Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2290 - Michael Kosta
Uploaded: 2025-03-14T17:00:45.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2290 - Michael Kosta' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-03-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2290 - Michael Kosta' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-03-14. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2290 - Michael Kosta

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Yes, sir, Michael.
Good to see you, my friend.
Thanks for having me and really appreciate you showing me around.
Wow, what a space you've created, man.
Thank you.
That's so cool.
Keeps going.
I was excited to show you the picture of my sauna.
And then you show me, you got an archery.
It's so cool, man.
Thank you.
That's so cool.
It's fun.
We were just singing Jon Stewart's praises before this started, but I'm so
happy he's back
at The Daily Show.
And I'm so happy he makes fun of everything.
And I'm so happy he still makes dick jokes.
Yeah.
You know, it's fun.
It's like The Daily Show seems like The Daily Show again.
That guy's a very unique dude, very unique person.
And one of the most important pieces to unify everybody.
He's reasonable.
He gets the whole big picture.
Let's stop being so fucking ridiculously tribal.
In the morning meeting, he'll come in, and we're all sitting there, the writers,
and
he just kind of shuts the door behind him, and we start talking.
But it's like a conversation with a college professor, but he's in charge.
And it's beautiful.
All sides.
This.
I disagree with that.
What about this?
And it's like, oh, wow.
It's really fun to be a part of.
And then someone will yell out a dick joke, and then that joke will make it to
the show,
too.
You know, it's like smart things and dumb things.
That's beautiful.
Well, he's never abandoned being a real comic.
Correct.
You know, which is what got him to the dance in the first place.
So he always has those instincts.
And he's the very best at, like, holding a line and, like, making something,
like, even
more preposterous just with a facial expression.
Correct.
Yeah.
And pointing out, like, these fucking unbelievably ridiculous in-your-face
hypocrisies that we
see every day from both sides.
Yeah, from both sides.
Have you ever done stand-up with him?
Oh, yeah.
We've done stuff together, like, back in the day.
Yeah.
I kind of can't remember the last time.
I was supposed to do something with him at one of Dave's things that he was
doing outside
back in the day, but I never wound up doing it.
But I definitely did stand-up with him in the clubs back in New York, and I
knew him way,
way back in the day when he was on MTV.
Yeah, I remember that.
And I think I remember one of his books was called Naked Pictures of Famous
People, which
was great.
He's a solid guy.
Like, he's a solid guy.
I don't know if he's agreeing with him, but I don't always agree with everybody.
I don't even agree with me.
Isn't that good?
I mean, isn't that the point of this?
It's like you want a couple people to be mad sometimes.
I also think we all, as human beings, need to be divorced from our ideas.
Okay.
Your ideas are not you.
You are you.
And ideas are things that you should consider.
Right.
Ideas are something that you should...
I mean, if it's going to have some sort of a real physical impact on your life
and your
family and your family's life and people you care about, I understand.
I understand why you get connected to things like that.
Right.
But for the most part, most of these ideas don't affect you.
A lot of them don't.
And yet we're so ideologically captured that we fight for these ideas as if it's
our very
nature.
You're talking about your essence as a human being.
And it's stupid.
This reminds me of a time I left my joke book on a train in New York.
And in the joke book I have, this book is important to me.
Call me if you get this, you know.
And this guy texts me and he says, I have this joke book.
And, you know, talk about your ideas.
Yeah.
A joke book is the most unfiltered, dumb idea ever.
Oh, yeah.
That's the beauty of it.
Yeah.
And I said, man, I'm sure he's reading it.
Why, you know, you're going to read it.
You're going to read a stranger's joke book.
And I connected with him.
He was very kind.
He gave it to me.
But he kind of looked at me like, are you a comedian type thing?
And I said, yeah.
But it's terrifying when that idea gets attached to you when it was just a fleeting
idea.
Right.
Yeah.
The joke book idea is the best example of that, right?
Because most of what you write is shit, which took me forever to figure out.
I was like, God, I just write shit.
Yeah.
And then every now and then a gem.
Yeah.
Like, ooh.
And then you extract the gem.
Yeah.
But I've realized afterwards, it's basically like gold mining.
Most of the time, you're not finding gold.
You're finding garbage.
And you only get to gold by going through garbage.
Yeah.
Sometimes I'll do a show and it's terrible.
New joke show.
But then the next day, the thing happens.
And I think, oh, that's because I was digging all day yesterday.
Yeah.
It's the muse.
The muse, right.
You have to show up and request the muse's love.
I like that.
Yeah.
I mean, do you ever read Pressfield's War of Art?
No.
It's really, we have a stack of them out there.
I'll give you a copy of it.
It's a small book, easy read.
Jay Larson, comedian in LA, recommended that book to me 10 years ago.
And I never tackled it.
It's really good.
I used to have a stack of them in the studio where I'd give out to guests.
Because so many comics, I was like, this is what you need.
What's the essence?
I will read it.
Also, you know what keeps freaking me out?
There's a shooting star above my head.
Yeah, there is.
Yeah.
Every now and then one will fly above your head.
That's so cool.
What's the essence, the war of art that makes it sound like it's a struggle to
create art?
Yeah.
It's the struggle against resistance, which is procrastination, which is this
thing that we
all do before we actually write, which is so weird because I love when I'm
actually locked
in and great ideas are coming.
It's one of the best feelings in the world.
It's like somehow or another, you're pulling these ideas out of nowhere.
And then it's your job to take this seed and try to go plant it on stage and
try to water
it and try to, over the course of many months, it'll become a great bit.
And they just only come if you sit there.
They only come if you sit there.
And what he is saying is that you have to treat it like you're a professional.
And you have to decide at 8 a.m.
I will show up and I will be there for three hours.
I will shut my phone off.
I will lock in.
This is what I do because I am a professional.
And you literally make a prayer to the muse.
You offer yourself to the muse.
You say, I'm here to work.
I'm here to gather ideas.
I'm here to be creative and to be open.
And you treat it that way.
Whether or not the muse is real or not, that's kind of, you can get hung up on
that.
But if you treat it like it's real, it works, which is really crazy.
I love that and I don't do that.
And early in my comedy career, I would go to the coffee shop at this time and
start typing.
And I had all these bits.
And I remember Tommy at the comedy store.
He would say, every time I see you, you have new bits.
And I would go, yeah, because I'm going.
And now it's crazy.
Life has gotten crazier.
I don't make time for myself to do that.
But I need to honor the muse, man.
I like that.
I, my move is when everyone's asleep in my house.
Okay.
Because I still, I get up pretty early for a comic.
Yeah.
You know, I'm up by eight almost every day.
Comics are unreal with that.
Right.
But that means that I can go to bed at one and still get seven hours of sleep.
So that's what I do.
So when everybody in my house kind of goes to bed early, my kids go to school,
my wife
goes to bed early.
So when everyone's asleep, it's just me and the dog, you know, and either we're
watching
YouTube or I'm writing.
And I, that's when I get my best work done.
You write by hand or you type?
No, I type.
You type.
Yeah.
I feel like I can't write fast enough by hand.
I need, what I like about typing is that I don't have to look at the keys.
I know how to type so I can make a letter.
I can make a word very quickly.
I can like, and I can like zone in to it.
But what I really like is a keyboard that I can feel like I need travel in my
keys.
Yeah.
You know, and these clickety, clickety, clickety little Mac book.
Yeah.
Those are bullshit.
Okay.
What you want is a keyboard that you don't have to look at because it's got
like little divots
where your finger sits.
So I use a think pad and think pads have the best keyboards.
They have travel.
Each one has like a couple of millimeters of travel.
So it's a clickety, clickety, clickety.
So my fingers know exactly where to go and I can just get into the zone.
You're zoning right now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But that's how I do it.
Like I have like a whole thing.
Right.
Like the laptop that I write on, it's not connect.
It has no apps.
It never goes anywhere.
It doesn't get email.
Yeah.
It does.
I only allow myself to use the Bing search engine to find out if what the,
because most of
the time if I'm writing about something like, you know, when was this
discovered?
Yeah.
What happened here?
Who figured that out?
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That's a trap for me.
Frequently, I'll start typing.
I was working on a bit recently that all of these amazing men, these explorers,
these achievers,
the idea was, because I found out that Sir Edmund Hillary, Mount Everest's
first man to climb
Everest, he had like nine kids or something.
And the idea of the joke was, I don't even think he likes climbing mountains.
I don't even think he enjoys outdoors.
It's that he's trying to get away from his family.
So then I looked up Roger Bannister, the guy who broke the four-minute mile.
He had like seven kids.
I'm like, I don't even think he likes running.
He's just trying to run away from his family.
But I remember writing that bit.
And it's a funny bit.
There might have been an Elon thing there.
He has a lot of kids going to Mars, whatever.
There's other stuff.
But I would keep getting sidetracked by these Googles, right?
I'd start typing a bit.
Now I'm on Sir Edmund Hillary's Wikipedia page.
Now I'm gone.
And that's a trap.
That's tricky.
It's procrastination.
It really is.
And you can get locked in.
So the discipline is to keep it, stay on the bit, Costa.
I would play this stupid game with myself.
I was like, I'll just go on YouTube real quick and see if I get inspired by
anything before I write.
And then I'm watching two hours of muscle car builds.
Right.
Right.
Oh, dude, it's wild.
Watching people turn their Land Cruiser into an off-road vehicle.
I would do motorcycle handlebars.
You know, I would find my motorcycle and then there would be like 20 different
handlebars builds and stuff.
What kind of motorcycle did you drive?
I have a Triumph Bonneville 2011.
It's in storage in Pennsylvania now.
I take it out in the summer a lot.
Where did you drive it?
In L.A., that was what I used all the time.
You ride a motorcycle in L.A.?
I did it forever.
Holy