Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2323 - Guy Fieri
Uploaded: 2025-05-16T17:00:25.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2323 - Guy Fieri' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-05-16. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2323 - Guy Fieri' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-05-16. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2323 - Guy Fieri

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Knuckle Sandwich is a sandwich shop in Austin.
I heard about it today.
It's legit.
My pilot calls me and says, you know, someone's got your brand out there.
I'm like, what's it called?
He goes, Knuckle Sandwich.
I'm like, go figure.
Well, in all fairness.
I heard it's good stuff.
Yeah, it's real good.
Can we smoke in here?
What's that?
Can we smoke in here?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Everything goes in here?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Whatever you want to do.
So that...
Don't shoot heroin on camera.
I think we're going to be able to pass that.
So what's happening, man?
How are you?
Well...
There we go.
I got one, thanks.
I really appreciate the invite.
My pleasure.
This is a long time coming.
I've been waiting for this.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, especially all the influence you've had and things you've done.
And I know the funny side of you.
I know the UFC side of you.
But watching the podcast and seeing all the characters, and I was just watching
the Bill
Murray interview the other day, and I just look at it and I go, man, to hear
those stories
he's talking about, Hunter, and just all that and all the stuff.
I mean, it's just, it's pretty, you got to have your mind blown by now.
Yeah, my mind's been blown out.
It's kind of overblown at this point.
It's huge.
Yeah.
I mean, I think about what you did with Trump and all that influence that you
made, and
you call it straight up the line.
You want to come on the show?
You want to do this?
Let's do it.
And took the time to do it.
I think it was a huge impact.
I think that we look at all the people that you've given a chance.
You've given them a platform.
And I think that's really, it's fair of you.
And the way you interview, the way I see it from, you know, doing a few
interviews, you
let people talk, you let them speak their piece, you continue to help them
through not getting
stuck on one thing.
You navigate them pretty well.
And it's really, I mean, it's from a guy that's, you know, in the business, not
to this
level, but guys in the business, it's, it's respectful, man.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
What is knuckle sandwich based on?
You even have a, your chain is a knuckle sandwich.
It's all, it's all has history.
Just kind of like, as I toured the museum today, chef's hat with a skull
started with
that tattoo.
One of the first tattoos I ever had to culinary gangster.
So my buddy, Joe Leonard monkey wrench tattoo, great friend of mine did my
first tattoo and he made that.
He says, I have this drawing for you.
I want to show this to you.
And that's pretty, you know, skull chef.
Let me check it out.
So I don't put a tattoo on until he draws it on first.
I have to have it on for a while.
Like, I have to look at it for a couple of days.
Like, does this resonate with me?
So that's how it started.
This way before TV, way before any of this.
And when I got on TV, when I got on Food Network, they're going to send me my
first paycheck.
You wouldn't believe how much I made that first episode.
I mean, just huge money.
$1,250 an episode.
You know, when you get started.
And I wasn't playing on TV.
But anyhow, I came back and I had all my buddies around my table.
My house was kind of like a soup kitchen.
And all my buddies, you know, come by and someone will bring, you know, crabs.
Someone will bring some, you know, whatever.
And so I'm sitting there with all my buddies.
I said, hey, I got to think of a name for my TV, like my other business.
Because my restaurant business had a business partner.
And I didn't want the checks to come to the business.
So I said, what do you think?
My one buddy, Dirty, says, and my nickname is Guido.
He says, how about you make us something to eat?
And that will give us like some food for knowledge.
And then, and I said, you know, and I'm serious.
I want to come up with a name for the company.
I got to get my $1,200 check sent to me.
And I go, hey, Dirty, how about I give you a knuckle sandwich?
And he goes, that would be a good name.
That's it?
That was it.
And it was originally that.
It was originally a sandwich with a ring on it and a sandwich made out of money.
And that was knuckle sandwich.
And then it just kind of all evolved from there.
And so all my companies go into the brand of knuckle sandwich.
But I never put a product of wine or tequila or anything I ever did.
And when we started making these cigars, and this guy that I'm partners with is
such a guru,
a guy named Eric Espinosa.
And we sat there and talked about it.
And I have another brand called Flavortown.
Like Flavortown's too whimsical and too, you know, it's got to be something.
I didn't want to call Guy Fieri.
You know, I didn't want to have my name on it.
I don't want to do stuff that, like, buy this because it's my, you know, it's
my name.
I just want to do something, you know.
And we all thought about it.
We said, cigars are that good.
And he's such a badass.
It's called knuckle sandwich.
Did you have any idea in the beginning of your career of being a TV guy?
Like, how did all that stuff start?
Because it's a weird world, you know.
I had a conversation with Jose Andres about this.
I watched it.
It's like the emergence of the celebrity chef is, like, I mean, it used to be,
like, Julia Child, like, way, way back in the day.
She was, and then.
This one?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then, I guess there was a few other people, but they never were, like,
cultural figures.
I guess Julia Child was.
She was probably the only one.
I don't know.
Well, she was really it, right?
Yeah, and that was PBS.
You know, that was PBS.
That wasn't people really blowing it up.
I mean, I watched it because I loved that I was in love with food at a young
age.
I mean, I just was, one, because I didn't really experience and like exactly
what my parents were feeding me.
My parents were really good cooks.
They weren't in the cooking business.
But, yeah, this whole food thing, I had, before I got on Food Network, I had
never watched the Food Network.
And not because I don't believe in it.
I mean, food's my epicenter of what I do.
But the last thing I was going to do, working seven days a week, 12, 13, 15
hours a day in the restaurant.
Come home and watch more food.
It's going to watch somebody make me, you know, a pot pie.
I'm like, I got enough.
Plus, I also didn't really have a true understanding of what was going on.
Knew who Emeril was.
I mean, you couldn't.
He's another one.
Remember when he had that sitcom?
His tagline, bam, like, they decided to try to put that into a sitcom.
We just had that conversation the other day.
Yeah, we just had that conversation the other day.
But Emeril's the OG.
I give such appreciation and accolades to everybody that did it before me.
There were so many people that helped pave the way in one style over another.
And some in TV, some literary, some, you know, just living the, you know,
keeping the energy of the industry alive.
Because if you're not from the industry, you don't quite exactly get what it is.
But it's a pretty, it's like understanding UFC.
You know, the bigger fan you become of something, the more you start looking at
it and just going, it is so much more than what you're watching in the ring for
the, you know, next 20 minutes.
It's really deep and there's so much more and there's so much, it's not just
lifestyle, it's attitude, it's energy, it's connectivity, it's family, it's
community, it's all that kind of stuff.
So did you, like, how does one go from being a chef to being a TV chef?
Like, what was it, did you just get an audition?
Like, did they contact a bunch of chefs?
Like, who's got the wackiest hair and who looks like they would be good on TV?
Like, how do they, how do they figure something like that out?
This is about the most whacked story in the world.
So, all right, so, never graduated high school.
Dropped out of high school when I was 16, went to France, was an exchange
student.
I'm going to give you a little bit more of the back story than you probably
want.
But I'll give you, I'll kind of give you the, you know, the quick version.
So when I got, when I came back from France, I was supposed to go to my senior
year in high school and I wasn't really super interested in going back to high
school.
I just lived in France in a boarding house and went to high school and I didn't
even speak French.
But my parents were really open-minded and I'd saved my money and they said, if
you can pass a year of French at the junior college at 16 and you can pass the
class and you can figure it out, I guess.
So I went and lived in a boarding house and went to high school.
Came back, my senior year, I just was not interested in going back to high
school.
So I went to junior college, finished junior college, went to UNLV, got my
degree, graduated a little bit early and went and ran restaurants for other
people.
And then, and I was 26, moved back to the wine country up to Northern
California where I'm from, opened my first restaurant.
Had a bunch of restaurants with a buddy, things were great, did exactly what I
wanted to do.
Wanted to be, you know, have a great wife, wanted to be a great dad, wanted to
have my own restaurant.
That's all I wanted.
Not that I was short-sighted and stuff, like big, big community person, wanted
to do a lot of, you know, community service and so forth.
My parents were that way.
So that was it, man.
I had like three restaurants, owned a couple of hot rods, bought my own house.
I was living it, you know.
And a bunch of friends came up to me, actually a kid across the street came to
me and said, you watch Food Network?
I said, no.
He said, we have a show on there called the Food Network Star.
You should go on that show.
I hadn't even seen Food Network.
I saw Rachel Ray one time.
I was at a bar and saw Rachel Ray on screen.
And I'm like, that girl's got energy.
I mean, listen to her.
And she could talk food.
She did.
She doesn't know her shit.
So that was whatever.
About six, eight months later, my wife's driving home from the city.
She says, hey, I was just listening to the radio station.
They had that Food Network Star show going on.
She goes, you'd be great in that.
I go, how do you know?
You know who I'm seeing the show?
She goes, no, they're just talking about it, like, you know, the culinary
challenges and all the things.
And then if you do it, you win a show.
What do I want a show for?
You know, doing what?
I've not been on TV.
I made my own TV commercials for my restaurant.
That was the only thing I ever did that was TV.
So none of it was appealing when they contacted you and they asked you?
I wouldn't say it wasn't appealing.
It just wasn't in my scope.
Right.
You know, it wasn't really in your plans.
It wasn't like something I was seeking.
You know, we had talked about it.
There had been many people that had come to me before and said, like, my buddy
that was the marketing manager for Flowmaster.
Remember Flowmasters?
The mufflers?
Oh, yeah, okay.
Hot rod mufflers.
Yeah, sure.
So he came to me and said, you should do a hot rod show.
You love hot rods.
Let's do a hot rod show.
What the fuck?
I mean, I know enough to be dangerous, you know, about hot rods.
I mean, I know just enough to get into the conversation where I bury myself up.
And so that was that.
And so anyhow, the show, they say make a three-minute pitch.
So all my buddies are like, you know, you got to make the pitch.
Got to do the thing.
Got to do the thing.
Got to do the thing.
And I avoided it any way I could.
And to the point where it had expired.
Like the entry time had expired.
So my buddy, my buddy named Mustard, he was on, we were on a barbecue team
together.
Did competition barbecue and all kinds of crazy shit.
And he says, did you ever send that demo tape into the Food Network?
And I said, no, I just missed that window.
And he goes, good.
I thought you were going to say that.
He says, because they opened it ba