Name: Joe Rogan Experience #906 - Henry Rollins
Uploaded: 2017-01-27T01:29:17.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #906 - Henry Rollins' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-01-27. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #906 - Henry Rollins' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-01-27. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #906 - Henry Rollins

I appreciate it. I'm really looking forward to it.
Two, one, boom. And we're live. Henry Rollins, we are live.
All right.
I like how you do the one ear off. That's the Jim Norton approach. He likes
that.
Yeah, I've always done it this way, so I can hear the room and hear me as well.
Keep your eye on the door.
Yeah, yeah.
One of those guys.
So listen, man, I heard you on Ari Shafir's podcast. Ari's one of my best
friends.
Yeah, he's a good guy.
I love that guy.
Yeah, he's funny.
He is very funny.
We were both doing his thing at that club, right?
You tell the story?
Yes.
And I saw yours, and I think I did like the month after you.
So I saw yours on the internet, and then I did one, and he's the host, and that's
how I met him.
This is not happening, yeah.
Yeah, that's it.
And didn't you guys meet somewhere?
Yeah, last year in August at the Fringe Festival.
He was doing like 30 nights there, and I was doing like five.
And so I guess the agent said, hey, do this thing with Ari.
And I went, sure.
And so he met me in the lobby where I was staying, and he brought his gear, and
we just did it.
Yeah, it was cool because there was background noise.
You could tell you guys were doing it.
Yeah, we were in the lobby of a hotel.
Yeah.
We were getting revelers outside.
I mean, that whole part of Scotland is full of people for 30 days.
It's amazing.
Well, what was amazing is the way you're living your life, man.
It's really fascinating.
Oh, thank you.
And the conversation that you guys had, it really blew me away because you're
really doing it.
You know what I mean?
I'm trying, yeah.
You're really doing it.
Like, you pick a spot on a map, and you just fucking go there.
Yeah.
You don't know anybody there.
Nope.
You go by yourself, and you just fucking hang out.
You see what happens, yeah.
Yeah, and that's usually, like, say I'll go to a place like Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia,
for like five days or whatever.
For two days, you get a tour guide just so you can get the history, like this
museum, not that one, this temple, not those two, just whatever.
And what I always try and do in a place like that is get the tour guide and
break them.
And I'm like, okay, so tell me about the corruption in your government.
Well, sir, we don't have any.
Ma'am, I'm going to ask you one more time.
And, you know, by the afternoon, they finally submit.
I'm like, okay.
And, like, when I was in Mongolia, the woman, by the end of the day, she said,
you know what, I called this guy.
He's like this total, like, insurgent, like, rebel guy.
He wants to meet you.
And I'm going to be the translator because, you know, he and his guys are
starting movements in this country to overthrow the government, and he really
wants to meet you.
I said, I really want to meet him.
Because they're rebelling against the government who's selling out that country
for the titanium, the copper, all the mining.
I think to some Ivanhoe, some Canadian extractive firm.
Anyway, we go, like, an hour out of town to some, like, spy bar where there's,
like, nobody.
And you walk in, everyone's like, you must be on the up and up.
And I sit at this table with this guy just because I was able to take the tour
guide and be like, tell me everything.
And I'll do that for a couple of days and try and get a real understanding of
where I am.
And then I just leave the hotel or the tent, whatever I'm staying in, with my
camera, my backpack, with some water.
And I just start walking.
I go, well, here's the street.
Look at that slum or that village or that souk or that bazaar.
In I go.
And so far, all ten fingers still work.
And I've been to about 100 countries in all seven continents.
And the only times I've almost been killed, which was twice, was America.
By comparison, the rest of the world has been very friendly.
What were the places where you were almost killed in America?
In California a couple of times, nearly stabbed to death.
And a guy shot at me and my friend.
And he killed my friend but didn't kill me.
And so that was real close.
You know, that's real.
But the rest of the world, by comparison, I was in Pakistan when Bhutto was
assassinated.
She was killed in Rawalpindi.
I was in Islamabad, like a few miles down the road.
And I was there for a week because the airport shut down.
And I went outside every day.
And no one, they just asked if I was lost, if I needed help getting back.
They thought I was like a journalist or embassy.
I went, no, I'm just a traveler.
And they said, basically, sorry, you have to see our country in this state.
I'm like, no, you know, I don't get to judge.
And so I've had travel experiences all over the world where I'm met by just
amazing generosity and kindness and humility.
And it informs kind of how I comport myself.
But that's what I try and do.
I try to live an eventful life.
Like, I work at it.
It's not by chance.
Like, you give me six weeks off or I know I'm clear.
I just whip out my high-res GIF file of the map of the world.
And I pick one country and go, okay, then I'll just go east from there.
Like China, Mongolia, Bhutan, Tibet, Vietnam, back to L.A.
And I'll just go do that.
I want to get back to this.
But what happened with your friend in California?
Is this the same sort of a thing where you just wanted to check out a place?
Oh, no, no, no.
We were robbed and the guy started shooting.
And the guy killed my friend and shot at me and just missed me very closely.
But that was a big turning point in my life.
I mean, that changed everything for me.
When was that?
25 years ago.
But, you know, it changes everything that you think about everything.
I mean, I think everyone goes through trauma like that in their own way because
it taps into everything you've ever done in your life beforehand.
But that was, you know, not to be crass, but that was a game changer.
But on the bigger topic of, like, danger, the world is a dangerous place, as
you know.
But at the same time, I don't think it's to be feared because then you don't
get anything done.
I mean, you live in America.
I live in America.
We're the roughest room I've ever been in.
I mean, we're a coast-to-coast Phillies flyer game.
You know, we are blood and teeth on the ice.
I mean, we are because of freedom.
We're very free.
And people just, you know, walk up and, you know, smack you.
And I've never been to a country as free as America.
I've been to countries that were way more hectic, like don't get caught outside
at night, like, you know, downtown Nairobi or, you know, parts of Russia are
kind of scary just because they're living hard.
But as far as a place where anything can happen, America is, like, easily the
hairiest place I've ever been day to day.
Really?
Baghdad was intense.
I was in Iraq for a few days.
But that wasn't real.
I was there on a USO trip.
So you're just kind of camping out in the green zone.
What initiated this crazy thirst for travel, this wanderlust that you've got?
Is this something you've always had?
It's a combination of things.
When I was young, I was born and raised in Washington, D.C.
And I lived down the road from the National Geographic Museum with a big whale
in the front and the Smithsonian.
And whenever there was a snow day, my mom, she worked for the government
downtown.
She'd like, I'd get on the bus with her and we'd go downtown.
I'd spend the whole day at the Smithsonian.
Dinosaur bones, astronauts, you know, all that kind of stuff.
You know, it's fascinating.
And my mom would save up her meager pay and she would save up for years.
She was like art nut.
So we'd go hit the museums in Italy, go to the museums in France, go to see all
the islands in Greece, go to England, see the National Museum, look at
Shakespeare and Chaucer's handwriting.
And so by the time I was a little kid, by 11th, 11 years old, like fifth grade
or thereabouts, I'd been, you know, to Greece and Italy and England and
different countries.
And so I kind of wanted more of that.
And when you grow up with National Geographic magazine, you look at the pyramids,
you look at the Sphinx and you go like, I want to see that.
Like, that doesn't look real.
And then eventually I did go to all those places.
You know, I stood in front of the Sphinx more than once in the Great Pyramid in
Giza.
It's bigger than you think.
It's like you kind of just, it hypnotizes you, stare at it all day.
Have you been recently?
I haven't been for a few years, but I've been there like three times.
I want to go, but it's, I just keep hearing sketchy things about Egypt right
now.
Yeah, yeah, it is sketchy.
It'll always be sketchy because their GDP is you showing up and going to the
pyramid.
It's like Las Vegas, but pyramids.
Like you can see all, you can see your hotel from the pyramid.
They've made a highway that goes from the cluster of hotels, right?
It's like the Giza highway.
Because like, what do you want to see?
The pyramid.
And so they take you right there, like seven minutes.
You're standing in front of the Sphinx and people are trying to, you know, sell
you stuff.
I would go without hesitation.
You wouldn't have a problem.
Well, I need to go.
A buddy of mine, he's been on the podcast, his name is John Anthony West, and
he's created
these incredible DVD series called Magical Egypt.
He's an Egyptologist, like one of the most knowledgeable guys I've ever met in
my life.
Yeah, there's a lot to know.
I mean, you can spend your whole life just studying one dynasty.
There's so much.
Yeah, I'm just a casual fan.
Yeah, well, I was planning on going with him, but unfortunately, he was just
diagnosed with
stage four cancer.
A lot of you might not know about that.
If you do know and you hear about it, you can Google it, but I put a link up
before to
try to help him.
That's sad.
Yeah, not good.
He's an older gentleman.
He's been trying to educate people on Egypt for a long time because he's a
scholar when it
comes to ancient Egypt, and he's one of those people that's actively trying to
kind of rewrite
the history of Egypt as far as how far back it goes.
They've got some pretty rock-solid evidence to point to the idea that Egypt is
a civilization
that was probably very, very advanced many, many, many thousands of years ago,
and then
some sort of a natural cataclysmic disaster, probably asteroidal impacts or
something like
that, around 10,000 years ago, sort of reset society and civilization, and then
they rebuilt
from there with whatever was remained.
That's interesting.
I mean, they benefited from having the Nile, because the Nile, the water's rich
with nutrients,
agriculture was huge, and people lived good lives.
You know, the Nile, it's massive.
There's parts of it that are still like a lake, and then when you see it like
in northern Uganda,
South Sudan, like right when you cross the border, you go across this river,
like, you
know, Category 5, whitewater roaring.
That's the Nile.
Wow.
I mean, it has a lot of different faces to it.
Now, this wanderlust that you have, this like crazy touring thing where you
just pick
out a spot and go, how long have you been doing that?
Well, I did conventional, you know, I used to do a lot of rock and roll, and
rock and roll
will get you all over Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, places like that,
but it won't
get you to Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Mongolia necessarily.
And so in the 90s, you know, I'm like anyone else in this business, you do
every interview,
and they say, you're pretty well-traveled.
And I always have to say, well, caveat, I've never been to the African
continent.
And then one day I went, well, why not?
And so I did some research.
What do you got to do?
You got to go get a bunch of shots, like a lot of them.
Makes you sick for like a whole day.
They put so many vaccines into you.
And so you go to the travel doctor, and you show them what countries you're
going to.
I go, well, and they just line up syringes, and they got on either side of me,
and just
like, just, we're just Charlie horsing me in both arms.
And they said, now you're, now you're ready to