#2340 - Charley Crockett

Charley Crockett is a country singer-songwriter. His most recentl album, "Lonesome Drifter," is available now. www.charleycrockett.com Go to https://ExpressVPN.com/ROGAN to get 4 months free! THE WATERFRONT - NOW PLAYING, ONLY ON NETFLIX Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, doing something at the Viper Room and then trying to come here the next day. The Viper Room is just notorious, like even when you're in the building, it just feels like, ugh.

• 0:27Speaker 03

  It is notorious.

• 0:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:29Speaker 03

  And it's funny because the only way I'd ever been in there was through that, you know, the door on the side street there.

• 0:33Joe Rogan?

  Uh huh.

• 0:34Speaker 03

  You know, and they, you know, they had all the cameras out and took me around the, I'd never come in through the door on Sunset before, even recognize the place.

• 0:42Joe Rogan?

  No, I'd never been through that door either.

• 0:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 0:45Joe Rogan?

  I've only, like I said, I've only been there once. I was there for a comedy show. It just feels weird. It's, there's certain buildings that just have bizarre history.

• 0:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, well Shooter was telling me last night, man, River Phoenix died on the sidewalk right out that door on the, I didn't know that, I thought it was in front of the, I thought it was in front of the whiskey for some reason.

• 1:02Joe Rogan?

  No, no, it was the Viper Room.

• 1:04Speaker 03

  I never realized that.

• 1:05Joe Rogan?

  No, it's a fucked up place. Hey, man, nice to meet you.

• 1:09Speaker 03

  Pleasure's all mine, Joe.

• 1:10Joe Rogan?

  I love your music.

• 1:11Speaker 03

  Really?

• 1:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, my friend Jake turned me on to you. Your music is like, you've lived a life, you can't fake that, you know what I mean? There's something about certain dudes' voices and songs, they're like, alright, that guy's done some living, you know? You can't create that with AI.

• 1:29Speaker 03

  Ha ha.

• 1:30Joe Rogan?

  Right? They're gonna try.

• 1:32Speaker 03

  Everybody, I mean, it's crazy, we're, I mean, we're, what is that, we're kind of reaching singularity, you know?

• 1:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  Where nobody can tell the difference.

• 1:42Joe Rogan?

  I know, I think we're right, right about there. There was a new one that just got released today, did you hear the new one today? It's even, even better than the Google one, that was insane, it was released last week. Yeah, it's weird.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  What are you talking about?

• 1:55Joe Rogan?

  Uh, some new AI engine that does video, I'll send it to you, Jamie. It's, uh, it's pretty incredible. This, the, the way they're able to make stuff now where it looks exactly like, like real human beings, like it doesn't, it doesn't look fake even a little bit, yeah.

• 2:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:14Joe Rogan?

  I'll send it to you, Jamie.

• 2:19Joe Rogan?

  It's called um Byte Dance. So is that the China one?

• 2:23Speaker 04

  That's the company.

• 2:25Joe Rogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:25Speaker 04

  Byte Dance is the company that owns like TikTok and stuff.

• 2:27Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah, China. Yeah. Yeah. Um, this is their new AI. So this is all fake, all fake people, all done by computers, indistinguishable. You know, it's like, it's very strange. You got it? Throw that up. Give me some sound.

• 2:49Joe Rogan?

  You gotta click on it.

• 2:54Joe Rogan?

  This is all fake.

• 3:08Joe Rogan?

  I mean, what the fuck, man?

• 3:29Joe Rogan?

  We are living in the weirdest time ever, Charlie Crockett.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  Oh, man, you're right.

• 3:33Joe Rogan?

  This is the weirdest time ever to be alive because we are so close to not being able to tell what's real and what's fake. We're so close. I mean, we're essentially right there with video. And then eventually it's going to move into some sort of perception. It's gonna be feel. You're gonna be able to put a helmet on and whoosh, go into some bizarre world.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  And you can't stop it.

• 4:01Joe Rogan?

  You can't stop it.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  It's coming.

• 4:03Joe Rogan?

  It's coming. It's in the people that are working on it in America, like, we have to because China's working on it. I'm like, okay. I guess that's just what we're doing.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  Space race, even if it's just a show.

• 4:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's essentially the Manhattan Project for artificial intelligence. There's a race around the world.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  Joe, did we go to the moon?

• 4:22Joe Rogan?

  I don't think so.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  You know, I don't think so either.

• 4:24Joe Rogan?

  I don't think so. It makes you sound fucking completely insane to say it, but.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  I lost a lot of friends when I was younger when I started talking like that.

• 4:32Joe Rogan?

  I did too. I gained a lot of friends too, though. I gained a lot of sc- uh, listen, man, I've talked to scientists that don't want to talk about it publicly.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:40Joe Rogan?

  Scientists.

• 4:41Speaker 03

  Well, see, you know what I figured? I figured that would be the one time in the history of civilization that hu- human beings got to a new place and said, nah, I'm good and turned around.

• 4:54Joe Rogan?

  Exactly.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  I don't want to look around there anymore.

• 4:56Joe Rogan?

  Well, Bart Sabrell, he's this researcher that's been doing these documentaries on the moon landing. And he's been saying it's fake since like, I met him sometime in the early 2000s, I believe. And he put out this, this documentary called The Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon. And he's got a great quote and he says, there's not a single thing that's not easier, faster and cheaper to reproduce today from 1969, except the moon landing. It's the one thing. Well, and everybody go, oh, but they spent so much money. Why would they spend the money on that again? Well, why would they spend money on all the things they spend money on? Like, what are you talking about? It doesn't make any sense. The, the moon is, has trillions of dollars in rare minerals on it. There's all sorts of shit on the moon that would be very beneficial to society.

• 5:40Joe Rogan?

  And it was always going to be that we're going to have a base on the moon and they were going to use that to go to other places. I don't think so. I mean, if you look at the, just the, the way they filmed it, like when you watched it on television, the people that watched it on television, it was the first time ever there were, where there was a news thing where the, the news stations, the, the networks didn't have a direct feed. What they had was they filmed the moon landing, they, they showed it on a projection screen. And then the networks pointed their camera at the projection screen. That's why it looks so shitty.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  Wow, do you remember there was a movie that came out, it wasn't that far back, and it's all about this, like a legit movie? And I should remember this actor's name because he's getting better and better known. He's a really great actor. He played the lawman in Killers of the Flower Moon that shows up there at the, near the end, and finally kind of takes them down. But he's been in a lot of other stuff, and it's this really great movie about faking the moon landing and all that stuff for like, you know, American kind of cultural and economic dominance over Russia and all that.

• 6:52Joe Rogan?

  Oh, so it's like-

• 6:53Speaker 03

  It's recent.

• 6:54Joe Rogan?

  Oh, okay. Hey, Jamie, can you tell Jeff to bring in some coffee? Oh, yeah. So it's a doc, it's drama, a drama?

• 7:02Speaker 03

  It's a drama, yeah, it's a Hollywood movie.

• 7:05Joe Rogan?

  Oh, Jamie will find out what it is when he gets back.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I only saw it once, but it was good. And you know this actor, because he's been everywhere, man, he's been in everything. I should know his name, I need to call him out. I think I saw him at the airport in Burbank a few months ago, actually.

• 7:17Joe Rogan?

  It seems like a stupid thing to say, but I don't think it is. I don't thi- and then after COVID, realizing how much stuff they can lie about, how much stuff the government can hide, how much stuff that people will just accept as being true despite all the evidence of the contrary, how much experts will go along with things, how easy it is to keep a secret. It's not that hard to keep a secret, especially a secret that is essentially set up to let us think, sir.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  Dang, that's how I know my wife stopped by.

• 7:45Joe Rogan?

  Yerba mate? Is that what you're into?

• 7:47Speaker 03

  I love them, man.

• 7:48Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they're good.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  You know why I like it, really? I didn't realize it for like a year or two, and now I realize it, because it tastes just like Coca-Cola.

• 7:55Joe Rogan?

  It does, really?

• 7:56Speaker 03

  It does. It's close. I think that's the secret, it tastes like Coca-Cola.

• 8:00Joe Rogan?

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• 8:43Joe Rogan?

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• 9:28Joe Rogan?

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• 10:12Joe Rogan?

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• 10:53Joe Rogan?

  Date within the first day. Try it for free today at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. That's ziprecruiter.com/rogan. ZipRecruiter. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. I would like to try the original Coca-Cola with cocaine in it.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  Oh shit.

• 11:10Joe Rogan?

  I wonder what that was like.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  Non habit forming.

• 11:12Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, allegedly. Yeah, another lie.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  Is it, was it true, right, that Bear, Bear at first had heroin in it or opium?

• 11:22Joe Rogan?

  Real?

• 11:23Speaker 03

  The original version of it? Yeah.

• 11:24Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 11:25Speaker 03

  The, the, the, the original product.

• 11:27Joe Rogan?

  We'll find that out.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it, I think it did.

• 11:29Joe Rogan?

  Well, that makes sense. I'm sure. That's real great for headaches.

• 11:35Joe Rogan?

  I mean, more lies, right? How many times have we been lied to?

• 11:38Speaker 03

  But, but you know what it is? It's, um, you know, I think it's, I'm preaching to the choir here, but I think it's a perception thing, right? With, uh, you know, it's like planting that flag on the moon.

• 11:51Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  Was a cultural thing, you know, a, uh, an American pop culture thing.

• 11:58Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 11:58Speaker 03

  Right?

• 11:59Joe Rogan?

  Well, they wanted us to be dominant militarily over Russia.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  Shit worked.

• 12:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. I mean, sort of, kinda.

• 12:05Speaker 03

  Kinda, I guess.

• 12:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. I mean, we definitely are dominant over, you know, militarily. We definitely were back then, essentially. Here it is. Heroin. Woo! Wow. Bear had heroin.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Non habit forming.

• 12:21Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  I gotta get the non habit forming kind.

• 12:25Joe Rogan?

  But I mean, like, what is the difference between that and doctors prescribing OxyContin? It's not that much. Sears Roebuck once sold heroin. Jesus Christ. Must have been a while time back then.

• 12:35Speaker 03

  Man, that's a great, uh, that's a great illustration there.

• 12:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, look at that. Two needles, two vitals of heroin, only a dollar fifty. Less than fifty dollars adjusted for inflation. Wow. This is the 19th century. So the 1800 Sears catalog used to offer a heroin kit. I think the actor you're talking about was Jesse Plemons, but I don't know what.

• 12:56Speaker 03

  That's him, bro. See if you can find it.

• 12:59Joe Rogan?

  Jesse Plemons, just Google moon.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, moon, moon.

• 13:02Speaker 04

  I did, well, the flowers of the summer moon keeps popping up.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  But do, but do, do space, um.

• 13:10Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 13:12Speaker 03

  Discovery?

• 13:13Joe Rogan?

  The Discovery?

• 13:15Joe Rogan?

  That's two thousand fifteen? No. Two thousand seventeen?

• 13:18Speaker 03

  Try Jesse Plemons, uh, Moon Conspiracy, or Space Conspiracy.

• 13:24Joe Rogan?

  Huh. Are you sure it wasn't AI? Cause there's a lot of those. I, I, I thought Keanu Reeves really wasn't a new Dracula movie.

• 13:37Joe Rogan?

  Fake?

• 13:37Speaker 03

  I don't know, no, I'm just gonna look, I was.

• 13:40Joe Rogan?

  Possibly fake? What was the other question we had? We had, oh, bear heroin. Yeah, man, they've been, you know, they've been tricking people for a long fucking time. You know, if they can make money, they'll trick you.

• 13:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:51Joe Rogan?

  Back then, they were probably being tricked themselves. People didn't really understand what was addictive and what wasn't, you know? Doctors used to recommend cigarettes for people with emphysema. You got asthma?

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:02Joe Rogan?

  You need cigarettes.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, they were drinking, athletes were drinking Coca-Cola on the, on the, on the court.

• 14:07Joe Rogan?

  Well, you know who drinks Coca-Cola? Floyd Mayweather. Floyd Mayweather, after training, would drink Coca-Cola. And there's actually some science to that. Like, having sugar, like, right after a really hard workout.

• 14:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 14:19Joe Rogan?

  Actually replenishes, replenishes glucose in the body.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  Like Gatorade.

• 14:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's probably not a bad idea.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  My wife's got me drinking Gatorade again.

• 14:28Joe Rogan?

  That shit's not good for you. There's, there's better versions of electrolytes, you know?

• 14:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're right.

• 14:35Joe Rogan?

  Electrolytes are good for you. Gatorade's okay. It's just, it's got a lot of shit in it.

• 14:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:40Joe Rogan?

  Corn syrup and. Here it is.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  Fly me to the moon, Channing Tatum.

• 14:45Joe Rogan?

  Oh, Channing Tatum. Is that it?

• 14:47Speaker 03

  Oh, that's the one.

• 14:48Joe Rogan?

  That's it?

• 14:49Speaker 03

  Wait. Twenty twenty four?

• 14:51Joe Rogan?

  Twenty twenty four? So.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  Oh, that's the one. Yeah, he's not, he's not even in it. No, he is in it, I think, but.

• 14:56Joe Rogan?

  Historical romantic comedy drama. Huh.

• 15:02Joe Rogan?

  Tasked with creating a false moon landing.

• 15:04Speaker 04

  Apple TV, didn't see it.

• 15:05Joe Rogan?

  Interesting.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  What year was it?

• 15:08Speaker 04

  Came out last year, like a year ago.

• 15:10Joe Rogan?

  I never even heard of it.

• 15:11Speaker 03

  Oh, I think it's still a.

• 15:12Joe Rogan?

  How do you have a movie with Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson and you never heard of it? Isn't that crazy? There's too many goddamn movies. Bro, you know what I saw last night?

• 15:20Speaker 03

  I think I'm still thinking of a different one, but I never, there's another one.

• 15:23Joe Rogan?

  There's another one, really?

• 15:24Speaker 03

  I think so. I saw it, man. It was a, it was a wild movie and they, they find, they realize that, that the whole landing is, is being faked. And then they, and then, and then, I mean, I won't spoil it, but, you know, then they get taken out.

• 15:44Joe Rogan?

  Apparently.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  Moon landing, JFK, I mean, what's the damn difference?

• 15:48Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, there's a lot of those, man. There's a lot of, I mean, there's almost nothing. Vietnam, Gulf of Tonka, and there's almost nothing from history that's exactly as we're being told. Almost nothing.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:59Joe Rogan?

  So I'll crack a shit.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  It's Coke and Pepsi, you know, because, you know, I was thinking like, you know, that's the one thing that, that they did that everybody liked. And then they've kept that as long as they keep that flavor.

• 16:12Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 16:13Speaker 03

  Right? You, they can, they can muscle everybody out, you know, it's like, and those are like my.

• 16:18Joe Rogan?

  RC Cola, shit like that, yeah. Nobody's into that.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, and only if you can't, couldn't afford the Coca-Cola price.

• 16:25Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  And the, you know, Coke machines. Bless you.

• 16:28Joe Rogan?

  Thank you.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  When I was a kid, that was the only reason we drank RC Cola is because it was 25 cents.

• 16:33Joe Rogan?

  Right, because it was cheap. That's it. And you drank it and you knew it wasn't Coke.

• 16:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they tried New Coke. Do you remember that? When I was a kid, God, I think I was in high school, they came up with a new formula of Coca-Cola, somewhere around the eighties, I think. It was terrible. They tried a new Coke and everybody's like, what the fuck are you doing? Why would you get rid of Coke? It's perfect.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, don't change that. They can, they can change and try everything else and buy everybody out as long as they keep Coca-Cola flowing.

• 17:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and then Pepsi's always like for weirdos, people who prefer Pepsi.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  I never liked it.

• 17:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's weird.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  I like Dr. Pepper.

• 17:08Joe Rogan?

  Well, you know Coca-Cola is to this day flavored with cocaine. Do you know that?

• 17:13Speaker 03

  You mean like?

• 17:14Joe Rogan?

  The coca leaves. That's the secret to the flavor of Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola, the company that makes Coca-Cola, they are the biggest producers of medical grade cocaine.

• 17:28Joe Rogan?

  For real.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 17:29Joe Rogan?

  So they take the coca leaves, they extract the flavonoids out of the coca leaves and they extract the cocaine. So there's no cocaine in Coca-Cola. But then they take those coca leaves and the flavor goes into Coca-Cola and then the cocaine goes into medical cocaine.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 17:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. To this day.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 17:47Joe Rogan?

  I think they're the only company that's allowed to use coca leaves. I think they're grandfathered in. I think that's exactly, is that how it works? I believe they're grandfathered in, but to this day, that's what they use. As I sniff, as I sniffle, but these are real sniffles, folks. These are allergy sniffles. I watched the fucking craziest movie last night, The Substance. Have you heard of that movie?

• 18:12Speaker 03

  I've heard of it.

• 18:12Joe Rogan?

  That's that new Demi Moore movie?

• 18:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was afraid to watch it.

• 18:16Joe Rogan?

  Holy shit, man.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  It's intense.

• 18:18Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God. One of the most insane movies I've ever seen in my life. It's about this lady who's getting older and someone approaches her with this new experimental drug that allows you to live as a young person for seven days and then you have to switch back to the old person for seven days? I don't want to spoil it for anybody, but it's fucking insane. Like, like I left, I was like, I gotta watch something stupid on YouTube for a couple hours before I go to bed because I'm, I'm weirded out by this movie.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the reason I haven't watched it yet. That's the, I'm just saying. Yeah, I never liked, I never liked, uh, like the sensory overload, like horror movies.

• 18:57Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:58Speaker 03

  I like classic horror movies.

• 18:59Joe Rogan?

  This is a sensory overload times ten. I mean, it's, it's fucking insane. It's an insane movie. It's really good. I mean, it really grips you. It's very entertaining, but just, good lord.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Have you seen, uh, um, Uncut Gems?

• 19:14Joe Rogan?

  Yes, loved that movie.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  Isn't that a good movie?

• 19:16Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my God.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  It was like a little much for me, but it was so good and it wasn't so crazy, you know?

• 19:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, I grew up with a lot of gambling addicts. So for that movie, that movie like really hit home for me. I was like, oh, God, gee, like got anxiety.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  Howard, is that his name, Howie Howard? You know, uh, Sandler's character.

• 19:35Joe Rogan?

  Is that what his name is, Howie?

• 19:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, and he's a, he's selling diamonds on Forty Second Street or whatever. That's, uh, that's, that's, that's every manager in the music business is that guy. A lot of them.

• 19:45Joe Rogan?

  Bunch of gambling addicts?

• 19:46Speaker 03

  That, they're that guy out there, you know, they're, they're juggling all these balls in front of you. Which is fine, I don't mind guys juggling. What I don't like is when somebody's got all these balls in the air, they're juggling in front of me. And they're like, Charlie, I'm not juggling.

• 19:59Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah, the music business, yeah, well, there he is. He's great in that movie too.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  Man, this is, yeah, he's incredible.

• 20:06Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I never knew he could act dramatically, you know, I mean, he's always been great in comedies, but he's, he's incredible in that movie, incredible.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  He had another one he did, real, that was like a serious flick way back, you remember Punch, Drunk Love, you ever see that one?

• 20:17Joe Rogan?

  No, I never saw that.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  That's a masterpiece.

• 20:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I never saw it, yeah. But Uncut Gems, the, the gambling aspect of it, like that sickness, that the gambling sickness is a wild sickness.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  I grew up around gamblers too.

• 20:30Joe Rogan?

  Yeah?

• 20:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, my uncle was always a big gambler and, well, my cousin and I spent a lot of time in casinos with him down in New Orleans on the Mississippi coast and all that.

• 20:39Joe Rogan?

  Oh, Riverboat Gamblers.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  Man, yep, exactly.

• 20:42Joe Rogan?

  Craziest.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  Man, I didn't, I didn't, I, I didn't mind, you know, he let, he let my, me and my cousin run all, run all over the place. So we were, we were stoked.

• 20:51Joe Rogan?

  So you liked the fact that he was a generous?

• 20:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, oh, and anytime he won, like if he won big, we used to play his bingo, he used to run this bingo hall in, uh, in New Orleans. And me and my cousin, we got, we could, both of us with those bingo dovers, we could play like, we could play nine, nine card pages for him. We got that good that we could keep up with it. And because he was running the place, nobody in there ever said shit about me and my cousin being like, you know, eight and 11 or whatever. And if we hit though, it was always a good time, it was Toys R Us and fried shrimp.

• 21:27Joe Rogan?

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• 22:13Joe Rogan?

  Anyone can hijack your connection and access your most sensitive information. With ExpressVPN, you know that your passwords and banking info are safe and secure. ExpressVPN is the number one ranked VPN by the experts at CNET and The Verge. And right now, you can get an amazing deal. They're offering four extra months free. If you go to expressvpn.com/rogan or tap the banner. And if you're watching on YouTube, you can get your four free months by scanning the QR code on screen or clicking the link in the description. For some people, that's their juice, man. That's what keeps them going in life, just that next bet, you know? I grew up around a lot of pool halls. And, you know, when I was in my early twenties.

• 22:58Joe Rogan?

  And I was just around so many people that just live for gambling. They would go straight from off-track betting right to the pool hall. And, you know, they'd bet on anything. They'd bet on two raindrops coming down a window pane. They'd bet on roaches. They'd bet on anything. And you name it, they'd flip a coin for ten. I saw dudes flip a coin for thousands of dollars. A guy would win a tournament. Like, this is like a famous thing in pool. Guys would win a tournament, win $10,000, flip a coin, lose the whole thing. And you had to have heart. You had to be willing, like, that was like part of the culture. You had to be willing to bet.

• 23:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 23:31Joe Rogan?

  And everybody's always, because the only way it's fun. Yeah, the only way it's fun is if money's constantly flowing. So if someone's trying to be conservative, someone's trying to save them, they called them a nit. Like, you're a nit. They didn't like you, you know? Nobody likes a nit. Like, those are the guys that get shunned by the pool hall. They're bad action.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  Where'd you grow up?

• 23:50Joe Rogan?

  Well, all over the place, really.

• 23:52Speaker 03

  Where were those pool halls?

• 23:53Joe Rogan?

  New York. Well, I moved to New York when I was in my twenties, my early twenties, like 23. And that's when I got indoctrinated into pool culture.

• 24:03Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 24:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it was just the most fun group of degenerates and weirdos and outcasts. And, you know, as a comedian, I never felt like I fit in in normal society. You know, and then I'm around those dudes, I'm like, oh, okay, you guys are just like me. You don't fit in either. Like, you're a bunch of fucking weirdos.

• 24:22Speaker 03

  Man, you know, thing, what I just thought about, Joe, when I was on the street in New York. You know, I played up there and I'm sure you know, but.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  I'd play on the street all day and at first I was playing in the parks. And then I went moved downtown. I was trying to play on the street corners in the villages and all that. And you're dealing with traffic and cops. And that's what drove me down into the into the subway platforms and those were really competitive too. So even there, I started playing at the stations that nobody wanted or, you know, weren't desirable and weren't, you know, nobody's really competing for the spots or whatever. And I would do that all day and then I would hit open mics all over the five boroughs every night, everywhere.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  And the comedy, the comedy guys were always the coolest because all of them, because we weren't in competition. You know, like I know comedians can be really competitive on the circuit and obviously same thing on the music side. But I ended up like playing a lot of, I would open up for a lot of guys like I'm like at the red door and like in the circuit there in the city and shit.

• 25:30Joe Rogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 25:31Speaker 03

  Open guys up with two or three songs or play their breaks or whatever. And, you know, all the comedy folks liked me, I think, because, you know, I wasn't one of them.

• 25:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:40Speaker 03

  We were cousins or something.

• 25:41Joe Rogan?

  Right, right. That's, there's always been a relationship like that. Like Oliver Anthony was at the mothership this weekend. And it was the first music act we've ever had performed there.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  That's cool.

• 25:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you could perform there too if you ever want to, man.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  I know where it's at.

• 25:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it'd be fun.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  I like that you got it down there, man.

• 25:56Joe Rogan?

  It's a great spot. Sixth Street is just such a fucking wild place.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  It is.

• 26:00Joe Rogan?

  To have it right there is perfect and to have it at the old Ritz. Yeah, it's amazing. So, you know, it was great.

• 26:07Speaker 03

  Is that, is that what it is in the old Ritz?

• 26:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we bought the old Ritz. Yeah. We have to keep the Ritz sign because it's, you know, one of those historical buildings.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  That's a great sign.

• 26:17Joe Rogan?

  It's a great sign. It's got so much history. In the tunnel on the way to the stage, there's a big picture of Stevie Ray Vaughan on the stage in 1983. Yeah.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  You like SRV?

• 26:28Joe Rogan?

  Fuck yeah.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  Come on.

• 26:30Joe Rogan?

  Come on, man. Come on. He's the only dude who could play Voodoo Child. Doesn't make me sick.

• 26:34Speaker 03

  Man.

• 26:35Joe Rogan?

  You know, other than Hendrix?

• 26:36Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 26:36Joe Rogan?

  It's two dudes.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're right.

• 26:38Joe Rogan?

  Hendrix and him. I mean, I'm sure other people could do it. I've never heard it.

• 26:41Speaker 03

  Nah, fuck that. Just them.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, man.

• 26:47Joe Rogan?

  There's certain songs, there's certain songs that you can't fuck with. Although I did see, one time I saw Honey Honey and Gary Clark Jr. Played Midnight Rider. And I didn't think anybody else could play Midnight Rider. And to hear Gary's song with Midnight Rider with that, you know, like Gary's signature sound.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 27:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's signature guitar sound.

• 27:06Speaker 03

  You seen Gary, you've seen Gary live?

• 27:07Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah, I'm friends with Gary.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  Man.

• 27:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I've seen him a bunch of times.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  Y'all love Gary too.

• 27:11Joe Rogan?

  I love that dude.

• 27:12Speaker 03

  That guy.

• 27:13Joe Rogan?

  He's so good.

• 27:14Speaker 03

  Man, I remember.

• 27:15Joe Rogan?

  Oh, I gave something to him and I got it for you too.

• 27:17Speaker 03

  What is it?

• 27:17Joe Rogan?

  This is a real, genuine woolly mammoth guitar pick. That is made out of woolly mammoth tusk.

• 27:27Speaker 03

  Man, that is something fierce, bud.

• 27:28Joe Rogan?

  Ten thousand plus years old.

• 27:32Joe Rogan?

  And then that's a shout out to my friend John Reeves from the Boneyard in Alaska. I got a buddy of mine who has this spot in Alaska where they just pull all kinds of crazy mastodon, woolly mammoth, fucking cave bear, all kinds of skulls, and all kinds of wild shit out of this one piece of property where a lot of animals died. And he's taken a lot of the woolly mammoth, that's where I got this too, this is a tooth.

• 27:55Joe Rogan?

  This is a tooth that was carved.

• 27:56Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 27:57Joe Rogan?

  Into a piece of art with a mammoth in it.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  That's a big old goddamn tooth, son.

• 28:02Joe Rogan?

  Imagine.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  Can I see that? How heavy that is?

• 28:04Joe Rogan?

  Isn't that crazy? It's crazy, right?

• 28:07Speaker 03

  It's beautiful too, man.

• 28:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, so that guitar pick is yours, brother.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  Man, thanks, Joe.

• 28:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, any cool guys that play guitar, I give them one of them picks.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I've never been good at holding, holding a pick. Um, so I learned how to play with my hands and I, because I could never hold a pick well, but some, a lot of guys I know that are really great pickers, they play these really hard picks, you know, and can real precise with them. And I just, I still can't hold them.

• 28:32Joe Rogan?

  You, you learned with your fingers?

• 28:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, I never, never held, I just couldn't hold the pick. I would try to hold it and it'd get sideways. And I never, like all this, you know, like the straight cowboy chords, you know, C, F, G, whatever. Uh, I couldn't hold any of those chords, like when I was teaching myself. The positioning was weird for me, you know, and so like, I kind of threw away the book and I did what you call choking the chicken on the, on the fret, you know, kind of hold it like you're choking a chicken.

• 29:05Speaker 03

  And that's kind of where I developed my style and then I learned all the regular chords many years later.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  You know.

• 29:10Joe Rogan?

  Did you, is, are you totally self-taught?

• 29:12Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:13Joe Rogan?

  Wow. When did you start?

• 29:16Speaker 03

  Um.

• 29:18Speaker 03

  Uh, I was seventeen, my mama got me a guitar out of a pawn shop in South Irving.

• 29:23Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  This Hohner guitar.

• 29:25Joe Rogan?

  And you just started messing around with it?

• 29:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, you know, my mama tried to get me on the piano when I was younger and I just couldn't focus and. Um.

• 29:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know. Seventeen was like the right age. I, I needed it, you know, uh, started banging around on that guitar and. And I mean, it must have sounded terrible and, and we, my, my, my mama lived in this little ass place, this tiny place and. I didn't, I was like scared to play in front of her, you know, but, but I was at first and I would say, Mama, am I any good? You know, she wasn't gonna lie to me and she said, well, son. When you play, people will believe you. She wasn't gonna lie to me and tell me I was good.

• 30:09Speaker 03

  But she was trying to say, you know, just be honest with your music and the rest will take care of it.

• 30:14Joe Rogan?

  That's great advice.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:15Joe Rogan?

  When you play, people will believe you.

• 30:17Speaker 03

  That's what she said. Yeah.

• 30:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then the next time anybody believed in me wasn't until I started hitchhiking. And I remember, cause I've been out in California a bunch recently. And it was. I had caught a ride with this guy. We were playing at this place called The Shanty up in, uh. Farmer's Branch, Dallas, Fort Worth areas years ago. And there was this witch lady that, I mean, they called her a witch. This kind of, um.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  Kind of magic woman who had a barn out behind her house and they called it The Shanty. And she would have people over on the weekends and just kind of any random night, travelers. Misfits, whatever, back there in the barn and everybody'd be. Telling stories and trading songs and, you know. Taking potions.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Stuff like that. Long story short, this guy I met one night, his parents had like worked, they worked for like Texas Instruments. And he had disowned them, you know, because his parents were like scientists and he woke up one day as a young man and realized they were like, his parents were manufacturing like weapons, you know, and I'd never saw this guy again, but that was his whole deal, why he left Texas. Oh, wow. And he was just back visiting this, this gal that had this shanty deal. And I talked that guy that he promised, he would, he was describing this town of Boonville, uh, which is this community in Mendocino County, Northern California.

• 31:48Speaker 03

  And, uh, the way he was describing it to me at this, in this barn or whatever, it sounded like a garden to Eden or something. You know what I mean? Like, and, and I wanted so badly to go with him and he promised me and this other guy that was playing guitar too, that he would take us. And we passed out at the lady's house. And we woke up that next morning, he was still there. And I was like, man, you ready to go to California? And he was like, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? Like when I pressed him, he's like, man, I was on acid. I was on acid. I, I don't remember any of that. I don't have any room for you. And I, I begged that, I begged him like my life depended on it.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  And he took me and this old boy who was playing guitar, actually taught me a lot of songs back then. He took us to California. Uh, but as we got closer to Boonville and we were talking to naive young Texas boys, who had never been anywhere, he realized he, you know, didn't want us going anywhere near those hippies he was living with there in Boonville. So he left us, like he pulled into like a grocery store and left us in this parking lot in Vacaville. And that's when I really started hitchhiking in my life is like when we kind of got abandoned in a parking lot. Wow. Kind of along the five, right? How old were you? Twenty one, probably twenty two, something like that.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  And I had done some, a little bit of hitching before, like around the south, Texas and like Louisiana, but I'd never really been way out there. And, uh, anyway, I started hitchhiking around, um, because I had to. But I remember it was in California, the first time by anybody besides my mama.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  Ever looked at me playing guitar as it having any kind of value, you know? Like any economic value or like it was a it was a A trade of, you know, recognition, you know?

• 33:42Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 33:43Speaker 03

  It was kind of the was the first time was out there out there.

• 33:46Joe Rogan?

  So you'd been playing about four, four or five years back then?

• 33:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:50Speaker 03

  I was playing outside because our place was so small. I wasn't playing outside to like make money or anything like that. I would go to this park, had like a baseball diamond on it, sit on these bleachers or whatever. And I'll never forget, the first time anybody threw like just a pocket full of change. In my case, I'm sure it's because they, you know, were worried about me and felt bad for me.

• 34:15Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  Or whatever, you know, and it wasn't like that. It wasn't like that money hit the case. And and not like a light went off or anything, you know? It was a slow. It was a slow gradual deal, like I was playing outside. Because there was, you know, there wasn't enough room to play in the house, in the house or whatever, you know? And then, you know, I got in a lot of trouble with the law.

• 34:40Speaker 03

  Which kind of put me on the run, put me on the road. And.

• 34:46Joe Rogan?

  What was the trouble with the law?

• 34:48Speaker 03

  Uh.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  You know, my, I've said it a lot and it's funny, I'm a lot better known than I used to be. So it's like you say stuff about your family and they hear about it and.

• 34:58Joe Rogan?

  They get mad.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  They get mad.

• 35:00Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  But uh, it's so funny because it's all over the internet and uh, they're the ones that had the government on their ass, not me. But anyways, yeah, we just kind of, you know, shit hit the fan, got up in the newspapers. My brother didn't go to high school, you know, neither my sister, neither one went to high school. They both dropped out, you know, because I'm from South Texas, I was born in the Rio Grande Valley. They were born up in Dallas, but my mama had moved down there to uh, South Padre Island area, McAllen, Harlingen area there and um.

• 35:29Speaker 03

  Anyway, it's poor and pretty hard living down there and, you know, hell, I didn't wear shoes till I was by nine or 10 years old, you know, playing outside and my brother and sister, they're 10 years older than me, half brother and sister, and we have different daddies. And they really lived wild, you know, it was, things were pretty, pretty tough back then or whatever. I'm telling you that background because my brother became a hustler, you know, because he had to. Because of a lack of education, lack of access, you know, because of poverty.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  And I've honestly always respected him for that, you know. He took, he used to take me around door to door selling newspapers when I was 11, right? And you want to know why? Because I had, I had broken my arm. And he realized if you carted that young boy out in front of those, those apartments when that lady entered the door, and it's these two brothers and one of them's got a broken arm, she's gonna buy the, she's gonna go ahead and subscribe.

• 36:28Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, she was bad.

• 36:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and, in a nutshell, man, he, you know, through all that stuff, you know, he, he started out as a door to door salesman, you know, hustling newspaper subscriptions, right? Then he started like selling neckties and like men's clothing, door to door in downtown Dallas office buildings, you know, and as a very young man. And eventually he graduated to,

• 36:57Speaker 03

  you know, hard knock boiler room type of guys, you know, you keep knocking on those doors in that Wild West business scene of towns like Dallas, you know, or Houston, you know, eventually you're gonna find what you're looking for. And he got in with some big old wolves, you know, and eventually it, it knocked everybody out and a lot of people died, a lot of people went to prison. And, you know, we were in the paper and.

• 37:24Speaker 03

  I couldn't, I found myself not being able to get a bank account and nobody I knew would go near me, you know, and um, so it ended up being like a Bob Marley type of thing, you know, like, you know, he said, uh, if you're not living good, travel wide.

• 37:38Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 37:38Speaker 03

  Right? And I literally just walked out of town because, you know, we had scarlet letters on our chest and that's when I, that's when I really started learning how to stand behind that guitar and write songs and slowly but surely start, I, I learned how to play basically in front of people and people just were giving me money kinda over time. That and, you know, food and shelter in exchange for my story at their back door.

• 38:04Joe Rogan?

  This episode is brought to you by Netflix. You think your family's got drama? Wait till you meet the Buckley's. I'm talking about the new Netflix drama, The Waterfront. Set in a coastal town in North Carolina, it follows the powerful Buckley family who've ruled Havenport for decades, but now their fishing empire is falling apart fast and their legacy is on the line. There's power grabs, addiction, legacy, love. From the creator of Scream and Dawson's Creek, The Waterfront is messy, twisty, and totally binge-worthy. Watch The Waterfront now, only on Netflix.

• 38:41Speaker 03

  You know?

• 38:42Joe Rogan?

  Do you ever wonder, like, how things could have gone? Cause things turned out great.

• 38:47Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 38:48Joe Rogan?

  Like, look, you're a popular music artist now.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:51Joe Rogan?

  You know, worldwide. You're famous.

• 38:53Speaker 03

  I'm surprised I, I'm, you know what I'm surprised by? I'm surprised I never got heavily addicted to drugs.

• 38:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:59Speaker 03

  I am, you know, as my, my sister passed away 10 years ago from substances and hard living and all that kinda stuff and hell, my whole family's in AA. Everybody, top to bottom, left to right, turned them inside out. I think about it a lot, but I really do, you know, and I remember I was living with that guy who, uh, was at the shanty that was playing guitar. He's on the football team. I knew him from sports. His name was Daniel Harmon. And he went out there to California with me that first time. And we were living on farms and I was working for ganja farmers, uh, working on horse farms, working for uh, uh, winemakers, all kind of people, you know, just, just doing grunt work for them.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  Doing the fence work they, they, they didn't want to do, moving soil for people, you know what I mean? Digging ditches, you know, laying pipe across really hard, you know, rocky roads. Not anything anybody can do, you just need, you know, broad backing up, you know, to be young.

• 39:57Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 39:58Speaker 03

  And uh, but before I ever left Texas, I moved in with his, his sister. And I remember, and she was just my friend, I was never in a relationship with her or anything. But she was working at Silver City in West Dallas, the gentleman's club at eighteen. And making more money than anybody I'd ever seen. The girl was eighteen, you know, and just making crazy, crazy money. I was living, she let me rent a room from her and kind of gave me a deal and all that. And uh, I ended up writing a song kind of about it more recently called Easy Money that I did with Shooter on the, on the Lonesome Drifter record.

• 40:40Speaker 03

  And it's kind of that thing, you know, if you're a poor kid from Texas, there's no such thing, you know, as easy money, but um, not, I can't remember why I was telling you that, but um,

• 40:54Speaker 03

  it was hard on, I just remember like seeing, you'd see like young women working in strip clubs, making big money. And the ones that I was around and have been around, very, very hard for that line of work, my line of work, your line of work not to become addicted.

• 41:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  You know, and I don't have a problem with, you know, a lot of the best, most, most, best artists ever saw, like struggled, struggled with addiction, you know, um, but I have, in that way, I have been very fortunate, very, very fortunate.

• 41:27Joe Rogan?

  How did you avoid it?

• 41:30Speaker 03

  I don't know, you know what it is, man, I never had no kind of, I never had, had no kind of tolerance. You know, I'm, I've always been like, I guess get drunk off of one drink. It's never changed. I just felt it all like really strong, you know?

• 41:45Joe Rogan?

  That's probably good.

• 41:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:47Joe Rogan?

  Maybe it's a survival instinct, too.

• 41:49Speaker 03

  I've never really thought about why, you know? But I have considered it because my brother's been through, you know, he did a lot of time in prison and, you know, my, let me see, my sister had, and my mama, you know, I mean, they both had their first kid, you know, when they were teenagers, you know? A lot of it I do credit to my mama, you know, it's like, you know, she told me something I remember that stuck with me, I've been saying this all the time, Joe. And like, we had a lot of trouble in our family and a lot of people that we knew, a lot of dysfunction, a lot of trauma. But well, my mama kind of got out of that.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  She kind of is the person in the family that said, I'm going to change the trajectory of this line now in my generation. You know, and she didn't have an education and, you know, she took herself back to school after I was born, you know, and cleaned up her act and got out of it and isolated me from a lot of that shit and, which I think is a big part of the reason that I maybe didn't.

• 43:01Joe Rogan?

  Right, you had a role model.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I had a role model, you know? There was no male role models, at least not at home. They were only, they were only pro athletes and coaches at school, you know? I mean, it's increasingly difficult for young men to find strong men of courage and vision that can help them grow into good men, too. I mean, it's, it seems almost impossible these days. It's unbelievable.

• 43:25Joe Rogan?

  It's very difficult to find in your personal life.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  It's hard, man.

• 43:28Joe Rogan?

  You have to find it in other ways. You have to find it, people online or people in the world.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  I found it in athletes, in, in, in, like.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  Like excellence in like athletics.

• 43:46Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  You know.

• 43:48Joe Rogan?

  Where the only way you can get there is hard work.

• 43:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the odds are stacked against you.

• 43:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  And it requires incredible focus. I mean, I just, I think that's why I'm always so, so, you know, in such awe of, of those people when they're able to succeed like that. But what I wanted to say to you that my mama said, she said, what happened to you when you were young? It's not your fault, but now you're a man and it's your responsibility. And I've been living, I've been living off of that, you know, for a long time, you know? Cause it's like, if you don't take responsibility at some point, man, it'll, it'll, it'll never leave you alone.

• 44:28Joe Rogan?

  Right. You can't think that you're a victim. Yeah, you can't think that it's not your fault. You gotta take responsibility. That's hard for people to accept when they know they've been victimized.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:40Joe Rogan?

  When they know they've been dealt a shitty hand of cards, you can just kind of wallow in it. But that's a trap. That's a trap that'll fuck you up. It'll fuck up everybody around you too.

• 44:52Speaker 03

  Damn right.

• 44:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, but it's a mindset thing. It's like you can, you can think your way out of that. You just, you have to have an example though. Either you have to be your own example, or you have to find, find an example of someone else who thought their way out of it.

• 45:05Speaker 03

  And for my brother, you know, for my brother, for all the trouble that he's been in, you know, in a way like, you know, he, I think he was trying to, he also was trying to help me, you know? And so, you know, his hustle and his work ethic in another sense, you know, was, that's been helpful to me too, you know? Cause I remember he used to hand out flyers and shit all over the place. And when I'd be like a teenager, he'd be like, he'd be like, listen to me now. If you go, if you leave an event at the other day that you're handing out flyers and you're flooding it with promotion, if you can even see that pavement underneath the, you know, pamphlets that you're handing out, you didn't promote it.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  So what he used to tell me, I was like 15, 16 and that all has come, that mentality came in handy for me because, you know, I was just a street performer, just an itinerant performer and.

• 45:59Speaker 03

  You know, I did have to learn how to market myself, you know, and, and part of the reason that I was, man, sometimes being underestimated is like the best thing that could happen to you, you know, because I think one of the biggest challenges for like in the music industry at least, is that the way the business works now is they're almost exclusively, you know, you ever seen Moneyball, Brad Pitt flicked Moneyball? Yeah. Right? Yeah. How they, you know, they introduced that concept of looking at the data to like maximize the potential of the athletes and all that kind of stuff, which has totally changed the game, you know, all the games.

• 46:42Speaker 03

  I kind of call it money guitar, right? Which is like, you know, the business is seeding the young amateur and for the way that they spend and invest and can move on if it doesn't work out, it's like kind of a, you know, it's kind of a pump and dump, you know? And the thing about that, it works, like if somebody has a, you know, if somebody, like some of these guys, you mentioned Oliver Anthony and some of these guys, they have a viral hit out of nowhere, they've never played a venue or anything in their life, you know, it can happen really fast.

• 47:23Speaker 03

  And then obviously there's tremendous challenges, you know, down the line trying to keep that, you know, astronomical, you know, quick rise up there. But back in the day, the business deals weren't any good, you know that, they were terrible. Right. What they were good about though, in a lot of cases, was developing these artists on these rosters, even if they were taking advantage of these poor farm boys, taking advantage, you know, of, you know, poor black artists from the South or women or whatever, nobody was getting a good deal, basically. But, you know, like guys like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, those guys were making two, three records a year. Wow.

• 48:07Speaker 03

  You know, and you think about when Waylon breaks through, right, in the mid seventies, you know, and like.

• 48:15Speaker 03

  As he's doing, you know, coming into his own in seventeen, nineteen seventy-four, nineteen seventy-five. I mean, how many records in is he at that point? You know?

• 48:25Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 48:26Speaker 03

  He's, I mean, you know, Willie's Red-Headed Stranger, which revolutionized country music, or like The Outlaws compilation record that the two of them were on together, which was basically a compilation and kind of marketed as the outlaw of subgenre. You know, those guys were fifteen, those guys were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen records in, you know? Aretha Franklin popped off on her ninth or tenth record.

• 48:53Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 48:54Speaker 03

  You know? And these, most of these artists, the way the business works, they won't make nine or ten records in their career.

• 49:01Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 49:02Speaker 03

  That's crazy to me.

• 49:03Joe Rogan?

  That is crazy. And what better way to develop than to just keep constantly producing new music and learn along the way?

• 49:09Speaker 03

  And, and being neglected or misunderstood by their business when I was first dealing with it, that was the, it was a really, a really a blessing because I ended up making so many records, you know?

• 49:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace. I know because I use it. That's right. JoeRogan.com is powered by Squarespace. It has all the features that you need to create a standout website, like an AI-enhanced website builder, SEO optimization tools, and seamless checkouts with mobile pay links. Head to Squarespace.com/Rogan for a free trial. And when you are ready to launch, use the offer code ROGEN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This episode is brought to you by Chime.

• 50:05Joe Rogan?

  And I know people don't usually get excited about banking, but Chime is doing something different and it's worth paying attention to. In a recent survey, they ranked the number one choice for new checking accounts in America. That means real people, millions of them, are choosing this over traditional banks. That's because banking at Chime is Fee free, no monthly fees, no overdraft fees and thousands of fee free ATMs. But here's the real kicker, if you get their Chime card, it gives you 5% cash back on a category you actually pick yourself. Your savings rate, crazy high, it's nine times the national average. They're calling it the most rewarding way to bank. Go to chime.com/rogan.

• 50:47Joe Rogan?

  Takes a few minutes to sign up. Chime is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services and Chime card provided by Chime's bank partners. Terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com/disclosures for more details. The music business has always been so predatory. But it's like, it's the way I describe a lot of things. It's like when you get something that's good, combined with a bunch of people that want to make money off that something that's good. You know, whether it's medicine, or whether it's music, or even in comedy, you get the same thing. You get a bunch of people that just think they can make money off you.

• 51:26Speaker 03

  Man, I always thought comedy was the hardest. Always figured it was the hardest, right? Because you mean like, you gotta make them laugh or they're gonna fucking kill you.

• 51:34Joe Rogan?

  And you have new shit all the time.

• 51:36Speaker 03

  There's nothing, there's nothing behind you. There's not even a guitar covering you up.

• 51:40Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  It's crazy to me. Still watch all those guys do their bit and shit. So, like, I was always amazed by even people going up at like the open mics and like trying out their routine. You know, that always terrified me.

• 51:54Joe Rogan?

  It terrifies me still when I watch open mics. I watch open mics and I watch someone bombing, I gotta leave the room. I fear that it's contagious. If I was on the road and I didn't get to pick my opening acts, like if I was working at a club and they had some local act in Florida or something like that and the guy was fucking terrible, I would literally have to like not listen. I'd have to leave the room and just sort of time when I was gonna go on stage so I could go on stage with a fresh mindset. I couldn't think that this audience had been poisoned by this guy's shitty comedy.

• 52:28Speaker 03

  I get that.

• 52:29Joe Rogan?

  You know what I mean?

• 52:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:30Joe Rogan?

  It's terrible and it's like you, you think that nothing could be funny.

• 52:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:35Joe Rogan?

  He just, it's like, this, like he's hypnotized them.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  Right.

• 52:39Joe Rogan?

  Into this like mediocre state of mind, like, I can't listen, I gotta hide.

• 52:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's crazy that they could have that. That strong an effect on the audience like that, that quick. I mean, somebody can be up there fucking it up like crazy musically.

• 52:54Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:54Speaker 03

  And you kind of get a pass, you know.

• 52:56Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 52:56Speaker 03

  You know, poetic license or whatever.

• 52:59Joe Rogan?

  Well, you know, people, it's tolerable if the guy's into it, you know, he could be into his own music and you're like, I'm not into it, but he's into it. At least he's like doing his song. If you're not into, if you're doing comedy and the audience is not into it, you're fucked. You're like really fu- you have to engage those people.

• 53:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I see that. It's unbelievable.

• 53:17Joe Rogan?

  You gotta be connected to those people and you can't fake it. Like you can't even be saying the words perfectly and not be thinking about it. You have to be thinking about what you're saying. They know. They're little animals. They smell you. They know. They know if you're faking it. And you just gotta lock in, man. And you gotta learn how to lock in. It takes about 10 years. It takes 10 years of eating shit. Just fucking bombing and traveling around and opening up for people and barely getting by.

• 53:48Speaker 03

  That's the same thing with music though, about the 10 year deal, you know, the 10,000 hour thing. There's no doubt about it.

• 53:54Joe Rogan?

  I think it's probably almost everything.

• 53:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:56Joe Rogan?

  Almost everything.

• 53:57Speaker 03

  Anything you dedicate yourself to, you know, uh, you like Noam Chomsky?

• 54:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, sure.

• 54:03Speaker 03

  You ever seen?

• 54:03Joe Rogan?

  I like old Noam Chomsky. I listened to him today. I'm like, Jesus, stop talking.

• 54:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's popping off, isn't he?

• 54:09Joe Rogan?

  Well, he just went, the COVID vaccine stuff, he was out of his fucking mind. He was wanting people to be isolated and quarantined and taken away from society if they weren't willing to take this fucking experimental shit that turned out to not even work.

• 54:21Speaker 03

  I haven't kept up with him in recent years.

• 54:23Joe Rogan?

  Well, he's old, right? And old people, unfortunately, also he's an academic, so academics tend to trust experts in whatever field they're in. And if he doesn't have an understand, like he has a deep understanding of how compromised people are politically by money. You know, and he's written some brilliant work on essentially the, the way the. The media is compromised and the way, you know, politics are compromised. I don't think he applied that same skepticism towards the pharmaceutical industrial complex.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  Which is strange.

• 54:57Joe Rogan?

  Well, people have their blind spots.

• 54:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, we all, we all do.

• 55:01Joe Rogan?

  And they trust experts and if you, you know, these kind of experts that are academics and you trust them and. And also he's old and old people get real scared of diseases. They get real scared because they know how fucking vulnerable they are. All the people that I knew that were old had the craziest reaction to COVID. Terrified. Even my own parents tried to, you know, talk them through some of this stuff. They didn't want to hear it. They only wanted to listen to doctors. They want, like, I don't think this is what they're telling you.

• 55:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:29Joe Rogan?

  You know?

• 55:29Speaker 03

  Doctors are crazy. They're just, they got a cabinet full of pills that they've been, they've been sold to sell you.

• 55:39Joe Rogan?

  And they're incentivized. That's what's really crazy. When I found that out, that mean I, I learned so much during the pandemic about the medical industry where I, I just thought they were there to. I didn't even, I'm so naive. I didn't even realize that hospitals are privately owned. I thought these were things set up by the government to make sure that people can get healed.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  Right.

• 56:00Joe Rogan?

  You know, I thought it was all about making people better and.

• 56:03Speaker 03

  They're not public. The closest thing to public there is if they're owned by like a, you know, religious organization, a church.

• 56:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Speaker 03

  Isn't that crazy?

• 56:11Joe Rogan?

  It's crazy. Yeah. It's crazy. And they're just fucking shuffling people in and out, trying to prescribe them as many things and they're financially incentivized to prescribe things. And then they have extreme overhead because they have liability insurance. They have student loan debt and they have, you know, a high overhead to keep their practice running and.

• 56:32Speaker 03

  Where's Bernie Sanders when you need him?

• 56:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well.

• 56:35Speaker 03

  Well, no, see, so I had, I had open heart surgery right here in Austin, uh, to fix a.

• 56:41Joe Rogan?

  What was wrong with your heart?

• 56:42Speaker 03

  Valve here. Well, I was born with Wolf Parkinson's white disease. It's a, it's an electrical issue. Um, in your heart, basically like your heart misfires. All this electricity is moving through it all the time. Uh, you know, like a semiconductor or whatever. And there was like a section of it that was like misfiring and it would cause my, an arrhythmia with me.

• 57:06Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 57:07Speaker 03

  And when I was a kid in South Texas, we were told, that was all I knew about. And we were told that it was an annoyance. Um, cause I almost died a couple of times and I was really, really young from it. And, you know, my mama noticed and saved my life a couple of times by getting, driving in, you know, into the city there, into San Benito and them hooking me up to all the wires and saving me. Anyways, they told me as I got older, that it would just, um,

• 57:35Speaker 03

  I could get, you know, a blight, an ablation for it. Where they apply heat, basically, and close this electrical channel that's stuck in a loop or whatever. But it, but it wasn't life threatening. And then I got out here, you know, I was on the street for years. And then when I was coming off the street, through kind of blues jams and I had been, you know, I was working on ganja farms and had started selling, you know, weed in the mail and all that to kind of get off the street, buy myself some better clothes, get myself a good guitar and amp and all that, started showing up at blues jams and then I could like, you know, cause everything takes money, you know, like, problem with being a street player was even go play the open mics, they'd have a two damn drink minimum.

• 58:19Speaker 03

  And they'd see my crazy ass coming and knew, knew that I was, you know, pretty wild and that didn't have any money. And it didn't smell, and I didn't smell good. So they really didn't like me for the, you know, for the longest time or whatever, but, I threw blues jams, I started leading bands and bars and Deep Ellum, first gig I ever got. And Austin was, uh, right there at Darwin's Pub, you know, on Sixth Street, playing kind of solo in the afternoon. It was the only guy, CJ was the only guy that gave me a gig, even on Sixth Street. I always owed him for that. And I think he was giving me 50 bucks. You know, he wanted me to get paid out of the, uh, well whiskey and those, those, uh, what does he sell over there? Those, uh, gueros or whatever the hell he's got over there.

• 59:03Speaker 03

  Um, anyway, I get on the road, I get an agent, I had, I was, I was standing out at Green Hall handing CDs out on a street corner, cause I couldn't get into the show. Handed a guy a CD. His name's Evan Felker. I didn't know who he was at the time, but he's front man for Turnpike Troubadours. I gave him a CD and he, well, he took it home and he listened to it with his then girlfriend and now wife and lo and behold, his agent, John Folk, called me up and started booking me and then that's when I started playing the old red dirt, I like to call it the Hank Williams circuit, you know, the kind of old country chitlin circuit. John Folk had kind of inherited it, inherited it from like Buddy Lee Attractions from an earlier generation.

• 59:48Speaker 03

  It goes all the way back to Lucky Moller and that old south circuit that all the R and B and the, and the hillbilly country boys were on and Folk kind of inherited it and rebuilt it. And then they, you know, then Coke and Pepsi came in, you know, CAA and William Morris and Wazerman and bought it all off, you know, bought it all out and you had no choice. I mean, they were gonna part it out no matter what and that's the way that it works, right? When you get Coca-Cola's attention, right? And they show up and they're like, "Good job. You're taking some of our money away from us. We're gonna buy you out, son." And yet, right? I think you can refuse them once or twice and they'll come back with a better deal, right?

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  After that, if you keep turning them down, then they put all their energy into knocking you out, you know? Yeah. That's what I mean. As long as Coke doesn't change the flavor of Coca-Cola, right? They can, you know, that gangster shit, all the other gangster shit they do works really well, as long as they don't fuck up the original flavor, right? Right. So I'm on that circuit working my ass off. Two hundred and whatever shows a year for a bunch of years in a row, playing all over the place. Seems like sometimes we play 21 nights in a row out there, you know, for shit kickers at Benita Creek Hall and punk rock clubs in New Jersey and shit, you know? Playing at the fucking, you know, Saint? That little club, the Saint in Asbury Park? It's like a 40 cap, man, it's a badass place. Anyway.

• 1:01:15Speaker 03

  My, I was like blacking out. I moved up to a bus and shit and I was like, my, I was getting really lightheaded. And I'd be sitting in the back of the bus and I would be so lightheaded, I'd be blacking out a lot, right? Just sitting there, short of breath, but I just thought, you know, I'm grinding, I'm playing all these shows, I'm going, I'm going as hard as you can go, taking potions, you know? Just doing all this dumb shit, working hard. And I was playing at the old Shady Grove here in town that's now closed down. They used to do, it was the KGSR radios thing, Marsha Millam put it on or whatever, and then it turned into, you know, ACL radio, and then Shady Grove closed down there, on Barton Springs, wherever.

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  But I played it a handful of times. First time I played it, there was nobody there. Second time I played it, it was packed and I had, I had Willie's old tour bus, the redheaded stranger. It was one of the ones he lost in the IRS era that he never got back.

• 1:02:13Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  And this fucking shyster, Chuck Ligon. I remember he, some motherfucker was selling this thing on the side of the highway up in Oklahoma. The redheaded stranger with the murals on it and shit, it was a beautiful bus. Somehow this guy gets it. Right? I shouldn't call him a shyster, but he definitely shyster me.

• 1:02:30Joe Rogan?

  That's a shyster then.

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. You know, the music business is crazy because it's so-

• 1:02:36Joe Rogan?

  There it is?

• 1:02:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:38Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:02:40Speaker 03

  That's the one, man. Yeah, that's the one. It, on the other side, it says, uh, driven only by the finest bass players.

• 1:02:46Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:02:47Speaker 03

  You know, because somebody in the band always drove those old buses. I had that bus, I used that bus exclusively for about a year, or whatever. And we get off the stage at Shady Grove and my heart had gone out of rhythm. I had to say this, I almost died in the back of that bus. I end up finding, because it won't go, here I am, thirty something years old, in my early thirties. My arrhythmia is out, it's, it's going out and it's getting harder and harder to get back in, to shock it back into normal rhythm. And I just kept ignoring it because somebody told me in South Texas in the eighties not to, not to worry about it. Anyway, um, you know, it turned out that my heart didn't large and all this shit was going on.

• 1:03:33Speaker 03

  And I had to get surgery. The point, long roundabout point that I'm making to you about medical industry that I learned the hard way, man, is like, no one's advocating for you. Only you. You have to be your own advocate. They don't give a fuck. You know, they don't like, they were just gonna automatically put a mechanical valve. In my heart, right? Automatically. Didn't present any other options, anything. Right? Um, and I get there on the American Heart Association. Web page or whatever, because I have insurance at the time or anything. Nothing, you know? Um. The only reason that they covered me at the time was the Affordable Care Act and I had the right window where they could not deny me. Right? Otherwise, I don't know what I would have done.

• 1:04:17Speaker 03

  And that is absolutely an imperfect system. Right? I just didn't have health insurance. So here they are covering me and probably because I don't have money and they're dealing with. You know, how it is, you know? American business practices or whatever. They're like, here's this mechanical valve. And I go and look it up, Joe, and it's like. You know? Um. If you have a mechanical valve. You automatically are on blood thinner the rest of your life. Automatically. No matter what. There's, and you can't, that's just how it's gonna be. Uh. It lasts. Twice as long as a prosthetic valve, which I had not heard of at that point. But that was the whole thing. This can last up to 20 years. But guess what?

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  You have like 300% higher risk of a stroke. With a mechanical valve. As a prosthetic, a bio-prosthetic. Cow valve. Um. And then the third thing was that. You can hear that thing clicking. You can hear the valve.

• 1:05:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:18Speaker 03

  Ticking.

• 1:05:19Joe Rogan?

  My buddy Everlast has one of those.

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  Really?

• 1:05:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, he could go like this.

• 1:05:22Speaker 03

  You can hear it?

• 1:05:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:26Speaker 03

  And I was reading about that and man, I'm like neurotic like I knew I'm like, I'll never get over it. So that's when I found out about the, about the bovine cow valve.

• 1:05:36Joe Rogan?

  So it's made out of a cow?

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. Edwards Scientific makes it. I carry a little card around in my wallet with the tag of, of, you know, that product number in case somebody sees me on, finds me on the sidewalk.

• 1:05:49Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:05:50Speaker 03

  You know, and in that.

• 1:05:51Joe Rogan?

  How long does that last?

• 1:05:52Speaker 03

  They're supposed to last around 10 years and I had mine and, uh, I had mine done and right there at Seton, you know, Seton Medical there on 38th in January 2019. So we're coming back around to it.

• 1:06:08Joe Rogan?

  So you have to get another operation?

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, but what they did is they put a, they put a, the way they did it, and here's the thing about, right, medical and anything, right? The medical industry is, I think, really fucked up and really predatory, totally profit driven and like, you know, people's health and preventative wellbeing and all that. I mean, we don't get, they don't give, we don't give a fuck about that.

• 1:06:32Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:06:33Speaker 03

  In this country, you know, I mean, there's no money to be made off of people look, taking care of themselves and eating right and being preventative and like.

• 1:06:41Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:06:41Speaker 03

  You know, there's, there's, there's nothing in that. The part about it that is amazing though, even in the like kind of insanity of all the land of cheap traders, is the technological advancements.

• 1:06:54Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:54Speaker 03

  The technological advancements in the medical field, though not really, you know, um, available to the common person, um, they are incredible advancements, right? So it's like, they're moving so quickly that by the time I need to get another one, I don't think they'll ever have to open me, cut me up, open again, because they can like go in through a scope now.

• 1:07:16Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  They could do it at that time. It was just more experimental and they didn't want to do it. They were only doing it on really high risk, older patients, you know, but I think it's already kind of gone more mainstream from where when they cut me open to like, if I did it right now, I could probably get around. Cutting it.

• 1:07:33Joe Rogan?

  Right, so they're going through an artery?

• 1:07:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:36Joe Rogan?

  And then what do they have to do to it?

• 1:07:38Speaker 03

  Well, so with me, what was happening was is, so I had the Wolf Parkinson's white. Had to get the ablation first to deal to, before I could deal with what aortic valve disease is what it's called. And what it, what it basically is, is that over your aorta, there's these three valves that sit on the, over the top of your aorta that, they look like a Mercedes symbol is what they look like. It's like the best example, it really looks like a Mercedes symbol. And some people, it's a bicuspid or whatever, some people are born with two of the three fused together, or just one missing altogether. And it turned out that I was just missing one. It's like a leaky carburetor, you know? So like, as the time goes, that old carburetor in that truck, over time, just leaking more and more and more.

• 1:08:23Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:08:24Speaker 03

  You know? And I mean, I just got lucky, man, because I was like in the back of that fucking bus and there was this lady driving us back then that like, was like, holding séances and burning sage over the top of me while I was like laying in the back of that bus, like that was gonna heal me. That shit, that shit didn't work. And she doesn't drive me anymore.

• 1:08:48Speaker 03

  Get yourself a good bus driver. You have to get a good bus driver, you'll never get good sleep.

• 1:08:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, because you'd be freaking out. You'd be thinking, what if this person falls asleep?

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a lot of them.

• 1:08:58Joe Rogan?

  Especially the late night drives.

• 1:09:00Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 1:09:01Joe Rogan?

  Ooh, late night drives is scary. That, that highway starts hypnotizing you. This episode is brought to you by NOCO. You're miles from home, you turn the key, nothing. Dead battery. Normally, that means finding another car, someone willing to give you a jump, and dealing with old jumper cables. But what if you didn't need any of that? Keep a NOCO portable jump starter in your glove box and jump start your car yourself. No cables, no second vehicle, no waiting for help. It also works as a power bank and has a built-in LED flashlight. NOCO, the end of jumper cables. Use code ROGEN10 for 10% off. Select jump starters at N-O dot C-O.

• 1:09:44Joe Rogan?

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• 1:10:41Speaker 03

  There was this guy, there's a video going around. He drove us around for a little bit and there was this video passing around the industry. This guy called Jimbo. And it was this bus driver that was like, you know, just a speed freak. And it was like this video of him where he was like on whatever he was on. And somebody had recorded him or like they'd put a phone up or something because they knew he was nuts. And he was like having one of those fucking like, you know, methamphetamine freakouts like, you know, driving the bus down the road and it was getting all passed around the industry. And I saw it because like he was driving us at the time.

• 1:11:15Joe Rogan?

  Geez.

• 1:11:15Speaker 03

  I remember we woke up and I remember we woke up somewhere in New Mexico one morning because we were going on this road all of a sudden. And we get up and I go to the front of the bus and he's, we're like on some fucking two-track, you know, Caliche fucking

• 1:11:32Joe Rogan?

  Dirt road.

• 1:11:33Speaker 03

  Dirt road that was like behind, behind a gate in a bus, that bus, right? And I get up there and he's looking all crazy and the door handle, the inside door handle of the bus had been pulled off and shit. It was crazy, man. We got, when we got to the, when we got back down here in Texas, man, I never saw a fool again.

• 1:11:51Joe Rogan?

  Jesus Christ. Well, you gotta think, if you're driving Buses all through the night. There's a high likelihood you're on amphetamines.

• 1:11:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:12:01Joe Rogan?

  For the business, it's like probably the best way to stay awake.

• 1:12:04Speaker 03

  Oh, no doubt about it.

• 1:12:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and then obviously that shit's very addictive. And you need it. This band has to get to Cincinnati. You gotta get to Cincinnati. It's an eight hour drive. There's only one way to do it. We gotta drive through the night.

• 1:12:19Speaker 03

  And that's why all the old performers were all on pills, you know, and they were getting prescribed, I mean, you know, and they were getting prescribed that shit by the doctor. You know?

• 1:12:26Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah. Does this give you a a greater appreciation for life, the value of life, like knowing you almost lost it?

• 1:12:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 1:12:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know. I hadn't thought about.

• 1:12:42Speaker 03

  Immediately after that, I'd started thi- I just cut, started thinking about my mortality. You know, I hadn't really thought about it before, you know?

• 1:12:49Joe Rogan?

  Of course, everybody feels invulnerable when you're young. Especially if you're young and you're liv- you're living that wild, you know, transient, moving around, no roots.

• 1:12:59Speaker 03

  When I was in my twenties, I guess I really. Looking back now, I was like, man, I was young, like, I thought I could live like that forever. I thought I, I thought I could live hand in mouth and. You know, sleep in people's pastures and. You know?

• 1:13:18Speaker 03

  Do the gentleman hobo thing forever, but you know, I was twenty six.

• 1:13:23Joe Rogan?

  There's something romantic about that, too, right?

• 1:13:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, I love that. I, I, I wouldn't take it back, man. I mean, like, you know, I believe that, you know.

• 1:13:35Speaker 03

  You know, I think mental slavery is something that is real. And but so much of it is us, like, we do it to ourselves. You know?

• 1:13:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:49Speaker 03

  And so that's what I was gonna say about Chomsky. I haven't kept up with him in years. But I remember something he said a long time ago that stuck with me, where he was talking about like American, you know, consumerism. Over the last hundred years. It really kind of illuminated my, my kinda mind was.

• 1:14:13Speaker 03

  He was saying, he was like, there are people working really, really, really hard to eliminate your sense of purpose for the explicit goal of making you a more efficient consumer. Right?

• 1:14:29Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:14:31Speaker 03

  All human beings live for and desire a, a life of purpose.

• 1:14:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

  Purpose. It doesn't matter what it is, something that you can dedicate yourself to, the 10,000 hours, the 10 years. It can be, you know, anything, uh, woodmaking or, or your buddy with the, this ancient tooth that he's carving into this beautiful piece of art or whatever it is, you know?

• 1:14:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:00Speaker 03

  Um, I don't know. I guess something, it's like a heavy thing, but I kind of realized when I became a transient that a lot of who I was was like this amalgamation of a bunch of people just trying to fucking sell me products. You know, nineties radio just blasting my brain as a kid, right? Like, programming that like, it's like, so much programming is so hard for me to watch because you know that it's only a vehicle for the commercials.

• 1:15:40Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:15:41Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:15:42Speaker 03

  So whenever I'm watching something and as soon as I think that it's not that good, I can't stop thinking about like, well, the only, this is just a vehicle for me to fucking, you know, think I need whatever the fuck they're selling.

• 1:15:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:59Speaker 03

  You know, so I feel like, I, I feel like I killed like a, a lot of the false version of me that I was becoming that I, I only realized when I walked, when I like walked away from Crystal City. You know what I mean?

• 1:16:18Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:16:21Speaker 03

  And then, and then I could, um, and then I really started becoming, you know, me. That's when I really started becoming me.

• 1:16:29Joe Rogan?

  A lot of people are prisoners throughout their whole life because the, the only value they place is in how much stuff they're able to acquire. That's the only value that they see in life. They look at numbers on a ledger, so they look at numbers in their bank account and they look at the stuff they're willing to acquire or that they're able to acquire.

• 1:16:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:16:49Joe Rogan?

  And that's their only measure of success in this life.

• 1:16:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, the very definition of the word rich has changed so much over the last, you know, a hundred years, you know, it's kind of moved entire, it really, it really, richness wasn't a, a material idea. You know, but it.

• 1:17:06Joe Rogan?

  What did it used to be?

• 1:17:08Speaker 03

  You know, richness of life, uh, fullness of life.

• 1:17:12Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:17:12Speaker 03

  You know, um.

• 1:17:13Joe Rogan?

  Fulfillment.

• 1:17:14Speaker 03

  Fulfillment, um.

• 1:17:16Joe Rogan?

  Purpose.

• 1:17:17Speaker 03

  Health.

• 1:17:18Joe Rogan?

  Health, yeah.

• 1:17:19Speaker 03

  Community.

• 1:17:20Joe Rogan?

  Community, family.

• 1:17:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, friends, yeah, real life. But so many people, they, they, they forego all that. They'll throw everything out the window just for the numbers, for numbers, and they, they think they're successful.

• 1:17:36Speaker 03

  I mean, it's the way that it's being run, you know, like, I mean, there's no such thing as a free lunch, you know? All this free social media, that shit ain't free.

• 1:17:45Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:17:45Speaker 03

  You know?

• 1:17:46Joe Rogan?

  You give up your attention, your attention's very, very valuable, your data and your attention. Yeah, your privacy.

• 1:17:52Speaker 03

  The transparent society.

• 1:17:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:54Speaker 03

  But man, like, you know, you're pulling, y'all pulled up that AI stuff. I remember, I, I won't tell you the whole thing, but I, I was playing on the street in Europe when, uh, when I was younger. I'd met a guy down on the Lower East Side, he's a Danish jazz singer, and he would show up over in the States a couple of times a year. And he was doing really well there in Denmark and the, the state really sponsors the arts there in a big way and it's a small country. High quality of life, like, he really had it made over there. And when he was coming over to States to play music, it was almost more of a leisure thing for him. Benjamin Agrabah is his name, great singer, great jazz singer.

• 1:18:33Speaker 03

  And he'd show up at the open mics and all this shit and he, I think he really liked me because he saw the way that I was living this American gypsy lifestyle. And he eventually helped me get over to Europe and I played the club circuit in Copenhagen for like six weeks or whatever. And I was really rough around the edges and like the American novelty in the folk in like blues clubs around Copenhagen wore off really quick. And I wound up back on the street, but this time in Europe. And as soon as I started playing on the street in Copenhagen, man, then being a real Texan in Europe in front of tourists on the street, man, I start, that's when I started making money. It was crazy.

• 1:19:18Speaker 03

  My money like quadrupled because all of a sudden I was like a truly exotic, Texas is exotic and everywhere you go in the world, it means something, right? They either want to shake your hand or they step back. And it doesn't matter where you go in the world, there's no, there's not an inch of the world that hadn't heard of Texas, you know? And, um, and that's, and so musically, you know, it, and I think culturally it means something, no matter what, you know? And to play music and be a Texan is worth a lot on its own. You know what I mean? It's a big part of it is just being a Texan. Gary Clark Jr., learning how to hold his own under the tradition of Austin blues players

• 1:20:01Speaker 03

  in Texas, guitar slingers, I mean, that's, it's second to none in the world, you know? And so if you've seen him live, you know what it is and, uh, but I remember seeing like, there were no self-checkouts at grocery stores and shit in the United States back then, not one. And then I was like, I ended up down in France because it was getting cold in Copenhagen and I had like, I had like two or 300 kroner left and I put it all on a bus ticket to Paris because it was my mama's favorite city and I grew up quite a bit in Louisiana, having some of that French heritage and. I went down there. I'm glad I didn't think about it, man, because the language barrier was really difficult and I didn't really realize it till I was pulling into the city,

• 1:20:46Speaker 03

  you know. And actually, there was an Algerian guy who spoke English that was like, man, go to Monmart, go to Les Sacres Corps, go to Les Sacres Corps, that's where the tourists are, whatever. And I kind of learned how to hustle tourists with gypsies, kind of, that would, were using me kind of as a decoy on the steps. And I thought, this is great, these gypsies love me. And I'm sitting there playing, and while I'm playing, I realized that I'm just a distraction while they're pickpocketing these tourists. It was a good trick. Of course, I didn't say anything. Also, I didn't stick with them too much. But like, so, like, the automation thing, you know, they're, Europe is way ahead of

• 1:21:26Speaker 03

  us on all of that. Because in a lot of ways, America, when you try to like, analyze America against Europe and these countries over there, like, in some ways, it's similar. But we're more similar to Latin or South America in a lot of ways, with just how big the country is, you know, and, you know, the, the, you know, because the country's so big, we got the states that are divided up, all that type of shit, those kinds of technologies to like, hit the people and become mainstream, it's, it's a slower process here, right?

• 1:22:06Speaker 03

  And one of the things, you know, about the pandemic that is obvious to me now is, you know, a lot of people realize that they could speed that up, you know, and, you know, I mean, they think they'd been trying to eliminate, you know, the, the risks and, what's the word? What are they like, you know, externalizing costs, right? Once, like, how do we get, how do we get these machines in here and these people out? And it, we've probably jumped ahead in that process in America a decade or more in just a couple of years. And I just remember, this was probably two thousand ten.

• 1:22:48Speaker 03

  You go into a grocery store in Paris and there was, there was only one person working there and everything else was self checkout. And that was years before I saw it here. And then you think about the way that that's hitting in every single industry in America.

• 1:23:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:04Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:23:05Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's so easy for people to be completely disconnected from other people now. You know, you don't, you don't have to interact. You know, and that's part of it. And if they don't have to pay people, they can maximize their profits and then it becomes a very impersonal experience.

• 1:23:21Speaker 03

  Soil and Green is coming, baby.

• 1:23:23Joe Rogan?

  It's coming.

• 1:23:23Speaker 03

  You seen that movie?

• 1:23:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:25Speaker 03

  Good movie, man.

• 1:23:25Joe Rogan?

  It's a good movie. It's a scary fucking movie.

• 1:23:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:29Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think all the dystopian movies about the future, they undersold it. It's gonna get real weird real soon. And because automation is not just gonna apply to self checkout, it's gonna apply to everything. All the, all that truck driving shit, that's all gone. That's gonna be gone.

• 1:23:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:23:45Joe Rogan?

  It's all gonna be self-driving trucks. And they're gonna be more efficient, less accidents, safer.

• 1:23:51Speaker 03

  So remember those big business people? Just remember those people. I know a whole lot of people. Who have relied on undocumented workers in this state for decades. Voting against the very thing that they were using themselves this entire time.

• 1:24:08Joe Rogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:09Speaker 03

  Reli- how you gonna rely on undocumented workers?

• 1:24:12Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:24:12Speaker 03

  Yourself.

• 1:24:14Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:24:14Speaker 03

  You ain't paying taxes on it. You're not, you know, those people got no safety net or anything.

• 1:24:19Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:24:19Speaker 03

  And then, you know, here comes the, that's where it's gonna happen. And I'm not saying just as a negative thing, like.

• 1:24:28Speaker 03

  I think you can already see in social media, I do think there's this, um.

• 1:24:35Speaker 03

  This exhaustion, even in the youth, with this, with this monolith, you know, with this thing.

• 1:24:41Joe Rogan?

  The phones.

• 1:24:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, and. I've been saying that in the music business, like in country music, you know, like Mark Twain said, history doesn't, um. It doesn't repeat, it rhymes.

• 1:24:55Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:24:56Speaker 03

  You know, and so it's like, it's 25 now, but I was thinking of it last year in 2024. Cause like 1974 in music was this crazy year. You know, and like thinking about the Nashville system. The reason that Waylon Jennings is different than anybody else is because Waylon's the specific guy who breaks the stranglehold that the Nashville system has on its artists. That you can't use your band, you can't choose your studio, right? Like any of that, like Waylon, you have to think how crazy that is. You couldn't use your band and you couldn't even pick the studio. You couldn't produce, you didn't have creative control at all. Waylon's the guy that breaks that, through that wall.

• 1:25:41Joe Rogan?

  How did he do it?

• 1:25:43Speaker 03

  I think, I think a couple of ways. It's all, it's the yin and yang of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. They were both on RCA. Willie was, you know, at first, you know, it's like Stapleton. Stapleton made his career as a songwriter early on, you know? And, and that's what catapulted really for everything, you know, that he's got going on now. There's a really great foundation there of a guy that's spent his whole life writing songs. And that's what Willie did, you know? So Willie actually had success pretty early when he got to Nashville with, you know, songs like nightlife and crazy and all that kind of stuff. And Baron Young and Patsy Cline and these kinds of really big artists were cutting his songs pretty early on, right?

• 1:26:28Speaker 03

  But he was so weird to the establishment at the time. And so, um,

• 1:26:36Speaker 03

  you know, kind of had this like philosophical thing into his writing that was going over the heads of the hillbilly deal. So he was really neglected as a, you know, Willie Nelson records with him singing them. Waylon was more favored actually by like Chet Atkins and them.

• 1:26:54Speaker 03

  But like you'd be you'd be number one on the country charts in Nashville in the mid sixties and be in debt. You know, that's what Waylon said. Waylon was like, man, I'd be number one all the time and I was fucking dead broke. You know, he's like, man, they got you out there seven nights a week. And you're coming back and Lucky Moller's telling them that you owe him fucking 10 grand. You know, that was, that was a crazy system. Willie ends up leaving RCA, they're over him. He leaves RCA because Jerry Wexler is coming down in A and R and Texans out of this progressive Central Texas scene of that era that was so unique.

• 1:27:32Speaker 03

  And it happened then and just totally unique, the whole scene, everything here, the movement, the hippies and the cowboys, the, the, where everybody could like here in the capital of Texas, you know, it was weird, but they were in the same rooms. We're still doing that here, you know, which is what I'm, what I'm really proud of, you know, and glad that this town never turned into Nashville or LA or of any of those towns. The best thing that ever happened to us is that the business didn't grow up like that.

• 1:28:02Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:28:02Speaker 03

  I really do believe that because it's allowed our unique culture to continue to grow. Um, even if it's, like I said, and sometimes it's, it's, it's good to be neglected by that machine.

• 1:28:13Joe Rogan?

  For sure.

• 1:28:13Speaker 03

  But so Willie leaves because Jerry Wexler pulls him out of there because RCA doesn't give a fuck about him anyway. Right? He goes to Atlantic, sells 400,000 records. The boys up in New York don't even realize there's a country division. After Willie sells 400,000 records, which is a lot, right? They closed the division. And that's when Willie lands at Columbia. And he's having success. Well, they were starting to think that Waylon was past his prime too, but then Willie's blowing up on the other label. And Willie and Waylon got the same manager at the time, Neil Russian. And what's Russian doing? Russian's leveraging it all. And so Waylon was about to leave RCA.

• 1:28:58Speaker 03

  And they doubled down and matched kind of Willie's deal.

• 1:29:04Speaker 03

  Because they didn't want, because they didn't want to lose Waylon. And Waylon was like, I'm only, I'm only staying, you know? If I like, I gotta be producing my own records. I gotta, gotta be my band and I gotta pick the place that I'm playing. You know, and he, he manages to do that. So it's not just Waylon. I mean, it's Willie and Waylon together. That's why they're so tied together, you know, as these two guys that their careers just kept, you know, they just kept chasing each other kind of through the record books. You know what I mean? And, uh,

• 1:29:42Speaker 03

  you know, cause you'd be in Nashville. It's still like this now, right? Like when I got signed to Nashville by 30 Tigers, it was purely because John Folk was my agent. And those guys, they'd tell you this themselves. They didn't understand what I was doing. They didn't get it. I was only put on the roster as a favor to my agent because they were having success with some other artists openly saying, I don't understand this. Right? Which at least they're being honest about, you know?

• 1:30:14Speaker 03

  But then what they would do that was so weird is like they'd give you,

• 1:30:19Speaker 03

  like if a major label would give you, you know, half a million dollars on your deal. These guys would give you 50 grand, right? Like a 10th of that, you know, kind of on the independent alt-country Americana circuit. But they would, what frustrated me, what frustrated me about it, Joe, was that they're only giving you a 10th of money, but they're behaving like major labels with these like two-year record cycles. That just kills an artist that's like, that hasn't broken through. It just kills you. That's a, that's a 100% industry model because they can always get another horse. You know what I mean?

• 1:31:02Speaker 03

  They can always get another horse and they can always, you know, they bet on 10 young guys and, and one of those kind of amateur realists blows up. You know, they're good.

• 1:31:14Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:31:15Speaker 03

  But you're never gonna get a Waylon Jennings out of that model.

• 1:31:18Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:31:18Speaker 03

  It's not gonna, you know what I mean? It's not, it's not gonna happen, you know?

• 1:31:23Joe Rogan?

  And so how did, but how did Waylon get it so that he could do whatever he wanted?

• 1:31:31Speaker 03

  Because Willie left, right? And they, because Willie left. And all of a sudden, Waylon was really gonna leave. That's all of a sudden.

• 1:31:42Joe Rogan?

  That was his leverage.

• 1:31:43Speaker 03

  They gave him everything. They gave him everything and, and, and everything was changing. Everything was changing in Nashville. We were talking about when I say like nineteen seventy-four here, you gotta think about it, you know? This is America in Vietnam. You know? This is America coming out of the sixties, you know? It's coming, everything was, you could, I feel like in a lot of ways, what was happening is like, you know, the commercial culture was really starting to take off. You know what I mean? And then by the time we get to the eighties, you know, it's like this level of like pop culture

• 1:32:25Speaker 03

  and like American pop culture as a global export, you know, by, it's like, I guess maybe it's finally truly realized by maybe by the time Michael Jordan becomes the like most visible person on the planet, you know, kinda in the eighties and nineties. It's like Nashville was such an old system. It's kinda like in country music today, like one of the reasons everybody's sprinting into it, right? Is because it's one, it's like one of the only places left where

• 1:33:02Speaker 03

  there is like loyalty, long-term loyalty in the fanbase compared to like, you know, what happened with pop music in the last twenty years with pop and hip-hop and all that. I mean, I can't, every one of those guys called me at one point and were like, "I wanna get into country music 'cause you got loyal fans."

• 1:33:19Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:33:20Speaker 03

  All hip-hop industry guys.

• 1:33:21Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:33:22Speaker 03

  All of them, every last one of them. And they've had success with a whole bunch of guys since then. I just didn't do it.

• 1:33:27Joe Rogan?

  Well, country music has always been connected to authenticity.

• 1:33:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:30Joe Rogan?

  And that's the reason why you keep the loyal fans, right? Cause people know that it's real.

• 1:33:35Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:33:36Joe Rogan?

  Whether it's Colter Wall or whoever it is, it's authentic. You hear it and you go, "This is not mass-produced, this is not..." A bunch of executives sitting around looking at a focus group trying to figure out what's gonna hit.

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• 1:34:49Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:34:49Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:50Speaker 03

  Man, you mentioned Coulter. I wanted to say this. This is something I wanted to bring up with the Willie and Waylon thing. And I've been meaning to tell Coulter this, so I'll just tell him on your show. So, we were both on the 30 Tigers roster for years. I met Coulter out at Willie's Ranch, goddamn, 10 years ago, right? And he's one of my favorites. I've always, always loved his songwriting. I mean, everything he puts out is great, don't you agree?

• 1:35:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I love him.

• 1:35:14Speaker 03

  Special, you know, really special.

• 1:35:16Joe Rogan?

  Jamie turned me on to him when I heard Kate McKannon the first time.

• 1:35:20Speaker 03

  Jamie Johnson?

• 1:35:21Joe Rogan?

  No, Jamie, this Jamie.

• 1:35:22Speaker 03

  Oh, this Jamie?

• 1:35:22Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. He texted me and he's like, "You're gonna love this guy."

• 1:35:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:26Joe Rogan?

  He sent me that song. I was like, "Holy shit." When I found out he was 21 when he made that song, I'm like, "You gotta be kidding me." That sounds like a 60-year-old chain smoker.

• 1:35:34Speaker 03

  Man, it bowled us all over. And you know what's funny, man? He's just getting better.

• 1:35:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:38Speaker 03

  You know, he is.

• 1:35:39Joe Rogan?

  He's incredible.

• 1:35:40Speaker 03

  Here's something about that I told him, I need to, I'm gonna, I wanted to buy him a pickup truck as a gift for this. This is why. So he was on the roster. I was on the roster. And I started way down at the back of the line, right? And made a lot of records. And more and more of the labels are calling, and each record I'm putting out is doing better than the previous one, and... Um, there's more money and promotion going into each album.

• 1:36:10Speaker 03

  But all, a lot of outside guys are calling, you know, all the coastal labels are calling. New York and LA are all over me.

• 1:36:18Speaker 03

  Culture ends up pulling up stakes and going to RCA. And he didn't just go to RCA, he took everything with him. He took the whole catalog over there.

• 1:36:28Speaker 03

  Um, and I wasn't really aware of that. I didn't know what was going on.

• 1:36:32Speaker 03

  Um, and RCA wasn't like, they had hollered at me like there's one of their A and R guys or whatever, but it, their big guys were never really interested in me out there, right? They, so they weren't one of the ones that was like really hot on me.

• 1:36:47Speaker 03

  But David Macias at Thirty Tigers, very similar to, what I'm saying is, is, Culture to me is kinda like Willie left RCA back in the day. And when he left, all of a sudden, those guys, because he took everything with him, were about to lose me and they fucking handed the keys over to me. You know what I mean? Because, and I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that Culture had left and just took everything. And so that ended up happening on a, on a, on a record cycle for me, uh, for an album called Ten Dollar Cowboy. And I was this close to going to, you know, the New York boys.

• 1:37:28Speaker 03

  And Macias comes in last minute and beats them all on the royalty rate, on the money, on everything. Right? So, uh, I guess what I'm saying is Culture's kinda my Willie Nelson. Appreciate you, bud. You're doing good.

• 1:37:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, he won't do podcasts. I tried to get him in.

• 1:37:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:37:46Joe Rogan?

  Sent me a bunch of records, sent me some cool shit, said, sorry, but no.

• 1:37:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:50Joe Rogan?

  But I mean, that's probably better. I mean, he wants to just be as authentic as possible. The dude spends time actually working on a ranch.

• 1:37:58Speaker 03

  Well, that's what he loves to do.

• 1:38:00Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:00Speaker 03

  You ever been up there to Saskatchewan?

• 1:38:01Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 1:38:02Speaker 03

  Man, it's in their blood.

• 1:38:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:04Speaker 03

  That's the, what that land is, that's what they do up there.

• 1:38:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:08Speaker 03

  I've been right through Saskatoon, even the big town there, you know, and he's, I guess he's not too far down south from there, but like,

• 1:38:15Speaker 03

  it's a. Those are ranching folks.

• 1:38:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, it's in his music, clearly.

• 1:38:21Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:38:22Joe Rogan?

  You know, I mean, tha- that guy screams authenticity.

• 1:38:25Speaker 03

  Yep, he does. And he grew up on, on, you know, Waylon and all that stuff, you know, and all the cowboy and all the, you know, he knows that cowboy music probably better than anybody.

• 1:38:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, that, well, that's, that's the thing that when you're talking about these hip-hop artists and pop artists, that, that's what they, you know, all artists, I mean, even someone to pop artist, what do they want to be? They want, they want something that resonates with people. They want something that really connects with people.

• 1:38:49Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:38:50Joe Rogan?

  You know, and if they think the vehicle to doing that is a hit pop song, they'll take that route.

• 1:38:55Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:38:56Joe Rogan?

  But then they'll hear something like Kate McCann and like, god damn.

• 1:39:00Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:39:00Joe Rogan?

  That's what I really want to do.

• 1:39:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:02Joe Rogan?

  You know?

• 1:39:03Speaker 03

  You can't dup- you can't duplicate that. The only, the only way to do that is to live it.

• 1:39:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's gotta be real. It's gotta be, you know, there's something, just like I was talking about with comedy, like, they, they have to know that you're really thinking that.

• 1:39:16Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:39:16Joe Rogan?

  It's something in music, too. They have to know that this is, and they like when you write your own shit, too, you know? You know that it's coming from someone's, someone's mind and their, their soul. It's coming from their life experience. It's who they are as a human being. This is their art. This is a true expression of their, their, their being. And that, that's what makes people loyal. That's what connects with people.

• 1:39:38Speaker 03

  Those pop artists just want to take a picture standing next to authenticity.

• 1:39:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they do. Well, they want to be it, but they don't know how to get there and they don't know how to do it and they've never lived it and they've been, you know, they've been paying attention to all the polls and the focus groups and they've been listening to the executives and they've been taking the advances and driving the Mercedes. They're doing all the shit that leads you down the wrong path.

• 1:40:00Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:40:01Joe Rogan?

  And then one day you realize like, fuck, it's not what I want, you know?

• 1:40:05Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:40:06Joe Rogan?

  It's, it's interesting, because it's like, you know, there's always Gonna be these examples of something that that pops through that's real, that people gravitate towards. And then there's always gonna be these people trying to capitalize on it, make money off of it and trying to figure out how to recreate it. In an inauthentic way, it's not possible. That's the one thing that might save us. From this AI shit.

• 1:40:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:40:29Joe Rogan?

  Cause AI is gonna create a bunch of really catchy songs, you know? But it's never gonna create an Oliver Anthony song. It's never gonna create Hard Times, you know? It's never gonna create some of your shit. It's not, it's not going to. It's gotta come from a real human being. And there's a thing that people are always gonna want, you know, you're always gonna want something. That you know a real human being made, that there's something in it, you know? That's why this building's filled with art. You know, I I love looking at something that somebody made, you know, it came from their their soul. Came from whoever they are as a human. They laid it down, whether it's music or whether it's art. Comedy, whatever it is, it's like that that's coming from a human being. You know, and that's, we're always gonna wanna be connected to that.

• 1:41:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was looking at you saying that with your Joe Rogan Experience sign and you telling me in the hallway that it's. Named for Hendrix?

• 1:41:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I stole it from Jimmy. When we first started.

• 1:41:26Speaker 03

  The greats never reveal their sources.

• 1:41:29Joe Rogan?

  I couldn't help it. I had to, I had, well, it's obvious. I had to give it up.

• 1:41:33Speaker 03

  It wasn't obvious to me, man, as I'm saying, I'm kinda slow.

• 1:41:35Joe Rogan?

  Well, I had to give it up. It's like, but you know.

• 1:41:38Speaker 03

  Austin, Texas, or bust it says right there.

• 1:41:40Joe Rogan?

  I used to listen to Jimmy all the time on the way to the Comedy Store. That was like Jimmy and Led Zeppelin. I'd listen to Whole Lot of Love and If Six Was Nine. I'd listen to that all the time on the way down Laurel Canyon.

• 1:41:57Speaker 03

  Can you imagine how crazy that must have sounded? Coming through the radio or coming through like. People's sound systems in America in the in the late sixties?

• 1:42:08Joe Rogan?

  Well, my friend Phil Hartman, when he was a kid, he used to work at the Whiskey. He was like, you know, like a grip. And it was his job, the the speakers were precariously placed on the edge of the stage. And Jimmy performed there and it was his job to stand there and make sure that Jimmy didn't kick over the speaker into the audience. So he stood right there while Hendrix played right above him. And the way he talked about it, man, it's like, it was just, to him, it was like this magical moment, because I think he was a teenager at the time. And it was, you know-

• 1:42:47Speaker 03

  Was he like in somebody else's band or something?

• 1:42:49Joe Rogan?

  No, he was just working for the club. You know, he was just a guy that was hired to work there, you know, just a kid.

• 1:42:55Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:42:56Joe Rogan?

  And he was basically, literally just there to make sure the speaker doesn't fall into the ground. And, uh, you know, Jimmy was playing right above him, just right there.

• 1:43:05Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:43:05Joe Rogan?

  And he said, it was incredible, it was insane. He said, it was just like this magical moment. Because Jimmy live, you know, there's something about seeing someone live, you know, like I was talking about when I saw Gary play Midnight Rider, there's something live. And I was with my oldest daughter and we were at this downtown LA club and it was like, a Monday or Tuesday night, it was a weeknight and it was a midnight show. It was like a real late night show and it was, uh, sponsored by an alcohol company. I wish I could remember the company. But they put together this very small show and it was just, they, it was a total impromptu session. And Suzanne, my friend Suzanne Santo, who's the lead singer of Honey Honey at the time, she's incredibly talented.

• 1:43:50Joe Rogan?

  She was singing it and she didn't know the exact words. So she had to get the words off of her phone. So she's singing Midnight Rider off her phone and Gary's in the background and I recorded it on my phone. And I uploaded, see if you can find it, Jamie.

• 1:44:09Speaker 04

  I have your version, but I have somebody else's version.

• 1:44:11Speaker 03

  Oh shit.

• 1:44:14Speaker 03

  That's what I'm talking about right there.

• 1:44:17Speaker 03

  Go ahead, Gary.

• 1:44:18Joe Rogan?

  It was Jamison.

• 1:44:28Joe Rogan?

  Come on.

• 1:44:30Speaker 03

  I just love when he gets into it. Yeah.

• 1:45:31Speaker 03

  The blues will never go out of style. Woo!

• 1:46:27Speaker 03

  Come on Gary.

• 1:46:28Joe Rogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:46:59Speaker 03

  That's a nice jacket, G.

• 1:47:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:04Speaker 03

  Oh, that's a...

• 1:47:07Joe Rogan?

  Jamie, see if you can find Midnight Rider on my Instagram. I know it's on there. I wanna, I wanna play that part because it's just, it was fucking insane. It was just one of those magical moments where you see someone perform live. There's just something about, you, you get a lot of it. There it is.

• 1:47:33Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 1:48:23Joe Rogan?

  See how she's looking at her phone? She had to read the lyrics off her phone.

• 1:48:27Speaker 03

  They're all doing that now. It's crazy.

• 1:48:28Joe Rogan?

  She had to because she didn't know exactly the lyrics.

• 1:48:32Speaker 03

  What if you didn't, what if you, what if you didn't have this fucking thing, though?

• 1:48:34Joe Rogan?

  Well...

• 1:48:35Speaker 03

  Then you might, then you might have to remember them.

• 1:48:37Joe Rogan?

  Well, she would've had to get a piece of paper.

• 1:48:39Speaker 03

  Or make some shit up.

• 1:48:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, make some shit up, but, you know.

• 1:48:42Speaker 03

  Man, you know, listening to Gary do that and you talking about how much he loves Stevie Ray Vaughan, it just, you know, it reminds me, it's like, you know, this... To me, it's like, you know, it's like country is everything and country is nothing. You know, because if you're in, if you're in Texas, all that shit over there on the other side of Mississippi, like it goes away for us. You know, there's a, there's a, there's a brashness, there's a, there's a boldness in any sound, whether it's coming out of honky tonk or coming out of a blues joint. In Texas, it's a totally different sound. You know, it's like Billy Gibbons talked about this a lot, you know,

• 1:49:22Speaker 03

  like when those guys were trying to break through on the national scene, the idea of Texas is just a total stigma. Right? It's all hillbillies, it's all provincial.

• 1:49:32Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:32Speaker 03

  You know, and all this shit, you know, and so it's like you go to Nashville or whatever and it's all Appalachia. It's all, you know what I mean?

• 1:49:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:42Speaker 03

  It's cause it's, and that's the thing, it's like, I don't give a fuck about some genres, you know, because you get classified. But one thing, you can't explain away is place, right? You can't explain away region, right? Like you are from where you're from.

• 1:49:59Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:59Speaker 03

  Gary Clark Jr. is from right here.

• 1:50:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:02Speaker 03

  And he fucking sounds like it. You know what I mean?

• 1:50:04Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:05Speaker 03

  He sounds like it and it's like, it's not that it's rock, blues, soul, country, whatever. It's, it's Texas and what happens with Texans of any background, right? They discount you for sure. Look at us as provincial, right?

• 1:50:23Speaker 03

  I mean, people got some ideas about what Texas is who have never stepped foot in the state. That's not any different than, you know, people who've never been to California claiming to be an expert on it, right? And so it's like, there's two roads for a Texas artist. You either let somebody in Nashville or New York or LA convince you to lose your accent, you know.

• 1:50:47Speaker 03

  Wash the Texas off, do it our way, or, which is the only way, is to take your brand of Texas to the world. Whatever it is, whether it's Gary, or Selena, or anybody.

• 1:50:59Joe Rogan?

  Steve Ray Vaughan.

• 1:51:00Speaker 03

  Stevie Ray Vaughan, man.

• 1:51:01Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's with comedy too, man. I mean, Bill Hicks is one of the greatest of all time.

• 1:51:07Speaker 03

  He's my favorite.

• 1:51:08Joe Rogan?

  Right from here.

• 1:51:09Speaker 03

  That's right. The scene was hot, man, the scene was hot.

• 1:51:11Joe Rogan?

  It was hot because of him. It was hot because of him and Kennison. It's Texas. You know, I remember.

• 1:51:16Speaker 03

  Did you know Hicks?

• 1:51:17Joe Rogan?

  No, met him once. Met him once, real briefly. Didn't even get a chance to talk to him. But I saw him perform live a few times before he died.

• 1:51:25Speaker 03

  You did see him live?

• 1:51:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, saw Kennison a few times live. I saw Kennison live before he died too, but he had already passed his prime. Kennison passed his prime real quick, because it was, he's a cautionary tale, because of the partying, you know? Like, he was the fucking man.

• 1:51:43Speaker 03

  Oh, y'all got a party scene, y'all, you comedians got a party scene.

• 1:51:45Joe Rogan?

  Oh, it's, well, that party scene in LA at the time was the cocaine party scene. It was a different party scene, you know? Marc Maron said that he hung out with Kennison, and they did so much coke that he had voices in his head for a fucking year afterwards. A year, like, literally, like, schizophrenic. You know, like, hearing voices in his fucking head for a year, before they stopped talking to him. Yeah, they were doing cocaine, man, and they were doing.

• 1:52:10Speaker 03

  At the viper room.

• 1:52:11Joe Rogan?

  Everywhere, yeah, he was doing it everywhere.

• 1:52:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:14Joe Rogan?

  But Kennison became almost like a caricature of himself. It became sort of captured by this, the perception, by this character that they had created. And Kennison is what birthed Hicks. You know, Hicks was, Hicks was a great comic, but he was one of the outlaws. It was Kennison and Hicks that sort of defined the Texas style. And when we were living in, at the time, I was living in New York, and there was, there was really two places in the country. There was LA, where you wanted to go to get on TV. Everybody wanted to go get a fucking sitcom. They all wanted to be Jerry Seinfeld. And New York, which was like the club comics. That was like the David Tells and the, these guys that would like, you know, the,

• 1:52:56Joe Rogan?

  the guys would do the clubs, and they were, they were thought of as like the real pure comics, you know? And then there was this new scene, this new scene out of Houston, this new scene out of the Laugh Stop in River Oaks. And I remember the first time I ever worked there. Man, you could feel it in the building. You could feel that they had been there. You know, they were both gone. By the time I had worked there, they were both dead. But you could feel it in the building, man. You could feel it in the comics, the open mic scene. You could feel, they were pure. You know, there was a, there was a Texas quality to the way they were doing comedy. It was a fuck you.

• 1:53:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:29Joe Rogan?

  Fuck you.

• 1:53:30Speaker 03

  That's what I like Hicks.

• 1:53:31Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:32Speaker 03

  Hicks would, Hicks would fuck with both sides of the room.

• 1:53:34Joe Rogan?

  Absolutely.

• 1:53:35Speaker 03

  And get, and get, and then, and just fuck them up and.

• 1:53:38Joe Rogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53:39Speaker 03

  Cross them over and.

• 1:53:40Joe Rogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53:40Speaker 03

  Put them in his pocket.

• 1:53:41Joe Rogan?

  And no one knew what, where, what he was. They didn't know what he was.

• 1:53:44Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:53:45Joe Rogan?

  The first time I ever saw him, he bombed. He bombed, except for the comedians.

• 1:53:49Speaker 03

  I've seen video. Cause you know, there's quite, there's quite a bit of video of him from these clubs here and in Houston when he was younger. Cause they were, even in the, you know, in the nineties, they were filming.

• 1:53:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:59Speaker 03

  And I've seen some of those clips where he's like, like you're talking about, he just couldn't fucking, the whole room's afraid of him. Like, no one, no one's laughing. Everyone's afraid. And he's like, super fucked up.

• 1:54:10Joe Rogan?

  Well, he was the first comic, really, that had a message.

• 1:54:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:54:14Joe Rogan?

  You know, he had like a, there was a, there was a social commentary to his, like a dark poetry to his comedy. And so many people tried to emulate it that at the, the green room, the punchline in Atlanta, there was a, a, like people wrote a bunch of shit on the walls in the green room. But one of the big ones that said, quit trying to be Hicks.

• 1:54:31Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:54:32Joe Rogan?

  I remember seeing that going, yes, everybody did. We all did.

• 1:54:36Speaker 03

  It's crazy.

• 1:54:36Joe Rogan?

  Everybody wanted to be Hicks.

• 1:54:37Speaker 03

  Dude, you'd come, so after Stevie Ray Vaughan passed, right? I remember, you know, we were up in Dallas, Fort Worth, and you'd come down here, we'd come down here in, in, in, in high school and shit. And go up and down Sixth Street. I will never forget this. Every single guitar player in every little bar on Sixth Street, every single one of them was playing like Stevie Ray Vaughan.

• 1:55:03Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:04Speaker 03

  Every single one of them. And there were thirty of them. Like there were thirty different ones that.

• 1:55:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:09Speaker 03

  Coming in out of bars, doing all the shit. It was, it was unbelievable.

• 1:55:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, there's always gonna be someone like that, that like sets the standard.

• 1:55:16Speaker 03

  Quit trying to be Hicks.

• 1:55:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, quit trying to be Hicks. But it was like, that was a.

• 1:55:19Speaker 03

  My daddy died for that flag. Oh, really? I bought, I bought mine at Kmart.

• 1:55:25Joe Rogan?

  It's made in China.

• 1:55:29Speaker 03

  But he could do it because he, because he was a Texan.

• 1:55:32Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:32Speaker 03

  The vernacular is real. And then he'd turn around and,

• 1:55:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:35Speaker 03

  you know, fuck up the other side.

• 1:55:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, no, it was genius. Well, when I, when I first saw him, he went on in Boston. And it was at Nick's Comedy Stop. And the guy who went on before him was this, he was a nice guy, but he was a hack. You know, he was just like cops and donuts, normal shit, stupid jokes. But the stupid jokes were working. It was cartoon characters, smoking pot, you know, what would happen if Daffy Duck smoked a, you know, joint with Donald Duck? It was dumb, but it was-

• 1:56:01Speaker 03

  Watered down Dangerfield?

• 1:56:02Joe Rogan?

  But it was getting people to laugh. And then Hicks went on stage. And, uh, like immediately started bombing, you know? And immediately he opened up with saying that he's tired of performing. And tired of going up and telling people a bunch of shit you couldn't possibly think up on your own.

• 1:56:26Joe Rogan?

  But the comics were dying. And there was, there was like 300 people in the room. By the time he was done performing, there was 50. There's 50 and there was maybe, me and my friend Greg Fitzsimmons were in the back of the room, just dying laughing and maybe 10 comics. We'd all come to see Hicks because we'd heard about him. And then I saw him a month later at the Comedy Connection and he fucking murdered. The Comedy Connection was this little tiny club. It was like 150 seats, real low ceilings.

• 1:56:51Speaker 03

  Where?

• 1:56:52Joe Rogan?

  Boston as well. This is when I was first starting. So this is like 1988. And it was before he'd really popped. I'd heard about him from the Rodney Dangerfield HBO special. You know, so the Rodney Dangerfield had these young comedian specials. Rodney was the best at like, introducing the world to talented comedians. And he had these Rodney Dangerfield young comedian specials. Where he'd have on like Robert Schimmel and Lenny Clark and Andrew Dice Clay. And that's where Kinison emerged. And Hicks, Hicks was one of them too.

• 1:57:22Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:57:23Joe Rogan?

  And I remember I'd seen Hicks on that, so I went to see him live. And like I said, the first time he bombed, the second time he fucking murdered. It was Tiffany meeting Jimi Hendrix at the mall. He was doing this.

• 1:57:34Joe Rogan?

  Bit about Jimi Hend- like Tiffany playing at the mall and Jimi Hendrix shows up. It was, it was this fucking just genius bit. It was so funny, man.

• 1:57:43Speaker 03

  Is that something that's out there? Can you see that?

• 1:57:45Joe Rogan?

  Ah, I wonder, man. I wonder, because I don't think he ever put that on anything. It might be on an album somewhere. But it was back when there was all this like pop mall comedy or pop mall music and he fucking hated it. You know, and it was, and he was just rallying.

• 1:58:00Speaker 03

  There's a genre for you right there.

• 1:58:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, rallying against corporatism.

• 1:58:05Speaker 03

  It's gonna make a comeback, that little subgenre.

• 1:58:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I mean it has.

• 1:58:08Speaker 03

  Do something new with it.

• 1:58:09Joe Rogan?

  It kinda has. Austin has a great comedy scene right now. It really does, and it's really just emerged from the pandemic.

• 1:58:16Speaker 03

  Was that like the main thing that drew you here?

• 1:58:18Joe Rogan?

  Well, we all moved here to start it. We didn't even move here to start it. We moved here to just keep doing what we were doing in LA. But LA had shut down. In, in 2020, we were all like, we were all without a country. You know, we were living in LA and the Comedy Store was shut down for a fucking year and a half.

• 1:58:36Speaker 03

  Y'all were wild, man. It was so, so shut down out there.

• 1:58:39Joe Rogan?

  It was so shut down. And I knew, I'm, I'm one of those dudes, it's just like, I've never had faith in systems and government. And I'm like, these motherfuckers are gonna keep us shut down. They're gonna keep, and I came to Texas and Ron White was already here. So Ron White, who's a very good friend of mine, and Gary, I knew, I knew Gary from LA. He used to hang out at the Comedy Store too, and that's why I became friends with him. And he moved here, I think 2017 or 2018. And I talked to him on the phone, like, why, why'd you go back to Austin? He's like, man, I can't fuck with those people in LA. It's just like, I'm tired of it, man. He goes, I love Texas. I just, this is real. And it's like, I need to go back home. And I was like, wow, that sounds right. That sounds right. And then when I talked to Ron, and Ron's the same way, Ron's a Texas boy too.

• 1:59:23Joe Rogan?

  And he was like, I can't, I just don't want to do this anymore. I will, I'll stay here. It's great. He goes, it's great. It's the middle of the fucking country. I can fly anywhere. Fucking food's good, people are nice. And so I knew when I came here.

• 1:59:36Speaker 03

  That's all you needed to know.

• 1:59:37Joe Rogan?

  I was like, at the very least, Ron's here. And Ron's a good friend. And then when we came here, we could perform live. And I first started doing shows outside, me and Dave Chappelle started doing shows at Stubbs. And we were doing outside shows where we had to test the whole crowd. Everybody had to get tested. So everybody had to show up like two hours in advance. We tested everybody for COVID. They had to wear a mask outside. It was so fucking stupid. The whole thing was so ridiculous, but we were hanging out in the back, getting drunk, smoking weed. And it was like, it was like normal. It was like normal times. And it was like this cultural thing, like we were the only ones doing comedy. And, you know, everybody just started coming here, man. They all just started coming here. And then we started doing shows inside at the Vulcan. The Vulcan Gas Company, which is a music club that's on Sixth Street.

• 2:00:21Joe Rogan?

  So we started performing there and, you know, Nick, the guy who's the owner, is just a wild dude. He's like, fuck it, let's just do shows. And we started doing shows in November of 2020. And it just felt like we were baby killers. We were killing grandma. You know, we were out there just spreading diseases. We were super spreaders.

• 2:00:37Speaker 03

  If you spend enough time on Sixth Street, anyway, it'll make you immune.

• 2:00:43Joe Rogan?

  We had developed some strong antibodies. I never got sick off of Sixth Street. I got sick in Florida.

• 2:00:47Speaker 03

  That's what I mean though. Sixth Street will make you bulletproof to that shit. Well, accept the bullets.

• 2:00:51Joe Rogan?

  So, yeah, accept the bullets. And there's a lot of that going on there, too. So we, we started doing shows there live and then comics started moving. Man, they started moving in droves. They started all moving to Texas because they could do shows here. We were just lost.

• 2:01:05Speaker 03

  I didn't know that.

• 2:01:05Joe Rogan?

  Without doing shows, we just all felt lost. And then by the time 2021 rolled around, there was like 15, 16 world-class comics living in Austin. And then I was like, fuck it, I'm buying a club. And Ron talked me into it. He's like, you gotta get a fucking club. We gotta do this. Because, you know, he knew I got a bunch of money from the Spotify deal. So I was like, all right, let's fucking do it. And so then in 2022 or '23, I guess, we opened up. And it's just been gangbusters ever since. And now it's like, this is the hub of comedy in the country, which makes it the hub of comedy in the known universe. It's all here in Texas. It's all at that club.

• 2:01:43Speaker 03

  I like that. Well, that's really cool, man. Props to you for pulling that off.

• 2:01:47Joe Rogan?

  Well, I mean, I think I pulled it off, but I think it's. Everybody pulled it off.

• 2:01:51Speaker 03

  People are proud of the comedy, you know, history in this town.

• 2:01:56Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:01:56Speaker 03

  You know?

• 2:01:56Joe Rogan?

  And it's a, it's a great place and it's all walks of life, man. You know, everybody likes to use that term inclusive and diversity. Well, our scene is diverse and inclusive, but everybody's great. It's only diverse because they just happen to be, everybody's fucking diverse. We're all, you know, you get artists, they're all different weird people. And what, we didn't seek that out. It was just what happened. It was just who's good, who's good, who's, who's really all about this? Who really wants to live this life? Who really wants to just do comedy? And we set it up where we have two nights of open mic nights and, you know, we've got Kill Tony on Monday nights.

• 2:02:36Joe Rogan?

  All the amateurs get a chance to be seen in front of the whole world and the biggest live comedy show in the world on YouTube. And it just became this hub, man. And now it's just fucking every night it's sold out and it's crazy. It's just, it's a vibrant, wild scene. And now on Sixth Street, there's five full-time clubs within two blocks of my club.

• 2:02:58Speaker 03

  Comedy clubs?

• 2:02:58Joe Rogan?

  Comedy clubs.

• 2:02:59Speaker 03

  No shit?

• 2:03:00Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, the scene is insane. I mean, it's the best scene in the country. It's like, there's never been a scene like this before. They just emerged. And in, and it had, oh, we had to hit every green light, like the Comedy Store had to be closed down. So I hired everybody that was working at the Comedy Store before we even had a club. I said, I'm gonna pay you full-time, you get benefits, you get all insurance, all that shit. Just come, move to Austin, we'll call on you in like a year. It's gonna take like a year to build this place. But meanwhile, you'll, you'll get paid, you'll be able to just like live here, set, set your roots, get established. It's a beautiful place to live. Everybody fucking loved it. And then when we opened, we hit the ground running. We opened up one night, we, we did a couple of test shows, like let's try the venues, make sure everything works good.

• 2:03:45Joe Rogan?

  And then we was like, fuck it, let's stay open. And we just stayed open. Before you know it, it was seven nights a week and then it was just, it's been almost three years now.

• 2:03:53Speaker 03

  You gonna keep it rolling?

• 2:03:54Joe Rogan?

  Fuck yeah.

• 2:03:55Speaker 03

  Hell yeah.

• 2:03:55Joe Rogan?

  Fuck yeah. We're talking about doing it in other places now.

• 2:03:57Speaker 03

  That's cool.

• 2:03:58Joe Rogan?

  We just don't wanna water it down. You know, we've talked about doing it in some other city and trying to figure out what the next one would be. But it would have to be a city that has a real group of talent. You have to have talent. Like that's, every comedy community, the only way it works is you have to have a lot of great comics that live in that town. It's the only way it works. And then we feed off of each other. That's the only way. There's no lone wolves in comedy. You know, comedy only, it's only iron sharpens iron. You know, there's no like, the best comic in the world living in Pittsburgh, doesn't exist. Like, they all live where they all, they're, they're in, not in competition, but in cooperation with each other. Like, you're, we're all inspired by each other. You, you have to have that. If you don't, and so we had to have like every green light.

• 2:04:42Joe Rogan?

  The comedy store had to be, comedy store had to be shut down for a solid year and a half. All those people had to be unemployed. I had to have all this money from Spotify. I had to be in a place like Texas that allows you to open up and have a, a show indoors when everything in California was closed. They wouldn't even let you do outdoor shows. We weren't even allowed to do show, we tried to do shows in the parking lot of the comedy store and they wouldn't allow us. It was crazy.

• 2:05:04Speaker 03

  No, I remember how, I remember how shut down it was.

• 2:05:07Joe Rogan?

  Seventy percent of all the restaurants went under. I mean, it was fucking madness.

• 2:05:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. A lot, a lot has changed.

• 2:05:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:15Speaker 03

  A lot, really fast.

• 2:05:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, real fast. Real fast.

• 2:05:17Speaker 03

  Really fast, you know?

• 2:05:19Joe Rogan?

  So we had to hit every green light. And we had to have all these people that were willing to take a chance. All the Tom Seguras and Tim Dillons and Tony Hinchcliffs and Duncan Trussells, all these great comics that just was like, fuck it. We'll move there. Brian Simpson and Tony Hinchcliffe and so all these guys just said, fuck it. Let's, let's take a chance. Like, I don't wanna live like this. I don't wanna, I wanna live where I can do comedy. It's like, we were just like junkies with no, no fix, you know?

• 2:05:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. I was on, I was still working the red dirt circuit when the pandemic hit. So to be honest with you, those old, those boys was like, it never closed.

• 2:05:55Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:05:56Speaker 03

  Didn't, not those, all those, all those old dance halls and beer joints and...

• 2:06:03Joe Rogan?

  Thank God.

• 2:06:04Speaker 03

  None of those places closed.

• 2:06:05Joe Rogan?

  Thank, thank fucking God. Thank God they were right.

• 2:06:08Speaker 03

  It kept us working, man. You know, it was the thing. And I was just working so hard, I never really thought about anything else. But something about the California shutdown that, that's funny, when you, we're talking, not funny, but, but, um...

• 2:06:22Speaker 03

  Like the pandemic hit and I was unknown, but I had just finished that record, Welcome to Hard Times. And it didn't have anything to do with anything. I had had the two surgeries. I'd like gone through a relationship that crashed and burned in a tailspin. You know, I'd gotten rid of a management relationship that was going nowhere. And I wrote Welcome to Hard Times, just kind of out of my own personal,

• 2:06:54Speaker 03

  kind of dark feelings about where I was going through and just the whole like rigged casino. You know, America's a casino, you know, and I have thought that since I was a kid because I kind of lived in them. You know, you're talking about being pool halls.

• 2:07:11Speaker 03

  And then I cut the record in Georgia, South Georgia with Mark Neal. Right, like the whole thing, I cut it. Like I wrote the record in November, cut it in December. Got the masters back and like a week or two later. I remember me and Taylor Grace, my now wife, we were dating and we were at a diner in Cloudcroft, New Mexico. And my manager at the time called me and said that South by Southwest was canceled. And that for us here at that time, that's when we knew the shit was real. Nothing could stop that machine that was South by Southwest at the time.

• 2:07:51Speaker 03

  And strangely for me, I'm not, I knew a lot of people that, I've known a lot of people that have passed away or anything. So I'm not saying that all the stuff that happened is a good thing at all. But for me, my career trajectory totally changed early on the pandemic because no one was putting out records. No one had any interest in putting out records. And for that reason, David Macias, because I was riding his ass, actually, thanks to John Folk at the time, he's like, "Don't let him shove your record. Put that record out right now." You know, we're talking about, you know, July of 2020. Wow. You know, and I demanded more money.

• 2:08:35Speaker 03

  No one, no one had ever put a dollar into marketing my records. I'm talking about nothing. Before the shit hit the fan, these guys were talking about spending like 10, 15 grand total, marketing "Welcome to Hard Times." Wow. Total. I mean, shit, I spent twice that or more making it. And that's still a cheap record, but I mean, I remember a publicist told me once, like, "You should spend at least double the money marketing your record that it costs you to make it and at least match it." You know, and here I was, like, that's what I mean, I was like caught on this like broke dick Americana scene, you know, on these two-year record cycles, you know, with no money, you know? I was on a, I was on a broke dick deal, just like Waylon was talking about, you know?

• 2:09:20Speaker 03

  Just didn't, I don't, I'm not, I'm not bagging on Americana or anything, you know, I mean, I'm, I'm glad I showed up on the map somewhere. But we went ahead and put it out in July of 2020. And I'd been wanting to buy billboards, and it just so happened, especially in California, but even in New York, I mean, everything was shut down. I mean, totally shut down. So I remember, we bought a billboard in Silver Lake and in Times Square, right? Static, traditional static billboards for like 80% off, because nobody was buying shit. Not a single other billboard, over the course of like a nine months or a year, and those neighborhoods changed. Right? And I bought a one, all those billboards, I bought like one month billboards, and some of those motherfuckers stayed up over six months.

• 2:10:05Speaker 03

  Wow. You know what I mean? At like 75% off, you know? And, you know, sometimes you write a song.

• 2:10:14Speaker 03

  That Get Lucky, I was writing about personal experience. And it spoke, for me, it wasn't a big record. It, but it changed my trajectory. Because Welcome to Hard Times, the song really spoke to what was happening in America.

• 2:10:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:34Speaker 03

  And that's what, that's when my train really started rolling. That's when it really started rolling. You know what I mean? It's like, and then I did all those records and Welcome to Hard Times and Music City USA coming like, kind of right for the, right for the Nashville machine. And then The Man from Waco that I made down in Lockhart with Bruce Robinson, which was like, the first time really that I'd made a studio record with my guys, you know, with more money. And Bruce Robinson, a songwriting friend that was not stopping me from being me. You know, and, and, and then that one was my first one to hit the like Billboard 200. Um, and then $10 Cowboy really took off another big step from there.

• 2:11:18Speaker 03

  Uh, and then I got hooked back up with Shooter. I, see, I used to open up for Shooter, because Shooter was getting booked by John Folk too. Right? And the two guys that took a liking to me early on, like, pretty much nobody else did, was Evan Felker and Turnpike Tributors and Shooter Jennings. You know, Shooter would take me out and like, he didn't have to be cool to me. I mean, he's a fucking whaling son, but he was always so cool.

• 2:11:40Joe Rogan?

  Oh, he's just cool.

• 2:11:41Speaker 03

  And so thoughtful, you know?

• 2:11:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, he's a great guy.

• 2:11:43Speaker 03

  And he would give me little things to live by, like, when he saw how hard I was working out there, he's like, it says you can't park behind the Nashville Palace, but between me and you, you fucking camp there and nobody's gonna say shit. And I lived in that fucking parking lot. That's the kind of shit you get by on, you know what I mean? And, uh, we, uh, I've got this movie that I funded, you know, how slow the movie business is, that I was gonna be called $10 Cowboy and I made, it's this thing I put together. I like finished my touring season at the rodeo finals in Vegas. And then I get back to Texas and all the pressure, the business is mounting on me. And I'm just trying to get away from my manager and the machine and my, and my phone and all that shit. And I decided to leave the phone at the house.

• 2:12:28Speaker 03

  And I had heard from a journalist about this secret shrine in a liquor store dedicated to Waylon Jennings in his hometown of Littlefield, Texas there on 84. I'd known about it, but we, in the movie, I'm playing like I've never heard of it and I'm going on this pilgrimage, you know, to, to find out if this little museum really exists, which it does. It's run by his youngest brother, James D., Waylon's youngest brother.

• 2:12:53Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:12:53Speaker 03

  And so when to get the movie going, I needed to get on the phone with Shooter, you know, to get hooked up with James D. and them. And we got the idea to get his mama, Jesse Coulter, involved and all that. And I was, and I wanted to use some of Waylon's music for the film. And, and I was scared to death to ask for it. But, but Shooter had always been good to me. And so we ended up having the conversation. We caught up on a lot of stuff because see, I'd been hearing that he was producing, right? But I couldn't make heads or tails of it, where he was going with it. And truthfully, I was like avoiding producers altogether because a lot of these guys, it's like, you know, they're such, they're such big names, it overshadows the artist.

• 2:13:32Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:13:33Speaker 03

  You know what I mean? And then they have the deal. Like, they have the artist's deal.

• 2:13:37Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:13:37Speaker 03

  Then the artist just kind of, in a lot of ways, gets limited to like acting talent, you know, showing up at the fucking, you know, movie lot or whatever.

• 2:13:48Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:49Speaker 03

  And, um, and, but I kept hearing records that he was making by people I knew, like Jamie Wyatt. And I said, man, that's the best thing she's ever done. Shooter Jennings. Vincent Neil Emerson. This is the best thing he's ever done. Shooter Jennings. Like over and over. And I had been noticing that. And so we're on the phone and he's all about the movie. Yeah, I'm going to help you license the songs. We'd love that. You know, my mama loves your music and all that. You know, she decided she's in the movie. Uh, he just was helpful with everything. And, um,

• 2:14:23Speaker 03

  I had almost made a record at Sunset Sound there in old downtown Hollywood, the old Sunset Sound studio. I'd wanted to go in there because Mark Neal had told me about it. And I was tired of making records in Georgia and didn't want to go over to the wrong side of Mississippi. I wanted to make a record in California. And I told Shooter in passing on the phone that it had fallen through. And, you know, did he know Sunset Sound? And he was like, man, Charlie's crazy. I'm signing the lease on Studio 3, the print studio, tomorrow. Wow. Just in passing, you know? And I'm like, man, well, then let's make a record. And we're right in the middle of a trilogy now. I did Lonesome Drifter with them. Man, and then the next one that's coming out is Dollar a Day on 88,

• 2:15:07Speaker 03

  which I think is a lucky number. And then I've got a third one coming after that that we're calling the Sage Bros Trilogy. And Shooter is the first guy I've ever been in a studio with where I truly don't feel judged. You know what I mean? Mm hmm. And now, and because I've got all these, it's just the perfect timing. It's like, wow, that like have been out on the road with him 10 plus years ago. And then, you know, like think about what he's been through in the business, right? I mean, he started cutting records 20 years ago. I mean, he's a crucified son automatically. Right, right. You know what I mean? Walking, you know, walking in that. Shadow. That shadow. Yeah. Man, he said a crazy line to me on the other day.

• 2:15:50Speaker 03

  He said, in regards to some other situation he was in, he was like, I was, he said, I went from one shadow to another. Just a beautiful line. I think he was talking about like an old relationship he was in or something, but, but like he's overcome that because, you know what I mean? Like he's stepped into, like, if you listen to his records, you know, when he's starting out and you compare it to the field, you know, in country music in Nashville at the time, like, he's totally, like, he's totally swimming upstream. He's totally going against the grain. Nobody's sounding like that. They're not sounding traditional and pushing the boundaries. Like, he just was, you know, and I can tell you constitutionally, he's, he's just like his daddy.

• 2:16:33Speaker 03

  I mean, he drank me and smoked me under the table. I'm like, you are Whelan's son. And for some reason, you like get smarter, the more weed you smoke. And my brain is like, my brain is just like pulverizing. You know, but, but I'm, I'm really proud of and excited about everything that I'm doing with him because it's just taken me so long to get where I'm at. And here, I've got a partner, you know, in making records that isn't judging me, but also is pushing me to take it higher. You know, because I'm trying to figure out how to transcend it too. You know, everybody's always, there's a lot of,

• 2:17:15Speaker 03

  you know, I've always been a pretty polarizing figure for some reason with audiences. It's either, it's a love hate thing.

• 2:17:26Speaker 03

  And I've done a lot of styles, you know, and they've called me a stylistic chameleon.

• 2:17:32Speaker 03

  Here in Austin, even the first time they put me on the Chronicle, you know, they called me a stylistic chameleon. And I had a hard time with that, you know, because I didn't, wasn't taking it as a compliment.

• 2:17:42Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:17:42Speaker 03

  Right?

• 2:17:43Joe Rogan?

  It's not a compliment.

• 2:17:44Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:17:44Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:45Speaker 03

  But,

• 2:17:48Speaker 03

  it's that whole thing where it's like, okay, I can play the blues, I can play country music, I can play folk music. Learned how to play all that shit on the street, matter of fact, right? It's surprising to me that people would question my authenticity and point to me playing in subway cars as this aha moment that I'm not who I said I was. I'm like,

• 2:18:08Joe Rogan?

  Isn't that hilarious?

• 2:18:09Speaker 03

  Why don't you go try to play in those New York City train cars?

• 2:18:12Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's people that are just talking.

• 2:18:14Speaker 03

  Brother, I'd rather get on a fucking bull.

• 2:18:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Do you ever think, man, like synchronicity, that like fate is a real thing? Because just think about how all that lined up. I feel like sometimes, I mean, it's a very egocentric thing to think. You know, the things are meant to be, like there's a plan for you. It's silly, but it also isn't. You know, fate seems to somehow or another be a real thing. And sometimes the way things synchronize and the way things line up, you're like, man, this seems like it's meant to be. I think there's certain things that just seem like they're meant to be. And I feel like, If you're on the right frequency and you're following the right path,

• 2:19:02Joe Rogan?

  those, those doors open and these things do happen and they happen when they're supposed to happen. They happen at the right time for the right reasons. You know?

• 2:19:12Speaker 03

  I believe completely in fate.

• 2:19:13Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:14Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't really believe in faith. I think there's a, there's a surrender and a helplessness in a lot of ways to a lot of people's idea of faith. Right? When people are like, "Love your struggle." I never liked that saying. It's like, no, love the strength that your creator gave you to overcome the struggle. Don't love the struggle. Nobody fucking loves the struggle. Right?

• 2:19:43Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 2:19:44Speaker 03

  It's the strength.

• 2:19:45Joe Rogan?

  Especially real struggle.

• 2:19:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:19:47Joe Rogan?

  Like, real, real struggle is not knowing if it's gonna work out. You're not gonna love that.

• 2:19:50Speaker 03

  That's what I mean. I never understood that. I mean, I guess I get it, but like, but fate.

• 2:19:54Joe Rogan?

  You get it after it's, it's successful.

• 2:19:55Speaker 03

  Fate is a thing that's like, that's destiny.

• 2:19:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:59Speaker 03

  You know? Like Waylon, like Shooter and like the Waylon Jennings thing for me, you know? It's like, you know, I was out there, you know, we were, I, I did my, uh, I debuted at the Houston Rodeo back in the spring. And for me, that was like my career goal, you know, because of Selena and, and George Strait and, and everybody. Hell, Elvis played there twice. I mean, it doesn't matter what your background is as a Texan, any background. The Houston Rodeo, that's the top culturally, I think, as like a stage for an artist to perform. I, I think it's the Houston Rodeo, you know, and it was the Astrodome and not the NRG Stadium and.

• 2:20:38Joe Rogan?

  I would have never known that.

• 2:20:39Speaker 03

  It's the, it's the truth and it does, it crosses, you know, everything, economic, racial, everything. It's, it's the Houston Rodeo, you know?

• 2:20:47Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:20:48Speaker 03

  And it's the biggest rodeo on, on earth, you know? Which is why you got everybody from, like I said, you know, Waylon Jennings, Merle, George Strait. Nowadays, you got Post Malone and Beyonce both playing it.

• 2:21:01Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:21:02Speaker 03

  I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't matter who it is, like, that's the, that's the platform. Anyway, I played there and we were mix, we're putting a live record out on it and me and Shooter were mixing it there at Sunset Sound. And then I stayed the extra night because he had the party at the Viper Room for the announcement of these three unreleased Waylon Jennings records. And they're legit unreleased. It's not AI bullshit. It's not remixes. This is truly legitimately unreleased music by arguably, you know, the king, certainly the king of all the outlaws.

• 2:21:35Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:36Speaker 03

  But in my opinion, when it comes to like Nashville country music, whatever you want to call it, man, like,

• 2:21:44Speaker 03

  a buddy of mine, John Spong, a journalist here in town, a Texan, he was, we were at the Sagebrush doing an interview a couple of years back. And he was saying that like, if Willie Nelson to country music is like Che Guevara, right? Waylon Jennings was the long-haired prince of darkness, right? And like, he's the guy that, like, he's from West Texas, right? The guy learned, he, he learned how to play bass onstage. He learned how to play bass on fucking stage backing up Buddy Holly, right? Who at the time was bigger than Elvis, man. You know, I mean, that style of rock and roll, right?

• 2:22:28Speaker 03

  It's coming from everywhere. I mean, nobody's just making their, nowadays, they're kind of strangely making music in a vacuum in a bedroom. But like, in some ways, right? But these guys, it's like whether it's Robert Johnson or BB King in the Delta or whatever, or Buddy Holly out in West Texas, you're influenced by the radio and all that, but there's something to be said for like, what's out, how hard that earth is out there in West Texas. And like, people talk a lot of shit about Lubbock, right? It smells like shit because cows everywhere. So fucking flat, you know, the thing you can stand on a fucking tin can and like, you know. See a hundred miles or whatever they say out there, right? But like, the best people to play a show for, probably anywhere in America in many ways, in my opinion, is like, a show and love it.

• 2:23:13Speaker 03

  Like, there's something about the people in that town where it's like, it's just the best place to play. And then, like, Willie Nelson is now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and he deserves it. Dolly Parton now too. But Waylon Jennings was always rock and roll. Like, he was never traditional country. There's nothing about him, if you know what you're listening to, even on his very first record, like, country folk, folk country, right? There's nothing straight ahead. Listen to anything coming out of Nashville in like nineteen sixty-five, anything, next to Waylon Jennings. He's the long-haired prince of darkness, you know? He is, like, he is going to be their undoing of the...

• 2:23:53Speaker 03

  Because what they did is they built a, they built a wall around Nashville, because the coast had all the money and all the zeitgeist power. And in response, Nashville walled themselves off, right? You know what I mean? That's really what they did. And then Waylon, Waylon busted through. And I know I'm going back on that a lot, but like, my path that led to making records with Shooter was that, when I started figuring out, like, the map is when I like cracked the code and realized why, what Waylon was doing musically. Like, I just, I finally fell in love with him musically. And it was on this specific record from nineteen sixty-eight called Hanging On, right?

• 2:24:35Speaker 03

  And like, every swinging dick in this business that I ever knew coming up in Texas, that had anything to do with Texas songwriters or country, every one of them wanted to be Waylon Jennings. Willie Nelson, Townes Van Zant, and Billy Joe Shaver. Every single one. And I naturally stepped wide of that, because everybody I knew was trying to do it. And like, imitating an artist, like, for the advanced part of their movement, on, in and of itself, that's worthless. It's, it's not that it's worthless, it's that... You will never touch it if you don't go walk your own path.

• 2:25:15Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:25:15Speaker 03

  So a lot of guys I knew when I started playing all the shows with Willie, Willie called me up and got me on with his agent and shit and put me on like fifty shows. And a lot of guys I knew were like, looking at me like, man, why are you gonna play with Willie? You know, and at first I didn't even, I didn't know. Right? Cause I was realizing guys that I knew, like, they knew Willie Nelson's shit in and out. We're literally trying to sing like him. So they're like, fuck you, I should have that spot. And like, you know, I'm nobody at the end of the day, right? I'm, I'm the best at being me.

• 2:25:47Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:25:47Speaker 03

  You know, when, sometimes, right? But like, how I think I've landed with Shooter and his family and, and playing all those shows with Willie and getting married on his ranch and all that stuff is because, not because I worship Willie Nelson, but because I think Willie looked at me and was like, I like, I like what you're doing. I like how you got where you're at. You can play with me, you know? And you don't ask to take your picture with Willie. He fucking lets you know when you're gonna take your picture with him.

• 2:26:23Speaker 03

  He's gonna let you know, it's time to get your picture taken with Willie. That's how, that's how they did it.

• 2:26:27Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:26:28Speaker 03

  And we're standing, there's like a hundred nitrous cans behind us and shit. It was like the greatest photo of my life.

• 2:26:36Speaker 03

  You know?

• 2:26:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's a natural inclination that people have when they want to be authentic, to imitate authenticity. That's the thing is you gotta find your own path.

• 2:26:47Speaker 03

  You gotta, you gotta, you have to put, you have to put yourself out there, you know? Like, when I was playing on the street, people knew I was different. And artists, the hipsters, like in the Brooklyn scene and in Bushwick and Williamsburg and

• 2:27:06Speaker 03

  all over the boroughs and shit, like, to be on the street playing, like, there's credibility to that, right? But, and like, I didn't wanna play in subway cars. Actually, what it was is young rapper, Jaden, Jaden Woodard is his name. And, uh, he kept seeing me at the, um...

• 2:27:27Speaker 03

  Metropolitan Avenue stop playing there at the platform, you know, for the, for the, for the cars coming by on the L train or whatever. G train down there on Metropolitan. G train sucks to ride on. It's great for subway performers because there's like, it's the slowest train in the world, right? So you get huge audience between every fucking, you know, train. So it's a gold mine for, for a street performer and a terrible drag for the, you know, New Yorkers waiting on it, right? Anyways, this kid kept trying to get me. He would always show up with like a different guitar player and shit with like an amp on his shoulder, which I copied. I got an amp, ran off a nine volt battery.

• 2:28:07Speaker 03

  You get about seven, eight hours of it in this Telecaster and I learned it from this guy Ghost who was already doing it. That was playing with Jaden. Who was like kind of part of Citizen Co, Clarence Greenwood's street team. And he kept trying to get me to go on the subway cars. And I was like, man, this kid's crazy. Like he's rapping and shit and man, the subway cars like, ah, I'm all right, you know, and eventually he like kind of cornered me. Actually, what it was, I kept dodging him and then I was finished one day and I get in the car. It's on the L train. And I'm riding in the car and I'm just sitting there looking down the train. And all of a sudden I see that skinny motherfucker in a white tee walking toward me.

• 2:28:50Speaker 03

  And he's moving, but can't really, you know how the trains can be loud? And I'm looking at him, trying to put it together. And when he gets closer, I realize he's rapping. And he's got that guitar player with him with the amp behind him. It's playing this like really badass, bluesy hip hop beat. And he's freestyling like, you know, the hatch you're wearing. He's rhyming to it. The next stop, he's putting it in the verse and shit. And he's got all these mixtapes in his hand and he's handing them out shit and he sees me and he hands me one. And that's how he got me. Cause I saw like it working. And he was making money and like dropping product, you know, I thought, holy shit. Right? Cause so like comedy scene, music scene, whatever. Say you got a place on Sixth Street, holds, right, a hundred people.

• 2:29:32Speaker 03

  And you play there thirty, you get a residency, you play there thirty nights a month, right? And you get a hundred, you, different people show up there every night, that, what is that, three thousand people? It's like, dude, we could, you could hit three thousand people in like, half a day on the, on the train cars, once we started working it. And so it was like, it was his, it was his, and he was a spoken word poet. This kid, this kid started fucking rapping on trains at like fifteen. Wow. In like Philly, which is, fuck, man, Philly's tough. I don't have to tell you, Philly's tough. Like, train cars in Philly, that's mind blowing, you know, and then he comes to New York with that. And like, takes that spoken word improvisational thing.

• 2:30:13Speaker 03

  And like, all the best rappers I saw in that town, they were all like spoken word poets, because, you know, they just were smart and quick. You know, and like, we, then we got together and like, mashed it up, and again, like, I went from making, where I would make thirty dollars. You know, all of a sudden, like, we would make three hundred dollars and split it, you know, fifty fifty. And we turned that into a whole, like, a really fine, pretty well-oiled machine. Where there started being five or six of us, and we were bringing guys up and down from New Orleans and shit. So that's where you see the trumpet players, different spoken word rappers, we were squatting in warehouses, you know. Owned by HaSids that were like renting out space that was supposed to be for rehearsal, but really everybody was living there and selling drugs and shit.

• 2:30:57Speaker 03

  Wildin' out and, you know, I cranked that up. We cranked that up and did get, and did get discovered by like, the heart of the pop machine, right there on the R train. Wow. And like, just what you would think, you can see video of this stuff, but it's like, they saw that we were believable. Yep, and we're just trying to figure out, and that's one of the spoken word dudes right there, was Eric, he was from Jacksonville, Florida. And that hippie right there, that was my friend of mine's younger brother from high school down here in Texas.

• 2:31:32Joe Rogan?

  There's something about street performing that is, there's no net. You're performing for people that are involuntary.

• 2:31:42Speaker 03

  Oh, man, they don't want you in there and you're breaking like ten laws. You're breaking ten laws and they don't want you in there.

• 2:31:47Joe Rogan?

  Right, but if you're good, if you're good, it means a lot. You ever see the video of Biggie when he's performing, he's seventeen on a street corner in Brooklyn?

• 2:31:54Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:31:55Joe Rogan?

  Oh, my god.

• 2:31:56Speaker 03

  You pull that one up. Can we see it just for fun?

• 2:31:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, pull that up. That fucking video is like you watching this kid, this kid with this.

• 2:32:03Speaker 03

  Talk about, even though he, I mean, I know he's the king, but he's still underrated, you know what I mean?

• 2:32:07Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:08Speaker 03

  He's crazy underrated for that, how smart he was.

• 2:32:10Joe Rogan?

  Oh, he was so good. He was so good.

• 2:32:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, standing on a street corner. Yeah, that's the one.

• 2:32:15Joe Rogan?

  Let me hear this.

• 2:33:19Speaker 03

  The blues never goes out of style.

• 2:33:21Joe Rogan?

  Never.

• 2:33:21Speaker 03

  What do you say, like, uh, like, uh, what do you say, like, ice cream, I'll scoop you?

• 2:33:26Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:28Speaker 03

  It's so clever and like.

• 2:33:30Joe Rogan?

  Oh, he was so clever. It was so clever. There was comedy in, in his lyrics, you know, it was just, it was power.

• 2:33:36Speaker 03

  I met his aunt on the train.

• 2:33:38Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 2:33:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, we did. And like Jay Don knew who she was, cause he, he ran, he was running the trains before I was. And like, he knew all those people because he'd been working it so hard. And it was like, it was crazy. Some of the people that we come in, like who you come in contact with on those subway cars, you know what I mean? It's like, I saw Jake Gyllenhaal on the train one day, and then some other day on the, you know, sixth train. It'd be like the NBA commissioner and shit, gave us a hundred dollar bill.

• 2:34:01Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:34:02Speaker 03

  You know, it's like, to me, that's like, that's all, that's, that's all it is, you know? It's like, whatever the circuit is, it's like, putting yourself out there. And when you go out in public, man, and when you go out in public and you put yourself out there, and you really do that, that's, that's a transformation. That's a metamorphosis.

• 2:34:23Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:23Speaker 03

  For anybody.

• 2:34:24Joe Rogan?

  For anybody.

• 2:34:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:34:25Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's, it's just undeniable. It's the most authentic form of performance ever. You know, that's not your audience. They don't know you. You, you have to earn it. You have to, you have to break through.

• 2:34:38Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:34:39Joe Rogan?

  You have to break through. It has to, it has to hit.

• 2:34:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:34:42Joe Rogan?

  It has to be real.

• 2:34:43Speaker 03

  So all I've been doing is swinging on them the whole time, Joe.

• 2:34:45Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, man, well, you're killing it.

• 2:34:46Speaker 03

  They used to call, sometimes they call me the Muhammad Ali of country music.

• 2:34:51Speaker 03

  That's too good a compliment, but I, I like it.

• 2:34:54Joe Rogan?

  But there's, you know, that's the only way you make Charlie Crockett. You gotta, I mean, your story is, is important for people to hear because it's the only way you make someone like you. You know, you don't make someone like you in a mall. You don't make someone like you with a bunch of executives making these decisions based on what they think is gonna be popular.

• 2:35:15Speaker 03

  Man, it was crazy. They were doing that shit you'd think they would do. So this woman, Nell Muldery, saw us in the R train. And she was in the Sony system and managing artists and like, kind of the Star Maker, that pop machine of like 2010, 2011. So they bring us up into the offices in Koreatown, right? And like on the Edge of Hell's Kitchen there. And her office was off the side of this Sony legacy, like kind of catalog room. Because of the time she was married to Rob Santos, one of the guys at Sony Legacy. And she had this, so she had this little office off the side of the like library thing, whatever. And she brings us in there.

• 2:35:57Speaker 03

  And they're putting us in front of these like computer screens. And showing us like gym class heroes and the gorillas and Odd Future and Janelle Monae and like. All doing these focus group. Training things, you know, and where they're gonna plug you in to the thing and it was like. What was so difficult about it for me, I'm I'm not, they didn't do anything wrong, you know, we were young desperate men. Playing in public transit, you know, you.

• 2:36:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:27Speaker 03

  Be careful what you ask for, you know, and.

• 2:36:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:29Speaker 03

  I was mad for a long time, but I've been eating off that plate forever because it. I realized, man, I was like, man, if you don't know what you want, if you don't know where you're going. If you don't know what you're selling, they're gonna sell it for you.

• 2:36:42Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:36:42Speaker 03

  You know what I mean?

• 2:36:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:43Speaker 03

  It doesn't matter who it is.

• 2:36:44Joe Rogan?

  Yes, it's not their fault, that's what they do.

• 2:36:46Speaker 03

  No, I need, that was the best thing that could have happened to me is cuz like I believed that there was some deal. I wasn't on the trains for it, but I knew we'd find it. I really did. I had, I had, it was fate. It was fate and like. You know, it's that whole thing like I got there, it fell apart quick, it wrecked me, man, and I got, that's when I found, that's when I got off the street. And I went back to California, started working on the ganja farms. Because I realized, you know, like Big L said or whatever, you know, I was gonna get street struck. You know, you can't stay out there forever, you really can't.

• 2:37:17Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:37:18Speaker 03

  And.

• 2:37:21Speaker 03

  That's when, you know, that's when I looked at. That's when I looked at it and it's like, man. Okay, what? What am I willing to sell? You know, like what? What is Charlie Crockett willing to sell? And I think that that's stronger than playing it cool. Right? And letting somebody else figure it out for you, you know, that's where it. That's where it it gets dangerous. You know, and so it's like, I know a lot of these guys in the business, they're like, oh, man, you know, I don't pay attention to the business shit and all that type of stuff. And I'm like, you're crazy for that cuz all like, I don't care if it was Willie Nelson or James Brown. They were poorer than you, they both picked cotton and they learned the business because they had to.

• 2:38:06Speaker 03

  Someone gave me that bullshit.

• 2:38:08Joe Rogan?

  We need to understand the business if you're in the business. If you don't understand it, you'll be taken over by it.

• 2:38:14Speaker 03

  There's no doubt, even if they got you on top.

• 2:38:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and then you have to have autonomy, you have to have, you have to this personal sense of self. Or you could avoid the influence. You have to be able to just stick to your guns. And that's the hard part, right? Because then they dangle that carrot in front of you.

• 2:38:31Speaker 03

  Man.

• 2:38:32Joe Rogan?

  That carrot is juicy.

• 2:38:33Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 2:38:34Joe Rogan?

  Especially if you've been out in the street.

• 2:38:35Speaker 03

  It's right there.

• 2:38:36Joe Rogan?

  Oh, it's right there. It's right there, and it's so juicy.

• 2:38:43Joe Rogan?

  And a lot of people bite it. A lot of people bite it, and then they don't want it anymore. And then they don't know how to be authentic.

• 2:38:48Speaker 03

  Were you, were you, were you dealing with the, like, in the, on that circuit? Because I mean, I know you're a comedian, and you, I know you also, like, got into the, like, dealing with the network, TV shows and all that kind of stuff. Like, did anybody ever fucking get you pretty good?

• 2:39:03Joe Rogan?

  Well, I got lucky in that I got on television so early, and I didn't want to be on television. It wasn't something that I wanted.

• 2:39:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:39:13Joe Rogan?

  But they offered me so much money to be on TV. I was like, what? Okay. But I kept growing and doing my comedy at the Comedy Store. And that was the most important thing, that I just kept doing comedy. And then the money was just like fuck you money. So it's like, because I had the fuck you money, I could kind of be myself.

• 2:39:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:39:32Joe Rogan?

  And, you know, there was a lot of temptation. Like, I remember the producers of Fear Factor were like, what are you doing? Like, because some of my comedy was just out there, like, you know, this gets you in trouble. There's people gonna be, this is not network television comedy. I was like, well, then I won't do network television anymore. Like, once I had a certain amount in the bank, I was like, all right, this is more money than I ever thought I'd ever have in my whole fucking life. And I never thought I'd ever be wealthy.

• 2:39:54Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 2:39:54Joe Rogan?

  And then all of a sudden, I have money. So if you have fuck you money and you don't say fuck you, what's the point? What's, no one's gonna say fuck you then. If you're gonna be a prisoner.

• 2:40:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:40:05Joe Rogan?

  To that money. Like, you're the, like, everybody says, man, if I have all that money.

• 2:40:09Speaker 03

  Just afraid to be you.

• 2:40:10Joe Rogan?

  Afraid to be yourself. Like, that's the only time you can really do it.

• 2:40:13Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 2:40:14Joe Rogan?

  Is when you have, you know, it's like, the universe gives you this gift. And what is, the gift is the gift of freedom. And you have to choose to either accept it and take it and, and run with it.

• 2:40:24Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 2:40:24Joe Rogan?

  Or be captured by it and then want more and more and more forever. Forever, and there's no end. You know, we were talking about, my friend Brian has this friend who's worth three billion dollars, and he feels poor because his friend's worth eighty. You know how crazy that is? Think how crazy that is. Like, this guy's just constantly chasing to keep up with his friend who's worth eighty billion.

• 2:40:46Speaker 03

  Man, that's how it works.

• 2:40:47Joe Rogan?

  Cause he's got three. Yep, that's how it works. You could get trapped. And then, you know.

• 2:40:51Speaker 03

  Still keeping up with the Joneses.

• 2:40:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you gotta hit show, you wanna hit movie, you gotta hit movie, you wanna be, I wanna have a Grammy. I wanna start singing. You know, you start getting crazy.

• 2:41:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, it's true.

• 2:41:02Joe Rogan?

  You chase that demon, that demon of success that just lures you deeper and deeper into hell. And the next thing you know, you, you don't even know who you are. No one knows who you are. And if you don't know who you are, they'll decide. They'll decide who you are. They'll sell you. They'll sell you as a thing, you know?

• 2:41:19Speaker 03

  You know what's crazy about the music business? The manager is, in many cases, the most powerful and the least regulated. You know? I think that's what's wild about the music business. There's basically no regulation. You know what I mean?

• 2:41:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:38Speaker 03

  It's like, I think that's what makes people say it's, you know, the shadiest business. I don't think it's the shadiest business, but a guy told me that in New York, actually, when I got caught up in the Sony thing with the train robbers deal y'all were showing on the screen. A lot of guys were, a lot of people were trying to sign us. Actually, the guys at A and R Wu-Tang, like DJ Scott Free and Matty C. They were trying to get us into a deal.

• 2:42:05Speaker 03

  Citizen Co had a deal on the table and all that shit. And it was like, um, he was the one that, that told me that. He was like, man, fuck what you heard, this is the shadiest business. Now, I had come from a background of dealing with some pretty crazy shit in Texas, you know, and with everything.

• 2:42:25Speaker 03

  But even in that business, like people that are, if you're trying to play the stock market or whatever, Wall Street, it's a corrupt business and it is really fucked up, but it's highly regulated. Come by, I mean, compared to the music business.

• 2:42:38Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:42:39Speaker 03

  You know what I mean?

• 2:42:39Joe Rogan?

  Right, right.

• 2:42:40Speaker 03

  And you're dealing in, like, you're, you know, it's, the, the stock exchange there, it's like, it's like, you're like, it's like, they're like dealing in culture. Cultural power.

• 2:42:50Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:42:50Speaker 03

  Cultural wars, whatever you wanna call it.

• 2:42:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:52Speaker 03

  It's on, and there's no, there's just very, very little regulation.

• 2:42:59Joe Rogan?

  A lot of power.

• 2:42:59Speaker 03

  Man, it's.

• 2:43:00Joe Rogan?

  So much power and influence and the people that make the most money, the people that don't even create the art.

• 2:43:04Speaker 03

  Cause like you talking about like, let's say you got a old boy's got his bike, it's worth eighty billion or whatever. Still doesn't make you a, it doesn't make you a star.

• 2:43:13Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:43:14Speaker 03

  Right? It's still not fame, actually.

• 2:43:16Joe Rogan?

  That's what's crazy.

• 2:43:17Speaker 03

  You know.

• 2:43:18Joe Rogan?

  I have a friend who's a billionaire who desperately wants to be famous.

• 2:43:20Speaker 03

  It's that's what I, well, I think it seems like a lot of them wanna be.

• 2:43:23Joe Rogan?

  They do, because that's the thing they don't have, right? They have everything else.

• 2:43:27Speaker 03

  You can't exactly buy that.

• 2:43:28Joe Rogan?

  They can't. Well.

• 2:43:29Speaker 03

  You kinda can.

• 2:43:31Joe Rogan?

  Kinda, but then it turns on you.

• 2:43:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what I was.

• 2:43:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it turns on you. Yeah, to be the, the rich guy, like then you're hated.

• 2:43:37Speaker 03

  I mean, I see some of that stuff playing out, like, I don't want nothing to do with that.

• 2:43:40Joe Rogan?

  Nothing. Look what they did to Elon. Yeah.

• 2:43:43Speaker 03

  It's crazy, man.

• 2:43:44Joe Rogan?

  You don't want that. Yeah, it's, it's a harsh world, cause there's no sympathy for you. You know, you're, you're the wealthy oligarch.

• 2:43:51Speaker 03

  Well, and you want everybody looking at you, right?

• 2:43:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:53Speaker 03

  And then all of a sudden, they're looking at you.

• 2:43:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they got you.

• 2:43:59Speaker 03

  Got nervous.

• 2:43:59Joe Rogan?

  They got you under that eye of Sauron. They're trying to find all your flaws and you.

• 2:44:04Speaker 03

  That's what.

• 2:44:04Joe Rogan?

  Everybody's got them.

• 2:44:05Speaker 03

  So I got this little bird right here, it tells me.

• 2:44:07Joe Rogan?

  What is that?

• 2:44:07Speaker 03

  Tells me all the secrets.

• 2:44:08Joe Rogan?

  What is that bird?

• 2:44:09Speaker 03

  I didn't know what this was when I bought it, right? This is, this is Horus, right?

• 2:44:12Joe Rogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:44:14Speaker 03

  And I just, I found it in this place, this, this found items place about ten years ago, and I just liked it. Actually, I just, I thought it was native. Right? I didn't realize it was like Egyptian, and I've always liked this one, cause it felt like it was a little bit of both. Um, and I, I didn't know anything about it at first, um, but the reason I never take it off anymore is like when I started like reading about, like, what it meant to the Egyptians was that it meant like safe passage as you journey through this world. And get ready to go on to the next one, you know what I mean? And protect you against evil, protect you, um, in, you know, and.

• 2:44:59Speaker 03

  For health and happiness.

• 2:45:00Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:45:01Speaker 03

  They called it initiation, so it makes a lot of people tie it to stupid shit like a, you know, Illuminati and all that kind of stuff, but I mean, it's just a, it's just a thunderbird.

• 2:45:11Joe Rogan?

  Well, you know, the eye of Horus is essentially the pineal gland. Where the seat of the soul, where the brain produces dimethyltryptamine. That's the eye of Horus. Have you ever seen the image of the eye of Horus next to the pineal gland?

• 2:45:26Speaker 03

  Hmm, I'm not sure. Maybe I have, but I'm, I'm ignorant. I didn't.

• 2:45:29Joe Rogan?

  The, the ancient Egyptian.

• 2:45:30Speaker 03

  What's pineal gland?

• 2:45:31Joe Rogan?

  The pineal gland is a, it's a gland that's in the center of your brain. It's essentially the third eye. In reptiles, it actually has a retina and a lens.

• 2:45:39Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:45:40Joe Rogan?

  Or a cornea and a lens. And it's, it's where the, now they believe that DMT is actually produced by the entire brain. It's also produced by the liver and the lungs, but it's like the most spiritual of all the psychedelics. And they believe that the Egyptians had some sort of, they, you know, there's so little understood about truly ancient Egypt, but look at that. Look what it looks like.

• 2:46:04Joe Rogan?

  I mean, the, the eye of Horus essentially is, it's a diagram of the pineal gland. Which is kind of crazy. It's kind of crazy when you see it that way.

• 2:46:17Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:46:17Joe Rogan?

  Because they, they knew things and we don't know what they knew. We don't understand how they built the pyramids. We don't understand how old they are. There's so much speculation about the true age of that civilization.

• 2:46:27Speaker 03

  Figuring out like how they harnessed energy and all that stuff.

• 2:46:30Joe Rogan?

  We have no idea. I mean, there's, there's this group of scientists that believe that there's structures under the pyramids that go two kilometers deep into the earth.

• 2:46:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:46:38Joe Rogan?

  And, and there's a lot of controversy about that, but these guys are, they've, multiple readings of these things and they're pretty sure that they're accurate. And they've, they've been accurate with other things, like other temples that are underground, that are 50 feet underground. They've mapped those things out with the same technology. So there's a precedent to it.

• 2:46:56Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 2:46:56Joe Rogan?

  These people knew things and we don't understand how they knew it or what they knew. And we don't know if the people that lived in ancient Egypt that we considered ancient Egypt, like, you know, 2000 B.C. We don't know if they found those structures. Or if those people built those structures, there's so much weirdness with Egypt. Because the construction is so beyond anything else that exists anywhere on earth. And especially when you're dealing with four thousand five hundred plus years ago. Four thousand five hundred years ago is the conventional estimations. But there's a lot of these heretic archaeologists that think, no, it's this is a lot older than that. I mean, there's a king's list that goes back thirty thousand plus years.

• 2:47:38Speaker 03

  Thirty thousand years.

• 2:47:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I mean, this, it sounds nuts to people that want to have this conventional dating of the, you know, the dawn of civilization being about six thousand years ago. But there's a lot of evidence that that's not accurate. There's a lot, and I think the most profound evidence is just the vastness of the Egyptian empire. And what they're, just the vastness of the, the construction. The way they were able to bring these stones from five hundred miles away through the mountains that are eighty tons. How? How did they cut them perfectly? How did they put them a hundred and twenty feet in the air and put them in the ceiling? Like, what, what the fuck was going on then? What the fuck was going on with people were supposedly just getting out of hunter and gathering?

• 2:48:24Joe Rogan?

  I mean, this is like the emergence, like a couple thousand years earlier. We're supposed to be like using stone tools and throwing them at animals. And now you have these people that build this immense structure that's perfectly aligned. A true north, south, east and west has two million, three hundred thousand stones in it. What? It's aligned with Orion stars, the stars in the Orion belt, like what?

• 2:48:47Speaker 03

  Maybe, maybe what happened was is AI took them down too.

• 2:48:52Joe Rogan?

  It might be.

• 2:48:53Speaker 03

  Way, way back.

• 2:48:54Joe Rogan?

  It might be.

• 2:48:55Speaker 03

  It's bad. I'm just saying, right?

• 2:48:57Joe Rogan?

  It could be.

• 2:48:57Speaker 03

  It could, stuff could be, I forget who said that, but it's like, I mean, I'm all for, I'm all for science. But in the end of the day, you know, no matter what we think we know, it's still just like a, you know, it's like a flame in a dark night, you know, there's, there's so much out there beyond, beyond what we can see.

• 2:49:16Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:16Speaker 03

  So always, I always kind of. Thought that myself. I mean, it's a basic thing nowadays. You know, when I was like a kid, you know, a lot of people have had this thought, but it's like, you know, I'm just like looking up here in the stars and it's like, if they're saying that the stars are basically infinite, then it's infinite possibility for other planets with life on it, which basically is a certainty, right?

• 2:49:39Joe Rogan?

  It's basically a certainty.

• 2:49:40Speaker 03

  It's a certainty.

• 2:49:41Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's basically a certainty. And the more we explore in the known universe, the more we understand that it's much more likely that this is not an anomaly. That there's many, many planets out there. Who knows, maybe an infinite number that have life.

• 2:49:55Speaker 03

  So who knows what was going on with those Egyptians?

• 2:49:57Joe Rogan?

  Well, we don't know how long ago they did this, you know, there's, there's just so much speculation.

• 2:50:03Speaker 03

  Well, and the, the version of Egypt that we're taught about, it was like just the latest stage of it.

• 2:50:09Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:50:09Speaker 03

  Like I read where there was just, it went on for so many thousands of years and there was this whole evolution of those kingdoms. I'm talking about throughout Africa.

• 2:50:18Joe Rogan?

  Yep. Well, all the Sub-Saharan area.

• 2:50:21Speaker 03

  All of that, too.

• 2:50:22Joe Rogan?

  That's where they believe that Atlantis was. I mean, there's this thing called the Reshot Structure that there's, again, these heretic archaeologists believe was the site of Atlantis. I mean, the, the South Saharan, the Saharan, Sub-Saharan Africa, was a rich rainforest thousands of years ago. There's whale bones. They find whale bones in the Saharan Desert.

• 2:50:43Speaker 03

  That's crazy.

• 2:50:43Joe Rogan?

  It's fucking madness, man. The, the history of Earth is so confusing. Like Graham Hancock says it best, we're a species with amnesia. You know, and that's what's wild about all this ancient shit.

• 2:50:56Speaker 03

  We don't remember anything.

• 2:50:57Joe Rogan?

  Well, we definitely don't remember shit from 20,000 years ago. It's all just speculation and, you know, and people have been in this form. You know, the form of Homo sapiens now for 300 plus thousand years. Like, who knows how long? And who knows where they learned this stuff from? I mean, who knows if they learned this stuff from visitors? We don't know. We don't know. I mean, if we did get visited 20,000, 30,000 years ago, what, what evidence would be left? You know, and are we being visited now? Well, we're about to find out because if this shit keeps popping off with Israel and Iran and they start going nuclear. You know, that was the only, the, the, the, the great hope of the people that really believe in aliens is that what they're watching over us is to make sure we don't fuck everything up.

• 2:51:41Joe Rogan?

  That we're so close to emerging as a type one civilization. We're to- so close to getting out of this barbaric, you know, territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons. We're, we're so close to passing this stage that we're in right now. As long as we don't fuck it up. And who knows how many times people might have fucked it up in the past. That mean, that might be what we're looking at when we're looking at ancient Egypt. There might be the remnants. And there's also natural disasters.

• 2:52:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's all I meant by AI.

• 2:52:10Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:11Speaker 03

  You know what I mean?

• 2:52:11Joe Rogan?

  It could be our greatest natural disaster.

• 2:52:13Speaker 03

  You get there and, but I like your, uh, there's a, it's a very positive outlook though, when you're talking about getting to the next.

• 2:52:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:21Speaker 03

  What'd you call it? Type?

• 2:52:22Joe Rogan?

  Type one civilization.

• 2:52:24Speaker 03

  What does that mean?

• 2:52:24Joe Rogan?

  Okay, there's, there's, there's type one, type two, and type three civilizations and, um, I remember who was the one who formulated this. It might have been Sagan. Um, Jamie, you can pull it up so I don't fuck this up.

• 2:52:38Speaker 03

  Come on, Jamie.

• 2:52:39Joe Rogan?

  It's essentially our, here it is. Type one civilization known as a planetary civilization defined by our Carteshev scale as the one that's harnessed and controls all available energy on its planet. This includes utilizing all forms of energy from sources like solar, wind, geothermal, and potentially even harnessing nuclear fusion. A type one civilization is also characterized by a global technologically advanced society with a high degree of interconnectedness and the ability to manage planetary scale resources and weather. So, we're on the way to that. And AI in best case scenario helps us achieve that.

• 2:53:21Joe Rogan?

  And we're, we're close. We're probably a lot closer to that than we think. Type two civilization is stellar, meaning we populate other planets. Type three is galactic. We, we populate the cosmos and we, we explore the cosmos.

• 2:53:39Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 2:53:39Joe Rogan?

  We're on our way to that. And this, it's inevitable. If we used to live in caves and now, you know, we fly in hypersonic jets, this is what's coming. And it's whether or not we fuck it up along the way.

• 2:53:50Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 2:53:53Speaker 03

  Beam me up, man.

• 2:53:57Joe Rogan?

  We should probably end on that. Charlie Crockett, you're the man. I appreciate you, brother. Thank you very much for being here, man.

• 2:54:01Speaker 03

  Pleasure's mine, man. Texas forever.

• 2:54:03Joe Rogan?

  It's been a lot of fun.

• 2:54:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks a lot.

• 2:54:05Joe Rogan?

  Thank you, sir.

• 2:54:05Speaker 03

  Come on, man.

• 2:54:06Joe Rogan?

  Thank you very much, man. Thank you, thank you. All right. Tell everybody where they can find all your shit. Do you have a social media?

• 2:54:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you don't gotta do all that.

• 2:54:14Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 2:54:16Speaker 03

  I mean, it's Charlie Crockett. Charlie with an E-Y, like Charlie Pride.

• 2:54:20Joe Rogan?

  That's it.

• 2:54:21Speaker 03

  Crockett with two Ts, just like David.

• 2:54:23Joe Rogan?

  That's all they need to know.

• 2:54:24Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 2:54:25Joe Rogan?

  All right, thank you. Bye, everybody.

• 2:54:42Speaker 01

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