Stephen Root and Rogan on the set of 'NewsRadio.' NBC
In 2007, at the Comedy Store, he got into a beef with comic Carlos Mencia and called him out as a joke thief — "Menstealia," the lowest of the low — which led to a sprawling argument that was caught on video and went viral. (Mencia has denied consciously stealing jokes.) Comics everywhere rose up to support Rogan, and to this day, he is beloved for his actions.
Over the years, he has appeared in documentaries like Marijuana: A Chronic History (2010) and DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2010), and shown up in two Kevin James movies, Zookeeper (2011) and Here Comes the Boom (2012). He's long said he'd never get married — even today he says, "Marriage is dumb, ****ing dumb" — but in 2009 he got hitched to a former ****tail waitress with whom he already had two daughters, and now has another. "She lets me do whatever I do. That's how we get along well. She doesn't **** with me. A prenup? Of course. I'm ridiculous and dumb, but I'm not stupid." Then he's thinking about his kids for a moment. "You know what? Porn and strip clubs seem so different to me now. They're not out. But they just don't seem the same. Having kids just ruined it."
Sometimes, Rogan will flesh out his story by saying that, early on, being moved around from place to place, he never felt like he fit in. He didn't get picked on and bullied so much as he was ignored or dismissed. He developed this odd sense that he was just another sad sack who didn't have anything going for him. He had friends, even had girlfriends, but he felt neither here nor there. "I was terrified of being a loser," he says. "Superterrified of being someone who people just go, 'Oh, look at that ****ing loser.' You know? I was always thinking that the other kids were going to turn on me at any moment. I was weird. I just ****ing drifted."
In Joe's 15th year, a school tough got him in a headlock in the locker room, not hurting him, really, but humiliating him to the core. A sudden determination to never experience that again led him to take up martial arts, where he first saw that he did have talents, was maybe not a loser, could stand up for himself. It was life-altering, and from there, one thing led to another.
And then there's his father, the cop, who he really would rather not discuss.
"All I remember of my dad," he says, "are these brief, violent flashes of domestic violence. And when I was five, I had a fight with one of my cousins — punched him in the face over something stupid — and his mother was screaming to my parents, 'Your son's a little monster. He punched my kid in the face!' My dad pulled me aside and I told him the truth of what happened. He said, 'Did you cry?' I said, 'No.' He said, 'Good, don't ever cry.' I mean, he was happy that I punched my cousin. But I don't want to complain about my childhood. Nothing bad ever really happened to me. It was just confusing, you know? He was just a very violent, scary guy. After the split, we moved to San Francisco and that was it. Never heard from him again."
As for his father, Joseph, now a retired cop still living in New Jersey, he won't respond directly to the allegations. All he will say is, "I don't talk about people the way they talk about me. That's not in my DNA. What's gone is gone."
These days, the main driver of Rogan's "personal evolution," as he calls it, is his podcast, which he records inside a small office in a nondescript industrial park. It's dimly lit, with mug shots on one wall, most notably of Jimi Hendrix. Brian Redban is here today, looking kind of disheveled, as well as comedian Nick DiPaolo, a mostly right-leaning longtime Rogan pal. Before the show begins, Rogan sparks up a joint, takes a hit, passes it to Redban and says, "A guy I was friends with, all he wanted to talk about was how he was the finest grower in all of L.A., always stroking his **** in front of you. Like, come on. These days, everyone's got good weed, so strong I almost don't want the best. I'd like to relax a little, Jesus ****ing Christ. I don't have to get blasted off into the center of my childhood on the first two hits."
And, in fact, Rogan takes only one hit, while Redban takes three and DiPaolo takes none. "I haven't smoked a joint in 25 years," DiPaolo says. And Rogan says, "It's good for you, Nick. I'm telling you."
Then, over the next few hours, they talk about El Chapo's great Mexican-jail escape. "Gotta give props where they are due," Rogan says. "He executed that like a god**** Clint Eastwood movie! How the **** do you not respect that?" Liberia: "There's an area where people just **** on the road. The ****way." Moderation: "I have, like, a night a week where I just eat like a ****ing slob in front of the TV." Late-night cooking: "My favorite thing is grilling meat in my underwear. I want to protect my shaft and balls at the very least." Cat-**** coffee: "This animal called the civet eats the coffee beans and then ****s them out....The digestive enzymes are juice in the cat's stomach that make it a smoother, smoother coffee." And so on. A real scattershot assemblage, near the end of which Rogan says, "It just seems like there's more wackiness going on right now in the world than any time I could ever remember. Does it seem like that? Like more hypocrisy, more contradiction, more chaos."
Yes, of course. On the other hand, how much of that could just be a reflection of Rogan's own picking and choosing and not so much a truth about the world — which has always been filled with hypocrisy, contradiction and chaos — as it is a truth about him?
"When I first met you," DiPaolo says later on, "you were ****ing nuts."
"No, I was still fighting," Rogan says. "Yeah, I mean, that was just out of fear, I'm sure. When you grow up with violence, you're programmed to respond and react quickly. [Kids like this] develop this hair-trigger reaction to things. Overreact. Make mistakes they can't rebound from. And a lot of it is because of the actual programming that occurs when they're in the womb, even. When their mother is experiencing violence from the father, it literally changes their genes in the womb."
They don't linger on the point, however. It's time to wrap up the podcast and move on to other matters. Caitlyn Jenner, for instance, which don't get Rogan started, because he won't stop.
He's fine with her being transgender and all. He goes on, "I'll call her a woman if she wants to be a woman. I'll call you whatever you want. I don't care. But you can't tell me she's beautiful and that because I disagree I'm a piece of ****....I mean, I don't understand the mindset of an ultramarathon runner, or an asexual person, or a person who wants to have sex with animals — by the way, I'm not connecting zoophilia to transgender people. What I'm saying is, I don't give a ****. And I think it's kinda ridiculous that everybody is forcing the fact that she's beautiful down everybody's throat. And that heroic thing is just outrageous. These are vampires of attention. The patriarch of this family becomes a woman and there's virtually no conversation about the fact that she killed someone while driving. There's no talk of that. That's been dissolved." (Since this interview, the L.A. district attorney's office decided not to bring charges against Jenner.) Rogan pauses. Finally, he says, "I mean, there's a lot of nutty **** with this, but ultimately, you know, for the human race, I think this is all for the good."
Later that day, he grumbles and roars his way to Pasadena in his '65 Corvette, to a famous comedy club called the Ice House, where he has a gig. He mills around in the parking lot, waiting to go on. His dad is still on his mind and he has a few more things to say.
"Look," he says, "I don't want to try to figure out what went wrong. I don't hate the guy, I don't want to beat his ass. I just don't want to be involved with him, and I don't want to talk to him. He was very nice to me, loved me. But he was super, super-violent, and he would have turned me into a ****ing psychopath."
Rogan seems sure about this, like there's no doubt in his mind, which maybe explains so much about why he's stitched everything together the way he has: the UFC gig, the testosterone and HGH injections, his float tank and freezers full of self-delivered meat, his DMT trips to the portal of souls, the taking of one hit off the joint instead of the two that'd rocket him back into childhood, all those guests on his podcast, filling his feverish, hopeful mind with all kinds of things. It's where life has come into play, stacking one thing up against another like into a fortress or a wall.
He turns to go inside, and pretty soon the crowd is laughing at bits about Texans, Scientology, Santa Claus and how "you eat a pot cookie and think about somebody you fingered when you were 14, and I'm sorry, OK? Jesus Christ, we were kids." A few of the transitions are shaky, some of the jokes a little flat. Not to worry. He's doing better than anyone might have expected, and the alternatives could have been far worse.
From The Archives Issue 1247: November 5, 2015
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