Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1918 - John from The Boneyard Alaska
Uploaded: 2022-12-30T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1918 - John from The Boneyard Alaska' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-12-30. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1918 - John from The Boneyard Alaska' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-12-30. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1918 - John from The Boneyard Alaska

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Welcome aboard, John.
Thank you, sir.
Very nice to meet you, man.
I've been admiring your Instagram page and all the social media stuff forever,
and it's
crazy and perplexing, and so I couldn't wait to get you in here and see.
How the hell did you acquire this magical spot that you have in Alaska?
I'd have to give you some context.
Okay.
And I grew up on an Indian mound in North Florida, to give you an idea.
An Indian mound?
Yeah, my parents moved this family down from Ohio and bought nine acres on the
St. Johns
River in 1962.
This is where I grew up, and it was on top of an Indian mound.
We didn't know it at the time, so I was always out digging in the mound looking
for pottery
and was always captivated by looking for treasure, and I did that as a kid.
And then did a lot of surfing and stuff like that, as you might think, in
Florida, and got
to be pretty good at swimming.
Ended up in high school setting the American record in a 50-yard freestyle.
And there was a fellow, an assistant coach at the University of Florida named
Eddie Reese.
You might recognize his name.
He's the head coach at the University of Texas right here.
Three-time Olympic coach, widely regarded now as the greatest swim coach of all
time.
I gave him a call before we came over here just to say hello.
We're in and out quick.
But he recruited me to Florida, and I got recruited at a couple other colleges
because I was a pretty
quick swimmer.
University of Alabama, I met Bear Bryant.
The swim coach took me by the practice field and introduced me to him.
And he said, can you catch a football?
You should be a football player.
You're too big to be a swimmer.
And that was a couple hundred pounds ago, by the way, I should mention.
And he says, can you catch a football?
I said, yeah, I think so.
He said, hey, Joe, Joe, come over here.
Throw this guy a pass.
It was Joe Namath.
Wow.
He says, go long.
I start running down the field.
Threw me a ball, and I said, you've got to catch this.
You've got to catch this.
And I caught it.
He says, throw it back.
And I did.
And then went to the swimming pool and met all the swimmers and all that kind
of stuff.
And then I got recruited by Florida at Coach Eddie Reese and decided I want to
go to Florida.
That seemed like a lot more fun.
And I went to Florida.
And the first year I was there, I was an All-American swimmer.
And I got seventh place at West Point in the NCAAs.
The next year, my coach, the NCAAs were in Knoxville, Tennessee.
He says, coach says, you don't win this year.
I'm going to send you to Alaska.
Alaska?
What's that?
Never even thought about Alaska.
I got second place.
So, okay.
I'm going to Alaska.
I didn't win it.
Now, here I am.
Full scholarship.
Great family.
I had five sisters growing up.
And doing real good.
I said, fuck it.
I only got second place.
I'm going to Alaska.
So I dropped out of college.
So just because he said that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was.
Obviously, he was probably fucking around, right?
Yeah.
He was fucking around.
But the thing is, I was such a shitty student.
If I didn't drop out, I was going to flunk out.
And I talked to the registrar there by the name of Wendy Smallwood, who took
care of all the athletes coming in.
She said, man, if you don't get out of here, you're going to flunk out.
So I said, well, if I drop out, can I come back my junior year?
And she goes, oh, yeah, you can do that.
But if you flunk out, no.
I said, okay.
I think I will.
And then I saw a movie called Jeremiah Johnson.
I said, you know what?
I'm going to be a mountain man.
And then after that, I went down to the registrar's office, took the dropout
sheet, wrote Gone Fishing on it as my excuse.
Hung it on my college door.
I had played two-card gut poker game the night before.
I had, you know, 50 bucks.
I got enough.
Put that the next morning, 6 o'clock in the morning, taped that to my door, and
out the door I went with a backpack, a shotgun, and that's about all I had.
Hitchhiked, got down to I-75 and started hitchhiking.
Somebody picked you up with a shotgun?
It was in a case.
Oh.
Got me in trouble in Seattle.
I got arrested for being the I-5 sniper.
Whoa.
And that was, you know.
Sniper with a shotgun?
Well, they had to look at the shotgun to find out I wasn't the sniper because
the sniper used a rifle.
Yeah.
I just walked into that.
I mean, it was like I made a phone call at a gas station and pretty soon all
the, nearby where the sniper was shooting the day before.
So all these cops showed up.
It's the only time I've been arrested by 60 police officers.
And I was, he goes, okay, killer, where's the gun?
I go, what are you talking about?
I forgot where I put the shotgun.
So I'm wandering around the gas station looking for it.
Found it tucked between the water cooler and a wall where I'd stop to take a
drink of water when all the action started.
So they, yeah, that's a shotgun.
They took me back to the University of Seattle.
I told them I had been sleeping in the brush.
You know, and there was a board there that said riders needed to Alaska must be
mechanically unkind.
So I called that number.
I said, oh, yeah, fuck yeah, I'm a mechanic.
No idea.
But I said, what do you got?
He goes, a Volkswagen van.
Oh, luckily, that was the only vehicle I'd ever turned a wrench on.
Because earlier, like two years earlier, three years earlier, I went on a
surfing safari from Florida to California in a Volkswagen van.
We had to drop the engine out in Tempe, Arizona.
It's only four bolts, but we had a spare engine because we figured that might
happen.
So anyways, I got a hold of the guy.
I rode up to Alaska with him and got about six jobs.
Because one thing I couldn't do as a swimmer is you're always working out, you
know, swim six hours a day for six years and never made any money.
I got up there and I had like a part-time job swim coach working as a film
editor from the University of Alaska.
Some just different bullshit jobs that I could make money, man.
I'm making money.
I like this.
And so I came back after that, Joe, and I went back to college.
And I mentioned I think that I was a shitty student.
I didn't get any better my junior year.
So junior year, I go, I'm done.
I went to the NCAAs in Long Beach.
Didn't do very well.
And knew I was going to go.
They had the swim banquet at the end of the year.
And the head coach told me, by now, Eddie Reese had moved on to another college.
I think he went to Auburn.
He looked at our team and he said, I'm going to go places.
I'm going to, instead of being an assistant coach, I'm going to be a head coach.
And then he ended up at Texas, where he's been an Olympic coach three times,
countless national championships, just a good guy.
And, yeah, I know you love sports.
He's the winningest coach in swimming history.
If you ever get a chance to meet that guy, he's awesome.
And so I went back and the coach said, at the banquet, you've been elected
captain for the senior year.
I said, I ain't doing it.
I'm going to Alaska.
I'm out of here, man.
So off I went.
Went back to Alaska and I've been there since.
What made you want to go back?
Just Alaska.
It's a big country, man.
Big country.
And it's just spacious.
Just, I'm going to be a gold miner, too.
And I had done some gold panning up there and I'm going to go be a gold miner.
Well, I got there in 74 and I got a job up there as a teamster.
It was right before the pipeline.
Started hauling freight as a teamster.
And put my money into a little gold mining operation on a creek that some guy
sold me.
He said, there's a lot of gold on this creek.
Well, there wasn't shit on that creek.
But he got my money.
And so went out there and did our best for the summer and ended up going broke
mining.
And I said, well, I didn't do it right.
So, ended up getting a job, running air freight, working prior to the pipeline.
Then the pipeline started getting going.
And a buddy of mine who was a diver at the University of Florida, he came up to
Alaska.
And he got on as an air freight driver for CF Air Freight, Consolidated Freightways.
I was a teamster for him.
And he was driving a truck for the terminal manager who owned the truck for the
air freight division.
And they said, that's a conflict of interest.
You need to sell the truck to somebody else.
Let them hire a company to do it.
So, he said, you guys want to buy this truck, this business?
And how much?
10,000 bucks.
We had nothing.
We went to every bank in town.
Now, you guys are, what, 20-somethings, 24?
You got no collateral.
You want to buy a $10,000 truck?
Yeah, but there's going to be a business associated with it.
The last bank we went to was the first national bank.
And the guy standing at the counter heard us talking to the manager.
And he goes, hey, Bill was the name of the manager at the bank.
He goes, hey, Bill, I'll back their play.
And we looked at the guy.
He looked familiar because we had delivered some windshields to him.
He was a windshield guy.
He had a junkyard and spare parts and stuff like that.
So, he co-signed a note.
I knew him as well as I know you right now.
And pretty soon, the manager of the air freight company called us in.
He says, boys, your life's about to change.
And we said, what's that mean?
He goes, we just got the contract to handle all the air freight for the Aliasco
pipeline.
We said, what's the Aliasco pipeline?
Well, the big pipeline they're going to be hauling.
They're building up here.
Okay.
What's that mean to us?
He says, that means you're going to get rich.
Your first delivery is sitting over at Reed Tool.
What is it?
Drill bits.
How much?
10,000 pounds.
You've got to remember, we're getting paid by the pound to deliver air freight.
Generally speaking, a minimum piece of freight, less than 50 pounds, was like $5.40
a pound or a delivery.
We made 700 bucks or something in minutes for them to drive a forklift up,
unload the pallet, and haul it off.
And I looked at my partner, Ken, and I said, man, we're going to do good.
And within a short amount of time, within a year and a half, we handled all the
air freight north of the Alaska Range.
We're bringing in 747 Flying Tigers into Anchorage every night, three of them,
solid freight.
Transship the freight from the plane to a flatbed truck.
Get 10 or 12 trucks every morning before 8 o'clock.
Take it over to the North Star Terminals where it was unloaded.
And we weren't allowed to touch it because those guys were a different union.
And we'd just drink coffee.
And then they'd sign our bill of ladings.
And we'd be out of there every morning by about, well, before the coffee even
got cold.
It was about $30,000, $40,000 worth of revenue.
Now, you give that to a couple young guys that had never had money.
In Alaska during a pipeline, that's a recipe for disaster.
And boy, did we.
What'd you do?
Boy, did we go through it.
You know, it was crazy.
We'd walk into a buddy of mine had a restaurant named Jack O'Brien.
They called him Ivory Jacks up there in Fairbanks.
Good man.
And we'd go in and go, there'd be 200 people in that restaurant.
And I didn't know the guy very well, but we lived in the same area out in the
woods nearby his restaurant.
We'd go there on occasion.
I'd say, hey, Jack, dinner's on me tonight for everybody in here and drinks.
You go, really?
I said, yeah, really.
At the end of the night, it was like $40,000.
Boom.
I'm telling you, all of a sudden, I had a little money.
Didn't know any better.
And we spent it, and we had fun, and we built a pipeline.
A lot of stuff happened during that pipeline that people don't even realize.
That thing was only supposed to cost $800 million to build.
It cost $9 billion.
It seems like the companies that were building it, they call them the Seven
Sisters,
you know, all the big oil companies were grouped together.
And an operating company was called Aliasco Pipeline.
And it was like somebody flew over Alaska and said,
let's drop $9 