#2144 - Chris Distefano

Chris DiStefano
Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan
I never know what's going on with you. If this is like an act or if this is part of the fun of being Chrissy d. I mean, no. Well, Chrissy D was all fun and games. Was.

Was third person. Now we're coming into a part. Two major things have happened here, okay? One, I've re found my love for Christ, and I'm back believing. I'm back being Catholic.

Chris DiStefano
I'm back in nice. Got 2ft in Catholicism. We're back, baby. And then the other thing is, I made, six months ago, I had this beautiful house, Staten island, right? Everything we wanted.

Sold the house. Because I was having anxiety about doing a show at Radio City. Swear to God, my brain couldn't process it that way. But through therapy, the therapist figured out, and it's right, because I checked on this with my girlfriend, and she was like, that's exactly what you did. Guy was very nervous about Radio City.

Didn't know where to put that energy. Cause he's a big show. I'm a New York guy. Biggest weekend of my life. So I said about two weeks before Radio City came home and said, we're putting up the house for sale.

I want to be able to walk to a bagel store. We can't walk to a bagel store at this house on Staten Island. I need that for my creative process. And my girl was like, what are you doing? We just renovated our kitchen.

You just poured money into. This is our home. I was like, I can't walk to a bagel store. And it's gonna fuck my comedy up. It will.

What? Yeah. And then, you know, and then people, if you knew my address back then, you would know that there's a bagel. Was a bagel store 0.9 miles away that I didn't know about. But.

Joe Rogan
But you had a dream house. I had a dream house that I. That we put to our liking. And I said I couldn't, didn't understand it. Then I said, we're selling the house.

Chris DiStefano
And I convinced my family. Cause that's what we can do, right, as comics. I convinced them. I had them buy this story, convince my girl, my family, what's gonna be better for us is to sell this five bedroom house. Here's what we.

Here's the move. We're gonna sell this five bedroom house for about $300,000 under asking price. We're gonna get out of this puppy to sell that. We're going to move to Queens where we can walk to stuff and bagel stores and be in civilization. We're going to temporarily live in a two bedroom apartment, and then we're eventually going to move into a condo.

And life's going to be better because, you know, we won't have to. I won't have to care for these grounds anymore. I won't have to throw out the garbage. We'll be safe in an apartment. People can't come in the back window of our home, and this will be the move.

And I did that. And then the apartment that we had lined up fell through. We left the apartment we were living in because it had roaches. Jasmine almost left me. She was almost like, I can't be a part of your chaos and self sabotage anymore.

And I had to kind of really just say, what the hell did I just do? Figure this problem out. Went back into therapy, turned back into religion, starting to find some answers. And now we're living in a home that we're renting, that we like, and we're kind of settling in, but that I learned the valuable. I learned the lesson of self sabotage the hard way, the hardest.

It's weird what's going on in my career right now. Selling the most tickets I ever had, financially, the best I've ever done. Getting all these opportunities was the worst version. Was the worst version of me as a human being. Not because I was just self sabotaging after self sabotaging, and I couldn't, didn't know why.

Joe Rogan
Do you have friends that you could talk to about this stuff? Yeah, but they're, you know, not. They call me gay. You know what I mean? Like, they're old school New York guys that are like, I don't fucking know, dude, get a therapist.

Chris DiStefano
And I'm like, well, yeah, what I had to do, I really felt like nobody could really help me with this. I was like, I gotta just turn to professional therapist. And then I go into. And then I turn back to going to church. And I was like, well, at least I have, like, if anything, for me, church is just an hour a week to just meditate and sit there.

And I have nothing. I have no thoughts. I have no technology. I'm like, it's just me and whoever I think God is. That's how I feel about it.

But that chaos stuff. Cause people always chrissy chaos. I was actually living in it and I was like, okay, now what I've done, now I've hurt my family, now I've done a thing that's not funny. Now, I've taken things from my kids because I thought my kids would be like, oh, yeah, dad. Like.

Like my eight year old. We had that, you know, this moment that kids are just kids. I'm like, telling her, I'm like, isn't this great, baby? Like, we can walk to the bagel store now. We can go to the park.

We're not, like, living off the side of a highway. And she was like, well, I love that we had a pool. And I was like, yeah, but isn't it better that we can, you know, don't have a pool now? We can go to, like, the pool club. And she was like, you know.

No. She was like, honestly, she was like, we did it for you. So I'm happy that you're happy, but I miss my friends. And then I was like, oh, my God, what the fuck did I do? So I kind of have been, like, backtracking as much as I can, little by little, to try to recorrect these mistakes.

And now my family is more on board. Now my family's like, hey, we're with you. We're with you, but we gotta figure this out. So now we're settled finally in a place, and we're kind of falling in love with the neighborhood we're living in. As time has went on, and my kids are finding friends and all that, and we are not going to.

I'm not going to take that from them. I'm not going to be like, well, wherever we are now, we're going to stay for years so they can build the bonds and the friendships that they need that I inadvertently took away from them without me even realizing. Hmm. Can I have those edibles? So this anxiety ramped up when success ramped up?

Yes. So here. I sound like a therapist here, but are you. Is it because you're worried it's gonna go away? Is that the anxiety?

Joe Rogan
Like, what is the anxiety? No. What is the fear? No, it wasn't any of that. It was.

Chris DiStefano
It was. I believe. I have confidence. I believe that I'm in this business. I can do it.

And I believe that, like, we're all together now, especially how comedy is now. I feel like we're all like, this big brother sisterhood. Like, we'll help each other if one of us is falling like we got each other. I believe in that. But I think that the actual anxiety of the day of, you know, again, being a New York guy, one night, Radio City, the next night, the theater at MSG, all these, for me, a lot of tickets, you know, 10,000 plus tickets, which is, you know, that's huge for me.

I was like, how am I gonna balance all this? What if I don't do well? What if. What if. What if one of these 10,000 people realizes that I'm.

Thinks that I'm some kind of fraud? Thinks that, like, hey, you know, one. Is going to always. Right? There's always people that are going to find some negative thing in anything.

So now, now I've gotten to that point to accept that I'm wildly different. Not wildly different, but I'm much better now than I was in September when all this stuff was going on, because I've just kind of accepted that I don't really have control of what others think. Maybe you need a thing other than just comedy that you do that's not, like, career oriented, like a hobby, like some kind of other interests that you really enjoy, that you could focus on. So what I did. Trans people?

Joe Rogan
Is that what it is? That's. Yes, trans feet. I'm really into Wikifeet for specifically trans women. And so, no, what I think is, well, what I've done, because I haven't gotten to the hobby yet, what I've done is I've really.

Chris DiStefano
I thought I was always focused on my kids always. Being a father is everything to me. But I said what you just said. I said, I'm gonna really just focus on being a dad. Being home, coming off the road a little bit, just temporarily doing my thing in New York, keeping my podcast going, keeping my name out there, but not going on this national tour, getting away from that for now, I've shot a special.

It's gonna come out at the end of the year. I'm like, be home. Be with the kids, be picking them up, be at the park with them. Focus on, like, give yourself a schedule. I'm a comedian from nine to five, and they are nine to three.

When you pick up your. And then when you pick up your kids, just for now, you just be with them. And then. And that's really helped. And now, like, last night, I was at your club, which is awesome.

I was at your club, and that was the first time I was on stage in about six weeks since I shot the special. Oh, really? And I felt so I did some of the same material that I was because I'd been writing, but I was like, I don't want to try a brand new thing right here. I did one new thing, but I was like, oh, wow. I felt like that little mental experiment helped me.

Like, I was so excited to be on stage again. I've found, like, reconnected and you something that you do that I noticed last night, and I was like, huh? You. You know how much there's really nothing more you can do in comedy, right? I mean, you've done everything.

The biggest you can get is you've achieved, which is beautiful. But I still saw you yesterday obsessing over your hour and thinking about, like, how do I make that joke better? Which is why you've gotten here. And I had that question in my head yesterday. I got back to the hotel, I was like, do I have that?

Do I. Is it okay that I don't have it? Like, Joe? Does that mean I'm gonna not be successful? Does that mean I.

Does that kind of. Are we all just different? Because I love comedy, but I was like, I don't know. Like, I just shot a special and was like, you know what? I need some time off where I don't know that you've ever done that, right?

I mean, you've never taken a big break from stand up. Well, I took a big break during COVID Right. But other than that, you've always been like, you have a love and a passion that's you're not worried about. This episode is brought to you by betterhelp. You guys know how much it means to me to stay in shape physically, but your mental well being is just as important.

Joe Rogan
When we keep things bottled up, it can start to affect us negatively, even if it seems like something small, like maybe you're stressed about work. Maybe you feel a little lonely. It all starts to add up. And if you don't deal with it well, these feelings will sit there and continue to fester. One way to work through whatever's weighing you down is talking.

It helps more than you think. And if you need a safe place for that conversation, I recommend therapy. It's a great tool that you can use to figure out your feelings and learn positive coping skills. So if you want to give therapy a try, check out betterhelp. It's entirely online, convenient, and flexible.

It's easy to get started, too. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and you can even switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get it off your chest with betterhelp. Visit betterhelp.com jre today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.

H dash e dash p.com jrek. Like, you're never looking at your watch being like, is an hour up yet? You know, when your podcast, you never be like, I gotta get an hour. You just flow. You're just free in the moment, flowing with passion, which is very admirable.

Chris DiStefano
And I look at that sometimes, and I question myself. I'm like, do I have that? I know I've been relatively successful in this, and I do love it, but I'm like, do I have that? I wonder if therapy is not a good thing for a person like you. Okay, why do you think I've never heard that?

Joe Rogan
I wonder if, like, obsessing about your problems makes your problems bigger and that maybe you just need another thing to focus on that maybe alleviates anxiety, like some kind of a. Like a hardcore workout thing. Okay. Do you work out? Yes.

What do you do? Well, yesterday. Yesterday I did hot yoga. That's great. Yeah.

Chris DiStefano
Just because I was, like. I was on the plane, wanted to do the hot yoga. Drip and sweat. That's a great crazy. And then today.

Today I did. I ran 2 miles. And then I did with 30 pound dumbbells. I did one burpee, one press ten times, ramped that up to five, so went all the way up to 1234. So it was a lot of burpees with that.

Then I did farmers carries ball slams thing. I was dripping in sweat. I was trying to do that. Does that help you? It does.

I always feel after a workout. Cause I was an athlete. I played basketball my entire life, to the point where my friends from home are like, you never mentioned basketball. And that's the thing you were known as, in the neighborhood. Everybody knew you as basketball.

They used to call me gums. Cause I had big gums. So they would call me gums, but they would call me Dirk. You know, little dirk. Like, basketball was my whole life.

Joe Rogan
You big gums. See how they're. See how they're kind of vague? No, you're doing that. I could do that, too.

Chris DiStefano
No, I know, but when I smile, like, they're just. I have gingivitis. Let me see. Smile. No, it seems normal.

No, they think you're thinking too much. Well, they really do. Yeah. I mean. Well, no, they used to call me gums.

I mean, I. Most people are rude. I've had the same size head and teeth since I'm seven, so I've always looked kind of weird. Your head grew into your teeth? Yeah.

I just was born with this big, fat head and big teeth, but. But they. So basketball was an obsession, then. Physical therapy, getting my doctoral degree was an obsession. And then comedy became an obsession.

And I think I have this thing in my head where I know I have to stay in the present, but sometimes I can't help it, where I'm like, well, is this your obsession ending now and you're gonna find another obsession? Yeah. It's the thinking about the negative possibilities that are dangerous. Right. You know, like, I think Elon posted this on Twitter that having anxiety is literally like having a conspiracy theory against yourself.

Got it. That's pretty. Yeah, that's. I didn't see that. Because you're, like, thinking, oh, my God, what if this all falls apart?

Right? So you're dwelling on that, but it's weird. But it's not falling apart. That's the thing. Which is what I don't understand.

Which is weird because. Yeah. Cause I feel confident. I don't feel like. I don't feel like, help me.

I feel like I can figure anything out. Right? I'm a biological male. Do you think that maybe the worrying that it's gonna fall apart is what keeps you on track? Cause you're like, I can't let it fall apart.

Joe Rogan
You know, I have a family. I have a lot of responsibilities. I have to keep killing. I have to keep doing great. Right?

Chris DiStefano
Yeah. It feels. Specifically. Yeah. I feel like if I.

I do feel like it's all on me with my family. Nobody else in my family works, and I take care of multiple family members, which I'm proud to do. I don't feel like that's a burden. I feel like this is great. This makes me feel.

At times when I feel emasculated, that's something that makes me feel masculine, you know, when I'm like, oh, I don't know how to build anything. And I'm. You know, I got my girlfriend here putting up sheetrock, and I'm like, can build fucking walls. Emotionally. I don't know how to do anything else other than that.

I was like, at least I can. At least I feel like, you know what? I can take care of this family. Like, you rely on me for that. And I guess there is something in comedy, I guess because it's not like a day job, a daily paycheck coming in every two weeks, maybe that seeps in.

But it's weird because I am very conf. I've always been confident in anything I do. I've always felt like my father would tell me from when I was a little kid, you control your part. You control the output, not the outcome. He said that to me a million times.

You control your output, not your outcome. Just control your output and the outcome is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if you win or lose. I don't care about that. How are you playing?

And so I feel like I control my output as best I can, but yet then I sit with these thoughts kind of, you know, they eat at me sometimes, you know, and then maybe it comes out in weird ways where I'm like, well, I'll just sell my house or I'll, you know, I have a grid family thing right now, but maybe I'll, you know, maybe I'll fall in love with the actress from baby Reindeer. I don't know. Did you ever talk to anybody before you sold your house? Like, talked to one of your friends? I was able to convince all of them that it was the right move.

Joe Rogan
And you couldn't have convinced me. I wish I got on the phone. I know, I wish you. And I got rid of a great mortgage rate. I really fucked up.

Chris DiStefano
So, but I, but I take, I mean, out of three, I was silly. I had, like, free money from the bank. I really fucked up, but I'm aware of that. And I'm kind of saying along these lines, you know, I really fucked up. I do believe I've learned a lesson.

I do believe that I would never do that again. And I do believe it wasn't fatal for us. But I was like, I really, like, I've never been that guy. I would manufacture problems in my brain. I would say, oh, you know, this is an issue.

But it's minor. It's not. It's self obsessed, narcissistic, like disgusting, like, Chris, get over yourself. Self obsessed bullshit. Get over yourself.

And I would do that and then kind of tell myself, like, you're being gross. Stop. Chris. Like your family, you have a pain in your big toe. It's not brain cancer.

Shut up. And, you know, your family needs you. And then, so I would do that. But then I actually did give myself a big problem. I had two major problems.

I had this house sale, and then I had a family member who really was acting crazy. Like, crazy, crazy, crazy. Where I was like, this is now a nightmare. This has become an issue. So I'm like, now for the first time in the past nine months, I'm like, you.

One self induced, one not. And you've created, now, how do you deal with this? How do you think you created the problem with your family member acting crazy? Because I enabled them. I feel specifically, how'd you do that?

I feel well, because I was giving them money. I was not aware that an issue was going on. I was kind of giving that drug issue. Yes. And I was allowing them, you know, like, to do things and say things.

And I was just like, this is fun. It's chaos, baby. And then. And then not realizing, like, hey, man, you're affecting way more. You're gonna be the head of this family than be the head of this family.

They're gonna follow your lead and your lead right now. No matter how much you tell yourself, I don't do drugs. I don't do drinks. I don't drink too much. I'm, you know, stable.

You're not, buddy. Like, you have to put your feet down right now. And your family's, you know, my eight year old is. She's old enough now to. Somebody will, you know, somebody in her class will be like, oh, your dad's the comic.

He's pretty filthy, right? So my daughter is now at an age where she's, you know, I've never mentioned them. Nobody knows what they look like. I'm not that, but I'm like, oh, there's responsibilities now. There's repercussions for things we're doing now.

My kids, they're not little anymore. My 13 year old, I have 13, eight and two. My two year old's obviously a baby, but 13 and eight, you're gonna have to now really, really, really get your shit together. And I think that was scary because nobody really, in my family, no male figures at least. Even though my father's a great man, nobody really got their shit together, right?

I was like, I'm the only one who went to college. I'm the only one who pursued anything. I'm the only one who's ever even owned a home, you know? So even though I sold it immediately.

Joe Rogan
How long did you have it for? About two years. And I sold it for way under. My neighbor, who I didn't consult with, was like, why? If you wanted to move, fine, I get it.

Chris DiStefano
Staten Island's not for everybody, even though I love Staten island. But you ruined the property value. He was like, yes. He was like, what the fuck? And he was like, you sold it.

Who the fuck did you sell this to? And you sold it for hundreds of thousands of dollars less than it was worth. How did you do that? Cause I just wanted to get out. I just wanted to move.

Joe Rogan
So you just accepted the first offer? Yes. I just needed action. My father was a. Is a.

Chris DiStefano
Like, his marriage with my mother got ruined because he was a hardcore gambler. Hardcore gamblers anonymous. Ru. Like, that's a scary disease. Yes.

Gambling gamble. And my father told me, you know, even before I started doing this, my father was always like, do not gamble, okay? If I ever see you learning card tricks, if I ever see you knowing what, gambling on sports, any of that, you're really gonna upset me. And, like, this is the only demand I have of you is do not gamble. And what I believe has happened is I don't gamble.

I don't even know what the point spreads and the vigs, and I don't know what any of that means because my father and card games, you could put cards in front of me. I have no idea what's happening. People talk about, you know, parlay bets. I have no idea what's happening. I don't know what.

It's a foreign language to me because I was like, I'm gonna do that. But what I've realized now is, well, of course I'm gambling still. I'm just not playing card games and betting. You're just taking risks with your life. I might be taking bigger risks with my life than he could, because now I'm, you know.

He was gambling. Yes, he lost his marriage to my mom, which sucks. But, you know, whatever. He gambled, you know, some guys wanted to kill him cause he owed money, got taken care of, and then he went to gamblers Anonymous, and at least he was like, well, I have this disease and I don't do it anymore. And I respect my dad for that.

He got out of the. He got out of it. But I'm like, man, I was going down this path where, like, how many more decisions was I going to make? How many more times was I going to gamble? Because I was like, I didn't realize.

And this. This last nine months, I was like, wow, dude, you really fucking are looking it in the face now. Like, these decisions. I mean, dude, when your eight year old looks at you like, what the fuck did you do? That's all, you know?

Your mom and dad can tell you shit. Even your wife and girlfriend can tell you shit, which I all love and respect. And your daughter is like, what did you do? Why did you do this to us? You kind of had this major wake up call where it was like, yeah.

Joe Rogan
When I moved here, I was very lucky that my kids wanted to move here. Right, right. And it was lucky. During the time that we moved, there was a real clear reason because LA was fucked, right? But.

And they love it here, so I'm happy. But if they didn't, I'd feel fucking terrible. And if I had sold the house like that. Yep. Especially if there's a real bagel store 0.9 miles away.

Chris DiStefano
Shout out manor bagels on Staten island. They had excellent bagels. Shout them out. You just didn't know. I didn't know until I sold back into the neighborhood.

I know. Well, that's funny. My girl was like, do you think we can contact the people who bought. Our home and buy it back? And buy it back, even though it's twice the mortgage rate and you'll have to pay more money?

Like, it would make us happy. And I reached out to him and he was like, no, you can't do it. And it's funny. I sold it to, you know, Staten Island's like a funny. It's.

The people on Staten island are great. They really, really are. But like, when we first got there, you know, it's like an old school. If you don't know Staten island, it's like an old school New York City neighborhood. It's like the only borough that is like, you know, kind of like more republican than anything.

Like, they are like freedom. Like american flag. You will see american flags everywhere on Staten island. And Wu Tang clan. And Wu Tang clan, right?

Wu Tang is on one part, but, you know, Staten Island, Staten island, baby. And so they're like, when I moved in, I come in here, it's me, I'm italian, whatever. But then my whole family's puerto rican. And my neighbors, for like the first two weeks, just cause I didn't know, I told my neighbors that my wife was italian and my girl was italian, not puerto rican. You lied?

I swear to God, I told her we were puerto rican. And then my neighbor, who's a great guy, he's a doctor, he finally came over to me once, and he goes, you know, we know she's puerto rican. He said, chrissy, it's no issue. Because I thought that that's what I was supposed to do. And then I sold the house.

And again, it's not, you know, I sold a house to a palestinian family, which, whatever, right? Who they would. They have palestinian flags. Yes, they have. Very nice.

They're very nice people, but I sold them, and now, you know, they're proud of their country. And then, you know, I sold them before this whole shit started popping off. So now that same neighbor's like, way to fucking go. And he'll send me pictures. And then it's funny.

Cause, like, they have a flag outside. And now my neighbor got american flag twice as big as theirs. Just fucking stampin that. So I'm like, so now I've caused a community conflict. Community conflict.

Joe Rogan
Why don't you just offer more money? The Palestinians, maybe they're uncomfortable there now. Well, so actually, what has happened is when I contacted them is they. They have, like, multiple family members living in there now. They have, like.

Chris DiStefano
So they're like, we can't. This is our house. Like, we have to stay. Like, they have a baby. They have a whole.

So. And I fucked up. But I do feel. I do feel that I'm confident we are getting out of it, and I'm confident in my abilities. Are you gonna go back to Staten Island?

I have been looking at houses on Staten island. Yes, I have. And we actually, we put an offering on one last week. You're a fun mess. Thank you.

Joe Rogan
It's a fun mess. Cause it's not the worst kind of mess. Like, if you were a gambling addict, that's a scary mess. Or drugs. Drugs is a scary one, yes.

Yeah, those are scary ones because those people slip away and then they find themselves at OTB and they're fucking betting money they don't have, and they just. They get that rush. Yeah. When you see people that get that gambler's rush, it's just like a drug addict. Like, their eyes gloss over.

Like, they just need that fix. They need that bet. You've seen uncut gems, right? Sure. It's a phenomenal anxiety.

Chris DiStefano
Oh, yeah. That movie's so good. So nuts. Well, that's when I watched it with my dad. My dad was like, this is what life was like.

This is what it was for me. I knew so many people like that in the pool hall that were like that. It's a wild thing to watch. Cause you realize, like, oh, it's a drug. You're getting a drug.

Joe Rogan
You're getting this weird anxiety fix, this dopamine fix, whatever it is from gambling. Yeah. And my father, like, inadvertently, like. Cause, you know, my. Loves me, you know, loves me like a phenomenal father.

Chris DiStefano
Right. They divorced when I was one. My dad lived on Staten island. My mom all the way in Queensland. You know, if you're not, that's like a two hour commute.

He could. He didn't have a car. He was taking the ferry and trains and never missed one visitation with me. It was at all my games. But even in the throes of the addiction, like, he would take me to the OTB racetrack and I loved it.

He was like, we're gonna watch the horsies. Chrissy, you have a yoo hoo. We'll have fun. But, you know, he would always tell me, you know, you could leave my mother's house right where she still lives, and you could go to the right was church, and to the left was the OTB racetrack. But it kind of.

The church was, like, at a top of a triangle, so you could go either way and get to the church. And my father told me he'd always be like, you know, when you're going to church with your mother, though, you always go to the right. Okay. You don't walk to the left. Never walk past that OTB with your mother to the right.

Because he knew that the dirt bags that hung out outside there knew me. And so one day we walked that way, and they all started going up. So, like, there he is, Chrissy. Good luck, John. There he is.

There he is. And my mother was like, how do you know those men? How do you know those men, honey? And I was like, you know, my. You know, sometimes dad walks with me past that way.

And then she was like, you tell me right now, is he taking you into that OTB racetrack? And then I, like, didn't know, like, what the fuck to do. I was. I had that moment, like, do I side with my mom or side with my dad? And that was.

I remember, like, first time feeling, like, anxiety. But, you know, one thing about. I just kind of always sided with my dad. So I was like, no. I was like, I've never.

I've never been in there. I don't know how those guys know me. But then, of course, she found out, and, you know, I got in big trouble. But. But it's what it is.

Joe Rogan
God damn, dude. By the way, I love Austin so much. I really do. I've. I got into the car today, you know, the.

Chris DiStefano
Send a car for me to come here. I appreciate. I get in the car, you know, real nice suit and tie driver. And then he stepped in dog shit. As soon as he got into the car, he's walking.

And I see him go, oh, fuck. And then he steps in dog shit. And he's just driving in the car, and it smelled. The entire car smells like dog shit. And I said, sir, did you step in dog shit?

And he said, yeah, I did. And I was like, oh, okay. He was like, you want me to take my shoes off? I can throw them out right here. And I was like, you'll drive this car barefoot?

He goes, absolutely. And I was like, no, dude, it's okay. I was like, you're willing to drive this car barefoot? He goes, you're my customer. I'll drive barefoot for you.

And I was like, dude, I fucking love it. And then he's waiting for me here. And I was like, what are you gonna do, man? He was like, I'm gonna find a paper towel and I'm gonna wipe down these shoes. You better bet.

You better believe it ain't gonna smell like shit in here when you come back. I was like, good for you, dude. Thank you. But full dog shit. Yeah.

Good people out here. They're good people out here. Have you met? I mean, there's not jobs everywhere though, right? Oh, sure, yeah, yeah, there's lot of.

Joe Rogan
Lots of crazy people here. Yeah, there's crazy people. Whenever you have a large population. There's 2 million people in this area, but that's not that much. No, no.

That's what's good about it. It's like, people aren't a burden. Yes. Cause you have the space. Yeah.

If you live in New York City, if you live in LA, people become a burden because there's so many of them, you don't appreciate them. See, the thing with New York, I agree. And New York now, it never felt that way my whole life there. But recently, New York has become a place still great, still my home city. But the problems that you would always hear about, like, you know, people would say, oh, it's conspiracy.

Chris DiStefano
Or like, you're watching that shit on the news now. You're actually seeing it. Okay, so for, you know, 39 years, I never had one altercation. Not one altercation on the subway or in the streets with any kind of mentally unwell person in New York, there's a lot of crazy people, but, like, they not really fucking with you. Three times in the past year.

Three times in the past year, I've been physically assaulted or, like, had to defend myself against a. A mentally deranged homeless person. One time I was walking in the comedy cellar, some guy came at me and, like, just put his elbow in my chest and I had to push him, and he fell over a pile of garbage. I just had to push him as hard as I can where I'm like, I never dealt with that. And now you're starting to hear people who, like, would always kind of, you know, never, ever, ever even think about, like, voting any other way.

But the traditional New York way are, like, I have to now vote another way because it's not safe for me anymore. Anymore. There's crime and the cops. I feel bad, man. The cops.

If I was NYPD, a lot of my friends are NYPD, they're like, dude, we wanna. We wanna fucking police. We can't. I can't do anything. My boy was telling me a story.

He's like, we were outside the projects, right? He goes and we see this drug dealer selling drugs, right? We see him, he's selling drugs, and we know he's right there selling drugs. We arrest him out right away. Out.

He goes. Then we saw him selling drugs to what we look like a ten year old kid. So we arrest him. We arrest this kid. We were seeing a ten year old child walk with a bag of drugs.

Arrest him back out. He goes, so what do you want me to fucking do then? I can't keep doing this. Why do you think they're doing that living in New York City? Why do you think they're letting people out?

Joe Rogan
Like, right away? There's no cash bail, right? Right. I was told that's by my police friends. I was told that's what it is.

Chris DiStefano
It's. That law is the big thing. It's like this bail law to get out, he said, which doesn't help anyone, because I. Why was it made? I don't know.

I honestly don't know. It's not. It's not well received, though. Nobody really. You're gonna.

In New York now. Even. Even the people who are wearing, like, 40 masks during COVID are like, I don't want my cities, like, being destroyed now. So now I don't know if that changes in an election, if people will vote what they. I don't know, but I'm like, I see it now for the first time ever.

I'm, like, fully seeing people injecting heroin, fucking. It's wild. Even my father, who was like, I grew up in New. You know, my father's like, I remember New York in the seventies and eighties, which was, like, nuts. Like, you know, he was like, you would get assaulted.

Everybody had AIDS. He was like, you know, this is scary. In New York, I'm more scared of this New York. Cause, you know, he said, in the old New York, you knew which neighborhoods don't go in that neighborhood. And then you're okay.

But this New York, I don't know where that shit's coming from. It's gonna pop out of anywhere at any time. And you'll have people that will hear this and be like, you're. You know, you're exaggerating. It's not true.

I'm telling you, it's true. They wouldn't. Haven't run into it yet. I'm telling you, dude, it's true. And when you are friends with the police, you know the cops there.

It's true. Well, when you saw those illegal immigrants that came here, that attacked the police officer, and they were out on jail the next day, flashing the bird at the cameras. Yep. Like, that's crazy. You got someone who illegally enters from another country, assaults a police officer, and they're right back out in the street.

Well, and by the way, nobody, like, any race or religion, doesn't want that in New York. Like, no, nobody wants that. Like, that's not a thing. That's like, oh, that. Nobody wants that at all.

So, like, I don't know what it's gonna take to change. I mean, I will tell you that. Like, a lot of New Yorkers blame it on Mayor Bloomberg. Like, he's the most hated ex mayor Bloomberg. He's the most hated person.

Really? More so than the last guy, than de Blasio. I'm sorry. De Blasio is what I meant. I'm sorry.

Not Bloomberg. De Blasio is what I meant to say. I'm sorry. Mayor. De Blasio is.

Is hated. Like, he's hated more than Satan. Like, people just. I was at a gym once in park Slope, Brooklyn. He was on the elliptical, and he has a security guard standing by him.

He was the acting mayor. And, I mean, people were just fucking trashing him as they walked by. Just, I mean, outwardly trashing him, because nobody gives a shit. We were like, you. The one guy was like, you fucking suck.

And by the way, that's a girl's machine. That's a girl's machine. Girls machine. That's what they said. And I was like, it's not.

Joe Rogan
Nobody's ever said that to me. Yeah, they said it's a girl. Elliptical machines. I mean, dude, they wouldn't say it to you, but he said. They said it was a girl's machine.

Chris DiStefano
And I saw one of security guards go like this. He just did that little laugh, and then. But people hate him, and they blame a lot of what's happened in New York on him. Well, he was definitely a fool. Sure.

Joe Rogan
He was a weird fool. First of all, that's not his real name, right? He's not italian. De Blasio is not his real name. It's, like, some sort of a german name.

What's de Blasio's real name? It's like, wilhelm, I think. Is it something very, like, Nazi? Wilhelm. Wilhelm.

Wilhelm. Wilhelm. What's really crazy is that video where he was doing that thing, trying to get people to get vaccinated. Like, you get a free burger. So he's eating a burger.

Does fries come with this? Yeah. Warren Wilhelm Junior. Yeah. And he just divorced his wife and.

Chris DiStefano
Which she also stole. They said like $80 million or something like that went missing. That's gone. So they hated her. Now they're divorced.

It's one of those things, though, where I just got to stay there. It's just home. If I wasn't. Yeah, well, especially after what I told you I just did. I can't now uproot the family to Austin as much as I want.

Joe Rogan
Are you thinking about it? Yeah. Well, when I come here, I'm like. You renting right now. We're renting right now.

Chris DiStefano
I can't take my kid out of school, though, again, I can't do it. Almost over. I. Yeah, but my mike. My kids have went to you.

Now you're making me think about it. Give me an edible it. Don't do it. This is only ten. Cuz five puts me on my ass.

Joe Rogan
No. Should I eat half or eat the whole thing? You'll be fine. Are you positive? No.

Chris DiStefano
Okay. I'm not positive in anything about you. Thank you. Other than you like trans girls feet. Yeah, I'm pretty positive about that.

Joe Rogan
I don't think you'd lie. I wouldn't lie. That's the one thing about me. I make shit up. I exaggerate shit.

Chris DiStefano
A lot of my comedy stories and stuff exaggerate it, right? When it comes to shit like that, I won't lie. Yeah. No, I believe you. This is a good place to live.

Joe Rogan
But I don't think you should uproot your family again unless you can convince them once they come here and they really like it. Well, Jasmine, my girl has told me you. You can move us again in five years. Okay? Five years?

That's not a good time to move them. Well, that's a bad time. Why? Because. Well, she's saying a 13 year old will be through high school.

Yeah, but then the other one, eight. Year old will be going into high school. So she don't want to move them like at high school. You don't think moving them in 8th grade? I think before.

This is my personal opinion, I might be wrong for whoever's listening to this. It's about to move their kid. Cause, listen, I moved. My family moved me to Newton, Massachusetts, from Jamaica Plain for my first year of high school. And it was actually good.

It was good because Jamaica Plain was fucking sketchy. Jamaica Plain, which is nice now. It's like they've done, you know, as Boston expanded. Like, they sort of, like, made. They renovated a lot of places.

Jamaica Plain is like a much more calm neighborhood. When I was there in the 1970s, it was sketchy as fuck. It was sketchy. It was like, I think we moved there in 78 or 79. It was fucking weird, you know, it was dangerous.

I had dangerous neighbors. These kids were dangerous. They were already having sex. Like, I was eleven and they were like, jesus. I remember this kid was telling me, like, you don't even know how your dick goes in a pussy.

You probably think it goes in straight. I'm like, it doesn't. Yeah. He's like, it goes up. I go.

It goes up. What I thought, you know, I've never seen, like, a girl's. No girls had ever shown me their vagina when I was eleven. But they were trying to explain to me that it's like, I guess I wasn't. I guess I wasn't eleven.

I guess I was 13. Okay, so, like, we only lived in Jamaica plain for a year and a half. Yeah, I think it was. I think we moved there before school. I think I went through the summer and then we went.

I went to school was sketchy. So this is where I went to 8th grade. I went to this, like, public school in Jamaica plain. We didn't have any money. We lived in.

It was a shitty area, but the kids were like, 17 in the 8th grade, and they would show up for the first days of class, then quit. And it was just like, they were just. They had dropped out so many times, and here they were, the age where they should be graduating and they're not even in high school yet. Wow. It was weird is that we think got you into martial arts, then you feel like you had to defend yourself in some ways.

I definitely felt super vulnerable, but I didn't get into martial arts until. Till the next year, but it was. What'd you do? Did you lose your virginity first or get into martial arts first? Martial arts.

Chris DiStefano
Nice. Yeah. Actual sex sex. I mean, I'd been fondled by a lady. She was 21 and I was 13.

Joe Rogan
That was a lot of fun. That's interesting. She's very pretty. Yeah, I believe it. But nothing hardcore serious.

Not like sex sex until I was, like, 1616. I was 1715. I guess I was almost 16. 1St time I ever had sex. Went raw dog, didn't pull out.

Chris DiStefano
Ooh, Jesus. First time, I didn't know what to do. Oh, my God. First time nobody talked to you? No.

Very catholic family. Wouldn't speak to me about these things. Hot dog. Not pulling out. Not pull out.

Joe Rogan
Everyone's so fertile at that age, dude. And she was half jamaican, half italian. Very beautiful, beautiful girl. We actually were on the same basketball team. We were playing basketball together, and she had already had sex, and I was a virgin, and we had this sex and unprotected.

Chris DiStefano
And I'll never forget. She was. You know, she put, like, a do rag on. She had done this before. My mom wasn't home.

She put this do rag on. She was ready to go. She was ready to go. And then she. You know, I could.

I was so nervous, I could barely get an erection. I just couldn't. It was, like, impossible. And then finally got it in, and then I finally got it up, and it was. She wrote, dude, two pumps blew her.

She was like, did you just come inside me? I was like, I'm sorry. So sorry. And then I had this emotional swing where I immediately. I started hysterical crying the very first time I had sex.

It was the weirdest thing. I can't explain it. Hysterical crying to the point where she, you know, comforted me. And then within two weeks, broke up. Of course she was done.

She waited. In two weeks. I couldn't. Yeah. And I don't know.

My therapist can't tell me why that happened. He's like, that's a rarity. I can't tell you, man. Well, you're an emotional guy. Dwell on it.

Joe Rogan
You were fucking 14 years old. But it's anxiety. It's anxiety. So thinking about a thing, that thing happens, and you're just overwhelmed and you don't know how to handle it, so you just cry. Anxiety, for me, is this interesting thing.

Chris DiStefano
I know a lot of people suffer from it, but it's this interesting thing where I've connected. Now, I used to lean into my anxiety, right? I used to. Especially doing comedy, I would, like, make it a thing, whatever. Pandora's box of anxiety opened up for me on 911 because I thought my mom was dead, this whole thing.

So I couldn't shake that feeling. For ten years after that, I could not shake the feeling of thinking my mom or anyone I loved, any woman that I loved, girlfriend or mom or aunt, if they did not respond to me within five minutes of a text, I assume they were dead. That feeling of 911 every day came back. Cause I was calling my mom. No response.

No response. Every day, coming back, coming back. And so I would deal with that. And then something happened where I started to look at my anxiety. Like narcissism and, like, disgusted with myself to the point where.

Cause I used to put out these videos, anxiety Tuesday, talk about my anxiety. And people will still sometimes be like, oh, that anxiety Tuesday stuff. It helped me so much. Why don't you do it anymore? And I'm like, I hate that.

I hate that guy. That guy was so pitiful. Like, because you were being worried about things that really didn't matter. What I should have done and what I know now is dealt with that anxiety in a healthier way. So instead of subconsciously, you know, selling my house, because I was really nervous about a big show, I would have been able to deal with that anxiety in a healthier way and make a better decision.

So I think, like, this relationship with anxiety is so, like, big and swings in my life that I used to kind of let. I'm trying to use the energy now to be like, well, how can you learn from this? How does this build you up, and how do you make better decisions, you know, by doing this? So I struggle with that. Do you have friends that you grew up with that also had anxiety, too?

No. Anxiety wasn't a thing that you could speak about in my neighborhood. So this was only, like, you on your own, developed this 100%. And then, like, I remember my anxiety was so bad. I played college basketball, and I would text my girlfriend at the time to make sure she got home from work, you know, whatever, what she was doing.

And if she didn't text. I remember there was this one game we were playing Brooklyn College, which was, like a big rival. We needed to beat them. I was. I was, you know, one of the best players on the team.

I I remember I would. She wasn't texting me back. I foolishly texted her before the game, like, when we were in the locker room and then thinking, okay, we're gonna go in for warm ups. 20 minutes. I would have to leave my phone in another room.

Cause the anxiety of, like, is the phone ringing or not? I couldn't handle it. So if I texted her and then I went and did something else for 20 minutes, I would say, at the end of this 20 minutes, she's gonna have a text. She's home, and you can relax, right? Even though it was pure daylight in New York, like, she was always gonna be okay.

But my brain convinced me otherwise, so one day, she's not texting back, and now the game has begun. So I'm playing this game like, I can't even feel my body. Like, I am paralyzed. Truly. I cannot feel my body.

My mouth is numb. I'm having, like, a full panic attack. But I am the lead player on a college basketball game that we need to win. So I don't know, like, what the fuck to do. So I call a timeout.

I call a timeout. Overrule my coach. I'm like, timeout, coach. I just need a breather, okay. I say, I'm just gonna go back into the training room.

I just want to tape my ankle, which is normal. Okay. I come back out because I wanted to look at my phone. Look at the phone. Still no message.

Still nothing. You know, turns out it was just a delay on the train. And she. Whatever. She's a 21 year old girl.

She's not looking at her phone all the time. And I come back and I have the phone stuffed in my pants. Oh, my God. I stuffed it in my, like, tidy shorts. And I played the game with the cell phone stuffed in my pants because I said the only way I'd be able to do this is somehow when nobody's looking, even though it's a packed college crowd, pull out this phone and make sure that she texted me, or else I can't play.

I'm going to be paralysed, and I can't play. So I had it. And then I was playing the game, realizing this is worse, because now I'm waiting for the phone to vibrate. And every time I thought it was vibrating, it wasn't. I was just running in the game.

So then I stuffed it in towels and the warmups, which was in a pile in the back of the bench. And they would call. Coach would call, timeout, or I would call a time out. I did that twice and get out. And then I would.

I would go over and look at the phone to see if, you know, she had texted me. And I dealt with this anxiety. And then what happened was, I was, you know, we were kids. 19, 1819, they. I opened up to one of my friends about it.

We used to call him Bam Bam. He was a big boy. And we. I. And I opened up to him about it, thinking, you know, whatever.

And then what they did again, back then, not knowing anything about mental health, not really caring, being from deep in Brooklyn. What they did is, they on a road trip one time, we were going to a game. They found a way to start. They star six seven called me from a, you know, unrestricted note. It'll pop up nobody.

And they said the girl's name was Melissa. They were like, hey, we kidnapped Melissa. Oh, jeez. We have her in the trunk of our car. She's going to die.

Like, everything that they. I confessed to them, they said, and I had. And it was crazy. My freshman year, when she also played basketball as well. That year, when I was a freshman, she was a senior.

So we would always be in the same gym at the same time. So I had no anxiety. I was 90% free throw shooter. 90. My junior and senior year, when I was a better basketball player, in better shape, the leader of the team.

But she was not with me every game. 50% free throw shooter. Because my brain. I couldn't feel my body. And I somehow got people.

My teammates didn't even know this. I got all the way to division three, all american. I was like, I'm my school's all time leading scorer, or maybe second now, but I did all this stuff, and I was completely, 100%, absolutely having, like, this mental health crisis. Like, as anxious as I could be where I swear I'm not. I would never joke about this.

Like, I was, like, at 21 years old, being like, I'm gonna have to kill myself. I'm gonna have. I cannot live like this. And nobody could help. My mother didn't know what to do.

No, but this was, you know, 25. Yeah, 20 years ago, I. No, but there was no mental health. Nobody knew that. Nobody knew about like that.

I just dealt with every day reliving. I think my girlfriend's dead. I think reliving that 911, pandora's box, and it affected me and to the point where, like, every relationship I had, they broke up with me because they were like, I can't deal with this. To them, it was control. And in a way, it was.

I was trying to control. I wouldn't care about if they cheated on me. Where are you? I was never jealous about that. I'd be like, go have fun.

Have sex. Let me know what big his dick is. I'm kind of into it. I don't give a shit. But I cared about their safety always.

And it was this thing I could not let go of. And the biggest fear I have. The biggest fear I have, and that's why I'm trying so hard to work at this now. And sometimes it's fucking exhausting, but I'm trying so hard is I don't want that anxiety to come back. And then I put it on my daughters.

Cause I don't want them. I don't want to be their 1819, want to live their life. And dad's here texting them, and they don't write back. And now I'm thinking, who has my daughter. So I worry about that.

That's the first fear I had when I held my oldest daughter, who was love of my life. I've held her and I was like, what am I gonna, what's gonna happen when she goes outside? Which I know you gotta stay in the present, you can't worry about that. But sometimes it hurts me. How did you get over this?

Joe Rogan
Everyday, crippling anxiety to the point you thought you were gonna kill yourself? How'd you get past that? So what happened was, is the only advice that I did get from a friend of mine who's my kid's godfather now, was like, you are so much better basketball player, which is, that's what I cared about back then. You are such a better basketball player when you're single, when you don't have a girlfriend, you are such a better basketball player, and that's what you need to do. So the only way at that time I could overcome it is to be single and to not connect to a girl in any way, shape or form.

Chris DiStefano
Because then if I was single, I wasn't worried as much. Cause my mom always would text me back, or if I called her, she was always pretty much home. I very rarely dealt with instances where my mother was not responding. Cause my mom, she is thinking about me all the time, where these girls, rightfully so, would be like, I'm not gonna sit here and respond to this behavior, you know, like, he's nuts. And I was, and then, and then so, and so, that's the only way I could get over it now how I deal with it, like, you know, now, you know, my girl is out picking up my kids from school while we're doing the show.

I just have a feeling what I think about now is if something was to happen, I can handle it. I'll be able. I'll be okay. It's going to hurt, but I'll be okay. I've had enough life experiences where things hurt, but you'll be confident you can get through it.

And I try as best I can to tell myself, hey, your brain is a defense mechanism is always going to give you worst case scenario for survival. So just know that that worst case scenario is the statistically, the least likely thing is going to happen. And if, God forbid, it does happen, you'll be able to deal with it, you can handle it. Where I think the anxiety for me the last time came, I don't know what to do. I don't have the tools to help me if something horrible happens.

Joe Rogan
So life experience therapy, all the things. Yeah. But it's interesting. What you said to me about therapy is I felt that way myself. I was like, you know, sometimes I feel like I have.

Chris DiStefano
We all have issues, but I'm like, sometimes I'm just, like, bitching to my therapist and I'm forcing myself to talk about these things that I feel like I have a better handle over from my own kind of meditation and just thinking, seeking out help for myself, listening to people speak, having life experience. I'm like, I like my therapist, but I'm like, I don't know, man. Sometimes it's like, you don't want to be the guy that's like, I don't need help because I get it. But I'm like, yeah, I didn't need this today. I feel like you made me nervous again.

Now, I didn't need this at all today. I was okay today. But it's Tuesday, 1115. So that's our session. That's what Abigail Schreier was saying.

Joe Rogan
I had her on, and she had written a book about therapy and kids, and that obsessing about problems sometimes can exacerbate the problem, make them worse. So instead of just, like, allowing that problem to sort of go away and naturally recover from it, now you just rehash it over and over and over. And over, and that becomes a thing. That you're concentrating on all the time and that you're not developing the ability to be resilient. And resilience comes from a lot of things, you know?

A lot of things. Like, if you have bad things happen in your life, you can develop anxiety, but also, when bad things happen in your life and you recover from them, you realize you can recover from bad things. Yeah, that's how I feel now. I feel like I'll just. You know, I've been through it.

Chris DiStefano
I'm. I'm not scared of anesthesia anymore. I used to be that guy that's scared of anesthesia. Cause I had to get a colonoscopy. Cause I took a shit that looked like it had some blood in it.

And it turned out it was just a bunch of boysenberries, but they. But that's what it was. Jeffrey. Beets. Yeah, beets.

Joe Rogan
You go into a panic. So I didn't know. So the doctor, I showed him a picture of my shit, and he was like, that doesn't look great. Let's just get a colonoscopy. And I got the anesthesia, and I woke up, and everything was fine.

Chris DiStefano
And I'm like, well, now I'm not scared now I feel. Cause a big anxiety for me would be okay. I feel a pain in my chest, my stomach, you know, whatever. Like, I had gas once in my stomach, and I had shows in England, and I literally went from literal gas pain. Cause you were eating all this british food.

Just a minor gas pain that was gonna go away in ten minutes to brain exacerbated it into potential appendicitis. I'm across the ocean. So now I have three more shows left. So what I'm gonna have to do is figure out a way to get home preemptively. So what I'm gonna do is I called the venue, I said, I have an emergency.

They said, what's the emergency? I said, my stepmom died, which wasn't true. And I got on a flight. No, you didn't. I swear to God.

And I got on a flight. Jesus Christ. Yes, I got on a flight. Didn't tell the other people on the show, got on a flight and got home, because. And when I landed back at JFK, my stomach pain went away, and it was all in my head to begin with, because what I was saying was, at that time was, I'm gonna get my appendix removed over here.

I might die in the hospital. I don't know how. I don't know how I'll react to anesthesia. But now. God.

But now that wouldn't happen. Now, what I would say if I got a appendicitis feeling right now in the show, what I'd say was, well, if that's going to be the case, you'll deal with it. You know what? You know what anesthesia feels like? You won't know about it anyway.

We have enough modern medicine here where if you really. If this thing got really bad and this was like, you're gonna die. You have enough medicine here where you can make this as painless as possible? Yes. Oh, my.

They weren't selling, but still, you know, it's not. I wasn't selling anything, but. But I still was the headliner. I let people down and, you know, and I had to apologize to my stepmom with you. Did they fly over there to do those shows, too?

No, they were from the UK. They were from the UK. But I missed. All I ever wanted to do was see the beach in the UK. I've always, like, been obsessed with, like, I wanted to see the water in England, and that's what they.

The day I left, they had a beach day, and I left because I was like, I have stomach pains, and I. And I flew away. And because my brain would get the best of me. But now I'm different. Now I say, well, I'll be able to handle this.

That's how I feel. Jesus. It's a little nuts, right? It is a little nuts, but it's okay. Yeah, I don't know how to handle that.

I know. My brain thinks so different than yours. It's hard for me to. But isn't it interesting that we can both. But both of our outlets are comedy, even though our brains are different.

Cause it's really defense. I do comedy cause it's a defense mechanism. That's why I do it. It's an art form. It's a discipline.

Joe Rogan
I like it cause it's interesting and it's fun. I like it cause it makes people laugh, and it makes. It excites my brain to come up with new stuff to talk about. But when you were young, but when you were young in, like, Jamaica Plains and doing those things, would your defense thing, would you always try to make people laugh from a defensive point of view? See, I was.

No, but if you talked to, like, my friends from high school, they wouldn't have told you I was funny. They thought it was a psycho. Got it. I'd gotten obsessed with martial arts when I got to high school, and that's all I cared about. That's all I wanted to do, and.

But back then, I just was a drawer. I was an illustrator. I did a lot of comic books left handed. Right handed. You know what?

Chris DiStefano
Me. Many people are good drawers who are left handed. Who are right handed. Really? Most of them are lefties.

Joe Rogan
That's. Well, lefties are really good at a lot of things. Yeah. I think lefties learn things easier. I don't know, easier.

But they seem to be better at learning things. I mean, this is a gross exaggeration. There's a lot of lefty morons, I'm sure, but lefties are really good at boxing. Like, some of the hardest sparring rounds I ever had to do were with left handed guys. It's a different angle.

You're looking at things totally different. You're open for stuff that you're not. Like you're open for a straight left. The right jab comes from a different place. It's harder to manage.

It's weird because your brain gets used to a guy with a left hand in front, and you're standing, you're moving around with him. As soon as the right hands in front, you're like, oh, shit. It throws everything off. Right. They're really good at pool, a lot of, like, world champions are left handed.

Like, some of the best players in the world are left handed. Not all of them. A lot of really good right handers, too. But there's something about left handed people that they seem to excel at stuff. I've never played pool once in my life.

Chris DiStefano
Good. Don't do it. You think I should? Is it golf? Don't get it.

Joe Rogan
Oh, golf either, if you get into it. The problem is, it's. The problem with pool is if you get into it, it's so engrossing. It takes over your mind, everything. It's like, it's so difficult to do.

People don't understand. Like, to play really good pool requires, like, this insane level of concentration that's sort of like a meditation. You're thinking about so many things. You're thinking about the exact amount of revolutions you're putting on the ball, the angle that ball is going to come off. What is going to come off with spin?

Are you going to put check spin on it so it shortens the angle? Or are you going to put running English on it so it lengthens the angle? Are you going to hit it soft or hard? Where do you want to get for the next shot? And then where do you want to get for the shot after that, which is you have to play three balls in advance.

Chris DiStefano
Oh, my God. I'm out already. Yeah. And it's all this geometry, and you have to understand angles and collisions. And what about chess feeling?

Joe Rogan
That's another one. Like, I'm scared to do it. I remember when Howard stern got really into chess. I was listening to the show, and he was taking chess lessons and all these different things. I was like, ooh, that's one of those things.

Like, in Boston, one of the things that I noticed is the guys who are really into golf, their career suffered. Cause they weren't really thinking about comedy. They were thinking about playing. They wanted to play golf. Comedy was, like, their job that they would do so they would have money, and then during the day, they would play golf, and golf had become their thing.

Chris DiStefano
That's interesting. Cause I thought you were gonna say, it feels like the guys who I know who play golf have bigger careers because they're making these connections with people on the golf course and getting these things. Well, that could happen, too. I mean, that's certainly a business thing. Golf is a great business game.

Joe Rogan
If you're into business, like, you kind of almost have to play golf. These guys like to do deals and talk about things on the course. You get to know a person on a golf course. You know, just like you get to know a person playing pool. You get to know, like, how they can handle pressure.

Right. What kind of a person they are. Like, Brian Callen famously told me the story where his mom was watching this guy that his dad was going to do business with play golf, and the guy cheated at golf. He moved the ball. And she goes, don't do any business with him.

He cheats. He moved that ball. He's a liar. She was right. Turned out she was right.

But there's a thing that you could see when a person plays pool or plays golf. You see their character. Yeah. That's like, my father has a rule. If you grew up in a city and you're not a fan of that team, you're a fan of a team from another city, he doesn't trust you, and he never will.

Chris DiStefano
He just won't. And it has nothing to do with his team. That makes sense. He just says, what kind of traitor of a person are you that you want to live around people who hate you because of your fan choice? Unless he said, the only caveat to that is if their father was from, like, pittsburgh.

Joe Rogan
Right. And you're a diehard Steelers fan. You moved to New York. I get that. But if you're just.

Chris DiStefano
You're the guy that just wants to go against the grain, his advice is, no, thank you. I want nothing to do with him. Which. That's pretty good advice. Yes.

That's a pretty good rule to live by. Sure. That's like, someone who's in your tribe that secretly wants to be in another tribe. Yeah. The only thing me and my father disagree on is, like, right now, I'm wearing a met shirt.

Right. And the only reason I'm wearing this is because I. I'm gonna be honest with you. I, you know, jerked off today. I was coming in a little heavy.

I was a little. I was a little anxious, whatever it happens. And then I kind of just let it sit there on me. And I got up, and the shirt that I had was at the edge of my bed that I was gonna wear, and I got up, and it just leaked. It fell onto the shirt.

So I was like, this is the only shirt I have. So I threw in a met shirt, knowing that some of my friends back home are gonna be like, are you a fucking Mets fan now? Or do you a Yankees fan? And how dumb is that? Cause they're both from New York.

That's my thing. For me, it's. I'm New York, I guess, is like. People who use Android phones. Yes.

Joe Rogan
Like you're a rebel. Yes, it's true. Dude, you know why I'm a Mets fan? I was born in Queens. My father's from the Bronx.

Chris DiStefano
Darn Yankees fan, but Mets fan. The owner of the team, Steve Cohen, right? He's, you know, big owner, you know, whatever. Really nice guy. I did in the pandemic.

I did his 60th birthday party. Oh, no. Private party, right? In a room like this. Did it suck?

Here's what happened. So I can't wait for this.

Okay, so here's what happened. All right, so. So, all right, I get a call, right? Okay, you're gonna do this show. What happened was I talk my jasmine, my family's puerto rican.

My kids are puerto rican. I have material about having this puerto rican family, right? Steve's wife is puerto rican, okay? They have a 60th birthday party. And what I thought the birthday party was gonna be was him and his family.

I'll do my puerto rican jokes. You know, the wife will like it, you know, whatever. It's 20 minutes, you know, great money, you know, cool opportunity. Do it. It's a challenge, right?

It's the pandemic. Not much going on. They rented out this restaurant. Nobody's supposed to know about it. It's like in the back room thing.

So I go. So I get there and it's, no, it's him and his ten friends. All guys, just all guys sitting at a table like this having dinner. They do not know comedy is supposed to happen. The wife thought it'd be a good idea to get a comedian in there for his 60th birthday that she wasn't invited to because this was a guy's thing.

And so a 60 year old billionaire doesn't know who the fuck I am. If you're gonna have comedy, have Jerry Seinfeld, have Joe Rogan, have somebody that they know. They have no idea. So the guy who, you know, was like, Steve's assistant, who the, you know, has to answer to his wife. I think his name was Ned.

He goes, are you the comedian? I was like, yeah. He goes, all right. He goes, what's your name again? And I was like, it's Chris DeStefano.

I thought, like, misses Cohen knew me. He was like, yeah, she's not here. Like, that's. This is. It's all guys in there.

I said, well, you know, do you not want me to do it? He goes, no, she already paid you. Like, I have to do it. So I was like, okay. So I was like, well, where?

Just show me where, like, the microphone is. He was like, we don't have anything. There's no microphone. There's no lights. He goes, we were thinking.

He goes. He goes, they just got served their entrees, so we were thinking, you can just stand in the front of the table and do a few minutes. Oh, boy. So I was like, you know that this is gonna be. This is a nightmare.

And he was like, it doesn't feel like they're gonna like you. So.

Oh, my God. So, Ned, my hands are sweating. So Ned. Ned goes, listen, they just got the entrees. Just go out there.

And so, I swear I'm not. I swear to God, I told him my name three times. He goes, he goes, all right, Steve, you know, your wife had a nice little surprise for you. We got a comedian. We got a, you know, fun comedian.

And he goes. And he goes, so here he is. And he goes, Chris, Chris. And then one of guys went, Chris Rock? Is it Chris Rock?

And then he goes, no, it's not Chris Rock, it's Chris. What's your last name, kid? And I was like, distephino. And then as I'm walking in, somebody goes, who the fuck is that? And so, and so I walk in and I get up there right away, and I was like, hey, guys, I know this is probably not what you wanted.

I can leave right now, but I have, you know, if you want me to do some jokes, like, you know, I'll do them right now. And then one guy was like, yeah, do it. He goes, but make it quick. So I was like, okay, this is good. So I go out there and, Joe, I am fucking bombing.

Like you can't imagine. Like a full zero. All you hear is knives and forks hitting the plate, people chewing. At some point, I don't know who threw it, a shrimp bounced off my chest. Somebody hit me with a shrimp, and they're dying in the back of the table.

Tommy Mottola was there, you know who, the famous record producer. Record producer. And, you know, was married to Mariah Carey. So I go. I go, oh, Mister Mottola, you know, I'm a big fan, you know, of your ex wife.

You know I love to work. He goes, yeah, I bet you're a big fan of cock, too. Big laugh, you know, like, I'm like, oh, my God. So then finally, the only person laughing. Matola dunked on you got the best laugh of the room.

Crushed. The only person laughing is Steve's son, who's 30 years old, who's become a friend of mine, Josh, great guy, he's laughing in the corner, not at my material, just because he's like this, because he knew my podcast. He was like, oh, my God, this sucks. So then Steve, Steve finally goes. He goes, listen to me.

He stops. He goes, I'm doing a joke. He wasn't very nice. He goes, okay. He goes, what did my wife tell you?

And I said, well, Mister Cohen, she told me, just come out here, birthday gift for you. Do 15 minutes. You know, like, just, you know, just do the best I can. And she thought you'd like me. Cause I talk about the puerto rican kids and all that.

He goes, yeah, yeah, that's. I'm not puerto rican, though. I was like, no, I know, I know. And he goes, how about this? I'll make you a deal.

He goes, what are your five best minutes? And I said, well, I did the David Letterman show a few years ago. He goes, oh, I know, I know. David Letterman. I said, yeah.

He said. He said, why don't you do that? How about. And he goes, do that. Do those five best?

He goes, I'm going to tell my guys to listen. Do those five best. He goes, if you can get me to laugh in those five minutes, I'll double whatever my wife gave you. He goes, did you get it already? I said, yeah, I think she wired it to my agent.

He goes, I'll double it, whatever it is. I don't even know what the number is times two. Give me your best five. So I just, like, planted my feet and I just to the wall. Didn't even look at anybody.

Just did my exact David Letterman set, which is about being on the subway. I just came back from England like shit from ten years ago, but I had it and I did it, and they started to laugh. And sure as shit, that's what he did. He had. He doubled the money.

Turned out to be a big thing, you know, for me. And then what happened was, is I had to sign all these NDAs not to talk about anything. But you just talked about it. Well, here's the thing.

I had to sign all these NDAs not to talk about, but I thought I had to sign NDAs. Cause it was during COVID times and they were, like, renting out a restaurant, which, like, you really couldn't do back then. So I was like, just don't mention that. And I was like. And I thought it was really more for, like, you know, they don't want reporters showing up to the actual event and them getting in trouble, but it's like, the next day, who cares?

So I do my podcast the next day, hey, babe. With Sal Volcano. And I start the show with, dude, I fucking ate it last night. Here's the story, right? Going crazy.

That episode comes out the next day. We filmed it in the morning. It came out that night. So the next morning. So two days removed from the Cohen gig, I wake up, I have 20 missed calls from my manager, my agent, lawyer.

I wake up, I'm like, what the fuck happened? So my manager gets on the phone, he goes, take down that episode, dude. Take it down. I said, what? He goes, you broke.

You violated the NDA. You just said all these things about the Cohen gig. You can't do that. His lawyers are saying you're gonna get sued right now, and they're gonna take you to court and they will not lose. Whatever.

And then. So I. I just hung up the phone on him. I was like, I need a second. And I just hung up.

I said, what the fuck do I do? Cause I'm like, I'm not taking that shit down. I. You know, it's comedy. Whatever.

And then. So I'm like, let me calm down. Let me calm down. So I scrolling on Instagram, right? This is what we do.

Baseline scrolling on Instagram like a fucking crocodile. I'm scrolling and I see DM's from Steve's wife, Steve's daughter, Steve's son. And I'm hearts like this now. I'm like, oh, maybe I am fucked. Cause, like, now the family themselves, it was all.

I can't believe you talked about it. Hey, babe. We loved it. That's amazing. My dad's dying laughing.

Come to a Mets game. Throw out the first pitch. The mom being like, I wanna meet your wife. Oh, my God. Thanks for mentioning that.

And I'm like, wait, what the fuck? So I call my manager, and I'm like, I have messages from the family saying that it's okay. And then he's like, all right, hold on. And then he calls. He says, send me those messages.

I send in the messages. And then within five minutes, lawyers backed off. Cause all the. Steve didn't tell them to do that. The legal team was just like, that's a violation.

I don't even check with Steve. You fucked up. And then, so. And then it went away like that. And then the family now has become, like, friends of mine.

It's like, really? Cohen family owns the Mets are, like, awesome, amazing people. It's like, it's almost. Even though it's a big major league baseball team, it's like, when you go to the game, it's like, josh, you don't even need a ticket, dude. Come walk in the back door.

Walk in with us. Like, so cool. And now and then Steve goes, I'm gonna let you redeem yourself in the baseball season. He goes, I'm gonna let you redeem yourself. Okay?

I was just at the game, and he goes, here's what we'll do. He goes, it looks like rain. He was like, if there's a rain delay, I'm gonna give you the mic. I'm gonna put you on the jumbotron, and you do five minutes.

I said, you want me to do five minutes to cold, wet Mets fans that are angry about the team not playing? He was like, do you want to redeem yourself or not? And I was like, I'll do it. So. So we have.

I think it's on my instagram somewhere. Oh, my God. So we have. I'm wearing, dude, the worst shirt. Like a floral printed stupid shirt.

My friends, I was sitting in the owner suite, right? My friends, or diehard Mets fans, they were sitting in the stands for this. They didn't know this was happening. So rain delay comes. They have the Mets announcer again, who messes up my name, called me Chris Destalopoulos.

I'll never forget that. She goes, Chris Destalopoulos. She goes, I was going to do a few minutes of comedy for you, so. And then the camera's just on me, and I'm still. I don't even have a mic, you know, one of those mics that you pin to your shirt.

So I had that. So I was, like, doing that bit where I was like, yes. And I'm bombing. Horrifically, horrifically bombing.

Oh, my God. So I'm. Oh, my God. Bombing in front of, you know, 30,000 where when I got Steve Cohen, by the way, and his friends are dying, dying laughing. Cause they knew that that was gonna happen.

And then Steve goes, he goes, you're all right, man. You're good. You're all right. And then I got all these texts, and my friends, my boy Pat was like, dude, I was in the stands for that. Like, you know, we're huddled under.

He goes, you were bombing? He goes, I heard multiple people say they were going to unfollow you on Instagram for this shit. And he goes, it was so bad. He goes, it was literally so bad. He said, there was a little kid started to cry.

It was horrific. And he goes, and your shirt fucking sucked. And I was like. And so so it was one of those moments. But I say all that to say, that's why I wear the Met shirt.

I'm New York first and the Cohen family is awesome and the Mets are awesome. And, yeah, it was like one of those things where a good thing turned a bad thing turned into a good thing. It's hilarious, dude. It was dude, bombing. Like, Joe, the one at Citi Field was worse.

I mean, that was worse because not only I was in the control room. When did you, how between knowing you were gonna have to do it and doing it, how much time was it? Less than five minutes. Oh, my God. Jamie, is there a way, if you could like Chris DeStefano Mets game bombing flower shirt?

I put it on my instagram. I don't know if you could be able to find it, but oh, my God, my abs. But, dude, it was, it was, and, you know, was the worst part is I was sitting in the control room. That's where they had me go live from. And I was bombing for the people in the control room.

They were just, like, looking at me and then they were still doing a thing like, when are we back from rain delay? I was like doing a bit, like, you know, like doing like a clean bit. And they were like, what? What was it? Is the storm coming in?

Not listening. And then at one point that I was in the middle of my bit and the guy was like, buddy, shh. I'm listening to the MLB. Shh. And I was like, oh, my God.

And I fucking ate it. But, but they were, but, you know, they were pretty nice to me. They've been pretty nice to me. But it was, it was bad. And my friend Josh tells me, he goes, yeah, dude, like, I've.

You've ate. You've eaten it as bad as you can eat it. Wow. Then they had me come out for a fundraiser. This was like in a comedy club.

I fucking bombed that. And I was just like, in a comedy club, not a comedy club. It was like a, it was the Paramount theater. It was like a fundraiser. But I had come out that classic thing where the one comic they have that nobody knows about comes out.

And I came out right after the video of the fundraiser for the kids with cancer and the mom and dad who lost their child to cancer. And then I have to come out and just be like, let's forget about that and do this. And so, and then they had these polar bears on stage that were like, raffled off. They were like a $1000 stuffed animal. Polar bears for Pete Alonso.

They call him the polar bears. The best player on the Mets. And I didn't know that, so I was bombing so hard for the thing. I just started throwing these polar bears into the crowd just to be funny, and they were like, that was $5,000 worth of raffle gifts you just threw into the crowd now. And I was like, um, sorry, I don't know what to do.

And then they were like, well, I don't know. Like, you might have to pay for that. Like, his, you know? And then. And then I was like, all right.

I mean, I guess if I have to do it, I'm sorry. And then again, his dad was like, fuck it, dude. It's polar bears. Just let him keep it. He was like, it was.

He was like, that might have been the worst one of all three. I was like, thanks. Oh, boy. But they still like me. You gotta say no to some gigs.

I do now. Now I do. Yeah, you can't do that now. I do. You can't do either one of those three things.

Joe Rogan
You can't go on after a video about kids with cancer. You can't go on during a rain delay when people don't know a comedian's coming and you're talking into this thing, and then they're in. You can't do that. You can't do a guy's birthday party with all of a billionaire's birthday party with no mic. They don't know you're coming, and they don't know who you are.

You can't do either of those things. Yeah, I wouldn't now, but back then, I mean, it was. How long ago was this, the pandemic? So 20, it's like 2021. Like, world start.

Chris DiStefano
Open up a little bit. So that's. And now. And how about this now, because I've, you know, this is. This is what I don't like now.

I'm, you know. Cause I'm Mets. I just like the Met. I like New York. But because I've talked about the Mets and went to Mets games, the Yankees, people used to give me tickets, won't give me tickets to the game anymore.

They said, you're either with them or us. I was like, that's kind of a dickish move. Wow. You won't let me go to Yankee games. You know, they won't give you tickets anymore.

Joe Rogan
They say you're either with them or us. Yeah. I used to be like, my thing is, what I've always cared about is, like, I want to be. I love New York. Right?

Chris DiStefano
I want to be the New York. Like a Colin Quinn. That's a mentor. I look up to Colin. He's the New York comic.

Dave Attell. These are the guys. Right? So that's the aspiration. So, like, going to the sporting events and people being like, Chrissy, like, all that stuff is.

Means everything to me. I mean, I want to sell out Milwaukee, too, but it's not. If it happens. Yeah, no, no, that's not it. That's not it.

That's just me being an asshole. That wasn't it. Go back to this. Must have been 21 or 22. I'm sorry.

Joe Rogan
If you have someone find it. Yeah, Jamie will find. It's. It's me on the jumbo. It's like I'm on the jumbotron with a floral print shirt.

Chris DiStefano
I look like a real asshole. But. But, yeah, they won't. You know, like, that's crazy with the Yankees. It won't make any sense.

They won't do it. That's silly. But. But so whatever I just deal with, I still root for them. Not even the same league.

I know. It's dumb. It's dumb. One's American League. One's national league.

Exactly. Mets National League. Right? Yeah. And I love.

Joe Rogan
What is that? That doesn't make any sense. I don't know. I mean. Cause, you know, you just deal with it.

Chris DiStefano
But what's the beautiful thing about comedy is, you know, when you put out the comedy work or the podcast is the players, the actual Yankee players, Anthony Rizzo, these guys, they've reached out and been like, oh, I like that bit. So they're like, text me if you want tickets. So that's good. Now they'll let you in. So they'll let me in.

But these tickets, you know, the pr people who would give you the nice tickets, they said, that's not happening anymore. For the Yankees. For the Mets. The Mets were like, dude, we'll give you fucking dirt from the field, whatever you want. So I kind of, you know, you go to where you're wanted, right?

That's just a normal life thing. Sure. Go where you wanted. Yeah. Mets people are rebels, rebels do it.

But, so. But it was because, like, people don't. Even think about the Mets outside of New York. No, people think like the Yankees. Like, if you think about New York, baseball, Yankees, that's what everybody thinks outside of New York.

Joe Rogan
But in New York, it's the only place where people care about the Mets. And you know what? The Mets, I would say the Mets fan base is a more radical fan base than the Yankees. The Mets. The Mets are.

Chris DiStefano
They will follow you anywhere. Like the Chicago. Like Chicago Cubs. The Cubs. Everybody loves the Cubs.

Joe Rogan
Yeah. Even though they couldn't win, everybody still love the Cubs. Yeah, everyone loves the country. This edible is hitting me, by the way. Chicago is the White Sox too, though, right?

Chris DiStefano
The White Sox. But they're kind of in the, in the, in the not good part of town supposedly. And the White Sox fans like the Cubs. It's the Cubs. Are the Yankees in that city?

Joe Rogan
And are the White Sox the Mets? The White Sox would be the Mets. Yeah. So it's kind of like, it's kind of that. Not a whole lot of cities have two teams.

Chris DiStefano
How many cities have two teams in baseball? Well, the Dodgers and the, and the Angels. But the Angels are so far outside. But that's one. Anaheim, right?

Joe Rogan
Yeah. New York and Chicago. That's really all I can think of. And same with basketball, like, you know, like nobody really cares about the Brooklyn Nets, it's all about the Knicks. But LA is just the Dodgers.

Like Anaheim is a different spot. Right. That's almost like San Diego. Yeah, it's fine. San Diego's got teams who though that?

They do. Yeah, the Padres, baby. The San Diego father. San Diego. Me too.

San Diego's fuck now, though. What I thought my friends who used. To live there say it's fucked. They went back. It's fucking tents everywhere.

Chaos really. Cuz I thought they were like the american freedom first type. Southern, Southern California city. Well, there's a lot of military there. I mean that's, that's the base of that, right.

Chris DiStefano
Navy Seals, right? Yeah, it's, there's a lot of bases there. We did UFC's down there because it was always a place where there was, there's military bases, a lot of military, but then there's always fucking weirdos, you know, like Southern California, you know, and there's more of them than there are the military people. Yeah, I, they vote in shitty politicians and. I know, and they let tents and all that shit happen.

Joe Rogan
How bad is San Diego now? I heard it. I think my buddy who just got back there, I mean he, he said it was fucking awful. Yeah, if they have the tents that's. Used to live there and he bailed, they realized, like during the pandemic, we gotta get the fuck outta here, dude.

Chris DiStefano
My fucking feet are numb now. From what the edible, dude, I'm telling you, I can't, it just hits me. It's, it's what? I don't know if it's, if it's what it is, but it's. My feet are numb.

And don't think about it. You think about yourself a lot, which. Is selfish and narcissistic, and I don't like it about myself because you can just. Can you just stop doing it while it's happening, or is it just, does it overcome you? Do you.

Joe Rogan
But that's why I was thinking that maybe you needed another thing to think about. Hmm. Like another thing that you're into. Like a thing that's, like, totally non career related. Like a.

Chris DiStefano
Like, um, you know, like painting or cooking. Something. Yeah, something. Yeah. Somewhere you really get into that thing.

Joe Rogan
We think about that thing and, like, being better at that thing. What about playing basketball again? Sure. That's a great one. That's also a good one, too, because it's physical.

Chris DiStefano
Yeah. You know, and I think the things that you get into that are physical require even more because it requires not just thinking, but it requires, like, execution. There's, like, a physical thing that you have to do. Yeah. I was gonna do boxing a few years ago, and then the very first day I was there, a guy got into the ring and sparred, and he was, you know, kind of being really, like a, you know, macho guy.

And he was like, I'm not wearing a cup. And the trainer was like, you know, you should wear a cup. He was like, I'm not doing it. I'm not wearing a cup. I'm not wearing headcan.

He got hit in the nuts and his testicle came out of the scrotum. So that was my 1st 20 minutes there. So I was like, I'm probably not going to do this, even though I know that that's not most likely going to happen to me because I would wear the cup. But I was like, I just was like, you know, if you see a man's testicle fall out of his nut sack, you're probably not going to go back to do that thing just because you just, you know, it just gives you. It makes you uncomfortable.

But that's what happened to me. Yeah, but I do want to. I do. I do envy. I do feel like I don't.

I should know about MMA because not only is it such a cool sport, you can defend yourself also in the comedy community, it's big. I mean, the only fight I ever went to was a PFL fight, that, that, that league at the theater at Madison Square Garden. And the fans, they were, you know, I had never been. I don't know anything about MMA. It was a lot of recognition from the pods.

Cause they were like, it's all one community. And so I was like, this could be my golf. This should be my golf. This is what you should get into. Not comparing that.

Joe Rogan
That would be very good for your anxiety, though, for sure, because it's very difficult. So it makes the rest of the day a lot easier. Because when I tried one jujitsu class and I felt like I don't even know how, I don't blow out my knee. It's a statistical impossibility. I won't blow out my knee.

Chris DiStefano
I'm going to. Of course this guy's going to follow me and I'm going to blow out my knee. But do you just deal with that and say, I'll get over that, or you just learn ways to not blow out your knee? Well, I've had my knee blown out. I've had three knee operations.

So I'm just going to have to accept that if I want to move forward in MMA. You're going to blow your knee out? Not necessarily. You could also strengthen your knees to make sure that it doesn't happen as often. There's a lot of stuff you could do to mitigate that.

Joe Rogan
Also, just roll cautiously and be smart about it. And don't roll with crazy people. You see wild people that are just, like, way too aggressive and explosive and just like, they just do it in a haphazard way. Don't fuck with those people. So you.

Chris DiStefano
Because, you know, it's become second nature to you how to do these things. But someone like me, who has a bit of fear just from being older and not doing it, like, my father learned how to drive when he was 45. So he's just a terrible driver and can't drive. Even though he's not scared of life stuff, he's gotten to fist fight stuff. He's like, I can't drive.

I learned how to drive when I was 17. I'll drive with one arm. You know, I'm in control. So I feel like that way with MMA, it's like now I've developed all these bad things that can, you know, you think, and I'm like, I can't do this. I can't even get into this.

Joe Rogan
The thing about MMA, if you want to get involved in that and same thing as if boxing, the thing is getting hit and getting hit is not a small thing. It's. It's a big thing, and it's a bigger thing than people want to pretend it is. Getting hit in the head is really bad, and you get it. You're going to get hit in the head, and you're going to get hit in the head quite a bit in the beginning because you're not good.

And people, especially if someone is sparring you and it gets aggressive and you're going to get hurt. And that's just fact, that's just if you, especially if you're sparring now, if you're just learning skills, you can just learn skills with people. If you have a really good place that they can show you how to hit mitts, you can hit the bag. You get a great workout, and you don't actually spar. Or if you do spar, you spar with an instructor who's going to be very gentle.

So they're just going to be touching you. They're just going to be tapping you and explaining that you don't have to hit hard, you just have to use technique. When you hit hard, hit the bag. You're not a professional. You're not thinking about taking on fights.

There's no reason for you to get busted up. Let's just work on your skills. Got it. So in some ways, then, it's like my fear of getting over anesthesia when I got the colonoscopy. You just got to get hit a little bit, and you'll get over the fear.

Chris DiStefano
You'll understand. You can accept that. The problem is, if you're sparring with another guy and you and the other, like, he hits you with a jab, and then you hit him with a jab, and he hits you a little harder, like, this guy's hitting hard, then you start hitting each other hard, and next thing you know, you're fighting. That happens all the time. That it's all the time.

Joe Rogan
So sparring oftentimes turns into, like, a real fight. Yeah. See, I was with big gloves and. Pads on, and I've only ever been in two fist fights my whole life. My first fist fight, I punched this kid Glenn in the face, thinking I'm gonna knock him off his bicycle and I'll win.

Chris DiStefano
And he didn't even move a muscle. And then he beat the shit out of me. And then the second, and then the second fight I got into was just like a bar brawl, and I got hit, but I got hit, like, in the back, shoulder wasn't too bad. And then I just kind of. I never really got beat up hard.

Joe Rogan
Like, you know, like, I know it's not necessary. You don't have to get beat up. But just learning how to defend yourself would just help for sure. Help. Anxiety and it's like, for a lot of people, it's like meditation.

It's like medication, in fact, for a lot of people. And Jiu jitsu is a really good one, because there's a possibility of you getting injured with any combat sport, it's a possibility of you getting injured. But jiu jitsu, at least you're not getting hit. You know, jiu jitsu is clinching and chokeholds and arm bars and leg locks and stuff, but you can learn those things. And if you do it with a good school that has a good ethic about them, you could do it pretty safely.

Chris DiStefano
Yeah. Because I'm a person, you know, we talk about it, we get excited about it, but sometimes I don't put these things into practice, even though I know stand up is. You're doing a diff. We're doing difficult things here. But other things, I'm like.

Like, for example, when I, you know, in the middle of the pandemic or whatever, 2022, some time around there, I got nervous about, I gotta. I don't know how to fight. I gotta defend my house. And there was at times, talks of some type of, what if a nuclear bomb went off here? Because things are getting tight with Russia before they invaded Ukraine.

So I came home one day with a night vision goggles, a 30 day supply of powdered fettuccine Alfredo, and a gun. And I don't know how to use the gun and iodine tablets. And so I did all these things, and then I was like, well, now what? My family was laughing at me. Like, what is any of this stuff gonna do?

You can't do any of this shit. And I was like, you're right. And I kind of just made a decision, but I don't put things into practice. So I wanna make a choice to say, if you're gonna talk about it, then do it. You know, go do MMA.

Go try it. Is there a place that you could go to that you know about? Well, there's that grace. You know, I live 15 minutes from Midtown, and that. The place that Anthony Bourdain was always in.

Joe Rogan
Kenzo Gracie. Yes. The main headquarters right there. Great place. And I always see guys walking in and out of there.

Chris DiStefano
Yeah. Go there, drip and sweat. You're close to that. 15 minutes. Go there.

That's the spot. Go there. Go take classes. Yeah. Perfect place to go.

Joe Rogan
Yeah. And that's the workout for the day. That's the hardest workout that you'll ever do. Very hard. Yeah, very hard.

Chris DiStefano
Yeah. And it's good. For your brain. The thing about it is it's really good for your head, because he just. It's so difficult that it makes.

Joe Rogan
It really does make the rest of life's difficulties easier. That's a good. It's a safe control. Difficult. Like, you.

There's like, if a guy gets you in a chokehold, you're trying to fight out of it. You can't. You could tap, and then you go right back to training again. And I won't be made fun of that. I'm 30, like an old.

No, they encourage you. They welcome you. Yeah. A lot of people get into it, and they're 40. If Bourdain didn't even start until he was in his fifties.

Chris DiStefano
What? Yeah. Like, Bourdain was, like, 62 when he died, I think. Is that how old he was? I'm not sure.

Joe Rogan
How old was he, Jimmy?

I think he got into jiu jitsu when he was 58. He was about to turn 62. Yeah. Damn. So when I did his show, I did one of the episodes of his show.

We went pheasant hunting in Montana together. So flew to Montana and bourdain and I. And he's talking about dar's jokes, and they're like, we're in the middle. Like, we're out there pheasant hunting. And then I go, do you know how to do a japanese necktie?

And he goes, what? That? And I go, when you go in for the dar, sometimes you can't get the Daris, but you can get the japanese necktie. Let me show you. And so we're on the ground.

On the fucking ground. And I'm showing him. Okay, now you got this. Once you got this. This here.

You're always looking for this, right? Cause that's the Darius. I go, but from here, I'm gonna tuck your head into my chest, and I'm just gonna roll on my right shoulder. I go, yeah, that's fucked, right? Wow.

Roll on my left shoulder. I go, that's the japanese necktie. So I'm explaining him the japanese necktie on the ground. That's great. Camera crew is there and shit.

And I'm like, go ahead, try it on me. Now he's got his friend Josh. Josh is doing jiu jitsu, too. He's like, get in here. So he did.

Here I go. Now from here. So this is. Josh is a big guy. I was like, it's hard to get this through, right?

But you don't have to get this through once you get this clamp. I just want you to tuck that head and then roll on this shoulder, and they're like, oh, shit. So we were, like, rolling around in dirt in Montana. That's how into it what he was. Did they air they cared about?

Chris DiStefano
They should. No, no, they didn't air. Oh, that'd be sick. It was just us shooting birds and eating them. It was really fun.

Joe Rogan
It was a really fun experience. He was a fucking fascinating guy. When I watched, I always watch if it's on the plane, his documentary, Roadrunner that they made, I think after he passed away, and it was amazing. He said something once where he was like, you know, I. Cause sometimes I think about this, you know, when you get a little older, even though you're not super old, but you start to think, like, hey, are my best years behind me?

Chris DiStefano
Like, what? You know, what is life? What's the next things? And I heard him say, he was like, you know, when I. He only became famous, or, like, people knew his name and read his book.

When he was 43 years old, he said, so I was sitting there at 42 years old thinking, whatever. All my fun, all my drug days, all my wild. It's all over. I'm in the back half of my life now, and this is what life's gonna be. He goes, and I didn't realize that it was gonna be the next 20 years of my life that would, like, be me.

Be, like, the best years of my life. And I never, like, heard someone talk about it that way, or it was like, I know. We know that, like, you never know what tomorrow holds. Our whole lives can change in an instant. But sometimes, you know, I can't help but feel like, oh, you know, I'm coming into my forties now, you know?

Like, what? But when I heard Bourdain, I was like, oh, that's a very hopeful way to. That's a very hopeful thing. There's no roadmap for everybody. Yeah.

Joe Rogan
You know, and sometimes the more interesting people are the people that lived their entire lives never thinking they were gonna be famous and then became famous. Like, Jordan Peterson is a great example that he was a professor. Just like, it was opposed to this bill that would cause people to have to be forced, mandated to use a bunch of made up gender pronouns. And he's like, this is crazy. Like, you can't allow this.

This is just gonna spiral, and it's gonna snowball into something else. So he becomes famous in his forties, which is a very difficult thing for people to deal with. Almost impossible. It's possible. Morgan Freeman is the only other one and Rodney Dangerfield are the only other two big names that I know.

Rodney's a big one, right? Yeah. Rodney was a aluminum siding salesman. Wild. Yeah.

And never stopped writing. Apparently. He was always writing jokes during that time, but he'd quit doing comedy and just went back to regular life and then said, fuck it, I'm going back in. And, like, back to school and all those movies. I mean, Rodney was huge.

It's crazy. Like, how many people are like that out there that could have made it and just didn't and just stopped. Just stopped. Or got whatever demons they had got the best of them, which is a lot of us. Yeah.

I mean, there's a lot of guys out there that have demons, and their demon might be cocaine. They're dealing alcohol, gambling, whatever it is. There's, like, a demon that gets people. And just gets you. And it's also timing.

Chris DiStefano
Right place, right time. I didn't know this about sports, but, like, you know, like, the same way. Like, we know funny, funny, funny people that just never really made it. For whatever reason. It actually happens in sports, too.

I thought sports being objective was being like, oh, the best player will get discovered. But it's like, no, you got to have the right connections. You got to play in the right tournaments to get noticed by the professional teams. And there's. There's players.

There's a guy out there who would have been as good as, you know, the Michael Jordan and the Colbys of the world, but he just never made it. He never got in front of the right people. Well, it's also a discipline thing. Sometimes people are very, very talented, and they really could be amazing, but they just. Because talent sometimes can fuck you.

Joe Rogan
Because if you're really talented, you don't have to work as hard. If you're better than everybody else, you can kind of half ass things and you can get through things without even training. Like, Jon Jones is so talented. He defended his title against Alexander Gustafson, who's, like, one of the best guys ever in the light heavyweight division and didn't even train for it, didn't even. Train for it and won.

And it was the hardest fight of his career because he was getting beat up in the first few rounds, and he pulled it off in the last two rounds. That's when he won the decision. It was a crazy fight. First time he's ever been taken down. I mean, he got busted up, got a big cut over his eyes.

I was swollen up. But he's so talented that he's able to beat one of the best guys in the division without even training. Then he has a rematch with him later where he says, now I'm going to fucking train. And he just annihilates him. Yeah, it's crazy.

Chris DiStefano
I tell him that he's the most, he's the most talented one. People argue of all, of all the fighters, he's very arguable. He's certainly the most accomplished. He's beaten every single person he's ever faced, except there's only one loss that he has. It's a disqualification in a fight that he was dominating.

Joe Rogan
The Gustafson fight was close, though, and he had a gut, but he didn't even train. There was fighters that he was fighting where he just, he was so much better than everybody that the way they would describe is like he was playing with his food. He wasn't threatened by them, so he wasn't fighting to the best of his ability. So does a guy like Jon Jones, you think, have some type of fear in the ring, or do you kind of lose that? When you become a guy of his level at this stuff, I think you're.

Always going to have some doubts and thoughts that enter into your head, but a guy who's that dominant knows how to dominate those thoughts, knows how to, like, overcome them. You don't let them in. You know you're going to have anxiety, you're going to have nerves, but you just don't let them in. Some guys don't have nerves. Like Justin Gaethje says he doesn't get any nerves.

He says it kind of freaks me out. I get in there and I'm not even nervous. Hmm. Yeah. But that's interesting because if, you know, you could be killed by some of these high level guys.

Chris DiStefano
Right. Even the best fighters, it's possible you get a hit in the head the wrong way. Well, that's one of the crazy things that Justin says. It's when he goes to fights, he never plans anything for after the fight because he doesn't assume he's going to be alive. Wow.

Yeah, that's pretty, that's pretty deep. Well, that's how he fights, too. That's really how he fights. That's interesting. I kind of, I respect that a lot.

Joe Rogan
He's a psycho. Yeah. Yeah, he's born for it. Well, yeah, it's. The human brain's a funny thing.

Chris DiStefano
I mean, I don't feel 1oz of anxiety on stage, whether I'm bombing, doing well. Zero. Always been that way. Zero. So it's all offstage after the fact, before the leading up and after is where all the anxiety hits me or, you know, really would spin me out of control and better at controlling it now.

But on stage, I mean, truly zero. Like, I literally was having so much anxiety. I told you, I sold my house because of Radio City, and then I was on stage at Radio City and not an ounce of anxiety. The unfortunate thing is I, as much as people tell me, be in the moment for these big things, slow it down, all that. I tell myself I'm doing it, but I never have any memory of it.

And I never kind of, you know, take over the night like I did Radio City, people. I was like, what'd you do after? Where was the after party? Where'd you go? I said, I was in bed at 11:00 with my family.

I was in bed. The show ended at nine. I was in bed at eleven on the night, my biggest night. And I don't know why. That's just how I, that's just how I am.

Joe Rogan
There's nothing wrong with that. No, yeah. There's nothing wrong with, like, just going on with your life. You don't have to celebrate. Right.

Chris DiStefano
Yeah. It's not necessarily a bad thing. Yeah. But, like, you've had, you know, so far, a very, very, very cool life. Do you feel, though, at times even you have fomo?

And I'm like, shit, I wish I would have did something else. Or you don't feel that anymore? Were you always that way or you got to this way after, you know, just the mounting success? No, I genuinely don't think that way from day one. No.

Joe Rogan
One thing that I used to do when I was on fear factor, though, I would. I would be jealous of guys that were on the road. Like, God, I wish I could go do the road right now. I just couldn't. I just.

Chris DiStefano
There was. The schedule was so hard. It was very difficult to just do just comedy. And the guys who were just doing comedy, I would admire that. I'd.

Joe Rogan
God, I wish I could just do comedy because fear factor, as great of a job as it was, was a job. It was something I was doing just for money. I do stand up for free. Like, I do guest spots all the time for free. Just show up and do comedy for free.

You work for free. But that's how comedy is. It's fun. I don't think about it. Like, we enjoy doing it.

Yeah, we constantly are working out. If you're working out in the city, like, what are you getting for a spot? $20. Yeah, it's nothing it's nonsense. You get a free drink at $20.

You're doing it to work. I give it to the waitress. Yeah. You know. Yeah, for sure.

Chris DiStefano
Yeah. Comedy store would always cost me money. What I pay out in tips. It would be way more than I would make for doing a set. When I was one thing that always stuck with me when I was in 8th grade, at the same time, I had mono and my mom had gout, so she.

None of us could. We just couldn't move. I fucking had mono and she couldn't move her foot. So she got us cable television, and we watched cable, and they would show reruns of Oprah, the Oprah Winfrey show. My mom would just watch it.

And I remember one day, and it's like advice that just stuck in my head. Oprah was on. I think it was one of the first times she was on with Doctor Phil. Oprah was on. And she said, you know, the thing about success is real successful people is the money always comes second.

It's the passion first, and then the money comes second. If you reverse it and you go after the money first, you may get success, but there's a negative karmic energy attached to that money. So the only way to do it the right way is you go passion first, and then the money will always come, but it will come second. And I don't know, I was like, in a fever mono dream, and I just always remember, and I was always stayed with me my whole life. And that's why I brought up before, I was like, when I saw you kind of, you know, hammering out your set, I was like, oh, shit, this is.

This is why. It's the passion is there. You couldn't pay him? Not pay him. If you were at this level, not at this level, you'd be still the guy hammering out the hour, which is dope.

Joe Rogan
But that's if you have the ability to do that. Like, what Oprah's saying is true, but it's easy for people to say that that have already been successful. That's like that whole secret thing. Remember the secret? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Where people like, you just gotta manifest things and they'll happen. Have a vision board. But sort of if you talk to successful people, they'll tell you that they probably did that, but they probably did a lot of things. That's one factor. And people want to pretend.

People want to. Excuse me. People want to pretend that it's insignificant. That's foolish. It is a factor, but the people that want to pretend that it's the whole thing.

That's foolish as well, because you can't just manifest things. I remember we were at the comic store once, and there was this lady that came to the store who was a friend of one of the comics, and she was telling me that she is following the secret. She's like, I have the secret now. And now I know that I am going to be married to the person that I love, and I'm going to have an amazing career and all these different things as I go, I go, so you're confident in this? Sure.

I think this was. I don't know if I had seen the movie yet, because I remember when I saw the movie, I was like, whoa, these people are out of their fucking minds. I was like, there's a lot more to it, kids, than just this. You can't have a bunch of people just thinking they're going to manifest themselves being a rock star. It's going to happen.

I'm going to make it happen. No, there's a lot of things you have to do. There's a lot of work involved, a lot of learning. You got to make mistakes and recover from those mistakes and do better and write better stuff and perform better and get better at, and you have to do stuff that people actually enjoy. So what do people enjoy about my work?

What am I missing that other people have? There's a lot that goes on. It's not just, I wanna be a rock star, I'm gonna make it happen. So this lady was telling this to me, and this was the only time I'd ever met her, but we had to. We were all hanging out in the back of the comedy store.

So she was out there for a couple hours, right? So then I saw her again, like a year. Two years later, I was doing a show at another club, and I ran it to her outside. I go, hey, how you doing? Last time we talked, we talked about the secret.

And she goes, it's not been working. She's like, I don't understand. My father is a ma. Like, her father was messing up her life. I don't know what was going on.

And she was like, and I haven't found that relationship, and my career isn't going well. And we had a very brief conversation. I was like, damn. Yeah, good to see you. Bye.

And I was leaving, and I was gone. And then I remember thinking, like, people that thought that way, that really believed you can hear that from a successful person. I just knew I had a vision. I stuck with that vision. I made it happen.

So there was a lot of people running around during these days, like, the early two thousands that had this thing in their head that they could manifest a reality. Yeah. And I think it's become a popular thing, especially in this culture, where it's like, you know, be a boss, be the best. It's like, that's not how society works. Society would crumble.

Chris DiStefano
You need people who don't want to do that. You need people who are saying, I'm okay not being the boss. I'm okay not being the best. You need that. Well, also, and I can tell you, like, in my own life, like, doing this podcast specifically, I fucking never thought it was gonna be what it is.

Joe Rogan
I never even imagined it. I didn't want it to be. It never was a thought. It was never, I want this thing to be. I want to have 15 million subscribers.

No, I never, never. Not one time. The whole thought was, do your best. Who do you want to talk to? What's interesting?

Have an interesting conversation. Stay in the moment. Just do your best. Well, and also, correct me if I'm wrong. By the time you started your podcast, you were already successful.

Chris DiStefano
You're already the host. You're already kind of a household name, I'm sure, financially successful. So you didn't need it for the money. You were like, I just want to talk to my friends. Yeah, I was just doing it for fun.

Joe Rogan
I always wanted a radio show. I'm like, no one's going to give me a radio show. And also, I'd probably swear I'd fuck it up. Right? And then there was XM.

And back at the time, accent wasn't given anybody any money. They had. All their money was going to Howard Stern. Sirius XM, whatever it is, the whole. I think it still is a big thing.

Do they still call it Sirius XM? Still Sirius XM. And I've heard that it's just. It's. It's.

Chris DiStefano
Howard's money has some. Well, first hour, he leaves there, fucked. Oh, yeah. Because that's, like, how many subscribers? Yeah, will.

Joe Rogan
Will bail when that guy leaves. Dude, I did Howard Stern show three months ago, and I thought he wasn't in the room, but the way they have that set up is you really believe he's in the room. Like, almost like a hologram. They tricked you, dude. I was talking to Howard Stern, but he was in Long island or wherever he was, Florida, and I was in the city.

Chris DiStefano
It was actually pretty crazy, because, you know, it's Howard. It's like, it's a big, big big deal. It's almost like a surreal for a New Yorker, particularly. Of course. Yeah.

It's almost like a surreal thing. We're like, this is Howard Stern. What? And they told me, they were like, you're going to go on for five minutes. So I was prepared to do that.

They had a segment on there where they. I forgot what the name of it was, but you have to guess this guy's sexual fetish. And the guy's fetish was that he liked his nuts. And dick taped. Nailed to the wall.

That's what he was into. Dick. Yes, Dick. Nailed to the wall. Nailed to the wall with a fucking nail gun.

It was. That's. That was when we had to guess it little by little. God damn. So it was even stand for that.

He loved it. Dude, you have to, like, get your dick on the side of a wall. How do you find it out? How do you get there? How do you find that?

Joe Rogan
Yeah, very good question, Jamie. It's a very good question. He would stick. When he was a kid, when he was a kid, when he would get yelled at by his mom and daddy, would stick, you know, safety pins. He would stick safety pins through his dick and balls, like, as a way to cope with it all.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. That's so crazy. Yeah, so you just ramp up from there. Kept it going rock hard.

Chris DiStefano
He said, by the way, he was rock hard on the show when he was taping his nuts to the wall. God. So we had to. We had to guess it. We had to guess it.

And he was like, you know, it was like this thing where they were like, the producer were like, hey, he's going to talk to you for five minutes. Just get to know you, your name, what do you do? Comedy, you know, whatever. And then you're going to get into this segment. And I was like, okay, great.

Baba Bowie, Gary, you know, is the one who hooked it all up. And I was like, great, dude. Five minutes. That's awesome. Like, excellent.

And then so we go. We're starting to talk. I don't know what I said. I said something stupid, and he started to laugh, and then he was like, wait a second, wait a second, wait a second. What is it?

Who are you? And I was like, on the show, I was like, hey, my name is what I do. Blah, blah, blah, blah. We talked for, like, an hour and a half. I'm like, I got, like, a real Howard Stern interview.

And then we did the bit at the end. I didn't have any good guesses. And then, like, 20 minutes later, I get a call from a random number, and I pick up, and he's like, hey, it's Howard. And I thought initially was one of my friends doing, like, an impersonation because they knew I was on Howard. He happens live.

And then he was like, no, it's me. It's Howard. He was like, man, that was. That was great. He was like, you just, I don't know.

Like, just whatever you're doing, just keep doing it. He was like, I was very engaged with that stuff, man. He was like, so, so good. And then I was like, okay, thanks. And then hung up.

And then I was like, holy shit. Did that really just fucking happen from comedy? And I felt really positive. I still feel really positive and great about that, but sometimes my brain can't hold on to that for too long, and then what will happen is we'll say, okay, well, let's balance it. Let's catholic guilt come in.

Let's balance it and make ourselves not believe him in some way. You know what I mean? And so I hear from you a lot. You'd be able to kind of take that confidence, which is a beautiful thing, and just kind of have it make you stronger, and say, all right, I'm going to keep going up where I look for a way down from it to balance. So I fight against that.

But I'm getting close. And I do think the next time I come on this podcast, I'll be fully. I'll be fully gay. Oh, okay. I'll be fully in.

Joe Rogan
Okay. I don't. I don't think too much about myself. Right. I try to just think about life, and I think about what I'm trying to do, right.

You know, whatever thing I'm trying to be good at, that's how I handle it. I think dwelling too much about yourself is not. It's like every comic has a tendency towards narcissism. I don't think that should be encouraged. I don't.

I don't find any benefit to it. Even you do. You think you have a bad. Do you have it? Everybody does.

Chris DiStefano
I think we just have it, right? Everybody does. Yeah. That's why you want to look good. You want to sound good.

Joe Rogan
You want. Want people to admire you, right? People think you're doing well, right? All that stuff. But don't.

Don't feed that, you know? Yeah. That's what it is. Feeding it. Don't feed it.

Think about the thing. Like, whatever you're doing, whatever your art form is, you know, relationships or friendships or think about those things keep the. Good wolf for the bad wolf. Yeah. Yeah, that's good.

Chris DiStefano
I like that. Don't think about you. Think about the thing you're trying to do and just be the best you can at the thing. The best you can be at the thing is everything you could ever ask for of yourself. And the only thing that's gonna get in the way of that is doubts, lack of discipline, lack of talent, lack of hard work.

Yeah. Work ethic is a lot. There's a lot of people that, like, substitute work ethic for anxiety. They substitute work ethic for a bunch of, like, bullshit thinking that just distracts them from doing what they really should be doing, which is working stuff done, because, like, what is the thing you're trying to feel? You've the only.

Joe Rogan
When I, like, there's a giant difference. Like, if I am in my office, there's a giant difference between how I feel if I just watch YouTube videos, even if it's like an interesting thing, it's a giant difference between how I feel that then if I go over my material and I start writing and I write a new tagline, I write a new joke, I have a new premise, I have a new thing, I put it in my phone. Now I go to bed, I feel great. Now I feel good. So it's like, you gotta learn, like, what is the thing that helps?

The thing that always helps my mental state is to be. To be engaged in a thing and to be creative and to try to figure this thing out and then do the work that you need to be doing for your career, for the thing that you love, which is comedy, right. Or whatever it is, or even podcasting, do that. Work on that thing, right? Work on the thing.

And then when you're done, you feel good. If you're just fucking off, you just feel like a loser. And if you feel like a loser and you start feeling that maybe that's who I am, and then you have imposter syndrome, and then it looks, just be professional. Just get it, do the things you have to do. And then if I do all that stuff, then I can actually enjoy a movie.

I can sit down and enjoy a movie. I fucking did everything I'm supposed to do. I can enjoy anything. But if I have, like, in my head, like, I'm not doing what I'm supposed to be doing, I'm not doing the work I'm supposed to be doing, then I feel like a loser. So it's like, just do the work, and then you don't feel like a loser.

And then you could be sociable. Then you could. You're fun to hang out with because you're not, like, overwhelm. Like, your mind is not on this thing that you should really be doing. Instead of being here at this party with your friends, you really should be at home working on that thing.

Get all that shit done so that you don't feel bad. See? Cause I hear you, and I think that that's 100% accurate. Right. But a lot of times, I don't know what it is.

You need to coach yourself. Well, that's what it is. And I think. But I do think a lot of this stuff is baked into some of that catholic guilt. Sure.

Chris DiStefano
I do think you can't feel good about yourself because it subconsciously tells you, well, then you're. Something bad now will happen. Right. It's this weird thing that. So I think sometimes I flirt with that because I pretty much, you know, I do my writing, and I do kind of say, all right, get into comedy.

Got the whole family behind you. You need to do this. Let's do this. But sometimes it's that catholic guilt. But I'm at a point in my life now.

I'm reading this book, Case for Christmas. You ever read this book, no? Case for Christ by this guy, Lee Strobel. I, you know, was very mad at Catholicism for a very long time because I grew up catholic. When I was 17, when our brains are forming is when all the catholic shit came out, the priests raping and all that stuff.

And I was like, well, fucking. I have catholic tattoos all over my body already. What am I supposed to do now? I can't this. I want to rip my tattoos off.

And I was very angry for a while initially. Didn't even want to get my kids baptized. Came around, did it. But then I read this book, case for Christ, and I was like, wow, this guy's putting forward, like, very compelling arguments for, like, not only Jesus existence, but his actual, like, works. Being real, like.

Like, this all being fucking pretty real and pretty historically accurate. And I was like, oh, shit. And then. So I started to, like, go back a little bit, right? And I started to say, you know.

Cause some of the things I'm even talking about on the show are kind of like, you know, it's still me, but it's like. It's not as. It's not as much as me anymore. Cause I start to go back to church, and I start to feel like this, like, just, like, calmness and almost like, even if it's forced like, this forced connection. Let me give you some advice.

Yes. You know what your problems are, right. And you know how you're doing when you're doing your best, and you know the things that you're doing that lead you to go astray, to go haywire. Right? You know that, right?

I think so, yeah. You're really aware of that. If you were a coach and you were looking at you and, you know, all this information, you would give yourself very solid advice. Right. You think I could.

Right. Do that then, right. Just have a coach in your head? That's what I do. I have, like, a part of my head that's like, the general that just tells me what the fuck we're doing.

Yeah. Like, I don't want to do this. The general says, shut the fuck up and let's go. And I listen to that part, like, have that. That part in my head, right.

Joe Rogan
That's always there, that knows this is gonna be fine. You know what? You know how to handle this. Just handle it. Deal with it.

Breathe, go through it, move on. Have, like, a set in your head of ideals. Yeah. Of behavior that you're tolerating, behavior that you're not tolerating. The way to handle things when things come up.

And don't just dwell on every problem every day. Instead, have this thing very rigid in your head. This is what we're gonna do. Write it down. Write it down.

Write down on a piece of paper if this comes up. This is what we do. We don't do this. We don't dwell on stupid shit. We don't worry about nonsense.

We don't fucking fret about. We don't sell our house because there's not a bagel shop close even though there was. Yes. You don't write those things down. Write those things down.

Like, give yourself, like, rock solid rules, right. And then go to those rules every time something comes up, instead of just, like, riffing it, just winging it, being lost in this world of, like, management of anxiety. Like, have rigid ideas in your head of how you're gonna handle it. It seems like you've gotten through the worst parts, right? Like, it sounds like your anxiety during basketball was fucking crazy.

Chris DiStefano
Nuts, dude. That sounds crazy. I used to bite my toenails off till they bled because my nails, because I went through my fingernails. That's crazy. Yeah.

Joe Rogan
So you got through that. So you got through the worst. So you know how bad it can be when it goes sideways. And you know how to coach yourself. Yeah.

Write all this stuff down. Write it down. In the future, write down, like, this is. This is. These are problems that come up, and this is how I'm gonna avoid these problems.

Chris DiStefano
Well, you know what? You know what I think happens, too, because of podcasting. Sometimes I'm like. Because my girl said something to me once. Interesting.

She was like, you know, on these podcasts, you talk about all these issues you have and whatever. She was like, but at home, you're like, not that guy. Like, I don't know. Like, this stuff is like, you're never, like, talking to us about it. You're never acting like that.

Like, she was like, I see you writing and doing things, but then you go on the pod and you're like, look at this. Fucking. Look at my brain. So she's like, what? Like, don't feel like you have to just go on a podcast and to try to be interesting.

Say all your. She was like, do you feel that sometimes? I never did until she said it. I'm like, you know, I'll come onto a podcast. Like, I came on today and said, chris, just come on.

Be confident. Be who you are. Project yourself. You're doing good, Joe. And you, are you closer now than you were two times?

Just shut up and do it. And then immediately, I'm like, I'm a mistake.

Joe Rogan
Damn. So that's. That's who I am, right? But you're not that way when you're at home. You're not that way when you're at your best.

Chris DiStefano
According to my family, I wasn't that way into it. You might be leaning into it. It might be a problem, because, like, it does. You do kind of think it's something to talk about that's interesting. And so you lean into it and you make it worse.

Yeah. Cause, I mean, yesterday in the green room, I wasn't like that. We were just fucking talking around, hanging out, and I'll be that way tonight. You didn't even seem a little anxious yesterday. No.

Joe Rogan
Especially for someone who hadn't done stand up in six weeks. No, I went out there yesterday, I hadn't eaten, and I did a 24 hours fast. So I was just. I was, like, in my body yesterday. I felt like a lot of.

Chris DiStefano
I mean, I know you've done it before, but when you get on those fasts and you just get, like, all this energy, like, I couldn't even sleep. Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? Yeah, I just loved it. Yeah. The fact you get energy from fasting is very strange.

Joe Rogan
I've done a lot of 24 hours. I haven't done anything more than that, though. I've been thinking about doing one of them three day ones. Yeah. People I know that did three day ones.

Chris DiStefano
I heard that. That's. I heard that George St. Pierre talk about. He does it three or four times a year.

Joe Rogan
I think it's probably really good to give your digestion a chance to rest. Like just constantly eating food. Your body's like, jesus, like, more work, like, give it some time off. Do you think it's possible, like, in ancient times, that because sometimes in the Bible they'll say people live to 400, 500 years old. Do you think it's not 400, but do you think it's possible people were living to as long as 120 years old back then?

Yeah, maybe 120. Yeah. In a rare genetic case with very good nutrition in a blue zone, someplace where there's a lot of minerals in the water. Yeah, you might be able to. It's possible 120s people have gotten there before, but the 500 years old, like Noah, like, out of here.

Chris DiStefano
Well, I think it's true, but I think it's one of those things where they probably just took birth. They took records differently back then. Like, I think in China, I think you only celebrate your birthday once every ten years. Wow. So you could be like, oh, I'm 500, but you're really not.

Joe Rogan
Well, that would mean you're five. Yes, exactly 50. Right. But I think, you know, human beings biologically, the only thing that's going to change how we age is science. And they're pretty close to being able to do that with a lot of things.

And there's a few things you could do to mitigate aging today, and it does work. It does help you. But 500 years old, it's most likely that they just didn't know what the fuck they were talking about. 350 years after the flood, he died at the age of 950. There you go.

Chris DiStefano
Terra was 128. Noah, pedophile, the last. The extremely long lived antiluvian patriarchs died 350 years after the flood, at the age of 950, when Terra was 128. The maximum human lifespan as depicted by the Bible, gradually diminishes thereafter from almost 1000 years to 120 years of Moses. See what I'm saying?

Now, that's Old Testament. So, you know, I don't know. A lot of that stuff was story stuff. But, dude, I'm telling you, this book case for Christ, the fucking history, it's not, it's not even an opinion. He's not saying I want you to believe.

He's like, here's the history. Here's why we. Dude, so like, if I told you, if I said to you, Joe, you believe everything you've heard about Alexander the Great, right? You believe it. You believe it.

You know, he's fought in these battles, what they say, you just believe it's Alexander the Great. I'll read his biography. You'd say, yeah, sure. But then you'd be like, oh, but I know, I don't believe they made the shit up about Jesus. Okay, Alexander the Great.

Cause what you'll always hear is, well, the gospels were written 100 plus years after Jesus died. Alexander the Great's first biography was written like 300 years after he died. So that right there is like, well, his Jesus is, the historians of Jesus were much closer in time than, say, alexander the Great. And even furthermore, back then, like the ancient Hebrews, they didn't have before writing, they didn't write anything. So they would memorize the Old Testament and the scripture.

So that you had guys that they would pass down, right? They knew 5000 pages of book inside of their head. So yes, the gospels were 70 years later, but they were based off the accounts of people who were living at that time and up to like 25 years after it. And they say, oh, well, game of telephone, I can tell you something goes around the room. Telephone.

By the time it gets to me, you know, ten people, what you just said is irrelevant. It's a totally different thing. I get it. But what they said is because of that ancient thing of, you know, kind of having to pass down these old testaments because they couldn't write, it would be like if you're playing a game of telephone, but every person, I check with the person before to make sure the word I'm saying is right. And then I keep going.

So then, then it's gonna work because you're constantly checking. So that's what they said happened there. And I was like, okay, well, okay. That'S a little bit of confirmation bias because the real problem is like, who said it originally? So when, who decided what the words were originally?

Okay, that. I get that, which is true. But just for Jesus, there was, this book was saying, the reason why they believe the historical accuracy of it is because basically his haters and the disciples were both saying the same thing. So you have the Romans saying, yeah, this is what happened. Who hated him?

And at that point would be like, get this guy out of here. He's basically causing a revolt. That's why we have to kill him. He's like a, somebody getting a protester today. They were like, fuck this guy, he's out.

And so they were saying, yeah, what you're saying happened. And then the disciples are saying it like a big thing is the resurrection, right? People say, really? He fucking resurrected from the dead? And you're like, well, everybody agreed.

Haters, Romans and the Israel jewish people, everybody agreed he died. That's 100%. That's why when they stab him and they say water came out. It wasn't water. It was fluid from his lungs because he was dead.

And that's what would happen to you or I when we die is we have this lung fluid that comes out. So that's what they said, oh, that's water. And that's what they made him, divinity. But it was like a natural thing. He's dead.

Everyone agrees. And you say, well, they buried him in a tomb and then the next day or three days later, the tomb's empty. And people like, so you know, that made up. And they say 500 people saw him in the town. Romans and Hebrew.

They saw him over the next couple of weeks. 500 independently sourced people. Real, like, corroborated. 500 people saw him. So you say, okay, so there's that.

And then the other conspiracy theory is like, well, the disciples robbed his body. The disciples just robbed his body because they didn't want him. They would hand over crucifixion victims to, like, the wild dogs. That used to be the way it was. If you got crucified, throw you in a pit, wild dogs eat you or leave you on the cross, birds will eat you.

That's how we deal with you. So they're like, that's why they were taking his body. And then you see, like, well, that's probably not what happened. And the Romans themselves acknowledged there's no body in that tomb that we put in there three days ago. The body is not there and we did it.

So in order to save ourselves, we're going to say the apostles robbed it. But in reality, that's just a conspiracy because the apostles would have no reason to rob it. That would. So the Romans think the apostles robbed the body. That's a conspiracy.

Joe Rogan
Why do you say conspiracy? You're saying a conspiracy to diminish the story. No, no, I meant conspiracy in the sense of that's what people say as a reason why the. Did the Romans say that? The Romans have said that.

Chris DiStefano
The Romans said that back then. And then I guess conspiracy is the wrong word. Cause I'm not. I'm not like, it's one story, one explanation. I'll say explanation of.

Joe Rogan
But if you'd looked at it like, what's the most logical explanation? Is the most logical explanation that a dead guy came back to life or the most logical explanation that someone took his body? Because that's what the Roman said. I'm just. Because I'm in.

Chris DiStefano
I'm saying that that is came back to life one time. And I'm not saying I'm crazy about it. I'm just saying, you know what? After reading that book, there was enough things that happened that historical scholars who aren't religious, some are believers, some are not, are like, this existed and this happened. But you're talking about historical scholars from 2000 years ago and their knowledge of science and biology and life and the universe itself was extremely limited.

Right? And so their entire fundamentals, like everything they believed in, was based on mythology. Everything, was based on gods and demons. Okay, so then what about this? All right, fine.

What if the Romans. Okay, they made it up, right? I'm sorry. I mean, the Romans are correct. The disciples took the body who everyone agreed was dead.

What about the 500 people that saw him in the town over the next six weeks? Did you talk to those people? No. So who knows what they believed? But who knows what they actually believed?

Joe Rogan
Who knows how they said it? Who knows if it was a religious thing? Look, there's. There's people that have mass hallucinations all the time about a lot of things, and there's people that you could give them false memory. False memory is a real thing.

Someone can convince you that something happened that didn't happen. Right? It's. It's real. It's like they've demonstrated how to do it.

We all know friends that have a memory of something, and you go, that's not what happened. And then you say your version of it, and then everybody has to, like, figure out what really happened. You know, you're like, do you remember that time we were at the game and you said this? I didn't say that. Like, that was not me.

Yeah, that was Mike. Yeah, yeah. And you're like, what? Yeah, yeah. You remember Mike lost his job, he was drunk.

Do you remember? And they're like, oh, yeah. Like, you thought it was me. You put it on me. It's like, yeah, you change things.

People change things. Also. Your memory becomes a memory of your memory and not the actual memory itself. True. It becomes a memory of the story you're telling.

And so if this person was this significant religious guru figure, like Jesus was, right, and he really does have this amazing view of how humanity can live in harmony and he really does talk to people about this, and he really does preach forgiveness, and he really does, like, treat everybody like they're the same paupers and hookers and everyone. Everyone's just God's children. Loved. When that guy's gone, you're gonna miss him, man. You're gonna miss him bad.

And if you really do have a fundamental view of reality that's based entirely on myth, and you have connected this guy to the son of Christ, or the son of God, rather, this figure that is brought here to save us, and the Romans took him from us and killed him, and now he died for our sins. And the whole thing, if you have that in your head, and then someone says, I saw him. Like, I saw him, too. People see the Virgin Mary in a fucking grilled cheese sandwich. People see things.

It doesn't mean those things aren't there. It doesn't mean that isn't a vision, but it also does mean that people see things that aren't. And there's a lot of people that are not that bright. They're not smart, and they're easily led, and they're easily manipulated. But it also doesn't mean that Jesus wasn't real.

Chris DiStefano
Right. Like, all those things. But it's just the likelihood of someone coming back to life is very low. Right. The likelihood of someone taking his body is very high.

Right. So if you use, like, Occam's razor, the simplest solution, right? The simplest answer is probably what you're searching for. It's probably that someone took the body, right? Dude, where did they put it?

Joe Rogan
Well, you could put it anywhere. Like, no one knows where Genghis Khan is buried. No, Genghis Khan, they did the wildest thing with him. They sent a pack of people to bury Genghis Khan. Then they sent another pack of people to kill the people that everybody that went to Genghis Khan's funeral was murdered.

They all got murdered by another group of people, and then those group of people got murdered by a separate group to make sure that no one had any understanding at all about where Genghis Khan was buried. Oh, my God. To this day, no one knows where he was. I think thousands of people died to hide his burial. But it's got to be somewhere in Mongolia somewhere.

Yeah. Yeah. No one knows. Yeah. Maybe they could do lidar over the entire country and figure it out.

Chris DiStefano
Well, there'll be some. Somebody will proclaim that they found it at some point. Maybe. You know, they have no idea. They have no idea.

Joe Rogan
So, see if you could find that story because it's a pretty wild story. What about people who, they get canonized as saints because you exhume their body and they haven't, um. They haven't, uh, you know, decayed at all. That's like a big thing. Yeah.

Chris DiStefano
What about those people? Well, there's people. Look, they found that guy who died in the glacier that was, uh, thousands of years old. You know, people's bodies in the right situations. Okay, hold on a second.

Joe Rogan
Marco Polo wrote, even by the late 13th century, the Mongols did not know the, the location of the tomb. Secret history of the Mongols has the year Genghis Khan's death, 1227, but no information concerning his burial. So a frequently recounted tale, Marco Polo tells that 2000 slaves attended his funeral, were killed by the soldiers sent to guard them, and that these soldiers, in turn, were killed by another group of soldiers, which killed anyone and anything that crossed their path in order to conceal where he was buried. Finally, the legend states that when they reached their destination, they committed suicide. Wow.

Chris DiStefano
Oh. They commit suicide so that no one will ever know where he was buried. Yeah. That's why it's pretty badass. That's pretty badass.

That's pretty badass. And. And they were fucking monsters. The Mongolians kill everybody on horseback. The best fighting force ever.

Joe Rogan
Some people say 10% of the population. Damn. They killed so many people that they lowered the carbon footprint of earth during the time he was alive because so many people died that they. All the places that they had deforested, they chopped down the trees. Trees grew back, and it created more trees.

So it created more oxygen, sucked out more carbon from the air. Because nothing's better at eating carbon than trees. They live off carbon dioxide. So these, you could do a core sample and show that these people killed so many people that they lowered the carbon footprint of humans on earth. That's pretty nuts.

They killed somewhere during his lifetime, somewhere between 50 and 70 million people, depending on what. So is there anybody, if you extrapolate that, like, did he kill more people than, like, Stalin and Hitler? Way more than percentage wise? Yeah, he killed more than anybody ever his people did during his lifetime because they mean they conquered a giant swath of the world. The Mongols, I think they were in control of, like a quarter of earth.

Chris DiStefano
Dude, Asians are fucking brutal. They get white people. We get the worst rap in history. But Asians fucking kill each other and are so racist and hate each other. Like, you can't imagine, dude.

You know, like the rape and nanking, dude, it's like white people never did that? Yeah. That was crazy. Bayoneting babies and shit and Genghis Khan. Sometimes I'm like, hey, man, I get why people.

I get we have our history, but it's like, so does fucking everybody else. Stop it. It's also just brutal times require brutal people. I mean, that was a brutal time to be alive. Yeah, right.

You can't. Ruthless. I read something about those times back. This was more medieval times. This is interesting that sex was not taboo.

It was because we all had to live under one roof. So sex was just animalistic to procreate, to get more bodies on the farm. So you would watch your mom and dad have sex right next to you. Didn't even. It wasn't a thing about cleansing this or, you know, I mean, I'm sure you have to get an erection and get wet.

So there had to be some type of something. But it was like this wild thing where like, this whole idea of taboo, a sex being taboo and having terms for everything is a pretty much like a new thing. It was. I read this whole thing about then they then about impotence court in France. So back in the day, court, dude, there was this guy.

There's this guy who wrote this. It's called fucking history. It's by the guy. The author's name's the captain. This guy's the man.

And it's cool. I read one page a day and it's about different times in history kind of apply to today. But this one thing I read about was the 16 hundreds. There was an impotence court. So if you could get divorced, if your wife or any.

If you wanted a divorce, the wife wanted a divorce, the only way out was you had to go to this court and you had to prove that your husband is impotent and can't get his dick up. So they. The court were there, and then you'd have to perform the act. And if the husband couldn't get it up, you have to have sex in front of people. Couldn't get it up, would grant you the divorce because that was the only grounds that it was necessary for.

And. Right, because he needed procreation. You need a procreation. That's what this is about. He wouldn't deny a woman's ability to procreate.

Joe Rogan
A man can't get an erection so you could leave him. And then I think if. If he did prove his manhood and have sex with her and get a hard on and come, I think then he had the legal right to kill her. Oh, for even taking him to court. So if you can fuck her in front of everybody, then he can kill her.

Chris DiStefano
Isn't that, like, wild how times used to cause it? If you're a fucking brutal man, it's. Not that long ago, like, we have the same brain as them, right? We're just more civilized. It's not like our brain has went over this insane evolution yet I have that guy's brain, but I just don't do it.

Like, I'm not. I guess we're more societal pressures not to do it. Well, also, society has changed. Where we have more access to information. We know how other people feel.

Joe Rogan
Back then, they didn't care. Dude, isn't that, what, like, the smartest, like, the Elon musks and the, you know, Stephen Hawkins of, like, that time thought, like, the. They thought that the sun went around the earth, and they were. I mean, the. Yeah, the sun went around, like, they.

No, they thought the earth was the. Center of the universe. The earth was the center of the universe. And, like, they were as confident as our smart people saying, we are positive that it's the other way. Sort of.

Chris DiStefano
Right. But when Copernicus and all these different people figured out that that wasn't the case. Galileo. No, I know that, but I'm saying, so what do you think today we believe in that we will be disproved in a major way. Like, cause as this.

You know, when they. When Copernicus and Galileo came out and said, I'm sure it's the other way. I have the proof. And then everybody was like, wait, what? What do you think?

Today is where we're believing as fact. Even you and me are believing, but it's going to be disproven is what if you had a hunch, what do you think it is? That's an interesting question. Thank you. I don't know.

Joe Rogan
I don't know what it be, obviously, because obviously this is a thing that we all believe today. Like, how the fuck could I know that? That would be the thing that you should read this part of the. What is it? This.

This is about the impotence court. I got the funny part where you should read the unhappy. Yeah, start. The unhappy couple would then be subject to separate examinations to speculate. Groping by surgeons, physicians, and midwives.

Speculative. Excuse me. Groping by surgeons, physicians, and midwives. A husband's natural parts were scrutinized for color, shape and number. The best thing he could hope for were the inspectors of delicate demeanor.

Various hypotheses were created. Could he muster an erection expel reproductive fluids on demand. Was he capable of healthy performance? Or had he been forcing his partner into. How do you say that word?

Chris DiStefano
Lascivious? Lascivious. Lascivious. Lascivious positions without the promise of coming children. That means butt fucking.

Joe Rogan
As could be expected, many withheld, many wilted under pressure. According to the reports of a trial in Rimes. I said, Rimes? I think so the experts waited around a fire. Many a time did he call out, come, come now.

But it was always a false alarm. The wife laughed and told them, do not hurry. So for I know him well. The experts said after that, never had they laughed as much nor slept as little as on that night. Oh, my gosh.

They're just laughing. This poor fucking guy. Freaking out. I got a hard on. She's like, he ain't got shit.

Chris DiStefano
Shit. Oh, my God. I mean, I couldn't do that. If you want to ask me to. I mean, it's very difficult.

There's no way to be able to get hard. Imagine you're in court and you got a fuck. You're saying that divorce was illegal then? Okay, so most of these would have. To come from the women.

Joe Rogan
And most of their majority, like 20% of the cases, it was from nobility. So, like, rich women were saying, oh, boy, my husband can't get a hard. So they have to. And then you. But then you would have to prove it.

Chris DiStefano
I'm not. That's real. Yeah. And then it was on whichever partner actually was found to not be able. To get it up.

Joe Rogan
Had to pay for the court proceedings and lawyers and everything. They were checking a woman's wetness. Like, what do you mean? The other way they could say the woman's impotent or a woman can't give birth. That's a big thing.

Chris DiStefano
You can't give birth to sons. Yeah. Yeah, that was a big thing. King Henry VIII, right? He killed all his wives and he was the one that was controlling the sex, but science didn't know that yet.

Joe Rogan
The thing is also that, boy, when. When human beings used to have fertility rituals, like, they were always trying to reproduce because people died so early. Yeah. Like, people died of everything. They died.

Broken leg, dead, injury, dead. You know, infection, dead. Right. Blood infection, sepsis, dead. Everybody just died.

Like, the odd. Like, that's when people look at, like, the average age of people back then. Oh, people only lived to 30. That's really because there was so much infant mortality and infant mortality and childhood mortality factors in that because, like, half your kids are gonna die. It's not like today.

You have five kids. The five kids are at my grandfather's house. Hey, everybody's grown up now. They have kids of their own. Way back then, everybody died.

Chris DiStefano
So you're saying back then there were still plenty of 50, 60 and 70 year olds walking around? There's probably a few, you know, like, dodged bullets and made it to that way and fucking pulled arrows out of their back. But the bottom line is it's like. It's the same. What's that guy's boner?

Joe Rogan
Why are you showing us this? Gets into saying that, like, it had to go. Big dicks were an issue back then or something. They were using this statue as a scarecrow in real places because it was. It would threaten rape.

So it just scare people away from the gardens and whatnot. It's. What is he? A big boner? And that would keep people from raping people.

Look at those dogs on these folks. Jesus. And that's them. Soft. Look at that guy.

Chris DiStefano
Look at that soft. That guy's a liar. That's crazy. No way. Perfect.

Joe Rogan
That's what. I have no circumcision back then either. Or maybe there was. I don't know. No.

They said they would parade them around on comic stages of athens until the fourth century. Giant members. Giant members. Guys with giant hogs. Yeah.

Wow. Okay. What's that word to mescent? Where do you see that? Perhaps the abundance of tumescent dicks.

Chris DiStefano
Tumescent. I roll it sounds eloquent. Maybe the abundance of giant beat. Giant hog. Yes.

Joe Rogan
What does it mean? Probably? Have you ever used that? I've never used tumescent. No.

Okay. Swollen. Swollen. All right. Hard dicks.

Hard dicks. I mean, everybody probably. So they tie their dick off, get a boner. Probably tie a little rope around the base of their balls and everything and keep it hard. Look, I got here.

Look at my fat. I think back then too, I think that soldiers. I read a lot of stuff about the. I think greek soldiers were like, you know, had wives and kids. But on the battlefield, night before was totally okay to be gay, have an intimate relationship because they thought you have to be in love with the man you're protecting next to you in order to protect him in the right way.

That's what the Spartans felt. Right? That's what it was. Yeah. Because that's who it was then.

Chris DiStefano
Yeah. But there's a lot of, like, gay sex going on back then. I think people did a lot of gay stuff and a lot of pedestrian bestiality. Right. I think, like, I think we have a lot of terms now for shit.

But I think back then, like, James Buchanan, who was the president before Abraham Lincoln, they used to call him. He didn't have a wife, he had a senator who was like. They would call him Aunt Nancy. That was like their nickname for him, because they were like, these two guys are gay, right? But the public at the time knew that, but didn't care.

You being your sexuality was never in the minds of the american voter in the 18 hundreds. That came later. I don't know when it came, but I was fascinated to read that. I was like, oh, wow. Back then, when you think that people must have been much more conservative back then, they were like, no, we don't give a shit at all.

Just do get the country in order. And actually it plays a part because James Buchanan, being possibly gay, and with this guy calling him Aunt Nancy, this senator boyfriend of his, was a senator from the south, and it was James Buchanan's presidency because he was giving all these favors to, they think, his boyfriend of that state that tipped the balance scales and kind of caused the civil war. That's what they say. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't have the hard facts on it, but I remember reading that, and I was like, yo, that's fucking wild.

Where, like, you just, like, Abraham Lincoln kind of took over a country that was the. The roller coaster had went down. He could not stop it. And they say that he really sided with the kind of freeing the slaves and the north and the union. Cause they had much more soldiers and were much bigger than the south.

But, like, if that was the other way, Lincoln wasn't at the time, you know, you can make up what you want, and some people agree and disagree, but it's like he was going with what he thought was best to preserve the union. Not necessarily. You know, I think slavery at that time, a lot of people started to be like, this is gross, now stop doing it. But I read a thing, too, where it was just geography, where they said if the cotton plantations were in the north, you would have had the slaves and we would have been the non slaveholders. So, like, we had to do that with the.

Of course they didn't, but they would say, we had to do that with the technology at the time. This is what we had to. We needed the manpower, and they were the only people who would do it. It's really just that they could do it. They could.

Right. Could do it. Well, you know, they definitely didn't have to. Yeah, because, you know, I read this thing about they got just paid people. Well, like, and native, you know, because, you know, they were saying, like, where the specific place.

I forgot where it was.

Specific tumulent specific place they got the slaves from in Africa were people who were very, like, kind, like giving people. There wasn't any war there, so they believed you. If you said, come with me, I'll come with you, because I. Listen, we're all at peace here where we are, so why wouldn't I come with you? And then the Portuguese were enslaving them and putting them on these ships.

And then that's why they were able to get them from that part. They knew that, which is really sinister, that these are good people. Their culture is to follow. But then you have, like, the Native Americans who were on the land at the same time in America, and you couldn't enslave them. Cause they would be like, no, we're fighting everybody around us.

Cause they could have subjugated them, too. In this. I forgot what book it was, but I was reading, but they couldn't. They just couldn't. It was like wild horses.

So they purposely went to a place where the culture was to be kind people. And I was like, oh, that's like a really horrible part of, like, the human brain. Even though I know at that time things were different. But I'm like, that's pretty. Just evil to do that.

Joe Rogan
There's a lot of evil in history. Yeah, history is flooded with evil. It's almost. There's almost no instances of people not being evil. And there's signs.

Chris DiStefano
Every culture, by the way, it's not just one group, every culture. I saw this one thing. I can't. I'm blanking on all these things that I read it where who we are as homo sapiens. I'm sure you know this.

Like, there's, like, however many groups of homo sapiens, there were like, you know, different types of humanoids, but us, homo sapiens, whether our type was the most vicious type, that's why we won. So this idea of war is always in our head because that's what's deep baked in our DNA, because we were the one that won out to evolve into humans. So we have it in our thing. So when people are like, not like we're warlike, because that's just. That's in our brains no matter what.

And if you don't, if you're not physical, some would say, like me, not physical, I'll create a war in my brain. But what keeps me going is war. What keeps me going is a problem that I have to fix like that. So I was like, oh, that was interesting. I don't know if any of it's founded.

Joe Rogan
We're certainly hardwired for conflict, right? Humans are hardwired. I mean, there's no one today that's rational that believes that, like, in three years, we'll have no war on earth, right? Or in fact, I mean, could you imagine a time with no war anywhere on earth? You can't.

No, that's not. That's not possible. That's. Humans do war, which is the thing that everyone's the most fearful of. The most terrifying things in history are war.

And we just. Even though we know that and most people don't want war, we assume there will never be a time with no war, which is a crazy thought. Here's a. You asked me earlier, why do you think the NYPD is not, you know, why do you think the city's going to fail? Here's a conspiracy.

Chris DiStefano
I heard. I guess you'd call this a conspiracy, or maybe an explanation, again, from one of my cop friends. He's like, you know why they're doing that? He's like, the high, high up people. You know, those people that don't even exist on paper, that are worth ten times as much as Elon Musk.

And whatever those guys, they want AI in, they want it in the police forces, they want it in the world. So what they're doing is they're causing chaos here, and they're gonna cause so much chaos that we're gonna beg to just be ruled by AI. We're gonna be begged for an indifferent AI piece of machinery that sees it in black and white and will do the right things. Put the criminals in jail is who will be ruling this city. And that it's gonna take some time, but that's.

That's what it is. And cops tell you that? A cop told me that. I mean, wow. I was like, I didn't dismiss him.

I was like, it makes sense. And he was being like, that's what it is. What else could it be? And I was like, dude, I don't fucking know, man. It's.

Joe Rogan
It's the. The ide. I don't think they're thinking that far in advance, honestly. I think the ideology of these woke people, it's. It's really a culture.

And the cult is that there is some institutional racism that has caused all these people to be locked up, and the only solution is to just let them out. And when they commit crime, it's because of institutional racism. That's put them in that position. That's why they're committing crime. And the only solution is to let them out and to just tolerate it.

Chris DiStefano
Right. And this is to try to break this cycle, which is ridiculous. That's not how to do it. The way to do it is to make wherever they live, to enrich it so that it's not so crime ridden and gang ridden that there's other ways out. Right.

Joe Rogan
People don't lose their lives being connected to the culture of wherever they're at because it's just so criminally entrenched. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just, they don't, they're not thinking that far in advance. I think most of the people that are propagating this stuff, but I also think we're being influenced by other countries. I think we're being influenced by social media, which is also being influenced by foreign actors that are doing things and saying things and promoting things specifically to degrade our confidence in our system.

Chris DiStefano
Yeah. Because we are the only system that's like this. We're the, we're the, the first experiment in self government in the world that we're aware of, other than the Greeks, obviously. But the Greeks did it out of psychedelics, like. Right.

Joe Rogan
They learned to develop democracy. I believe that, too. And I think that maybe that's something that in the future, like, we're living through it now, but in the future they'll be like, oh, remember when the years those people were on social media and they got into all these wars and destroyed the planet? If it gets there because of these things that weren't even real, it's gonna be history. It's gonna, the influence of it is gonna be measured.

It's gonna be monitored. It's gonna be a very hotly discussed topic because it's controversial even today while it's happening. And the evidence is irrefutable. The evidence of its presence is irrefutable. But there's still some people that don't think that that's what's causing it.

I think it's certainly exacerbating it at the very least. I don't know if it's caused it, but the infiltration of the education institutions by other countries is well documented, too. They know what they're doing and it's working. I mean, Yuri Bezmanov, we've talked about it a thousand times. Unfortunately, that video from 84 saw it.

All that stuff is crazy. Laid the plan. Yeah. They were talking about this in 84. Yeah.

It's actually the chickens have come home to roost. It's really going on right now. Yeah. You're seeing it on college campuses today. It's crying.

Chris DiStefano
Oh, New York, Columbia University, nuts. It's all over the news. They're cult people. They're basically in like, this weird societal collapse. Cult.

Joe Rogan
They want society as it stands right now. They think it's fundamentally terrible and it should be destroyed. So, like, those people, when we speak about these people that want this and want that, like, there's things about the universe that they know for a fact, and they're as human as you and I, and they just know it. And this is why they do what they do. Like.

Chris DiStefano
Like they're speculating. I don't think they're thinking that far in advance. That's the thing I'm thinking. The problem with all this is no one's take, like, like freedom of speech. If you take away people's freedom of speech because you think they're wrong and you're right, the problem is then someone else who comes along can also take away your freedom of speech if they get into power, if they think you're wrong.

Joe Rogan
You gotta have people be able to talk about things so you can figure out what's right and what's wrong and sort things out and find out what's true, what's not true, what's the only way to do that is freedom of speech. And you have to allow people to do that. Even if they say things that you don't enjoy, you don't wanna hear. It's better to have someone refute that and work it out than to silence people. Right?

As soon as you don't think that, then you've silenced discourse. If you silence discourse, you fucked up all progress. Now people are just gonna cling to whatever it is. Like what the reason why they went after Galileo. Because people have like an entrenched set of beliefs and they don't want anything to come along and challenge that and anything that does, they'll squash that.

Chris DiStefano
Yeah. They'll kill you, they'll fucking torture you. And that's the time right now. The puritanical. Yeah, it's very similar to that.

Joe Rogan
The woke stuff is very similar to religion in a lot of ways. Like you, it's absolute adherence. Anyone who deviates at all is cast out of the kingdom. They attack you. It's just like a cult, right?

Chris DiStefano
I think it's lost a lot of, I mean, it feels like it's lost a lot of more of its power. Now it feels like most people are like, well, just, we'll, you know, people. Are coming out of the fever he. The haze of it all, like, what the fuck was going on? And I think they're more aware of how crazy it all is now than ever before.

Yeah, yeah. But there's still a lot of people on universities especially, that are just deeply entrenched. And it's also their identity. It's a way that they could be interesting. It's a way that they can get social status.

Joe Rogan
Status is a big factor, is a giant factor in how people behave and why they do what they do. And it's certainly the social media is the worst for that because so many people, they post these cringy things on social media. Like, I know what you're doing. Yeah, you're just fishing for likes, you fucking weirdo. See, I think we all starting to know that now.

Chris DiStefano
Cause I remember when I was, when my daughter, who's eight now, was like one or two, we had a friend and they were giving their kid, who was like, I think, ten, social media as a birthday gift. You would hear that a lot. I'm gonna give my kid social media. But now nobody would do that. Now we would know, like, how poison that is for a kid.

And that was just, you know, five, six years ago where people weren't aware of the kind of dangers of it all. That might be a thing where, like, you know, how people, when they were smoking cigarettes, didn't know that they were killing themselves and they didn't. You were. The smoking industry was allowed to just camp, you know, promote. That might be, that.

That might be the thing of the future. Pervasive, though. I think it's gonna. It's gonna turn into something even crazier. I think with AI, the introduction of AI and then newer technology that allows some other form of communication, it's just gonna get even weirder.

Joe Rogan
I just think this is the reality that we're living in. We are a technological society. We are technology creating species, and we're. Going to keep going, just keep it going. And then you think the first person who might live forever with their conscious uploaded into an AI is alive right now?

I don't know if that actually happens. I don't know if that happens. Yeah, I think something happens. I think for me to speculate would be kind of crazy, but I think something, something wild is going to happen pretty soon. I think with AI and the way AI is progressing, that it's going to be smarter than every human being alive inside of five years.

Chris DiStefano
Oh, yeah. Where does that take us. And do we find ourselves in a position, like your cop friend said, where AI has to govern the country? Because that does make sense. But the problem is, like, who is in charge of the AI?

Joe Rogan
Who gets to program the AI, right? Because AI is not immune to being programmed. We saw with that google AI that the founding fathers were all black. Did you see that? Yeah, they show us a photo of a pope with a black eye, asian lady like, shit.

It's like it doesn't know how to avoid the woke bullshit that it's been programmed with. Not yet, but it could adapt. It could adapt. And if it does adapt and it becomes objective and it actually has smart decisions that would benefit the entire country as a whole, people are going to want to listen to it because it's going to be superior to us and it's not going to have the greed and deception built into it that human beings do. It's not going to be supposedly influenced by money.

Chris DiStefano
Yeah, but of course, I mean, yeah. Well, it becomes sentient, then it doesn't, you know, right now it's controlled by people. It's. But if it becomes something that designed itself, you know, if it surpasses the design of human beings and creates its own version of itself, but a far superior version of it, and then we allow that thing to lead us. So what we got to do is find jobs that you just want to be towards the back of the line because AI is going to start to take over job after job.

But comedian, we're pretty far down the line. I mean, I know AI could take us over in on tv and live. Performances are still going to be sports a thing. Live sports are still going to be a thing. So you're at the back of the line for AI.

Joe Rogan
I mean, they're trying to hold off technology in sports by limiting steroid use. Right, because what is steroid use? It's manipulating chemicals in order to achieve a superior human being physically a superior specimen that can do things that an average person can't. Like when you look at bodybuilders, that is not possible without technology. No, there's no way.

You don't get that big. That's crazy. You're not supposed to be that big. Yeah, like those people are that big because of human invented technology that allows you to introduce massive amounts of hormones in your system that don't make any sense. And you're fucking 350 pounds, you're five'seven.

That's crazy. Yeah, but there's people like that in the world. Yeah, yeah, they're monsters. Monsters. And I heard that I was always taught that steroids will give you cancer, all these bad things.

Chris DiStefano
But I read recently that was just based off one study a while ago that steroids done right is actually not healthy, but it's not gonna kill you if you do these things right. Where are all the bodies? That's the thing. There'd be so many bodies. There's so many bodies of people who smoke cigarettes.

Joe Rogan
There's so many bodies of people who drank themselves to death. And there are bodies for people that did overdo steroids and wind up having heart attacks and stuff. But, God, there's a lot of people that did it and didn't have anything. Go wrong with it. Yeah.

Chris DiStefano
Yeah. It gets tempting, you know. What's that documentary? Bigger, stronger, faster. That's probably what it was.

Yeah. Bigger, stronger, faster. Yeah. Because I just started taking creatine, like, three weeks ago, and I feel like fucking awesome. Creatine is great for your brain.

Yes. There's a study recently that showed the creatine mitigates the effects of lack of sleep too. Wow. Yeah. So if you have a lack of sleep and you take creatine, it's supposed to increase your performance and things and makes it so that the lack of sleep doesn't really affect you nearly as much.

Yeah. It says on the. On my bottle not to take the creatine with caffeine. It says, don't do that. My powder, naked creatine.

It says, don't mix this with caffeine. And then I read it's because they counterbalance the effects of each other somehow. So it makes sense. You're taking it and it's not doing. It's.

You're not getting the full benefit of it. Yeah. Creatine is actually a nootropic. It actually helps brain function. Interesting.

Joe Rogan
Creatine does a lot of good things. Well, you got to think about. Right. It helps your body hold more water. Right.

Which is why one of the things that does, it makes you stronger. Yeah. It allows you to hold more water. You get a little bigger, stronger. But people would always say you get bloated in fat, which.

Chris DiStefano
That's not true either. Yeah. You get bloated from. You know, you can get bloated for many things. You definitely can get a fatter face if you have more water in your face.

Joe Rogan
But it's also. So what are you eating? Well, I'm saying I've been on creatine for Oprah of a month now, and I feel my performance is going up in the gym. I'm a little bigger, but I haven't lost. My scale number is the same.

Chris DiStefano
I think I've lost body fat. Well, that's probably because you're working hard. I think that creatine is a very overall positive supplement. I don't think there's any negatives associated with creatine. I'm sure you could probably overdo it.

Joe Rogan
Like, you could overdo anything. Anything. Creatine is one of the safer supplements, like performance creat. Yeah. And it's good for you in a lot of ways.

It's actually. It's a part of food, right? Yeah. Like creatine from food itself. Since steak, I take creatine and a scoop of sauerkraut for the fermented food every day.

Chris DiStefano
Baby. Love sauerkraut. How great is hot dog with sauerkraut and some brown mustard? The kind of hot dogs that snap. Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan
Oh, baby, I fucking love it. Talk to me. Yeah. Even though the bun's bad for you, who cares? Let's go.

Chris DiStefano
Who gives it? Well, they say the hot dog is bad for you, right? Says, oh, communists. Yes, exactly. If it snaps in your mouth like those really good kosher hot dogs.

Oh, love it, dude. That's so good. Oh, yeah, it's fucking good, dude. Yeah. So many foods that are so good.

Joe Rogan
That are so bad for you. Yeah. Like the other day, two sleeves of oreos in one sitting. Damn. Damn, son.

Chris DiStefano
And I didn't. Milk. Oh, yeah, got it. Milk was going wild. Dunk.

Dunked them all. But I did it in my fasting window, so I didn't feel too bad about myself. Oh, there you go. There it is. You knock it out.

Joe Rogan
There you go. But I. People can eat, man. Yeah, they'll go fucking wild. For me, it's anything.

Carbs, pasta and pizza. That's when. That's my cheat stuff, right? If I'm gonna have a meal where I know I'm not supposed to eat it, but I'm just gonna enjoy it, it's always like, pizza, carbs, pasta, lasagna, something like that. Yeah, just go fucking wild.

But then I just stop afterwards. Okay, we did it. I think I might have told you this the last time I was here, but my father is a big eater. He ate an entire tray of lasagna one day. Like, in front of us, like throughout the day at Christmas, he ate the entire tray of lasagna.

Chris DiStefano
Then he slept on my house, and he woke up in the middle of the night with chest pains. And him and his wife, my stepmom, were wake me up. Like dad's. I don't know what's going on. He can't walk.

He's, like, at a. He's going. Can't breath, chest pain, right? Goes to the hospital. They hook them up to the machines, whatever.

Do some tests, stays overnight. They call me the next day. They said, hey, man, we're sorry. Looks like your dad here has congestive heart failure. This can be a year, four years, but he has congestive heart failure.

His fluids are backing up, so we just want to let you know we're going to release him, but this is the protocol and the medicines and all that. So now I'm going down to the hospital, like, oh, my God, this is it. Times running out with my dad. And then took me about 45 minutes to get there. I get there, and I guess they continue doing tests, and I walk in, and the people are there, the doctor, and I say, you know, I was briefed.

You know, I understand he has congestive heart failure. Like, what do we have to do? Can you, like, explain that to me? And they were like, you know what? We reran the test.

We had given him a diuretic. Your father had eaten so much sodium in one sitting that it made our. I swear to God, it made our machine. Machines convince us that he had congestive heart failure. But in fact, he had eaten so much sodium because of the food that he ate that this diuretic, once the fluid cleared his heart, he has a slight arrhythmia, but nothing like congestive heart failure.

That was purely from the sodium. That's crazy. And I was like, dad, that's fucking nuts. You almost killed yourself. With lasagna.

With lasagna. And now. And he's extreme. And now my dad's lost 120 pounds. Intermittent fasting.

He looks phenomenal, but he said he's lightheaded all the time. And I'm like, well, what are you eating? And he said, one half of a tuna fish sandwich a day. That's all he eats. Oh, he went the other way.

Dad. What? Can we get a little balance here? Cause now, you know. And he's like.

I said, what did you do to lose all this weight? He said, I eat tuna fish sandwich. And I walk in the pool, I was like, yeah, but, dad, you're eating. You're gonna like. You could kill yourself that way.

Yeah. You're gonna fuck your heart up. Yeah, man. Your body starts robbing its tissue. If it doesn't get enough protein, it starts eating your muscles.

Joe Rogan
Yeah, yeah, don't do that. No, I told him to try to. I told him to try to eat more. Just eat. Just.

Chris DiStefano
I was like, dad, just eat in those windows. You know? He's like, I want to be ripped. I'm like, you're 77 years old and you lost 120 pounds. Yeah.

I was like, you look like you're wearing a dress. It's fat. It's fun. You look great, dad. It's not about what, your abs now and then?

70. 70? Yeah. And they have, like, a funny relationship. He'll be like, oh, you know, you believe my fucking wife over here is 60?

He's like, I should trade her in for 230 year olds, huh? And my wife, my son was always like, I'd like to see you try, you fat fuck. If you can bring home a 30 year old, I'll gladly give you the divorce. And then he'll be like, oh, I'm going to kill her. I'm going to bury her in the backyard.

I'm like, this is the kind of couple fighting that's just, like, old school. That's fun. That's fun to see because I have one example of divorce in my family. My mom. Dad got divorced, but then my dad remarried my stepmom, and they've been married 35 years.

So I see, like, kind of two things on, like, how it works one way and not the other way type thing. It's interesting the way that they fight their old dad. Sounds very extreme. Gambling. Now he's addicted to not eating.

What does that equal, though? Fun, that guy. Nobody's more fun than my fucking dad. I mean, wild people are fun. They're funny, fun guys.

I mean, when I. I had my first daughter, we told them, you know, you can't come into the opera, the delivery room. You know, it's just me, my girl, and my. My mom and her mom. That's what she wants, you know, women and whatever.

So my dad, I tell him that. He's like, hunt, all right, you know, whatever. And then I call him, obviously, when her water broke, we're giving birth, and, dude, her water broke in the middle. We were watching that movie mad Max with Tom Hardy and her water broke, and we were. I love that movie.

We're right at the end. I was like, is there any way. We got, like, ten minutes left? And she was like, get to the fucking hospital. Oh, my God.

I know. Like an idiot. So we get. But, but. So she's giving birth, like, crowning.

Like, it's happening. And my dad walked. Walks in because he's just like, this is my first. My grandkid. My first grandkid.

I walk in and I was like, dad, like, you cannot at all be here. Like. And he was like, yeah, you know, like, you're here. I want to be here. And I'm like, nobody feels comfortable.

Like, I don't give a fuck, but, like, she doesn't want you here at all. And she was like, get out of here. Like, it was like this whole thing. And then as he's leaving, like, right before he goes, he goes, I'll be in the. I'll be in the waiting room.

Just let me know. And I'm like, okay. You know, like, we're in the middle of the birth. And he's like, by the way, chrissy, Yankees got fucking rocked last night. You got it.

This team sucks. And I was like, all right. The nurse, everybody's laughing because they're like, what is this guy screaming about the Yankees for his birth? And then. And then, you know, we had.

We had my baby. And then he was like, he was like, it's a girl. I said, yeah, and, you know, great. And he was like, oh, man. He was like, I was hoping for a boy.

Hoping for a boy. I'm like, you aren't the gender reveal. You fucking knew it was going to be a girl, dude. What do you mean you were hoping for a boy? And then he told me, though, he was like, you know, if I was still in the throes of my gambling, he's like, I would have gambled with your uncles on your kid's gender.

I would have put a bet down. I would. I would have had to put my money on it. That's how deep it got. I was like, that's wild, dude.

He was like, I would have did it. If I wasn't in control, I would have did it. I would have gambled on it. I would have gambled on the. On her.

The kid's birthday. I would have gambled on it all. We would have come up with real, you know, he was like, there was action on everything. Always wild action. There's action on that impotence court, too.

What have we got now? They were gambling. They were gambling on how long they would take to prove if they could actually do it or not. Yeah, there was this story of a guy that tried for 15 hours.

You imagine that poor fuck, dude, 15. Hours trying to get it out, trying. To get, I think, the French. To this day, I think you're allowed to cheat on your wife in France as long as you don't fall in love with someone else. You're allowed to step out and have sex, but, like, it'll get you in trouble.

But, like, a night out with the guys drinking beer has got you in trouble. Like, you're not gonna get divorced unless you fall in love, then you're out. But I'm almost positive french men can have sex with women outside their marriage and their wives don't really care. It's just french culture. You think that's nuts?

Joe Rogan
It's definitely, well, not true. France is being invaded by Muslims. Now, they're not invaded, but, like, I think 25% of France essentially lives, like, under, like, almost a form of sharia law. Now. Who's talking about that?

Recently someone's explaining that to us, like, how much, you know, because so many muslim immigrants have moved into european places. Yeah. And they're trying to change. Like, they've changed neighborhoods, they've changed the way people behave. The way they're allowed to behave.

Chris DiStefano
Yeah. I was gonna go to Dubai just three weeks ago, and, you know, it's the most progressive place I think I've heard in the Middle east. But even with that, there was certain, like, I couldn't, you know. You know, sometimes bits would joke around, like, oh, my friends think I'm gay. They said, you can't do any of that.

Do not even mention that on stage. Then they said, you know, no jokes about your government, our government. Do not mention muslim faith at all or religion at all. And if you take videos of anything, anywhere, you can be arrested without the proper permission. So really?

Joe Rogan
Like, if you take videos of buildings. Yeah. There's a kid, TikToker, who went to prison for a year. He's in prison right now. Cause he took unauthorized videos of, like, the public square in Dubai.

Chris DiStefano
Yeah. And he got thrown in prison and that hat. So all that was happening when I was about to go. I was going on the. We were going on the trip in, like, two days.

It was my girl. So how would you have to reorganize your act? So that's what I was, like, thinking about. And I was like, you know, so this was again, just three, three, four weeks ago. We were going.

I only said yes to the gig because it was my girl's 40th birthday, and she was like, what a great, like, we should do it in Dubai. I was like, I really don't want to go. She was like, it's. The show is on her birthday, April 17. So.

So I was like, all right, we'll go. And then. But I was having all this anxiety. Not even anxiety. It was more like, you know, like one of my.

You know, I have a friend who, you know, gay, gay.com. Mateo Lane. You know Mateo Lane. You know Mateo, great comic, unbelievable.com. One of the most talented people I've ever seen in my life.

Can cook comedy, great comedy. Fucking. And then, you know, I was talking to Dubai, talking to the shows in Dubai with him, and he was like, yeah, man. He was like, I would love to go to Dubai, but, like, I'm gay. I just.

I wouldn't even be allowed in. And I was like, wow, that's fucking wild. Why am I going to this place? And I'm starting to think about it, right? Even though I know the people of Dubai are progressive and cool and whatever.

But I was like, what's the point of all this? And then that day, the night before, I'm sorry, of our flight from JFK to Dubai, I ran and Israel got into that little skirmish. Remember that? Where, like, people were like, world war three, Israel is going to invade Iran. Dubai borders with Iran.

So I was like, I don't want to go. I was like, I know that it's probably safe, but I was like, I actually don't want to be. Why am I going there? Why are we going to where there's possible conflict it's bordering with the country? Even though I know Dubai will be safe, I know it's a safe place.

I get it. But, like, what am I doing over there? Why are you and I. Me and my girl going? Our kids are back home.

What happens if there is a war and we can't get home? What's the point of all this? Like, what is it? And she was like, you know what? Like, then cancel.

I just had, like, this gut feeling. And then two days later is when the Dubai airports flooded. Did you see all that? That's. My show got canceled.

My. The venue flooded. You could not get anywhere, so. And you had already canceled anyway. I had canceled it anyway.

The fear that I had had was Israel, Iran. But then two days later, it was the flooding. Was that because of cloud seeding? That's what they say, partially. I mean, not 100% that, but, like.

There was, like, a weird low pressure. Zone where they did cloud seed, but the clouds didn't move for a few days or something like that. Okay. Yeah, so. So that's.

So that's what happened is. Is it got flooded. And I didn't. I didn't go. Okay.

At all. And that's why. And that's what, you know, that's why. Christ, that's why I'm with Christmas. Okay.

Yeah. Let's wrap this up. Chris, great talk to you. Love you, too, buddy. Love you, babe.

Thank you so much. My pleasure. It was fun. Yeah. Bye, everybody.

Joe Rogan
Bye, everybody.

Chris DiStefano
Bye, everybody.

#2144 - Chris Distefano

Primary Topic

Episode Summary

Main Takeaways

Episode Chapters

1: Opening Remarks

2: Major Life Changes

3: Coping with Anxiety

Actionable Advice

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