.

MARK NORMAND: Carroll O’Connor.

JOE ROGAN: Carroll O’Connor, yes. Right. He was 10 years younger than me now.

MARK NORMAND: Whoa.

JOE ROGAN: Right?

MARK NORMAND: Oh, I think they did a Cocoon one with Paul Rudd and Wilford Brimley.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

MARK NORMAND: Same age.

JOE ROGAN: 48.

MARK NORMAND: 48. You know, Mrs. Robinson was 39.

JOE ROGAN: What?

MARK NORMAND: 39 in The Graduate. And she’s like the old bag.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

MARK NORMAND: 39. Now they got 39 year olds walking on 6th street who look like, you know, Cindy Crawford.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MARK NORMAND: I update my hot women. Megan Fox. There you go. Stuck in the 90s.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s odd, man.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. Oh, look at that.

JOE ROGAN: She looked 39, I guess.

MARK NORMAND: 39, 80s. That’s Mel Brooks’s wife, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that. That’s what 39 looked like. That looks like 60 now.

MARK NORMAND: I think she’s pretty sexy.

JOE ROGAN: Not bad.

MARK NORMAND: Look at that.

JOE ROGAN: Not bad. Especially for someone who never went to the gym. Like, ladies, they didn’t do nothing back then. They walked.

MARK NORMAND: Well, and the dudes, too, could be completely. No definition and still be like a leading man. Right.

JOE ROGAN: The only one who was like, really ripped back then was Charles Bronson. Well, yeah, motherf*er.

MARK NORMAND: Action star.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but he was him even before he was an action star. Like, that guy was just fit, fit.

MARK NORMAND: He, like wiry.

JOE ROGAN: You know, when he did Hard Times, that movie.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. He was 50. No.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

MARK NORMAND: Wow. Yeah. That’s impressive.

JOE ROGAN: Shredded.

MARK NORMAND: Well, all these TRT reasons, old and taken. I was looking this up. The Golden Girls were all playing like 10 years younger than what they were. Wow.

JOE ROGAN: That’s nuts.

MARK NORMAND: 53.

JOE ROGAN: They were playing 79. She was 62. She was playing 53. But she was 63. Oh, wow.

MARK NORMAND: Wow. That was a great show.

JOE ROGAN: 53 and she’s 52. The one lady that’s crazy.

MARK NORMAND: Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan, Betty White.

JOE ROGAN: And is Betty White still alive?

MARK NORMAND: Nah, she kicked it.

JOE ROGAN: How old was she?

MARK NORMAND: I don’t know, but Keith Richards beat her, that guy. How he’s like JLo. He’s the male JLo.

JOE ROGAN: I saw the Stones at Circuit of the Americas a couple years ago. Incredible. Yeah, he still shreds.

MARK NORMAND: I know both of them.

JOE ROGAN: Jagger’s out there just dancing around like Jagger’s. Not like standing still. Like, have you seen. It was one of those old guys. It was in Vegas. Like one of them guys from like the 60s.

MARK NORMAND: Like a Wayne Newton type.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. What is his name?

MARK NORMAND: Frankie Valli.

JOE ROGAN: Frankie Valli.

MARK NORMAND: Valli, bro.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like all lip syncing and he can’t move his lips anymore.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, I believe it.

JOE ROGAN: And he looks like a statue. It’s odd.

MARK NORMAND: That is odd. Yeah, those guys.

JOE ROGAN: Dancing, moving around. I mean, like. And they did a 90 minute show.

MARK NORMAND: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: Cranking it.

MARK NORMAND: He’s got very peptides.

JOE ROGAN: Look at this guy.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, this guy’s dead.

JOE ROGAN: Let me hear some of this.

MARK NORMAND: This is like Mitch McConnell. I mean, he’s just stiff, but he’s like a board. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You got any volume on this poor bastard?

MARK NORMAND: Someone talking about it. Oh, well, hats off to still go out there.

Barry Manilow and Celebrity Aging

JOE ROGAN: It probably has to debt. Have you seen Barry Manilow?

MARK NORMAND: No. Rough. Weird.

JOE ROGAN: Go to Barry Manilow’s Instagram. He sings, but he’s got like filler and it looks like his chin’s disappearing. And I don’t know how old he is, but he’s not that old. Like, look at this.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, they start to look trans. God, this is weird. It’s like an animatronic. It’s Chuck E. Cheese. Right?

JOE ROGAN: That’s what it’s like. But that’s not even a weird one. Go to his, his, the one on the far right.

MARK NORMAND: Right there.

JOE ROGAN: Click on that one. Listen to him talk here. Well, looks like I made it.

MARK NORMAND: He’s like Kermit the Frog.

JOE ROGAN: Fabulous. Look at his hair.

MARK NORMAND: That’s awesome.

JOE ROGAN: Is there any chance. How much would you bet that that’s a wig? Everything I own.

MARK NORMAND: It’s all fake. Everything’s fake.

JOE ROGAN: Everything but the face is like, guy, let yourself just age. Don’t do the filler and the Botox. So this is when he was younger.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, this is.

JOE ROGAN: This looks good. This looks legit. I mean, it just. When they start pumping stuff into their cheeks, it’s just like, look, he got stung by bees. It’s just weird.

MARK NORMAND: It’s weird.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a weird look.

MARK NORMAND: We all know. Just what do you do? It looks weirder. It’s worse. Just age.

JOE ROGAN: I know.

MARK NORMAND: We like age with women.

Body Dysmorphia and Cosmetic Surgery

JOE ROGAN: It gets really strange because there’s a thing that bodybuilders get and anorexics get — body dysmorphia. You can’t see yourself the way other people see you. So you don’t realize that it’s weird that your cheeks are that big.

MARK NORMAND: Right. Is that what it is?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

MARK NORMAND: Well, you know when you’re drawing something and you’re painting and you’re like, “Alright, it’s done, I’ll add a little more, I’ll add a little more.” Then before you know it, you ruined it.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you get obsessed with the little minutia and you’re just focusing on weird parts of your face. Maybe you got a weird little smile line right here and you don’t like it. You’re like filling in.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: It swells up.

MARK NORMAND: You’re like, “Good.” And they get used to it. We see them after eight months and you’re like, “Good God.”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: But they’re just gradual.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they don’t realize. How Ryan Gosling isn’t — aren’t people accusing him of getting a bunch of stuff in his face now too? Like, there were some photos of him on a red carpet. It looked real weird.

MARK NORMAND: I get the hair implants, I get it. Do that all day. But as a dude you can age. We’re all right. Well, look, Jason Statham and all these guys, they look fine.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: Let it go, let it go.

JOE ROGAN: Don’t do the filler thing. It’s just you’re changing the shape of your face. It’s also, there’s a ratio — the golden ratio of your face. When you do something weird to your face, it throws people off.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: You’re the width of your face and the closeness of your eyes, the size of your nose — all of it fits within a certain ratio. And when that ratio’s off, like when you have a really thin face but a small nose, everybody’s like, “Hey, where’s that Ari nose? I need to see that big old beak. That makes sense with this shape.”

MARK NORMAND: We like it. I mean, look at Jennifer Grey. She cut her nose off, lost her career. Lost her career. And she was a cute, you know, she’s a cute Jewish broad.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. She had a big nose. Like, so what? She’s beautiful.

MARK NORMAND: Beautiful.

JOE ROGAN: You don’t have to be perfect. Perfect ain’t the way to go.

MARK NORMAND: Look at Bill Murray. That guy looks like an old fart.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: I mean, he looks crazy, but it’s Bill Murray.

JOE ROGAN: He’s a cool guy.

MARK NORMAND: I love Bill Murray. He’s my childhood hero.

Bill Murray and Woody Harrelson

JOE ROGAN: I really enjoy talking to him.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah. You had Bill on.

JOE ROGAN: He was. He was a good one.

MARK NORMAND: That must have been pretty nerve wracking for you, huh?

JOE ROGAN: No, no, it was cool. He was real easy. It wasn’t nerve wracking. It was a little nuts when you first meet him. But he had no idea who I was.

MARK NORMAND: Whoa.

JOE ROGAN: He doesn’t watch podcasts. Yeah, he had heard of me. He’s like, “You’re Joe.” I’m like, “Yeah.” It wasn’t bullshitting, like some Hollywood people do — “I’m sorry, your name is?” He wasn’t doing that. He’s not online, doesn’t have a phone. He said he had to get a phone to talk to his kids.

MARK NORMAND: Whoa.

JOE ROGAN: Woody Harrelson also doesn’t have a phone.

MARK NORMAND: Really?

JOE ROGAN: You got to get a hold of him through his wife.

MARK NORMAND: Damn. Sucks with a wife, though.

JOE ROGAN: He’s happy. He’s like, “Leave me out of everything.” You can’t get a hold of him through email. “Leave me out of it.”

MARK NORMAND: He seems interesting. I remember that SNL he did where he just outed the Covid stuff. That was interesting.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, he’s great.

MARK NORMAND: I saw him at Kill Tony once.

JOE ROGAN: He hangs out at the club all the time.

MARK NORMAND: Really?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, he’s in the green room all the time. But he hangs out normal. Like, talks to everybody. Doesn’t big time anybody. He’s talking to door guys. He’s talking to f*ing everybody. Normal.

MARK NORMAND: Damn.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, he’s cool.

MARK NORMAND: Cool dude. I mean, White Men Can’t Jump is one of my favorites.

JOE ROGAN: He’s awesome. He’s just real. That guy’s a real — I’ve hung out with him multiple times now. I really enjoy talking to him. There’s a few of those guys, they make it through and they’re still cool. But one thing that a lot of them have in common is they stay out of social media. They stay offline. They just live.

MARK NORMAND: They just live.

Living in the Cloud

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, he’s in the cloud, you know what I mean?

MARK NORMAND: He’s a pothead all day.

JOE ROGAN: He’s like those rappers — they call it living in the cloud.

MARK NORMAND: I’ve never heard that.

JOE ROGAN: They’re never not high.

MARK NORMAND: Like a Lil Wayne or something.

JOE ROGAN: High all day, constantly high.

MARK NORMAND: I don’t know how they do that.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know. I don’t know how to do that either.

MARK NORMAND: Those people just wake and bake and then go out and do stuff. And then they just keep smoking. I mean, there’s comics in the green room in New York who’ll just smoke weed for like three hours and then go on, then do another set and they hang out. I’m like, if I smoke weed for three hours, I’d be crying in a fetal position. It’s insane.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I wouldn’t be getting anything done.

MARK NORMAND: No.

JOE ROGAN: You’d be so locked in your own head thinking about the world. But I think people’s mental chemistry is different. For some people, I think weed is like a legitimate medicine. It keeps them together.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And they’re not hurting anybody.

MARK NORMAND: No.

JOE ROGAN: Why is it okay to be on SSRIs and OxyContin, but it’s not okay to just live in the cloud?

MARK NORMAND: It’s a good point. They’re medicating a little bit.

JOE ROGAN: 100%.

MARK NORMAND: I mean, that’s what I was doing with alcohol as a teenager. I was so anxious and nervous and I wanted to fit in. I would just drink for social lube.

JOE ROGAN: Most teenagers are doing that for that same reason. They want to be able to go to a party and relax.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And not feel like everybody hates them, or isolated, or weird, or “Who’s judging me?” Just relax.

Gen Z and the Fear of Being Filmed

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. My nephew, he’s 16, never drank, and he’s a virgin. He’s got no friends. He plays video games all day, and he gives me shit for drinking. He’s like, “It’s so unhealthy.” But I’m like, this is unhealthy. You’ve got no friends. You never fingered a girl. You don’t go to parties. Nothing.

JOE ROGAN: It’s weird that there’s a lot of kids doing that now.

MARK NORMAND: 85% — alcohol sales are 85% down with Gen Z.

JOE ROGAN: What?

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. So it’s weird. I’m like, how do you cut loose? I think they’re all scared of being cringe. They’re all scared of being filmed. We were so lucky. We could just get after it, drive drunk.

JOE ROGAN: That’s it.

MARK NORMAND: I think that’s part of it. Somebody told me that kids don’t dance at dances anymore because they’re too scared of going viral. “Look at this white guy dancing like an idiot. Cringe. Hashtag.” I think that’s part of it.

JOE ROGAN: So happy to catch people doing something, ruining their whole life.

MARK NORMAND: That gotcha culture. It’s horrible.

JOE ROGAN: It’s horrible. And the type of people that want to do that — they should be shamed.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: That is a horrible behavior.

MARK NORMAND: Thousand percent agree. That’s where we’re at. People scan videos just to be like, “Gotcha.” “Well, you said this, you said that.” They go through your old tweets, whatever it is. But we need to flip it and make those guys get in trouble.

JOE ROGAN: 100%.

False Accusations and Accountability

JOE ROGAN: It’s like, when someone has a false rape accusation, how come they don’t go to jail? You almost made a person go to jail. It turns out that they didn’t do anything, and then you just skate. That’s insane.

MARK NORMAND: They were going to go to jail forever. For nothing.

JOE ROGAN: For nothing. For something you made up, and then you just skate because you’re a woman.

MARK NORMAND: That’s insane.

JOE ROGAN: Or you’re a guy.

MARK NORMAND: Sure.

JOE ROGAN: There’s guys that make fake rape accusations against other men.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: It’s nuts.

MARK NORMAND: I know. It’s a bummer, but I guess it’s human nature. It’s powerful. I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: I know, but we should punish the people that make fake claims.

MARK NORMAND: I agree.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

MARK NORMAND: They should have to do half the time of the sentence.

JOE ROGAN: Like, think about the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp thing.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: He gets exonerated at the end of it. Everybody kind of sees her talk and they go, “Oh, she made up a bunch of shit. He’s okay.”

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: But meanwhile, what happened to her? Nothing.

MARK NORMAND: Well, she was humiliated. But, yeah, she lost the money, I guess.

JOE ROGAN: But when you falsely accuse someone of crimes — beating you —

MARK NORMAND: She got a makeup lady to put it on her.

JOE ROGAN: He could have gone to jail for 10, 15, 25 years. Cruel.

MARK NORMAND: That’s unusual. That’s.

JOE ROGAN: A psychopath tried to ruin his life. That’s what Jordan Peterson talks about — that women are experts in reputation destruction. That’s what they like to do. And that’s what she was trying to do with him.

MARK NORMAND: Well, they can’t fight, right? So that’s kind of their way, I guess.

JOE ROGAN: You know, when they kill people, you know how they do it? For the most part.

MARK NORMAND: Antifreeze in the oatmeal. Poison. Yeah. They get it slow, over time.

The Poisoning Case

JOE ROGAN: I was reading about this lady who wrote a book about helping her children get over grief, and she sold this book because her husband died. And then they just arrested her for poisoning her husband.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, my God.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, she killed. It was in 2022.

The Rebel Wilson Controversy

MARK NORMAND: At least they got her. How’d they find out?

JOE ROGAN: She was like crocodile tears. “So hard for me to lose my beloved Steve,” or whatever the name was.

MARK NORMAND: Would you see the Rebel Wilson thing?

JOE ROGAN: No.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, man. She accused a guy of sex trafficking.

JOE ROGAN: And she accused Sacha Baron Cohen of telling her to grab — to finger his asshole.

MARK NORMAND: What?

JOE ROGAN: Meanwhile, what he really said, it’s on camera. Like, she was supposed to grab his ass in a scene. And he said, “You stuck your finger right up my arse. Like, take it easy.” And she said he told her to finger his asshole. Something along those lines. Whoa.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. Why would he say that?

JOE ROGAN: Well, he is Sacha Baron Cohen.

MARK NORMAND: Sure.

JOE ROGAN: So what did she accuse someone of?

MARK NORMAND: She accused a guy of being a sex trafficker, I believe, with children. And they caught her on a hot mic — or somebody on a hot mic — saying their plan. They spelled it out. And so she’s in hot water.

JOE ROGAN: Well, she’s going to go to jail.

MARK NORMAND: Sure.

JOE ROGAN: Like that. You can ruin someone’s entire life. Rebel Wilson vs. the Deb — what’s the Deb? Four lawsuits explode as leaked audio alleges smear campaign against producer.

Well, she’s another lady that used to be really big, and then she got kind of hot. She slimmed down a little bit. So what, did they actually catch her?

Okay, what it says — the producers. So it says she alleges. Page Six reported that the dispute intensified after leaked audio raised questions about an alleged smear effort linked to a crisis PR team working on her behalf. Wilson used social media to accuse billionaire Sir Len Blavatnik of funding both the film and the legal actions against her.

It dates back to 2024. Wilson accused the film’s producers, including songwriter Amanda Ghost, of inappropriate behavior towards the lead, played by Charlotte McInnes. She also accused them of embezzling funds from the film’s budget, engaging in retaliatory behavior after she raised concerns, and trying to block the film’s premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.

MARK NORMAND: Yikes.

JOE ROGAN: Producers later filed a defamation suit against Wilson in Los Angeles. Wilson then filed a countersuit that expanded on her sexual harassment and embezzlement allegations. McInnes — is it McInnes? Yeah. McInnes publicly denied Wilson’s claim that Ghost had sexually harassed her, and then filed her own defamation suit against Wilson in Australia. Wow. So the lady she was saying was being sexually harassed filed a defamation suit against her.

MARK NORMAND: Another twist. This is when it gets good. Hollywood Reporter published leaked audio that allegedly captures members of Wilson’s team discussing fake websites that would paint Ghost as a sex trafficking madam.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. In the recording, one person can be heard saying, “We can’t just do that. Like, oh, she’s a bitch, she sucks. It’s got to be really, really heavy and connected to something that heavy.”

MARK NORMAND: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: Go to jail. Yeah, go to jail.

MARK NORMAND: If canceling works, you can use it. You can weaponize it.

JOE ROGAN: Wilson addressed the controversy in a series of Instagram stories. She says, “I was going to wait to take the stand, but the absolute bombardment on me as a person via heavily paid crisis PR firms recently has taken its toll, and it’s impossible to say nothing,” she wrote.

She also said, “Everyone who knows me knows I’m a true rebel.” Oh, she’s a rebel because her name’s Rebel. “I say it how it is.” Wow.

Another post added, “I am pretty strong” — in all caps — “and when push comes to shove, I’m going to get on the stand and tell it like it is.”

Holy. These people are f*ing crazy. Scary stuff. There’s so many of these people that are just not just narcissists but sociopaths at the same time.

MARK NORMAND: Right?

JOE ROGAN: Narcissists and sociopaths. And then recently — hot.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like new powers.

MARK NORMAND: Exactly. New powers.

JOE ROGAN: New hot powers.

Doja Cat, Cancel Culture, and Social Media

MARK NORMAND: You know what I’m loving, though? Is this Doja Cat? So she’s some pop star who I don’t even know — I’m an old boomer. But she went after Timothée Chalamet when he made fun of ballet. Did you see that whole thing?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, and then she said she was just virtue signaling.

MARK NORMAND: Yes. Which I commend her. She apologized. She goes, “I was just trying to get clicks. I’m sorry.” That’s hilarious. She backtracked and she came clean. I love that.

JOE ROGAN: It is funny that she just admitted it. She’s probably high. Like, “What am I doing? What’s wrong with me?”

MARK NORMAND: I’m on board. We need more of that. We need more people going, “Ah, f*, I was high.”

JOE ROGAN: And Louis CK said this about social media stuff. He goes, “It’s just talk.” But the problem is it’s written down. Like, people say things all the time that aren’t right, that they shouldn’t have said. But when it’s written down, it’s like, oh, it’s documented.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then everyone can read it forever. He goes, “But it’s just talk. It’s just talk that you could read.”

MARK NORMAND: That’s true.

JOE ROGAN: It is true.

MARK NORMAND: And it’s in stone forever. Forever on the Internet.

JOE ROGAN: And people are never going to forget it. You could say something stupid at a party when you’re drunk.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then call your buddy the next morning. “Bro, I don’t — I was saying — I’m sorry.” But if it’s written on Twitter —

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: They’ll never let you forget it again.

MARK NORMAND: Why? Kids can’t fool around. They can’t cut loose because they’ll get written about.

JOE ROGAN: They must be so paranoid.

MARK NORMAND: I feel bad for them. They can’t enjoy youth. Youth is when you do stupid stuff.

JOE ROGAN: And when kids do get shamed, if something happens to you in high school —

MARK NORMAND: Oh, it’s traumatizing.

JOE ROGAN: It’s traumatizing. And you can go back to high school — I remember going back to high school, like, years later, like, driving by, and I would get nervous.

MARK NORMAND: Yes. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: The same feeling that you got when you were going to school there. And I didn’t have a horrible high school.

MARK NORMAND: No, me neither.

JOE ROGAN: But still. Still, imagine if I did. Imagine if something terrible went down.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: At school and I was there. Like, oh, my God.

MARK NORMAND: Well, you see these poor girls who get bullied for being fat, then they become anorexic or whatever. It goes all kinds of different ways. Guys who got beat up — I got bullied pretty bad in school.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And that can affect your confidence forever. Of course, there’s some guys that get bullied in high school and they just never recover.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. Now you can do that on social media in two seconds, and some kid will kill himself. Yeah, happens all the time.

JOE ROGAN: And then there’s like pylons that people —

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: When comics do pylons, I’m like, good Lord. I have a mental list of people that do pylons that I’m like, I’ll never — with you again.

MARK NORMAND: I never —

JOE ROGAN: I don’t want to ever talk to you.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: If I ever see you, I’m like, you’re just — you’re waiting to turn on people.

MARK NORMAND: It’s strange.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: And as Bill Burr said, “We’re all eating a sandwich out here. Why do you have to make this harder?” Yeah. We’re trying to be comedians. It’s like a crazy job to go for.

JOE ROGAN: Well, one thing that they all have in common is they’re all not doing well. It’s all comics that are failing.

MARK NORMAND: I guess so.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And then they’re seeing all these other people that are taking off and doing really well. Like when they piled on Shane.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It was because Shane’s talented and they were really kind of scared of him.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: When someone like that could take off — and now he has taken off, and now they’re fed. They can’t say nothing. And then we all remember, of course, like, “Hey, you’re the c that piled on.” All that stuff was going on with SNL.

MARK NORMAND: You got mad at a comic for saying something inappropriate. That’s what we do.

JOE ROGAN: Not only that, it was completely out of context. He was pretending to be a person who’d never been in Chinatown before, who was a racist. That was his quote.

MARK NORMAND: But they could get him because he had a big gig. He got a break. So now we can take that away. And that’s kind of the root of it.

JOE ROGAN: It’s losers. It’s not like Chris Rock’s trying to take people’s gigs away. You know what I mean?

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, of course.

JOE ROGAN: It’s only loser people that don’t have anything going on.

MARK NORMAND: Well, Shane’s got — he’s like f*ing Buscemi in Billy Madison. He’s putting that lipstick on and he’s got a list.

JOE ROGAN: Good.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, good. He knows everybody.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, good. F* those people. You don’t have to do anything to them, but just know them. Know them for what they really are. Never deal with them again.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, avoid them. Just keep writing jokes. Keep killing. Live your life killing.

JOE ROGAN: You don’t need those f*ers. And there’s always going to be people like that. In every business, in every industry, there’s always people that aren’t doing so well, that haven’t got their life figured out. They want to attack the people that do.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

Beers, Doja Cat, and Comparison

JOE ROGAN: Bro, why do we have beers? What’s up with the beer?

MARK NORMAND: I brought a few in if you wanted one.

JOE ROGAN: Lone Star.

MARK NORMAND: I don’t like that Bud Light. No offense, Mulaney.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t mind it, but I prefer a Lone Star.

MARK NORMAND: Same. Cheers. Hey, now we’re mixing liquors here.

JOE ROGAN: My dogs finally went to sleep.

MARK NORMAND: Hallelujah. Oh, yeah. Oh, I was going to say something — Doja Cat.

JOE ROGAN: There are a lot of cs in the world. Yeah, there’s a lot of great people. I think cs are important because they make you appreciate nice people.

MARK NORMAND: Right?

JOE ROGAN: If I didn’t know any c*s, maybe I wouldn’t like you.

MARK NORMAND: Right? But I see the c*s and I want to hug them. I want to go, “Come on. What are we doing?”

JOE ROGAN: I do, too, but it doesn’t always happen. I made up with Maron.

MARK NORMAND: I heard. Yeah, good on you. Well, the funny thing is, you never really started anything. It was all him.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s that thing — it’s like he wasn’t doing so good. And he’s also separate from us.

MARK NORMAND: He’s doing great. He’s in movies.

JOE ROGAN: I know, but it’s like he’s not doing as well. I guess it’s all comparative.

MARK NORMAND: Ah, so sad.

JOE ROGAN: Comparison is the thief of joy.

MARK NORMAND: I agree. But he’s in the Joker. He’s talking to Obama. He’s killing it.

JOE ROGAN: He should be killing it. Yeah, but it’s like people compare themselves to other people. It’s very toxic. It’s very bad.

MARK NORMAND: It is, it is, but it’s —

JOE ROGAN: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Do a better job.

MARK NORMAND: That’s it.

JOE ROGAN: Figure out what you f*ed up yesterday. Do better. Compare yourself to your friends and get inspiration from it.

MARK NORMAND: Now, were you ever jealous of a guy?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

MARK NORMAND: And you go, I wouldn’t mind taking that guy down or that gal.

JOE ROGAN: No, no, I never thought that.

MARK NORMAND: I don’t have that instinct either.

JOE ROGAN: No, I never wanted to take someone down, but I definitely felt jealousy. But then I realized that’s a bitch feeling. And they’re like, don’t. Like, you should be inspired.

MARK NORMAND: And nothing comes from it.

JOE ROGAN: Nothing. But it’s also — I came from a martial arts background where you have to have people better than you or as good as you around, or you won’t get better. If you’re in competition, competing against elite people all over the country, like I was doing when I was in high school and afterwards, if you don’t have people in the gym that are better than you, you’re going to get left behind. You need to be around the best people in the world. I had national champions in my gym, and because of that, I had to rise to a very high level. So they were very valuable to me.

MARK NORMAND: Sure.

JOE ROGAN: So instead of being jealous, like, “Why is he the champ and I’m not?” — instead of that, you’re like, “I see what this guy’s doing. I see what he’s going through. I want to mirror his behavior. I want to be inspired by him.”

MARK NORMAND: Step it up.

JOE ROGAN: And you can do that with comedy, too, with everything else.

MARK NORMAND: But I will say martial arts is more objective. That guy pinned you. That guy knocked you out. This comedy thing is subjective. And people go, “That guy’s funnier than that guy.” And I’m like, “I’ve never seen you kill.”

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MARK NORMAND: So that’s true.

JOE ROGAN: That’s true.

MARK NORMAND: That makes it harder. That’s why we love sports, right? There’s an ending. You got more points.

JOE ROGAN: The basket goes in the net or the ball goes in the basket. That’s it.

Good Politics, Bad People

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. But that’s the problem. We’re so tribal now that people vote the right way or they tweet the right thing, but they’re still mean as s*. Like, as Ari would say, “Good politics, bad people.”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: I’d rather you tweet some horrible slur, but be a nice guy. Our priorities are out of whack in society. I think we’re rewarding the wrong things.

JOE ROGAN: Well, we’re really confused because social media is not real. And it’s not real human interaction. It’s not normal. You’re not supposed to be able to just write something, and the people that respond just write something back. It’s supposed to be dialogue.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: People are supposed to communicate the way we’re doing. That way, when someone says something nutty, instead of letting them go on for paragraph after paragraph, you go, “No, that’s not true. I never said that.”

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: “I never said that. You’re missing the point. First of all, you’re taking something that was sarcastic.”

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: “And you’re making it like a quote, as if this is what my real feelings were.”

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. And they kind of want it to be real, which is strange. I heard this thing where they’re like, “Bill Burr’s a racist.” And somebody tweeted, “His wife’s black.” And they were like, “Well, sometimes people marry black women to dominate them.” And you’re like, give it up, man.

JOE ROGAN: And then you don’t know that relationship.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. Well, his wife tweeted after, “Shut the f* up.”

JOE ROGAN: Good for her.

MARK NORMAND: And you’re like, there you go.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, good for her.

MARK NORMAND: Just go, oh.

JOE ROGAN: But also, don’t interact with those people.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: These are not good faith conversations.

Making Up with Marc Maron

MARK NORMAND: So do you feel good? It must be a load off with the Maron makeup.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it was nice. I never hated that guy. And it was a nice conversation.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And we’re going to get together when he’s in town.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, my God, this is amazing.

JOE ROGAN: I even invited him to the club. I’m like, “Come to the club. It’s not what you think it is. There’s all walks of life. There’s a ton of lesbians and gay people, and it’s like the most diverse place on Earth, but they’re all talented. It’s only diverse by accident. It’s diverse just because the talented people all happen to be diverse.”

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, it’s like UFC. There’s a Russian guy, f*ing Chinese guy, white guy, Korean guy.

JOE ROGAN: But that’s what it’s supposed to be. Diversity is supposed to occur naturally if you just let the best people excel.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Especially in something like comedy, because there’s no barrier to entry. It’s an open mic night. All you do is write on a pad, come up with some ideas. You don’t have to have a lot of money to do it. Everybody there starts out broke.

Diversity Quotas and the Oscars

MARK NORMAND: Well, did you see those Oscars regulations? Crazy. That was a bummer, because I’m a big movie guy, and that really bummed me out.

JOE ROGAN: F* the Oscars. Who cares?

MARK NORMAND: I mean, I grew up watching it. I love movies. But like The Godfather — all these movies would never have been made or won.

JOE ROGAN: Never. There’s a ton of movies that you could never make. You could never make Braveheart.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, right?

JOE ROGAN: Or Apocalypto. What about brown people?

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. Boyz n the Hood — there’s no Asian guy in there, and it’s a great movie.

JOE ROGAN: It’s insane that you would have diversity quotas when you’re talking about art. What if you’re doing a film about Scotland in the 1400s?

MARK NORMAND: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: You can’t bring Asian people into the mix. They weren’t there.

MARK NORMAND: But now you’ve got to write one in, like, “Oh, this Asian guy is the best doctor in Scotland.” And you’re like, wait, what? It’s the 1400s.

JOE ROGAN: If you’re going to write a thing about feudal Japan, it’s going to be all Japanese people.

MARK NORMAND: Squid Game.

JOE ROGAN: That’s right. Squid Game. That’s okay.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, that’s okay. I love that show.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Just like Sinners is okay — have a movie with all black people. It doesn’t matter.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Just make movies, and if people like it, they like it. But this idea of having a diversity quota — I’ve talked to friends that have pitched shows, and when they pitch the show, they ask about diversity. Bert was telling me this. He was pitching a show, and they’re like, “Where’s the diversity?” And he’s just sitting there like, “I don’t know what to tell you. It’s a movie about Russians in Russia. What are you saying to me? Where’s the diversity? What does that even f*ing mean?”

MARK NORMAND: I know.

JOE ROGAN: It doesn’t have to be diverse. It just has to be good. And then if you have enough good things, you’re going to have diversity across all these different films, because there’s going to be films about black ballerinas, films about people running in The Olympics in 1936 in Germany.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: You’re going to have films that cover all the bases.

MARK NORMAND: I know. And let it just happen.

JOE ROGAN: Let it happen.

MARK NORMAND: Let the movie be good.

JOE ROGAN: Just let people create what they want to create. And I think judging art is crazy anyway. Well, I think awards for art are crazy.

MARK NORMAND: It’s all political, too. Scorsese wins for The Departed, and that’s not his best movie.

JOE ROGAN: When they were doing the Golden Globes for podcasts, I’m like, good luck.

MARK NORMAND: Get out of here.

JOE ROGAN: I didn’t even submit. I’m not going to be a part of that. You just decide who’s the best — and who’s deciding?

MARK NORMAND: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Awards for art are just nuts.

MARK NORMAND: It doesn’t work. And then we all go, “How’d they win? Is that because of this, or are they actually really good?” Now you’re questioning it. You can’t even get into it.

Siskel and Ebert, and Tropic Thunder

JOE ROGAN: Well, do you remember Siskel and Ebert?

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: I love Siskel and Ebert. I love them, too. Until I saw those outtakes and I realized they were both c*s.

MARK NORMAND: I know, but it was fun going after each other. They hated each other. Those YouTube outtakes are amazing.

JOE ROGAN: Amazing. They f*ing hated each other.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah. But that was a fun show. Two thumbs up. It was lighter.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

MARK NORMAND: It wasn’t like, “This movie was racist, racist.” Just good or bad.

JOE ROGAN: They just judged it based on what they felt watching the movie. And then they had educated takes.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But that’s where — not awards for art, but recommendations for art by people that you appreciate.

MARK NORMAND: Yes. I just picture the Academy going, “Damn, that’s a good movie. But there’s no trans guy in a wheelchair. This one does that.” They used to do it with disability portrayals — that was a big thing with Oscars. Like, “Oh, this guy’s playing a mentally disabled person. We’ve got to give it to him.” And now it’s more skin color based.

JOE ROGAN: And then it got to Tropic Thunder where they had, “Never go full retard.”

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

JOE ROGAN: They killed that genre.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You never see people playing handicapped people in a film anymore.

MARK NORMAND: But that movie’s great because it shows — Robert Downey Jr. is in full black everything.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

MARK NORMAND: And everybody’s like, “He nailed it.”

JOE ROGAN: I asked him about that. I said, “Do you think you could do that movie today?” He goes, “Well, you could do it.”

MARK NORMAND: Problem? Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: He was the last guy to do blackface and not get canceled.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. And he killed it.

JOE ROGAN: Killed it. It was amazing. That movie was amazing.

MARK NORMAND: Amazing.

JOE ROGAN: It had the last completely politically incorrect movie. And it is hilarious.

MARK NORMAND: I know. It’s so good.

JOE ROGAN: You know who kills in that movie?

MARK NORMAND: Tom Cruise killed it as the agent. That dancing.

JOE ROGAN: That guy’s so good.

MARK NORMAND: He’s good.

JOE ROGAN: He’s so good. And I was just talking the other day about that movie Collateral. Jamie Foxx. Michael Mann.

MARK NORMAND: Great movie.

JOE ROGAN: I just watched it like a couple of months ago. I was like, “This movie’s so good.”

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: He’s so convincing, so scary. He’s a complete psychopathic killer.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. And there’s not much going on, but those two together, the chemistry was amazing.

JOE ROGAN: Well, when things happen, they’re so crazy.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Like that scene in the alleyway where he shoots those two guys. Rob him.

MARK NORMAND: Great.

JOE ROGAN: Like, yeah, yeah.

MARK NORMAND: And hats off to Jamie Foxx.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, he’s so good in that movie.

MARK NORMAND: Plays like a kind of a nerdy, scared guy. And then he could play Ray. Yes.

JOE ROGAN: That guy can do anything.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I love that guy. He’s great.

MARK NORMAND: He’s a talent.

JOE ROGAN: He’s a super talented guy and a really nice guy. I’ve met him — I met him at a gas station once. He was taking his daughter home from a martial arts class.

MARK NORMAND: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: And we were just pumping gas next to each other and some guy pulls up in one of those — have you ever seen those Rezvani trucks? Do you know what that is?

MARK NORMAND: No.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a crazy, like futuristic looking, bulletproof car. It’s like a Rezvani tank.

MARK NORMAND: Pull it up.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, it’s cool looking.

MARK NORMAND: Is it electric?

JOE ROGAN: No, no. This is a long time ago, before electric cars. This is probably — well, there was some Teslas, the real small ones, that were based on the Lotus platform back then. But this is like 2014 or 15 or something like that. That thing. Whoa. He pulled up in that. That’s Jamie Foxx’s car.

MARK NORMAND: That’s like a Batmobile kind of thing.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly, exactly. So he pulled up next to me, and I was like, “Who’s driving that f*ing thing?” And Jamie Foxx got out. “What’s up, Joe?”

MARK NORMAND: “What’s up, Jamie?”

JOE ROGAN: But he’s cool. He’s like a normal dude.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. And he did it all. He did stand-up. He did In Living Color. He had his own sitcom and the movies.

JOE ROGAN: Ultra talented. Can sing.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Act. And he can act in comedy. He can act in drama. He can play a nerd. He can play a killer. He can play anything.

MARK NORMAND: I just rewatched Ray. It’s incredible.

JOE ROGAN: It’s amazing.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah. He kills that role.

JOE ROGAN: How good is he singing it?

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Him singing.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. I didn’t realize Ray was such a junkie.

JOE ROGAN: Was he? Yeah, that’s right.

MARK NORMAND: Big heroin guy. That’s why he was all moving like that. He was all wonked out on the h. You know, people say —

JOE ROGAN: Stevie Wonder can sing. Or Stevie Wonder, rather, could sing.

MARK NORMAND: Can see.

JOE ROGAN: Could see.

MARK NORMAND: I’ve heard that he catches the microphone — talk real fast — the microphone falls and he catches it. So that’s a big conspiracy theory. But looking back, that’s like such a gentle, light conspiracy compared to what we’ve got going on today.

I know, right? Yeah. That Elvis is alive. We used to have fun, kind of playful conspiracies. Yeah. And now it’s all out of whack.

JOE ROGAN: You know, Macron’s got a dick.

MARK NORMAND: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: I’ve heard Erika Kirk’s got a dick. I’ve heard that one.

MARK NORMAND: Whoa. She seems thrilled right now.

JOE ROGAN: She’s an odd duck.

MARK NORMAND: She’s a kook for sure.

JOE ROGAN: You ever seen the compilation of her making crazy eyes?

MARK NORMAND: No.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a video of her making demon eyes. And every time she makes the eyes, the music —

MARK NORMAND: She’s possessed.

JOE ROGAN: Well, she just gets intense.

MARK NORMAND: She’s like — what’s the gang guy? What’s that guy? Oh, my God. Look at that. She looks like a television.

JOE ROGAN: Give me some volume. She’s talking to Bari Weiss.

MARK NORMAND: There you go.

JOE ROGAN: Watch this. Pay attention to her eyes.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

ERIKA KIRK: Charlie said or believed things that they believed were controversial or even hateful. That he somehow had it coming. What do you say to people who justified —

BARI WEISS: You’re sick. He’s a human being.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

MARK NORMAND: Oh, boy.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. When Bari is saying — they basically said that because Charlie said —

MARK NORMAND: All right, we don’t need the Vincent D’Onofrio on.

JOE ROGAN: That’s not the one that I want.

MARK NORMAND: Okay. But yeah, she seems — she’s having a good time. Well, she was on a reality show, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

MARK NORMAND: So she’s a star.

JOE ROGAN: A little bit. Maybe. She was also in some weird CIA documents or CIA films.

MARK NORMAND: Is that right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. You ever seen those films?

MARK NORMAND: No, no.

JOE ROGAN: See if you can find those films. There’s some weird like internal films that they made that she was a part of.

MARK NORMAND: She looks like if a pageant lady, a pageant girl was growing —

JOE ROGAN: Growing up. 100%.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, look at that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Well, I mean, she essentially was a pageant lady.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, really? Right.

JOE ROGAN: Wasn’t she in like Miss USA or one of those things?

MARK NORMAND: I don’t know, maybe. Hasn’t she got that kind of face?

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s a thing that people want, right? That attention, fame thing. Yeah, that is what they really want. Okay, so Jamie will find it.

MARK NORMAND: She’s got fireworks. She’s wild.

JOE ROGAN: Erika Kirk, CIA video releases.

MARK NORMAND: Serious question. That’s the one I just played. Yeah, I didn’t have it. Had a 5-second clip and the rest was not —

JOE ROGAN: Oh, but the full videos are out there. I watched it and it’s very weird.

MARK NORMAND: It’s the same video.

JOE ROGAN: So see, if you play it, it’s about EMP attacks and power grids.

MARK NORMAND: The whole rest of this was not that clip.

JOE ROGAN: None of it?

MARK NORMAND: Nope. Well, a gig’s a gig. I think if you’re a struggling actor, you take any kind of employee video —

JOE ROGAN: Or whatever. I guarantee that video’s out there. I mean, no one could have pulled it. Well, there’s a — the Jimmy Dore video there. Here it is. Here it is. Look at this.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

ERIKA KIRK: That we’ve presented to congressional officials. One being cyber, two being hackers, three being physical threats, fourth one is solar EMP, and the fifth one is man-made EMP. So the concern that we have is that we put out this critical information and when we go over this risk analysis, they hear what we’re saying, but they don’t want to take action.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Action.

ERIKA KIRK: Take action. Well, there are 18 critical infrastructures.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

MARK NORMAND: It’s weird, but very weird.

JOE ROGAN: She’s doing a CIA informational video.

MARK NORMAND: Weird. An acting gig. Or is this something else perhaps?

JOE ROGAN: Or — but even so, you’re doing an acting gig for the CIA? Who calls you for that?

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You ever get one of those calls? No, no, I never got one of those calls.

MARK NORMAND: And my agent never hit me with that one.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s odd. Well, there’s a lot of people that think that she was his handler. Charlie Kirk’s handler. But of course, there’s a lot of people who think I have antlers.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. Well, you’ve got about nine Navy SEALs out there.

JOE ROGAN: They’re not. They’re my friends. They’re not handlers. I know those guys, okay?

MARK NORMAND: They’re tough dudes. They know some stuff.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a lot of kooks out there, bro.

MARK NORMAND: That’s true. I mean, you just had a shooter on 6th Street. Yeah. Finally, a guy in Austin kills — only three people, though. We don’t have to get to the Austin-New York debate.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a stupid —

MARK NORMAND: It’s all silly. What are we doing?

JOE ROGAN: Luis J. Gomez getting involved in these things. Settle down.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, yeah. Just more comedy the better. Keep putting clubs in every city. I know, right? Yeah. Give me more good clubs.

New York Comedy Scene

JOE ROGAN: How is New York these days?

MARK NORMAND: New York’s good. I mean, we’re humming. We got all these clubs opening up still, and more opening. More opening. Yeah. It’s crazy. And comedy’s hot, as you know, comedy has been —

JOE ROGAN: The more f*ed up the world is, the more hot comedy is.

MARK NORMAND: That’s probably true. Yeah. But it’s legitimized now. You know, everybody takes it seriously. Before, you were kind of a clown. Now they’re like, “Oh, let’s go see some comedy and listen to them talk about Iran.”

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think one of the things that helped is podcasts, because people hear comics talk and realize, like, “Oh, these are thinking people that are going through this very bizarre art form that doesn’t have a playbook.”

MARK NORMAND: Yes. Right. And we have no rules. Whereas now the Oscars have all these rules. We will never have rules. And if we do, the whole art form’s —

JOE ROGAN: Well, they’ve tried to put rules in certain clubs, and those clubs always fall apart.

MARK NORMAND: That’s true.

JOE ROGAN: You know, you can’t do that.

Punching Down in Comedy

MARK NORMAND: Well, it’s so f*ing gay because they’re all like, “We love Richard Pryor.” I’m like, if he was around today, you’d hate him. Right. He hit his wife. He was a drug addict, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MARK NORMAND: He was a psycho.

JOE ROGAN: Kinison.

MARK NORMAND: Kinison.

JOE ROGAN: One of the f*ing greatest comics that’s ever lived. Completely out of his mind. And also the best example of someone who did not punch up. Yeah, he punched down all the time. Punched down about starving people in Africa.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. I love — when did we decide punching down was not funny?

JOE ROGAN: They’re stupid.

MARK NORMAND: It’s hilarious.

JOE ROGAN: I had a guy on once that was a professor that taught comedy, and he wrote a book on comedy, and he tried to tell me that punching down is never funny. I go, “That is wrong.”

MARK NORMAND: It doesn’t make sense.

JOE ROGAN: You’re wrong. I go, “Because Sam Kinison — one of the greatest bits of all time was him doing a bit about the starving people in Africa.”

MARK NORMAND: Right? Yeah. It’s a legendary bit. David Tell has 18 minutes on midgets. That’s literally punching down — like, they’re little. But it’s funny. If it’s funny, it’s funny.

JOE ROGAN: If it’s funny, it’s funny. And sometimes it’s funny because it’s wrong.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Sometimes it’s funny — it’s like, “Oh, my God, what he’s saying.”

MARK NORMAND: Exactly. I know.

JOE ROGAN: Or Holtzman.

MARK NORMAND: Holtzman. Hilarious example.

JOE ROGAN: People try to take Holtzman literally. I’ve seen comics complain about the Mothership because they let a guy come up and say these things.

MARK NORMAND: Right?

JOE ROGAN: What guy? Brian Holtzman.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Talk to Brian Holtzman offstage. It’s Jekyll and Hyde.

MARK NORMAND: Completely. Nicest guy in the world.

JOE ROGAN: Sweetheart of a guy.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Friendly. Loves everybody. Super kind.

MARK NORMAND: He’s like a camp counselor. He’s wearing a polo and slacks.

JOE ROGAN: The nicest fella.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: On stage, he becomes this character that he’s created over the years, and it’s amazing.

MARK NORMAND: But we do the hierarchy thing, and by that logic, I should be able to make fun of Asians because they’re doing the best.

Asian Academic Achievement and Affirmative Action

JOE ROGAN: They are doing the best.

MARK NORMAND: Asians are number one, then honky, and then who knows? But so by that logic, I should be able to do a Ching Chong whatever, right? Because, you know, by your logic, hey, I’m punching up.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MARK NORMAND: They’re killing it.

JOE ROGAN: They are. Especially academically. I mean, they’re killing it so hard that they made rules to try to eliminate Asian people.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: University.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: There’s f*ing lawsuits about it. They made it more difficult. They have to get higher scores.

MARK NORMAND: That’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: It’s not because they kill it. They work so hard.

MARK NORMAND: But what a crazy con. Hey, you look like that guy. We got too many of you guys who look like this.

JOE ROGAN: You’re trying too hard. It’s like a union job. Hey, slow down.

MARK NORMAND: Right, right.

JOE ROGAN: F*ing it up for the rest of us.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. But, yeah, keep killing it. Let them be smart and invent and run the country. I don’t care.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. Make it so that, you know, there’s a legitimate competition where the other people realize, okay, we’re not working as hard. They’re working harder. We got to catch up.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You can’t just slow them down and remove. There’s too many Asians in Harvard.

MARK NORMAND: Yes, that’s why Japan, you leave a Rolex on a bench. Yeah, because they’re better in a lot of ways. Let them be better. We don’t all have to be the same.

Dubai and Law Enforcement

JOE ROGAN: You know, that’s the same thing about Dubai. A buddy of mine moved to Dubai and he said he’s black and he was saying that in America, he goes, “Dude, I go to a nightclub, I worry about being shot.” He goes, “There’s none of that there.” And he goes, “You could just leave a diamond ring on the ground, someone will pick it up and turn it into the police.”

MARK NORMAND: Damn.

JOE ROGAN: There’s no theft.

MARK NORMAND: How do they do that? Is that cultural? Is that raised better? What is that?

JOE ROGAN: Laws. Hardcore laws. They have a monarchy. They have a king over there. And you can’t f around. There’s no fing around. They will lock you up and that’s it. And there’s no ifs, ands or buts. There’s no social justice warriors.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: There’s no people that are going to give you no cash bail and let you out because, “Oh my God, the system’s racist.” No, no, no, no. You commit a crime, you go to jail. So nobody goes to jail, because nobody commits crimes.

MARK NORMAND: Damn. Is that what it is?

JOE ROGAN: Yes. But you f* around over there, like, there’s an American lady who went over there and she got in arguments with people at the airport. You’re going to jail. Locked her up. She was yelling at people. She was trying to do the thing you do with Spirit Airlines in America. Not here.

Fistfights on Airplanes and Bus Travel

MARK NORMAND: Well, the fist fights on airplanes has gone up. If you go from 1960 to 2025, it’s got to be up 8,000%.

JOE ROGAN: What happened?

MARK NORMAND: I don’t know what happened.

JOE ROGAN: What happened? Why did we lose our f*ing marbles?

MARK NORMAND: Maybe because flights got cheaper and you get bus people on a flight. You know what I mean?

JOE ROGAN: Right. Bus people were the people who are cutting people’s heads off on a f*ing interstate truck.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, yeah. I assume that’s what it is because, you know, back in the day, they wore a suit and they had a cocktail and they smoked. But taking a flight back then was a big deal.

JOE ROGAN: You ever traveled by bus?

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I did a few bus gigs back in the day because my car broke down and I didn’t have any money, so I had to travel by bus.

MARK NORMAND: It hurts the people.

JOE ROGAN: You have to hang out with us. It’s like the dregs of society on these Greyhounds.

Extended Stay Hotels and Mickey Rourke

MARK NORMAND: It really is. You know, where else you see that is, I still do the free breakfast at the Holiday Inn. The characters you see in there, it’s like a family. There’s a guy with a neck tattoo, an ex-con, a tweaky meth guy. And then me.

JOE ROGAN: I was watching a video about how people that don’t stay in that hotel sneak into these hotels.

MARK NORMAND: I used to do that.

JOE ROGAN: Did you?

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, they just walk right in. You got pajama pants on. You pull an all-nighter, you go get the free breakfast. They’re not going to stop you. They assume you’re staying there.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, just want to make it nice for everybody.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, you can make a waffle. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But staying in a shitty hotel teaches you a lot about humans.

MARK NORMAND: That’s true.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what road gigs are really good for. You meet the people that are working the f*ing counter, right? Sad.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Brownie face, dude working the counter.

MARK NORMAND: The crazy ones are those, what are they called, when you can kind of live there and they have a kitchenette. Oh, you know, the extended stay. Yeah, there are dogs everywhere and people making crack on the stove.

JOE ROGAN: And you know who’s in a hotel now? Mickey Rourke.

MARK NORMAND: Really?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, he’s in a hotel in Hollywood now. He got evicted. Doesn’t have any money anymore.

MARK NORMAND: What?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s a sad story.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, he was a hot guy and a great actor.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, he was great.

MARK NORMAND: Rumble Fish.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, my God, dude. So many films. Angel Heart.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, my God.

MARK NORMAND: So good.

JOE ROGAN: He was incredible. Well, The Wrestler was when he was making a comeback, right. So he made a comeback for a little bit. He was in Iron Man, remember?

MARK NORMAND: He was great.

JOE ROGAN: But, you know, I don’t know, man.

MARK NORMAND: I think he got a lot of work done.

JOE ROGAN: He did, but he made it after he got a lot of work done. The comeback, The Wrestler and everything, was after the work.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

Mickey Rourke’s Boxing Career and CTE

JOE ROGAN: You know, the thing was, he did a lot of boxing, remember? He didn’t like the fact that he was a big actor. He wanted to be more of like a real person and a man. So he started having fights. Legitimate boxing. Allegedly legitimate.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Some look sus. Some of them look like people laid down. But when you think about that, if he’s sparring with James Toney and real people, he’s probably getting the f*ing brains beaten out of him. And he probably went a little squirrely.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. CTE is no joke.

JOE ROGAN: No joke, dude.

MARK NORMAND: Aaron Hernandez, all these guys.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. A lot of these MMA fighters that I talked to, they’re struggling.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. Who are these ladies who are like—

JOE ROGAN: They’ll date this guy because they’re exciting and dangerous. That’s why.

MARK NORMAND: Dangerous? They’ll hang you. Yeah. I think he hung himself, actually.

JOE ROGAN: Who hung himself?

MARK NORMAND: Aaron Hernandez.

JOE ROGAN: Oh. In jail, right. But he had killed a bunch of people already. Yeah, he was killing people while he was in the NFL. He was wild. But then they said when they checked his CTE after he was dead, he had some of the worst CTE they’d ever seen. Really. Yeah, his brain was gone.

MARK NORMAND: Well, there you go.

JOE ROGAN: A friend of mine who has CTE was explaining it to me, and the way the doctor was explaining to him, most people have several steps to go through before they lose control of their impulses. Like, you have an initial thought, and then your brain comes in and goes, “Don’t do that.”

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then there’s another one. Ramps up a little bit. “This is getting serious. But let’s not get out of hand.” But someone with CTE, first initial thought, right into DEFCON 5.

MARK NORMAND: Whoa. They just immediately go. No buffer.

JOE ROGAN: No buffer.

MARK NORMAND: No.

JOE ROGAN: No impulse control. Cocaine, women, whiskey.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: No matter what it is. Especially with booze, you add booze, loss of inhibition.

MARK NORMAND: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: No impulse control. Shoot out with the cops, you know. It’s like the worst case scenario.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, right, right.

JOE ROGAN: To the worst case scenario.

MARK NORMAND: Remember that Bill Burr bit? He’s like, “I’m driving down the street, I see a bunch of people on the sidewalk. Just a quarter inch turn to the right, I’ll just mow them all down.” Yeah, you have that thought, but you don’t do it.

JOE ROGAN: Everybody has those thoughts.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. You go up on the top of a building and you’re like, “I could jump.” Yeah, you have that for a second. Then you pull back.

Brain Damage and Impulse Control

JOE ROGAN: Some people just don’t have it, I guess. Well, brain damage is basically like, think about if you have a f*ed up phone. I dropped my phone once and I was in Hawaii and it just started calling people.

MARK NORMAND: Really?

JOE ROGAN: I was showing my wife, like, “Look at this. This is crazy.” You hang up, it calls another person. Hang up. It was just broken.

MARK NORMAND: Whoa.

JOE ROGAN: So that’s your brain, right?

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: All the wires are all messed up and you got holes in there.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: CTE.

MARK NORMAND: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: Chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, your hormones are all messed up, your cortisol’s all up.

MARK NORMAND: You got to put their head in rice and—

JOE ROGAN: Just like that, all of a sudden, you’re just running through red lights. You don’t even know why you’re doing it.

MARK NORMAND: Who? Probably kind of fun in the middle of it.

JOE ROGAN: Probably not. You’re probably like, “Am I in control of my own destiny? I’m not.”

MARK NORMAND: Oof. Man. Yeah. We’re lucky. And you, you’ve taken a lot of blows. Yeah. Mentally and physically.

JOE ROGAN: I have the right amount of brain damage. Not worried about things.

MARK NORMAND: That’s good.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t concern myself about things that I think would cripple a lot of people.

MARK NORMAND: Right. Interesting.

JOE ROGAN: I think it makes me a little more fearless.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. It’s like autism. If you have just the right amount, you’re a genius.

JOE ROGAN: A touch of the ’tism.

MARK NORMAND: A touch.

JOE ROGAN: Just a touch.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: You don’t want to be non-verbal, but you want to be really good at math.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. Yeah. It’s almost like blind guys who can f*ing do other stuff, right.

JOE ROGAN: Like, they hear better.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like echolocation.

MARK NORMAND: There you go.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: I mean, Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I think I have just enough brain damage.

Voluntary Adversity and the Comfort Crisis

MARK NORMAND: That’s very interesting because you wonder, how could you do this for so long and do comedy and do UFC and drink and smoke weed and all run a club. You got a lot of irons and kids and a wife and a f*ing dog. And you got J-Mo and cars. You got a lot of plate spinning.

JOE ROGAN: But I’m still just me because I don’t have to ever be anybody but me.

MARK NORMAND: But you also do a ton of work on you. You do the f*ing cold plunge, the sauna, the working out, the kicking, the fighting, the comedy.

JOE ROGAN: That helps. I always tell everybody that’s going through anything difficult in your life, do something more difficult voluntarily, and it makes the difficult things easy. A career in the public eye is very difficult psychologically.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So do something. My workouts are way harder than anything I ever experience in regular life.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, really?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I do it to myself.

MARK NORMAND: That’s the key.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So when I’m done, I can kind of tolerate a lot. Like if you do jiu-jitsu, I did jiu-jitsu for what, 25, 28 years or something like that?

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Just doing that all the time is so hard that the rest of the world seems easy.

MARK NORMAND: But weren’t you beaten as a kid?

JOE ROGAN: No.

MARK NORMAND: I thought you got hit a few times or your mom got hit.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Not me.

MARK NORMAND: That could have scrambled some stuff.

JOE ROGAN: It definitely did. Made me more attuned to the potential of domestic violence, which scares the s* out of me. But I got hit a lot in fighting. I started training when I was 15.

MARK NORMAND: Seriously?

JOE ROGAN: So for all my formative years, I was getting my brains punched. I was getting kicked. I was getting punched.

MARK NORMAND: Whoa. Have you thought about getting a real brain scan exam on you?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t want to know what’s in there.

MARK NORMAND: All right, all right. Just keep riding it out. I don’t want to know because it’s going well.

JOE ROGAN: It’s going well. Yeah. So I leave it alone. But I think you have to have tools for managing stress. And one of the best tools, I think, is voluntary adversity, where you force yourself because it gives you discipline. And you understand that you can control a lot of the way you think and a lot of the way you behave by your actions.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And it’s also like, I don’t want to do it every time. Today I got in the cold plunge and every time I do it, I’m trying to figure out ways that I could talk myself out of doing it. And then I have one part of my brain that’s talking like a b, and the other part of my brain is like, “Shut the f* up. You’re just going to do it.”

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: “You’re not even going to think about it. You’re not going to hesitate. You’re just going to lift the lid off of that thing. You’re going to set the timer. You’re going to slide into that 34 degree water and you’re just going to f*ing sit there.”

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: “You’re not going to b and complain. You’re just going to breathe and don’t overreact. Just deal with it.”

MARK NORMAND: And it keeps you in reality.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

MARK NORMAND: This is real. I’m freezing. You could die, you die. Or you’re lifting weights, you’re like, “This sucks. I’m doing it.”

JOE ROGAN: When you’re doing sprints on the air dyne machine, it sucks.

MARK NORMAND: Also, the society, the population is more comfortable than ever. I mean, Uber Eats, you got Netflix, you got all these comforts. So they’re going the other way. And then we’re kind of decaying.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a guy named Michael Easter. He’s been on my podcast before. He wrote a book called The Comfort Crisis. Great book.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, there you go.

JOE ROGAN: He’s a professor at UNLV, I think. But he talks about it from a perspective of how to really manage and balance out life. And that comfort is your enemy. It really is.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s 100% your enemy. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it. The desire to constantly be comfortable doesn’t get you anywhere in life, and it doesn’t make you happy.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You think you’re going to be happy if you’re comfortable. You’re not. Now, you got to be comfortable sometimes, but you have to earn that comfort.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: I still watch TV. Like I told you, I watched that guy cook an ostrich. He baked an ostrich.

MARK NORMAND: That’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And I watched the whole thing sitting there like a moron. Because the world’s on fire, I’m like, “Let me watch this guy cook in Azerbaijan.” Super.

MARK NORMAND: But it’s better to watch that than Love Is Blind or some horsesh.

JOE ROGAN: I can’t watch those things.

MARK NORMAND: I can’t either.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t like watching people behave badly.

MARK NORMAND: I feel myself being dumber. I feel slower after watching.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I like watching interesting things about space. I was watching something about the James Webb Telescope, what they’re finding out now. Some new guy that has some theory about how the universe is not expanding. I’m fascinated by really interesting things and just people doing things that they love to do.

Prioritizing Later and Imposter Syndrome

MARK NORMAND: Well, Jimmy Carr said the key to life is two words: “prioritize later.” And that’s big. You don’t want to exercise, but you do it so you’re healthy. You don’t want to eat right. You want the pizza, you want the Snickers, but you think about later. And I think that’s a big one.

JOE ROGAN: Right. You want your comedy to do well, you got to write.

MARK NORMAND: You got to write.

JOE ROGAN: Sit down in front of that f*ing computer or the notebook and just concentrate. And then do those sets. Some of the best sets that I’ve ever had are the ones where I’m sitting at home going, “Can I get an excuse to not do this?” I would be in my house not wanting to go to the store. I don’t want to do it. And then I would kill.

MARK NORMAND: And you’re always happy you did it. Every single time.

JOE ROGAN: Every time.

MARK NORMAND: Every time. I’m a big introvert, so I would always go, “I can’t go to that party. That thing sounds annoying.” But if I go, I’m like, “That was great.”

JOE ROGAN: It’s weird that you’re an introvert.

MARK NORMAND: Big introvert.

JOE ROGAN: But you’re so good in public.

MARK NORMAND: Well, we do an art form that’s pre-written.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. But you’re also good like this.

MARK NORMAND: But it’s me and you.

JOE ROGAN: But you’re also good in interviews and like Good Morning America. You’re really good at those.

MARK NORMAND: I can do a one on one. But in a group setting, I’m a mess. It’s not pretty. I sit at home and I go, “I can’t go. What if I say something stupid? Nobody likes me. I’m annoying.” Everything tells me to stay home, but I just push it.

JOE ROGAN: But don’t you think it’s healthier to have that perspective? Like, “Oh, people are going to hate me,” than “Everybody loves me.”

MARK NORMAND: Of course. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t want to be that guy that doesn’t work. Whenever I talk to people and they say they get imposter syndrome, I go, “Good, that means you’re healthy.” Everybody who’s doing really well gets imposter syndrome.

MARK NORMAND: Right. David Tell thinks he’s a hack. He’s the funniest guy on the planet.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Everybody who’s really killing it in life at some point thinks, “This doesn’t make any sense. Why am I even doing well? Why is this so good?”

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. But now, are we just blessed in that way that we hate ourselves or are insecure? Or did we have to find that out? Because I’m jealous of the guy who’s cool and collected.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. But they’re probably jealous of you because you’re talented. I think the thing about it is, if you really believe you’re something better than you are, that prevents you from getting better than you could be.

MARK NORMAND: I agree. Yeah. If you think you’re great, you’re fixing something and you go, “That’s good. I did it.” And it falls apart.

JOE ROGAN: We all remember that from the beginnings of our career. There are guys that thought they killed, and they were terrible. They were bombing. No one was laughing.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: And they’re like, “That was a great set.” You’re like, “What did you hear?”

MARK NORMAND: You see all these 400 pound skanks who were like, “I’m a 10.” You’re like, “What? You’re an ogre.” But, you know.

JOE ROGAN: But that’s those weird shows where they sit those ladies down. I don’t like those shows.

MARK NORMAND: I don’t like those either. They’re too mean to the gals. And look, I’ve called everybody skanks, but I’m not going to just say that to a woman’s face, so those make me uncomfortable.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Even the gals that deserve it, I’m like, “Oh God, don’t. Just don’t talk to them. Don’t do that to them.”

MARK NORMAND: No, no, no.

JOE ROGAN: People love it. They love it when people get shut down. They love it when a really stupid person with a delusional perspective talks to a genius and gets just annihilated.

MARK NORMAND: I know, but I’d feel icky leaving that studio.

JOE ROGAN: I feel icky watching it. Even the little clips. I’m like, “Oh, what are you doing? That poor lady.” Some of them deserve it, arguably. They have ridiculous perspectives. Their vocabulary sucks, and they try to use it anyway.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. And look, maybe they should be. It’s like cops. I see them shutting criminals down, and I’m like, “Thank God they’re here, because I don’t want to do it.” I would never want to. Imagine giving someone a parking ticket. I’d kill myself.

JOE ROGAN: Or how about pulling someone over and thinking they’re going to shoot you?

MARK NORMAND: Well, that’s a whole other thing. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Those guys all have PTSD.

MARK NORMAND: How could you not?

Policing, Society, and Human Nature

JOE ROGAN: I was talking to a friend of mine who worked for the Austin PD and he said, listen, Matt. And he was in the — he served overseas and was deployed several times. And he said, I saw way more working for the police department than I ever saw overseas.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, wow.

JOE ROGAN: Way more murders, way more crime, way more dead bodies, way more f*ed up behavior.

MARK NORMAND: And then we go on to defund them. “Cops, ACAB,” or whatever. And I’m like, we need them. We need those guys.

JOE ROGAN: More of that stupid virtue signaling. Because those people — remember that lady who was the mayor of Chicago was like — yeah. All about defund the police. Meanwhile, she had her block shut down. She had armed guards with her everywhere.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Come on, lady.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, and I get it. Cops aren’t perfect. We got to have different money allotted to certain things or whatever, but they need —

JOE ROGAN: — to be trained better. For sure.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. But you can’t just shit on this guy. He’s taking bullets to the head just so we can be safe.

JOE ROGAN: It’s literally one of the most important jobs in a functioning society —

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: — is to stop criminals from ruining everything for everybody else. And the only shield between us and them is police officers. If you don’t appreciate that, you just don’t know. You’re either delusional, you’re arrogant. Whatever it is, you should go on a ride along.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: A lot of people that have been on ride alongs — I haven’t been on one, I should just say that right away, but I know enough cops, I’ve talked to them. But if you go on a ride along, you’ll go, “Oh, these guys are dealing with this for decades.”

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Not just one night, not just a couple of nights.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Decades of chaos.

MARK NORMAND: Why would that —

JOE ROGAN: Because it’s a good job. You could pay your mortgage, you can raise a family. And you know, you come out of the military — what are you going to do? You get a —

MARK NORMAND: — job in the police force and you feel good, probably. “I’m helping, I’m saving a lot of lives.”

JOE ROGAN: A lot of times you are helping.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: A lot of times you’re stopping bad guys.

People Who Hate Cops Are Very Cop-Like

MARK NORMAND: Well, I’ve noticed a lot of people who hate cops are very cop-like. Like these people who are like, “Defund the police,” and they’re like, “Don’t do that joke. Don’t say that word.” You’re like a cop.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MARK NORMAND: There’s a lot of that. Like, a lot of people who hate Trump, I notice, are a lot like Trump. I’m not a Trump guy, but these people — they’re also kind of a narcissist and egomaniac. And I’m like, you’re like him.

JOE ROGAN: Like girls who are promiscuous who talk shit about girls f*ing other guys.

MARK NORMAND: Right, right, right.

JOE ROGAN: That’s always the case.

MARK NORMAND: Always. Yeah. There’s always people like that. I think you hate yourself. Kind of like — Jew, Palestine — they look the same. They’re not that different.

JOE ROGAN: I used to joke about that.

MARK NORMAND: No way. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I said, when I look at Israel versus Palestine, I go, it’s like the Williams sisters playing each other in tennis. I go, “Who the f* is who?” I go, there’s a brown-skinned guy with dark curly hair throwing rocks at a brown-skinned guy with dark curly hair holding a machine gun.

MARK NORMAND: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: What the f*?

MARK NORMAND: I have a similar bit about how the people who hate each other most, they look alike. Like Ireland’s been fighting — North Korea, South Korea, Bloods and the Crips.

JOE ROGAN: North Korea and South Korea is the best example.

MARK NORMAND: It goes on for days.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they hate each other. You’re literally in the same patch of dirt. Russia, UK — exactly the same. You look the same.

MARK NORMAND: I know — women, yeah, they hate each other.

JOE ROGAN: A lot of them do.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Competition, though.

MARK NORMAND: I know, that’s primal.

JOE ROGAN: They want prime dick. They all get mad — someone’s getting the prime dick.

MARK NORMAND: Hot girl walks into a party. My wife hates her.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

MARK NORMAND: She’s like this. I’m like, “She’s nice, she gives to the poor. She’s charitable.” And she’s like, “I hate her.”

JOE ROGAN: One of my wife’s friends gets super upset because someone showed up at her wedding — this guy brought a date and the date was super hot and she had her tits out. And this lady was furious.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, it’s innate.

JOE ROGAN: She just overdid it.

MARK NORMAND: Right, right, exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Listen, that lady could show up with a f*ing Jabba the Hutt outfit on and you would hate her.

MARK NORMAND: She’s hot.

JOE ROGAN: She’s hot. She could have a cloak, she could be dressed like a monk. You’d hate her. She’s beautiful.

Big Guys and Bar Fights

MARK NORMAND: In college I lived with a guy who was 6’9″, just this big beefy Midwestern football player guy. And every bar we’d go to, guys would try to fight him. Of course, he was like a Birkenstock-wearing, weed-smoking kind of guy. And every guy’s like, “You got a problem? You think you’re tough? You think you’re hot? You think you’re better than me?” And he’s like, “Dude, I’m just sitting here drinking.” And he would have to fight these guys, bro.

JOE ROGAN: I’ve seen that happen with MMA fighters.

MARK NORMAND: Really?

JOE ROGAN: People try to pick fights with MMA fighters. They get drunk and they just think, “I’ll f* this guy up.”

MARK NORMAND: Yes. That’s crazy. Stupid.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a lot of morons in this world. It’s too easy to survive. We need wolves in the streets. We need predators everywhere.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: We need something like a real fear of the consequences of your actions.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, that’s why animals stay in line.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

MARK NORMAND: We talk all this about animals, but they’re keeping it together. They got gender roles. They’re doing all this we’re not supposed to do.

JOE ROGAN: Not a lot of non-binary wolves.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: They don’t make it.

MARK NORMAND: The male penguin gets the fish. The female watches the eggs. If he was like, “I want to be a graphic designer,” it would collapse.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

MARK NORMAND: It would all fall apart.

The Roots of Radical Feminism

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. The idea of gender roles — I had this lady on who was explaining the roots of feminism. It was the strangest conversation because she was talking about how all these people that started radical feminism were all completely f*ed up. They were all out of their minds. They were all having all these affairs, not raising their kids — completely self-obsessed.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And they’re the ones who tricked all these women into being girl bosses.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, wow. Yeah. Anytime someone is too outlandish about something, there’s always a trigger for that. There’s always a reason, no matter what it is. “I’m going to take down these pedophiles.” And you’re like, what’s in your basement? I mean, I’m against pedophiles.

JOE ROGAN: Have you seen — when Pizzagate was happening, there were all these people that debunked Pizzagate. Four of the journalists that debunked Pizzagate got arrested for either child sex crimes or child porn.

MARK NORMAND: Wow. There you go.

JOE ROGAN: Isn’t that crazy?

MARK NORMAND: It’s —

JOE ROGAN: Guys are like, “This is an unfounded conspiracy theory.” All right. They were pervs.

MARK NORMAND: It’s like the same with Bill Cosby. Why is he so gung-ho about you pulling your pants up? “Don’t curse.” There’s something behind it. There’s always something behind it.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. He’s the best example.

MARK NORMAND: Right? Yes. Yeah. Ellen — Ellen is up there. “Be kind. I’m dancing.” And then she’s the boss of the year.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, I knew about that a long time ago because Fitzsimmons worked for her.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, that’s right. He told everybody.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, he told everybody. He told me, like, decades ago. He’s like, “She’s such a —” Yeah. I said, “Really? Ellen?” I was shocked.

MARK NORMAND: Me too. We all —

JOE ROGAN: She seems so sweet. She seems so nice. He’s like, “Dude, she’s horrible to her staff. She’s horrible to everybody.” I’m like, “Wow.”

MARK NORMAND: Wow. There you go.

JOE ROGAN: Everybody loved her during the pandemic when everybody was bored, before it all came out.

MARK NORMAND: Right, right.

JOE ROGAN: Like, hey, let me tell you something about that lady.

MARK NORMAND: But one interesting takeaway is the fact that she was kind of canceled for being gay in the 90s, and she came out of it and became a star. And then she got canceled for being mean. That’s progress.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but people celebrated her because she got canceled for being gay. They canceled her show. Isn’t that nuts? Like, you could get a show on the air now if you were playing a gay character.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: They’d be like, “Ooh, diversity.”

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: “This is going to get greenlit.”

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. Well, it’s funny how being gay used to be the ultimate insult when I was in high school, and now I got friends like, “Tell them I’m bi. I’m trying to fit in.” So it went from an insult to a cool thing.

JOE ROGAN: “I’m pansexual.”

MARK NORMAND: That’s my favorite. Yes.

JOE ROGAN: “I’ll f* everybody.” That’s what it is. “I’m attracted to everybody.” That’s nuts.

MARK NORMAND: But in 20 years, you’re going to be like, “Tom, I’m a child molester. I’m trying to fit in.” Where does it end?

Minor Attracted Persons and Suicidal Empathy

JOE ROGAN: Well, there are academics that are trying to say that these are “minor attracted persons.”

MARK NORMAND: I’ve heard of MAPs. That’s bananas. Insane. Why isn’t that a big story?

JOE ROGAN: Gad Saad calls it “suicidal empathy.” You get to a point where you’re trying to justify everything and empathize with everything to the point where you make horrific actions and terrible crimes —

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: — justifiable.

MARK NORMAND: Well, doesn’t it kind of horseshoe — you see, like, an alt-right guy will draw a swastika on a synagogue, and you’re like, “All right, that guy’s shit.” But then a liberal guy will do it on a cybertruck. And you’re like, “Wait, you guys just met in the middle somehow.”

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

MARK NORMAND: You’re crazy.

JOE ROGAN: You’re putting swastikas on cybertrucks because you think Elon Musk is a Nazi because he said, “My heart goes out to you,” while he’s trying to stop fraud and waste. And they’re using the whole political machine to paint this guy as a Nazi. You’re buying into it to virtue signal. And so to show that you’re buying into it, you’re keying Teslas.

MARK NORMAND: But when you look at the steps of it, it’s fascinating.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s the same thing we were talking about earlier. The religious right is the same thing as the religious left and Islamists.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, the same thing.

JOE ROGAN: These are patterns of human behavior —

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: — where you want to point at other people and not look at yourself. And you want to think that your radical beliefs are fine, and everybody else’s radical beliefs are wrong.

The Two Algorithms: Politics, Media, and the Comedy World

MARK NORMAND: But we’ve gotten there with politics. And that’s what’s scary because no. 1, people aren’t… There’s not even two parties anymore. There’s two algorithms. Everybody’s just seeing two totally different realities.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

MARK NORMAND: Like these Iranian soccer player ladies who are too scared to go home. And you’re like, where’s Rapinoe? Where’s that loudmouth? She’s a justice warrior. Do some justice. Right.

JOE ROGAN: These people, their family back home is being kidnapped.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: These people are in real danger.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: And no one’s supporting them.

MARK NORMAND: Incredibly brave to do that, to show the hair, whatever they do. And they’re scared to go home. And then their family members get tortured because they won’t come back. It’s horrible.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly. I think those people sought refuge in Australia now.

MARK NORMAND: That’s right. That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, their whole life has been ruined. And no support from the left.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. Give a tweet, something. Hashtag.

JOE ROGAN: It’s crazy. Like, how do they pick certain things to support and other things they just blatantly ignore?

MARK NORMAND: It’s fascinating. It’s so contradictory. The right will be like, “Abortion’s bad,” but then they’ll have an abortion behind the curtain.

JOE ROGAN: Or like the left, getting horribly mad at the George Floyd violence.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: How do they do that to him? But then that lady in Charlotte gets stabbed on a train.

MARK NORMAND: Not a peep. Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You got some guy that’s getting released from jail, like 40 times. He’s a violent offender, over and over again. Stabs some random lady who survived the Ukraine war. She was a refugee from Ukraine.

MARK NORMAND: And not a bad looker.

JOE ROGAN: Hot.

MARK NORMAND: Very hot.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the problem. Nobody feels sympathetic for a hot lady. She’s got it too easy.

MARK NORMAND: Well, that’s correct. People are people.

JOE ROGAN: Nuts.

MARK NORMAND: Damn.

JOE ROGAN: Nuts.

MARK NORMAND: Nuts. And then I feel like some of this we’re saying is controversial. But how is this controversial? We’re just saying what is.

JOE ROGAN: In a world gone crazy, speaking sane is controversial.

MARK NORMAND: That’s why it feels so good when it comes back to real. Like when, you know, we had to call fat people beautiful. They’re all on Ozempic now. Like, what are we doing here? So now it’s okay to go, “All right. I like being thin. I want to be hot.”

JOE ROGAN: I know.

MARK NORMAND: But they never go, “I was lying. I lied a bunch.”

JOE ROGAN: I know.

MARK NORMAND: “I was a fat piece of s* and I hated it.” Lizzo’s losing weight. She was the fat champion.

JOE ROGAN: I know, she’s lost a lot of weight.

MARK NORMAND: She looks great. But I liked fat.

JOE ROGAN: And she’s probably a lot healthier.

MARK NORMAND: Of course.

Jelly Roll’s Transformation and Stage Names

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s very strange. People are mad at Jelly Roll for losing weight.

MARK NORMAND: Well, his name’s Jelly Roll.

JOE ROGAN: He’s lost 300 pounds with pure discipline.

MARK NORMAND: Is that right? Come on.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: No.

JOE ROGAN: Ozempic.

MARK NORMAND: Really?

JOE ROGAN: No Ozempic.

MARK NORMAND: What’s he doing?

JOE ROGAN: He does testosterone replacement and exercise. That’s it. And changed his diet. Eliminated sugar. Eliminated everything from his diet.

MARK NORMAND: Because he was a big boy.

JOE ROGAN: He was 500 pounds.

MARK NORMAND: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. He lost 300. He’s in the twos now. And then 35 pounds of it is extra skin. He’s got crazy extra skin. He worked out with me in here. He had ran six miles the day before. Came into the studio, before the podcast we did, he ran 2 and a half miles on the treadmill. I watched him.

MARK NORMAND: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: Talking, like, in great shape. He’s talking while he’s running, laughing, joking around.

MARK NORMAND: Hey, good for him.

JOE ROGAN: Super nice to everybody.

MARK NORMAND: Nice, sweet.

JOE ROGAN: The sweetest guy you ever want to meet.

MARK NORMAND: He’s a very nice guy to everybody, man.

JOE ROGAN: Everybody sees him hugging everybody. He’s like a sweet, kind guy and he’s on the right path. And he’s lost 300 pounds.

MARK NORMAND: Wow. Good for him.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: He’s got to change the name. No, you can’t be Jelly Roll and thin.

JOE ROGAN: Just call him Jelly. Jelly.

MARK NORMAND: Anyway, not even that.

JOE ROGAN: What is his real name? I’ve known that guy for seven years. I don’t even know his real name.

MARK NORMAND: Jason. Jason? You’re Jason now? I’m sorry.

JOE ROGAN: No, I’ve known him for seven years. I met him at my club. I’ve known him for three years.

MARK NORMAND: All right, Jason.

JOE ROGAN: I didn’t know that. I would have guessed, like, Brian.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, yeah. Who knows?

JOE ROGAN: Who knows? But it’s cool that he’s got a fake name, though. That’s a good move.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. It’s a black guy move.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Wild. Vanilla Ice.

MARK NORMAND: A black guy move. You know, Earthquake, they all have cool names. Lil Wayne. You’ve got to have a cool name for a black guy, right?

JOE ROGAN: Very few comics have done that. Earthquake’s one of the few.

MARK NORMAND: You know, we had Hamburger, the Cable Guy. There you go. There’s a white guy doing it. Dice Clay.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

MARK NORMAND: That’s a fake name.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MARK NORMAND: So a couple guys did it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, Dice Clay is just Dice. I just call him Dice.

MARK NORMAND: He just kind of turned into Dice. It just is Dice now.

JOE ROGAN: Well, most people don’t know that he was Andrew Silverstein.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: And the Dice Man was one of many characters that he did on stage.

MARK NORMAND: Travolta, Jerry Lewis. He did a bunch of guys.

JOE ROGAN: Well, he’s got great impressions.

MARK NORMAND: He’s a talent. He’s a talented guy.

JOE ROGAN: He’s not just a talented guy. That guy is a legitimate performance artist.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: He does performance art on the street for fun, for no money. And he’s literally mocking the fact that he’s not famous.

MARK NORMAND: Yes. That’s comedy.

JOE ROGAN: The most ego-free version of that.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

Andrew Dice Clay’s Advice and Doing the Road

MARK NORMAND: I opened for him once and I was kind of nervous. He’s a legend. And I went up to him, I was like, “Hello, Mr. Dice. Just letting you know I’m your opener.” He goes, “You want a picture?” I’m like, “No, I’m just letting you know, I’m your opener. How much time do you want me to do?” He goes, “You want a picture?” And I’m like, “I don’t need any picture. Just how much time do you want me to do?” He goes, “Get over here.” And he gets me in a headlock and takes a picture. And I never found out how much time to do. But as he was with me, he gave me great advice.

JOE ROGAN: In the 90s, I was doing NewsRadio, and I was just doing the Store and the Laugh Factory and the Improv. He’s like, “You should do the road.” And I said, “Really? Why?” He goes, “You don’t want to be relying on these jerk offs to make your living.” He goes, “You’re a funny comic. You could be headlining all over the country, making a good living. You don’t need these f*ing people.”

MARK NORMAND: That’s really nice.

JOE ROGAN: It was the smartest thing that anybody ever taught me.

MARK NORMAND: You’ve got to do the road.

JOE ROGAN: I had to do the road because I was doing like 15-minute sets. And I never was really headlining for a few years. And I did, back when I lived in New York. And then all of a sudden I was like, “You know, he’s right.” And then I started really putting together an hour, like a solid hour on the road. And it got way better. My act got way better. And then I realized, like, if a show gets canceled, I can still make a living.

MARK NORMAND: Right?

JOE ROGAN: Whereas everybody who just works in those poor comics that stop doing the road and then become writers — that’s even worse than being an actor because nobody knows who you are and you’re completely reliant on the scene to feed you. And then you have a mortgage. Maybe you have a family, you have a wife and kids, college you have to pay for.

MARK NORMAND: Writers’ rooms are cushy, though. You get air conditioning, you get snacks, you get healthcare. You get a paycheck and you go into an office every day. But you’re writing the funny stuff that that other person says.

JOE ROGAN: True.

MARK NORMAND: And in the back of your head, you know, like, the reason why it’s funny is because of my mind.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: And no one knows who I am. It’s a velvet prison.

JOE ROGAN: And then you see these 65-year-old comics back on the Funny Bone train because they’ve got to make money and no one knows who they are.

MARK NORMAND: And they can’t sell a ticket.

JOE ROGAN: They can’t sell a ticket.

MARK NORMAND: That is a bummer.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a bummer.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

How Podcasting Changed the Comedy Store

JOE ROGAN: And all these guys that missed the podcast train, too.

MARK NORMAND: Ooh.

JOE ROGAN: A lot of those guys, they’ve kind of abandoned the bitterness. But years ago, guys were really bitter.

MARK NORMAND: I remember that.

JOE ROGAN: Like, “Are you a comic? Are you a podcaster? Well, I can’t do both. What am I doing all day?”

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. It’s a cheat code. People get to know you. They listen to you every day or every week, and then you get to go to their town.

JOE ROGAN: And in conversation with people, you come up with ideas.

MARK NORMAND: That’s true.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a big one.

MARK NORMAND: That’s true.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: I mean, I think this podcast saved the Store.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, 100%. I was a part of it. I know for a fact it did.

MARK NORMAND: It changed everything. You had all those guys, Santino, Theo, all those.

JOE ROGAN: A hundred percent changed the Store. And it changed everybody’s attitude towards each other. Because instead of being competition — like, we’re all struggling to try to get this one spot on a sitcom or this one host of a show — instead, we’re all an asset to each other because we’re guests on each other’s shows. “Hey, could you help me promote my Netflix special?” “Yeah, come on.” And everybody’s an asset. Everybody helps everybody.

MARK NORMAND: They help. Yeah. You’re a guest on theirs, they’re a guest on yours. And it’s so low maintenance. You just set it up in a hotel room and put it out.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. And people love it because they love real conversations.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s hard to get those in this weird world where everybody’s communicating on social media.

The Late Night Show Experience

MARK NORMAND: Well, it makes you think that maybe that’s why actors have to play ball, because they don’t have this thing to rely on. So they have to, you know, play the game and bullshit each other.

JOE ROGAN: The sane ones that I talk to, they talk about the deep pain that it gives them having to f*ing acquiesce to these people.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. Well, I just did, you know, I’m doing this crazy press tour with the special. I just did a late night show, and it was fun. You do the couch. You put makeup on. You put on a nice jacket and you yuck it up for the live audience. But you’re just sitting there going, that guy’s got a headset and a clipboard. What is she doing over there? He’s like a page. He’s an intern. It’s so much wasted money.

JOE ROGAN: So much wasted money.

MARK NORMAND: And you’re like, one of these are kind of going away. It’s unnecessary.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that was the thing about the complaint about the Colbert show being canceled. They’re like, “You’re censoring. You’re censoring speech.” But the Colbert show is losing CBS 40 to $50 million a year.

MARK NORMAND: Jesus, that’s wild. Well, who watches it? I mean, no offense to these guys. They’re all super talented, whatever. But it’s like the idea that they’re

JOE ROGAN: supposed to keep that thing on the air while they’re hemorrhaging money from it is crazy.

MARK NORMAND: Crazy. And the guest is just like a crapshoot. Who are we getting today? Snooki. Oh, great. I’m not going to watch that. I couldn’t think of anybody relevant, but, you know, they have to sit and talk to Snooki. You have to. You got a book out, huh? Who’s going to watch that?

JOE ROGAN: That was Bill Hicks’s old joke about Jay Leno killing himself. Do you remember that joke? Yeah, yeah. Sitting down next to Joey Lawrence. “Hey, you got a girlfriend.”

MARK NORMAND: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: And he sticks an Uzi in his mouth and it blows out his brains. They form an NBC peacock.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Because he’s a company man. To the bitter end.

MARK NORMAND: Well, that’s why Conan, he saw the writing on the wall and he said, “I’m starting a pod.”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, he also left and did the TBS show, which was, like, way less pressure. That was a good move because he still got to do his own show and people watch it that are fans. It still kept an audience, but he still stayed himself.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, yeah, that’s true.

JOE ROGAN: He’s a smart guy.

MARK NORMAND: He’s a smart guy, and he’s very funny. Super funny.

JOE ROGAN: Very funny.

MARK NORMAND: He helped me a lot in the early days, too.

Conan, Scripted Banter, and the Late Night Machine

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I was on his show way, way back in the day. A friend of mine was a writer on his show in the very beginning. And when I went to the filming, their banter was all planned out. They had these big, like, post boards with all the dialogue. And someone would be standing behind. What was the other guy’s name?

MARK NORMAND: Richter. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Andy Richter. Someone would be standing behind Andy Richter, and someone would be standing behind Conan. And so they would read the things that they were going to say. It was all scripted out. I was like, “Oh, this is crazy.”

MARK NORMAND: That’s funny because when I did this late night show, they call you at like, 10 in the morning, like, “What do you want to talk about?” What do you call those guys? Like, the producer guy who gives you the. And he’s like, “What about this?” I’m like, “Nobody cares about that.” He’s like, “We’ll talk about your writing process and how you got into stand up.” I’m like, “That’s just hack shit that’s been done to death.”

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

MARK NORMAND: Let me riff.

JOE ROGAN: Let me riff.

MARK NORMAND: I’m a comic. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I did the Bob and Tom show once. They tried to do that to me. The producer got upset at me. Bob and Tom were great, but yeah, the producers were upset with me. He was visibly upset. He goes, “Well, what are you going to bring up?”

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And I go, “I don’t know.” He’s like, “You don’t know?” I go, “We’re going to have fun. Don’t worry about it. I’ve done this a million times.”

MARK NORMAND: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Go in there and have a good time.

MARK NORMAND: Don’t worry about it. I did it once. I was so green that they made me write on loose leaf setups. And I wrote, like, eight setups. So then he’d be like, “So I hear you have a dog.” And I’m like, “Yeah,” and I do my dog bit.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, it’s horrible.

MARK NORMAND: I know. It was like school.

Opie and Anthony: The Birth of Podcast Culture

JOE ROGAN: That used to be all morning radio guys doing their act on the radio.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, it was terrible.

JOE ROGAN: Terrible, terrible. Fake. You know what changed that? Opie and Anthony.

MARK NORMAND: Opie? Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Opie and Anthony was the beginning of podcasts.

MARK NORMAND: Not Stern?

JOE ROGAN: No, Stern was the beginning of free speech. Stern was the beginning of, like, being wild on the radio. He’s the goat. Like, if it wasn’t for him, none of this. We would have no podcast. Well, I don’t know if we wouldn’t have a podcast, but the evolution of it would have been stalled radically. Yeah, he was the guy that stuck his neck out. He was the guy that got fined, like, during the Bush administration. People forget about that. They were going after him for indecency.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Not blasphemy, obscenity. They were fining the f*ing stations insane amounts of money.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: But he was so big that he stayed alive and survived that. But then Opie and Anthony came along, and it was totally different. It was just wild and loose.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It was just Norton and Voss and Patrice and.

MARK NORMAND: And Louie.

JOE ROGAN: Louie and all of us and Ari, and we would all go in, and I loved going there. And then when Anthony started doing Live from the Compound, he had this sick house in Long Island. They made a ton of money. Oh, yeah, they had a sick house in Long Island. And he built his own studio in his basement so he could live stream. And he had, like, Guinness on tap. And he had, like, real professional microphones and cameras. Oh, it was nuts.

MARK NORMAND: Freedom.

JOE ROGAN: And I was like, “Wow, that’s it.” And they were trying to get him to stop doing it.

MARK NORMAND: Really?

JOE ROGAN: They were saying, “Yeah, this is violating your contract.” Because I’m not making any money off of this.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, just doing it. Love of the game.

JOE ROGAN: And they were upset that he was doing this on the Internet.

MARK NORMAND: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And then Tom Green. Tom Green was big.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah, that was a big one.

JOE ROGAN: We did his Internet show.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But it was just totally loose. Like, there was no asking you what you wanted to talk about when you were sitting on the couch. You just came in and hung out.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Tom Green’s a funny guy, and he’s smart and loose, and we’re having a good time. And I was like, “This is it. This is the future.”

MARK NORMAND: He was weird, innovative. He got ball surgery on air. Remember that? He had ball cancer and he did the surgery on the show. Did he really? Yeah, he was ahead of the game. But these TV shows are so weird because they want comics on, but they don’t want you to be a comic.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MARK NORMAND: These morning shows are like, “Oh, what’s up, funny man?” And you’re like, well, I atola. And they’re like, “Cut it, cut it.” I’m just being me.

JOE ROGAN: They’re just scared.

MARK NORMAND: You had me on.

JOE ROGAN: They get scared. They get scared of losing their job. I mean, those people are really scared because they don’t have nothing. All they have is like, “Hey, good morning. It’s five past the hour. Here’s Tom with the weather.”

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like a fake gig.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Anything can take it away from them. So all the stuff that they rely on, their membership at the country club, they have to pay for. All that stuff could go away at any moment. So they live terrified.

MARK NORMAND: That’s a prison. He might as well be a weatherman.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And even the weatherman.

MARK NORMAND: Same thing. Yeah. That’s a good gig, though, I guess. I mean, you just. Eight minutes to go. Have the Doppler. You do some hand movements and then you’re done. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just. You live in hell. We’re lucky.

MARK NORMAND: We’re very lucky, and I’m very grateful.

The Legacy of Opie and Anthony

JOE ROGAN: We’re lucky. But this platform, like the podcast platform that we all enjoy, that we all do, wouldn’t have existed without Opie and Anthony. Opie and Anthony was the first time where comics got together and it was completely loose.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It was just. There was no figuring out, like, what we’re going to say. Everybody was just riffing. They’re all shitting on each other. And then when it went to XM, it was amazing.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Then you could swear.

MARK NORMAND: Right, right.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, my God. Crazy.

MARK NORMAND: If you’ve never heard it, go on YouTube and watch it. There’s some comedy gold on there.

JOE ROGAN: Gold. Especially the Patrice episodes.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, my God, he was so good.

MARK NORMAND: That’s where he really shined. You know, him and Louie together talking about black versus Mexican was amazing. And they do one episode where they talk about where the N word came from. And Louie goes, “Well, I think it was just a bunch of guys being N words.” You never heard shit like that. It was comedy gold.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you could be free. And then Tough Crowd.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. That was another one.

JOE ROGAN: Another one. Another kind of situation.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Where comics just got together and Colin Quinn was hosting it, and he’s hilarious. And everybody’s just riffing around, and Norton’s chiming in, Apollos chiming in. And Greg Giraldo, when he was alive.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, brilliant guy.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, he was great.

Starting Over After the Special

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. But comedy’s weird because, like, I got my special out, and it’s only been out like a day or two, but I’m getting all these nice messages. “I love that bit. I love that bit.” And those are the bits that didn’t really do as well as some of the other ones. Isn’t that weird how that works?

JOE ROGAN: Well, sometimes people just like something clever that’s different than the way they think.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, right, right.

JOE ROGAN: It isn’t. There are bits that are just hilarious, and there are other bits that just make me smile. Like, “That’s f*ing great.”

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Bit.

MARK NORMAND: That’s true.

JOE ROGAN: Just like Hicks said that once. Like, “If it’s not going to be funny, at least make it interesting.”

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. That’s good.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, be funny, but just be you.

MARK NORMAND: But if you can be both. Yes, that’s the winner.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the key.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And it’s just this constant dance. And then as soon as it’s over, oh, my God, I’m starting from scratch.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, that’s where I’m at. I got the special out. I’m back to square one. I’m the worst comic in America right now.

Joey Diaz, Tour Life, and Remembering Comedy Legends

JOE ROGAN: You’ll be the club tonight?

MARK NORMAND: I’ll be there.

JOE ROGAN: Joey’s at the club tonight. Oh, Joey Diaz is headlining.

MARK NORMAND: I don’t want to follow him with my hard.

JOE ROGAN: No, he’ll be headlining.

MARK NORMAND: Okay, great.

JOE ROGAN: But no one has to follow him. He’s an animal.

MARK NORMAND: He is.

JOE ROGAN: He’s on fire right now.

MARK NORMAND: Really?

JOE ROGAN: He’s on fire. Yeah, because he’s been doing these residencies. He’s been doing casinos in Philadelphia. He’s been doing shows all around New York and New Jersey. He’s killing it right now.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, good.

JOE ROGAN: I’m still trying to get him to move out here. I’m trying.

MARK NORMAND: I can see.

JOE ROGAN: I’m going to have to get him a place. I think I might have to buy a place.

MARK NORMAND: A little warm out here, though. He’s a sweaty Cuban.

JOE ROGAN: He’ll deal with it. It’s hot too.

MARK NORMAND: That’s a good point. I mean, really, right now, he don’t really complain about heat that much.

JOE ROGAN: Joey complains about these mokes, these white people. “Joe Rogan around these white people too much.”

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, well, New York’s the weirdest. You walk by a hobo jerking off, and then I’ll tell a zinger and be like, “Easy.” Isn’t that weird? I’m like, there’s a dead guy on 3rd Street. And you’re in the subway. You took here. And then I tell a joke and be like, “Whoa, buddy.”

The HR Culture and Shifting Social Norms

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’ll turn around. It just has to. Like, culture goes in these big waves. It’s like a seesaw. It goes up, it goes down, it goes back, it goes forth.

MARK NORMAND: It just feels like with young people, there’s an HR vibe in the young world.

JOE ROGAN: We think that’s the world they have to live in every day at work.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, that’s a good point.

JOE ROGAN: They go from the university where they’re taught that shit, and then they go to a job where they’re taught that. And that shit can actually help them get ahead.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And if you enforce it, people like. Oh, they’re scared. They’ll help you. They’ll move you ahead. If you push these values and push these ideas, it’ll help. And then there’s people that are — their whole job is just enforcing that stuff in the workplace.

MARK NORMAND: And those people are f*ed up.

JOE ROGAN: They’re scary.

MARK NORMAND: HR people are the wackiest nuts on the planet.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, those are the scary people because those are the f*ing hall pass monitors.

MARK NORMAND: Right. You know, it’s kind of like Asian porn. Asians are the most repressed people, and their porn is bananas because they got to get it out.

JOE ROGAN: You know what’s nuts about some of their porn? They have to blur out the genitals.

MARK NORMAND: I know. Oh, silly.

JOE ROGAN: Help me out.

MARK NORMAND: What are we doing here?

JOE ROGAN: Help me out. Like, I don’t get to see her where she’s in a guy’s mouth. This is crazy.

MARK NORMAND: That’s funny.

JOE ROGAN: Legitimately crazy.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. You know, like in the 90s, you couldn’t say “but,” but you could say the N-word on TV.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Saturday Night Live.

MARK NORMAND: Exactly. Right. You’d say the N-word.

JOE ROGAN: That Chevy Chase, Richard Pryor thing.

MARK NORMAND: Yes, exactly. But you couldn’t say “but” at all. So it’s funny how we take certain — that that’s okay, but not that.

JOE ROGAN: I know. People are always looking to tell people what to do.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That’s really what it is.

MARK NORMAND: And that’s not new.

JOE ROGAN: They’re always looking to define people as being worse than them. Like, “That’s a bad person.”

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: “I’m a good person.” And they’re always looking to tell people what to do.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, that’s as old as time.

JOE ROGAN: Sure.

MARK NORMAND: These old — you know, but it just keeps shifting. Like in the 50s, you couldn’t have a man and a woman in the same building. But you could smoke in front of a baby. And now you can have people f*ing on TV, but smoking is like — they have a disclaimer.

JOE ROGAN: There’s always going to be bitches in this world, ruin it for everybody. No matter what you do, there’s always going to be people that try to find a loophole, try to find some f*ing cheat code, sneak their way to the top, take Ozempic, do what they got to do.

MARK NORMAND: I guess so. But we’re all going to die one day, folks. You might as well have a good time.

JOE ROGAN: You should be having a good time before you die. Don’t wait till you die and go, “I should have had more fun.”

Bert Kreischer’s Tour Bus Fire

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, well, don’t have too much fun. Bert Kreischer — he quit drinking.

JOE ROGAN: He had to.

MARK NORMAND: He got blood clots. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Probably from the vax. He took four of those things.

MARK NORMAND: Really? Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: He had to keep taking them because he was doing projects.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Telling me he needs another booster in order to do this new thing.

MARK NORMAND: Well, what happened to his tour bus?

JOE ROGAN: What happened to the tour bus?

MARK NORMAND: Oh, his tour bus caught on fire.

JOE ROGAN: When did this happen?

MARK NORMAND: I think three days ago. They got a flat tire and then just randomly — I think they got another ride and, like, while they were getting the ride, it caught on fire.

JOE ROGAN: What happened?

MARK NORMAND: They could have been in there. I think he might be smartly saving it for a podcast or something. Oh, well, it’s all over the news too. Yeah, they just showed the fire, but I don’t think that they’ve said what caused it. He did a big Instagram live about it. I didn’t watch it, but yeah, that thing is torched. It looks like Gaza footage.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the type of guy that might light his tour bus on fire just for clicks.

MARK NORMAND: Look at that. Whoa.

JOE ROGAN: “Comedian Bert Kreischer’s tour bus destroyed by fire in Minnesota.” Yeah, the Antifa got him.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. Minnesota’s cursed. Fire cause is unknown.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, Antifa. I’m calling it. I’m calling it. It’s the Anti-ICE people. “We are all safe, but my bus is gone. God works in mysterious ways.” What? Oh, he lit it on fire. As soon as you say “God works in mysterious ways” —

MARK NORMAND: Look at that thing.

JOE ROGAN: That’s nuts.

MARK NORMAND: Something can’t stop the machine.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. That’s crazy.

MARK NORMAND: Something’s burning.

JOE ROGAN: That’s gotta suck because that was a very expensive tour bus. Yeah, he was always on that thing.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, my God. That is crazy.

JOE ROGAN: I’ve never had the desire to get a tour bus.

MARK NORMAND: I don’t like it either. I’ve opened for Bert on the bus and it’s fun, but I couldn’t do that all day, every day.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I don’t get hammered like he does, so it’s like this idea of just touring around. But my friends that are in music, like Sturgill Simpson, he loves being on the bus.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, some people love it.

JOE ROGAN: He said it’s like a living room that you travel around in. They’re all strumming along, singing songs, partying, laughing, watching movies.

MARK NORMAND: I guess it’s nice. I’ll give you a flight. I’ll get there in 10 minutes.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

MARK NORMAND: You’re traveling all night.

JOE ROGAN: I need to go to the gym. I need to eat steak.

MARK NORMAND: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Nice restaurant. I don’t like doing that.

MARK NORMAND: I’m with you. And that bed is like a coffin.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: And you feel the bump of the road. You’re like, “Oh, we could just turn off any minute,” and all the highway —

JOE ROGAN: You think about crashing.

MARK NORMAND: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: What about that guy driving, falls asleep?

MARK NORMAND: Oh, and those aren’t the most stand-up guys driving those. They’re like ex-cons and pedophiles and whatnot.

JOE ROGAN: It’s weird. Also, I’ve never done those long tours like that. I don’t like those.

MARK NORMAND: I don’t either.

JOE ROGAN: I think they’re bad for you.

MARK NORMAND: Well, also, we got kids, so I like to get in, get back. Get in, get back.

The Maxim Comedy Tour and Charlie Murphy

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I’ve always done that. I’ve always done like a week. Except one time I did the Maxim Comedy Tour with Charlie Murphy and John Heffron. We did 22 dates in a month. And I hated it because I’d be waking up and I’m like, “Where am I?” I didn’t know where I was. You’re right, because you’re always on the road.

MARK NORMAND: 22 dates is crazy.

JOE ROGAN: It was nuts.

MARK NORMAND: In a row, you don’t even know what day it is. But by the end —

JOE ROGAN: By the end of that month, you’re sharp, you’re tight.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, you’re sharp.

JOE ROGAN: Out there murdering. Your timing is on point. Everything is just rock solid. And in a weird group.

MARK NORMAND: Heffron, Murphy, and you. Yeah, that’s a lot of range.

JOE ROGAN: It was fun. He’s funny, he’s fun. He’s very funny.

MARK NORMAND: Clean too.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, he mixes it up. He’s not clean off stage. Hilarious. He’s just hilarious, period. He’s a really good joke writer too. And this was like he had come off of Last Comic Standing. He won that, right? And then Charlie was the best. Charlie was —

MARK NORMAND: I never met him.

JOE ROGAN: Such a good dude.

MARK NORMAND: Really?

JOE ROGAN: Such a real man. Yeah, a real solid dude.

MARK NORMAND: Well, Eddie Murphy always talks about how he was kind of his protector. Like if you talked about Eddie Murphy, he would just go beat you up.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, well, Charlie was a legitimate martial artist.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, is that right? I didn’t know that.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, yeah. He fought in karate tournaments. Yeah, we talked a lot about martial arts. He knew his stuff for sure.

MARK NORMAND: Ah, I didn’t know that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: I thought he was a street guy.

JOE ROGAN: No, he knew how to fight. He was a dangerous guy, but just a nice guy. Just a solid human being. I didn’t even know he was sick, man. I had no idea until he died. And he kept it quiet, just like Norm did. Yeah. No one knew. Norm was talking about moving to Austin.

MARK NORMAND: No.

JOE ROGAN: Coming out here. Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: And then just died.

MARK NORMAND: That’s so commendable. In this victim culture, he could have gotten so many points off that. And he just rode it out.

JOE ROGAN: Apparently he had been fighting cancer for a long time.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And if you look at him, like when he got real puffy for a while.

MARK NORMAND: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Probably what was going on.

MARK NORMAND: Ah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: He was probably battling cancer.

Norm MacDonald and Wrapping Up

MARK NORMAND: If you watch his old, I’m talking 80s clips, he’s holding his stomach like on Letterman. Because he had stomach cancer and that’s why he always touched his stomach, because I think it hurt.

JOE ROGAN: He had it for that long.

MARK NORMAND: He had it because he had it. And then he kind of beat it and it came back. Yeah. Crazy. He’s a hero.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, man.

MARK NORMAND: Is there a funnier guy, than Norm?

JOE ROGAN: I mean, one of the funniest guys of all time.

MARK NORMAND: Funny on a podcast, funny on stand up, funny in movies.

JOE ROGAN: Funny talking to him in the hallway of the store.

MARK NORMAND: Yes, exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Just a great guy, man. Oh yeah, a great guy. And you know, and would go after people who are c*s online too.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, he did.

JOE ROGAN: Some guy went after him.

MARK NORMAND: Oh, really?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. “One day I’m going to meet you in real life.”

MARK NORMAND: Whoa. He wrote Shane a nice. Shane showed me the email after he got a solid.

JOE ROGAN: He was a solid dude. He was a real solid and funny man.

MARK NORMAND: So brilliant, so funny, enlightened. And he was like a Dostoevsky reader, you know, and everybody thought he was this, you know, dumb guy.

JOE ROGAN: I sat next to him randomly on a flight twice.

MARK NORMAND: Don’t do the smoking story.

JOE ROGAN: I did already.

MARK NORMAND: All right, all right. We’ve all heard it too many times. Sorry.

JOE ROGAN: But just randomly sitting next to him on a flight, it was like. It was such a treat.

MARK NORMAND: That’s a gift.

JOE ROGAN: To hang out with him for hours on a plane, just laughing and talking.

MARK NORMAND: Ah, Joe.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MARK NORMAND: Over here.

JOE ROGAN: Solid dude. There’s good people out there.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Exist.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah. He was great. And he changed Weekend Update.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

MARK NORMAND: I mean, the fact that he got fired for being funny. He told the truth. He told the truth about O.J. killing his wife and he got in trouble.

JOE ROGAN: Is that what happened from Weekend Update?

MARK NORMAND: Because old Meyer was, like, the head of NBC and he was friends with O.J. so he was like, “Stop shitting on O.J., he’s a friend of mine.” He’s like, “I can’t. He’s a murderer.”

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. To stop shitting on O.J. and he kept doing it, and he got fired. Really? That’s what it was.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. Let me hear what he said. Back it up.

MARK NORMAND: “And now the fake news. Well, it’s finally official. Be honest. We can’t.”

JOE ROGAN: Can’t play it now.

MARK NORMAND: Okay, okay.

JOE ROGAN: We’ll get in trouble.

MARK NORMAND: Yeah, you can see it. It’s amazing. It’s. He’s got a whole compilation.

JOE ROGAN: Let’s wrap this up, bring it home.

MARK NORMAND: All right.

JOE ROGAN: Mark Normand, you’re the man.

MARK NORMAND: Appreciate you, brother. New special.

JOE ROGAN: New special out on Netflix. I know, it’s hilarious. I watched you work out some of the material. It’s called None Too Pleased. It’s available now. As of the time we’re talking, it’s number five. I’m sure it’ll boost up after this.

MARK NORMAND: Hell, yeah. Kick it up a notch and I’ll see you tonight. Thank you, sir. Let’s go, comedy.

JOE ROGAN: Bye, buddy.

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