Name: Joe Rogan Experience #886 - Hank Shaw
Uploaded: 2016-12-16T02:40:37.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #886 - Hank Shaw' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-12-16. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #886 - Hank Shaw' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-12-16. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #886 - Hank Shaw

So I've never been to Woodland Hills.
It's a rare land. The land of wood.
It smells like money.
Does it? Out here? Really?
It smells like white people, where white people come to breed.
Hank Shaw, ladies and gentlemen, we're live!
Hank Shaw said Woodland Hills smells like money.
You gotta go to Beverly Hills. It smells like diamonds.
They don't let people like me in Beverly Hills, no.
Come on, man. You look respectable.
Barely.
You look fine. You're a chef.
How do you go from being a political blogger?
You were a political blogger.
Well, I was a Capitol Bureau chief in Sacramento and in other places and
covered Congress,
so I was a bit more than a blogger.
You were deep in.
Oh, yeah. I was in the room several times.
Watching this thing go down now, this atrocity of justice and voting and chaos
and everything that's going around, the Russians are attacking,
all this stuff that's going on right now, what does this feel like to you?
It feels so good to not be doing this job anymore.
So good.
I just feel like anybody that has any sort of intelligence that is a political
blogger
that's involved in it for any length of time, or not necessarily a political
blogger,
or a columnist, an author, after a while, you've got to realize you're fucking
writing about pro wrestling.
This is a rigged system.
You're writing about a rigged system, and then occasionally something like this
happens.
It used to be, I mean, what got me into it, I did it for 18 years.
Wow.
I got into it because when I got into it, the essence of politics was people of
different kinds of backgrounds
and persuasions of different regions would all meet in a room, i.e. the Capitol,
either it's a state Capitol or Congress, and solve a problem somehow.
So it was all about compromise and debate and wheeling and dealing and that
kind of stuff,
which is inherently fascinating when you're a reporter.
Like, whose ox is going to get gored?
Who's going to win this?
And like, you know, Joe needs this and somebody else needs that.
I got to give him this thing, otherwise I'm not going to get his vote.
And then at the end of the day, you'd have this bill, this transportation.
I mean, I could go on about some hilarious congressional stories and state
government stories.
Please do.
So there was a transportation bill.
God, it was a T-21 bill in Congress in 98.
And one of my guys, a guy named Frank Wolf, he was a lawmaker from Northern
Virginia.
He's not there anymore.
He's kind of a do-gooder, you know, kind of a reformer Republican guy, you know,
Dudley
D. Wright kind of guy.
And he hated pork and he wanted to get rid of all the earmarks in the
transportation bill.
But as you probably know, the transportation bill is what they call a Christmas
tree.
So everybody gets a little bit of an ornament on top of the tree so that they
can go home
to their district and say, look what I got.
So Bud Schuster of Pennsylvania was the head of the transportation committee
back then.
So Bud would shut the door.
Anybody in the transportation committee was one of Bud's boys.
You weren't a Republican, you weren't a Democrat, you were one of Bud's boys.
And so they all played a game like this.
And so, except for my guy, my guy would come out and hold press releases saying,
oh, you
know, this is terrible, you know, this is corruption, blah, blah, blah.
Nah, this is how the game is played.
You know, everybody gets a little piece.
So it comes out and the bill passes over Frank's dead body, basically.
And he holds a press release or a press conference talking about how terrible
it all was.
And I'm coming out of this press conference and one of Bud Schuster's aides
comes and says,
hey, check out page, I can't remember, it was page 123 of the bill.
So I did.
And in there was a line item that gave the residents of Bud Schuster's
congressional district
a free pass to drive the Pennsylvania turnpike for X number of years.
So basically anybody who lived in Bud's district didn't have to pay tolls for,
I think it was
two years.
Awesome.
That's ridiculous.
Well, there was a reason because the road that most of those people took to
work was
being, there was going to be construction on it for like the next two years.
Oh.
Well, that's fairly reasonable then.
Yeah.
You could justify it in front of a court of law as not being completely.
But, you know, I mean, cases were like, yeah, check out page 123, we stuck
something in there.
It's still going on too.
I mean, that's what's so bizarre that even in this age of transparency, they're
still like
stacking stuff in, sliding things into bills.
And there's very few people to watch them now.
Yes.
And there's too many things to look at anyway.
Even if there is something.
Yeah.
Even if something does get in, there's going to be some new scandal tomorrow.
Kanye West going to be visiting Trump at the Trump Tower.
And they're like, you're not going to think about the bill anymore.
Exactly.
There's too much to pay attention to, Hank Shaw.
Which is why I find it fascinating that you went from that world to like much
more of an
artistic pursuit of being a chef.
And that's something that I've like really come to appreciate over the last,
say, 10 years
or so.
And I credit the initial push to watching No Reservations when Anthony Bourdain's
show
was on the Travel Channel.
Because I always loved food.
You know, I like eating.
Everybody does.
You know, but I never really thought of food.
Dietitians don't like eating.
Which ones?
Registered dietitians.
They don't?
They don't like eating.
Well, they don't like the pleasure aspect of it.
They want everybody to just say, like, there's a fucking guy that I know who's
like, I don't
eat for taste.
I eat for performance.
He eats like oatmeal with water and he doesn't heat it up.
I'm like, get the fuck out of here, you asshole.
There's people that just, you're missing the point.
You could do both, stupid.
But the point being that I didn't think, I thought of food as being like, great.
Like, oh, this tastes good.
I like this.
I didn't think of it as an art.
And then when I watched Anthony Bourdain's show, when he would have this, like,
great reverence
for these people that he would visit, who were these real artists, and they
would put together
these amazing dishes and the enthusiasm and the passion that he had for
describing it made
me, like, super excited about it.
And then I started realizing, oh, wow, I never thought about it like this.
This is an art form.
This is just an art form, like, you know, in a way that you would, like, make a
sandcastle.
You know, it's not going to last forever.
You're making a meal.
You can take a photo of it.
It is not unlike stand-up comedy.
In a lot of ways.
It's performance art.
Yeah.
It lasts for as long as you're in the restaurant or as long as you're in that
comedy hall.
Yeah.
If, like, you couldn't record comedy where, like, you could record a meal and
film it,
like, on Anthony Bourdain's show.
I can't appreciate it at home, but I could watch you.
If you did stand-up and I laughed at home, I don't have to be there.
That's true.
It serves more people, but in a sense, the same way.
Like, if there was no recordings, it would be kind of very similar in a lot of
ways,
but shared with larger groups of people.
Right.
And in cooking, when you bring it up to that kind of a level, and I still, I
hesitate to
use the word artist with cooks and chefs.
It sounds pretentious, right?
We're artisans.
We're craftsmen.
But that's an artist, too.
Like, what's the difference?
Well, okay, so there are some people who will say that my cooking leaves you
with a deep
feeling of whatever, you know, ennui or happiness or joy or farts or whatever.
And, like, no, we're cooking good food.
We are buying product.
We are making product in a way that will make you interested in it and will
delight you in
some way, shape, or form.
And, you know, there's a very famous old Spanish chef whose name escapes me.
It said, the end of every Michelin-starred meal ends with good shit.
That's a great way of looking at it.
I just don't want to take myself that seriously.
Well, good for you.
But that's the same thing as comedians.
Like, my comedy changes worlds, changes minds.
I'm an influencer.
I think it's important to get my message out there and use my platform.
No, dude, you're joking.
You're making people laugh, ultimately.
Well, comics are freed from that today in this very unique form because of the
Internet
and because of podcasts.
So because of podcasts, comics, if you have actually something that you want to
say that
is not necessarily funny, you can do that now because podcasts are so open-ended.
There's no real structure to it.
Whereas, like, if you go on stage, and people did for the longest time, they
would go on stage
and rant about the government or about abortion or about crime or whatever, and
it would be
not funny.
And they would feel like it was something that was important.
So it had to be discussed, even though it was discussed in this weird forum
where people
go to pay to see comedy, and you're not giving them comedy, you're ranting.
And it was almost, like, respected under, like, some snobbish sort of sect of
stand-up comedy
fans and practitioners.
It was a real weird time.
I blame Bill Hicks.
Do you know who Bill Hicks is?
Yeah.
Bill Hicks did it perfectly, but the way he did it, fuck, a lot of people imitated
it
to the point where there's a famous comedy club in Georgia called The Punchline
that went
under, and it had a back room, the green room where the comics would hang out,
and everybody
wrote on the walls.
And one section of this wood-paneled wall said, quit trying to be Hicks.
And Jamie, the owner, says he's going to get me that because they tore it down.
They saved those pieces.
I want to put it up in here somewhere.
You can, by all means, make a statement, but make it funny.
Yeah, man, that's where it's hard.
It's hard to do that.
So some people, like, took the shortcut, and they just wanted to be self-righteous.
It's hard to do molecular gastronomy and make it actually soulful.
Ooh, molecular gastronomy is what he's calling cooking, ladies and gentlemen.
Not my cooking, but tweezers, foams, spherification, calcium lactate, all that
kind of stuff.
Yeah, what is that all about?
Like, some people go too deep, right?
Yeah.
Well, you're kind of the opposite.
You're like, one of the things that I've really enjoyed about seeing some of
your dishes, that
you like to cook things, like, say, if you're cooking, like, a wild pork loin,
you want to
use a lot of the ingredients that are in the area where that animal lives.
Yeah, I'm not the first person to do that, but it's one of the things that I do
a lot.
What goes together in the field or in the water or in the seashore or whatever,
almost always
will go together on the plate.
So, I mean, I've done such weird stuff as, you know, when I go grouse hunting,
what were
the grouse eating?
You can tell what was in the crop.
And, like, I'll never forget, there was this moment in, we were in North Dakota
hunting
sharptail grouse.
And the grouse had all been eating rose hips.
So, I'm like, yep, got to make a rose hip glaze on these Sharpies.
A rose hip glaze?
What does rose hips taste like?
They're a little bit like, well, they're loaded with vitamin C, so they have
that kind of acidy
twang to them.
But they're, like, imagine a cross between a watermelon and an orange.
It's something like that.
That's what rose hips taste like?
Mm-hmm.
Why don't we just buy rose hips at a store and eat them?
Because the center of a rose hip is what they used to make itching powder out
of.
That's what it looks like, Jamie?
Oh, look at that.
That's a rose hip?
Mm-hmm.
It's a fruit.
It's the end of the rose, and, I mean, that's what a rose becomes.
Really?
And there's a variety called, yeah.
How the fuck do I not know this?
I have roses.
Well, they don't always get pollinated.
Oh.
So, when they get pollinated, the best one is called a rugosa rose, and it's a
co