Name: Joe Rogan Experience #785 - Dom Irrera
Uploaded: 2016-04-14T03:48:47.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #785 - Dom Irrera' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-04-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #785 - Dom Irrera' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2016-04-14. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #785 - Dom Irrera

Doo-doo.
Huh, huh, huh.
Sam in a career.
Joseph McGee.
Joseph Rogan.
How are you, brother?
For Foxit.
Good, man.
How you doing?
Great to see you, as always.
Sorry, my pool game wasn't up to snuff.
Mine wasn't either.
We both sucked.
I smoked a cigar before this podcast, during the last one, and I'm all jittery
now.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
Everything's firing.
All that nicotine, did you inhale it?
No, but just having it in your mouth and smoking it and sucking on it, you get
a nicotine high.
I feel like I'm left out of a certain club, those guys who think it's really
cool to relax with cigar smoke and all.
It makes me nauseous.
Yeah, it doesn't make me relax.
It's fun.
I like to do it, but it's a high.
They're lying to themselves.
That's a high.
It's a nicotine high.
Of course.
Letterman and those guys were into that.
Yeah, they're doing drugs.
Drugs?
That's crazy.
That's illegal, isn't it?
It's a goddamn drug den.
You know what's hilarious?
They're hepped up on something, Joe, I tell you.
But it's one of those things.
It's so common, and it's so a part of the culture, that we look at that as
being less ridiculous
and more reserved and intelligent than if someone got together in a little
shack there, like
a smoke shop, and it was smoking pot together.
Oh, yeah.
Those people, I guess, in all fairness.
I get more of a buzz from coffee than I do from Xanax.
You do?
Oh, fuck yeah.
Because Xanax just makes me feel like what I think a normal person feels like,
you know,
without the terrifying anxiety.
Have you always had that?
We talked about this before, but when did you start getting anxiety?
Second grade.
Really?
Wow.
Yeah.
Second grade.
But I'm really doing better.
My doctor says in 10 years I should be out of it.
There's a single one.
You never had anxiety?
I've definitely had anxiety.
Yeah.
But about a specific thing, the worst thing is just anxiety that you don't even
know what
it's from.
Oh, yeah.
From the core of your being.
So it's some sort of a firing error or something in your brain.
Yeah.
It's definitely a chemical thing.
Hmm.
And does anything else help it?
Does exercise help it?
Or like alcohol?
Alcohol helps it.
But the thing about alcohol is the rebound is worse than the high.
Wow.
Like if you have three hours of a buzz for alcohol, you'll have a 12-hour hangover.
Yeah, especially as you get older.
Yeah, the hangovers get rougher and rougher for me pretty much every year.
Well, I never drank when I was young, so this is all new to me the last few
years.
Like how many years?
Eight.
And I know you stopped for a while.
We talked about it.
You stopped for a while.
It felt so good.
I couldn't believe how good it feels not to have a hangover.
Yeah.
Holy shit, this is it.
But you like it.
Well, I like the whole, you know how you were talking about the ambiance of the
cigar
and the puffing and laughing and raising it up like you made a big point.
Yeah.
I like that with alcohol, that whole, you know, social thing.
I like to have a drink with you, too, because it's like we're announcing festivities.
Yeah.
Like what the-
That moment in time.
Fun festivities.
Cheers.
Cheers, my friend.
And we, you know, we both sort of agree that we're off on an alcohol-filled fun
rump.
Yeah.
Of chit-chat and laughter.
But no DUIs.
Yeah.
No DUIs.
That's where Uber came in.
Uber changed the game.
Joe, I can't take it with the fucking Uber anymore.
You can't?
Everybody's trying to convince me, like, there's something wrong with me.
You got to take Uber.
I go, I don't want to take Uber.
I don't want to get in a car with a strange guy.
I don't want to get in his own car.
I want to either get a car service or take a cab.
You're just an old school guy.
I just don't want to, I mean, it's like, and the thing that's funny about Uber
to me
is the idea, like, you know, I used to drink maybe one, two drinks a night, but
now, see,
I drink all day because I can take Uber.
I'm a raging alcoholic now.
What's funny about Uber is they, it's like the application, connecting people
to people
that want something, and those people get all the money, I think, and then they
pay the
drivers, right?
Isn't that how it works?
I don't know.
You pay in the app.
I don't understand it.
When I moved to New York, they had medallions.
They had to spend thousands of dollars to get the medallion to be able to drive
a commercial
vehicle.
Yeah.
Here, anybody can drive an Uber.
How does that work?
Well, that's why it's really crazy, because they are independent contractors.
Like, in New York, it used to be illegal.
They used to have these things called gypsy cabs.
Right.
Like, they still do.
Do you remember that one year, there was a, I want to say, more than 40 gypsy
cab drivers
were murdered.
Really?
Yeah.
But find this out.
Gypsy cab driver murders in New York.
I think they would take them to, like, bad neighborhoods and shoot them and rob
them.
So these cab drivers who were fucked, you know, they weren't making much money.
They had to take every fare they could.
And they would take these guys, or one guy.
I mean, who knows how many people actually wound up being the people killing
them.
What does it say?
1990, this story is from.
That sounds about right.
That's when I was living there.
Gypsy cab driver was found shot dead in the Bronx.
That's only one.
There was a, okay, killings are related.
So it was the sixth finding of it.
The sixth one back then.
Yeah.
I want to say it was some insane number, man.
I really think it was more than 20.
I want to say it's 40 for some reason.
Cappy's didn't get a fair shake.
All those hookers that got killed got a lot of press.
Well, they got press in New York, but this was press in 1990 or 91 or whenever
it was where
it got real bad.
Before the internet.
Exactly.
Can you imagine there was a time before the internet now?
Exactly.
I mean, yeah.
Well, we became friends before the internet.
How about that?
Yeah.
How did we even get a hold of each other?
We called each other on the phone.
I had to catch you when you were at home.
Like normally.
That's right.
You had to get up early, make phone calls before you leave the house.
You remember the first cell phones?
They looked like you could use it as a billy club.
Here it is right here.
Driving in gypsy cabs is one of the most dangerous jobs in New York City.
Since 1990, 180 drivers, an average of over two a month, have been killed while
on duty.
Holy shit.
So, it wasn't 400.
It was 180.
I mean, maybe it was, or not a 440, but maybe that was 180 when they stopped
counting during
the time this article was written.
Because this is, they're talking about 1990.
I was living in New York when this was happening, and I kind of moved there
around then.
So, it could have gotten even worse.
Do you ever miss it?
No.
Me neither.
You know, and I, do you get the guys from New York acting like they can't
understand how
you could like it here?
It's awesome.
Don't get me wrong.
I think I could adapt.
I think if I decided to live in New York tomorrow, I'd love it.
I don't think it's bad.
Yeah, but you've got your kids and the whole thing.
It's hard.
But you know what, man?
I mean, kids can grow up anywhere.
They really can.
I just don't know if it's ideal.
When you're out of them being walking around where you live than walking around.
Honestly, I think really it's better probably in a non-showbiz related city.
I think just being in this city is probably not healthy for kids.
I think kids are better off in places like Seattle, which is even if it's showbiz
related, it's
not television and film related.
Like, I feel like the television and film world is filled with so many people
out here.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's a bad business.
I was in it for a long time.
I don't mean anything against it.
But I just think that the kind of people that it attracts, not all of them, but
a good amount
of them, are really crazy.
And they're real needy, and they value a certain type of fame.
And it gets really crazy.
It gets really crazy.
We were talking about, last night, about the girls at the comedy store.
And Sophie, Sophie or Sophie, I forget, she said to me, she didn't want to tell
me she
was an actress.
She was embarrassed to say, isn't that funny?
Yeah, it's funny.
Because, well, you know, it's like I was doing a thing on stage the other night
about, we
need more actors than actors.
Please, if you know anybody back east that wants to be an actor, tell them to
come out
here.
But it's sad when you're embarrassed to say what you want to be.
There's nothing wrong with doing it.
No.
See, that's the problem.
Like, acting itself, there's nothing wrong with it.
It's not what I'm saying, there's something wrong with the profession.
It's just, there's a giant number of people who come out here that are just
absolutely
batshit crazy.
I know.
And they want, they just want everybody to like.
That's the other thing, too.
There's like this lack of a, it's very difficult when people are judging you.
It's like there's a problem with the entire design of the audition process.
Because you're creating people that are going to be exactly what you want them
to be, because
those are the people that you're going to hire.
So it becomes an incredibly left-wing environment.
It becomes, which is great in a lot of ways.
It balances things out.
But our culture is driven primarily from things from the left.
Good things like compassionate stuff like, you know, gay rights and gay
marriage and a lot
of other like left-wing type ideas that I agree with and I think are great.
But it's 100% driven by that.
So these people, if they have differing opinions, it's very difficult for them
to express it
and still work.
Like, so you get a lot of people that are terrified of stepping on anybody's
toes.
So they say a bunch of nonsense.
Like, you ever talk to people that don't say nice to meet you because they're
worried they
might have already met you?
Right.
You know what I mean?
So they, you know what they say?
They say, nice to see you.
Uh-huh.
Well, you know what I never do to people?
I never ask them what's up or what's going on.
I know that about here because people feel guilty like they have to recite what's
going
on in their lives, this whole resume.
Oh.
And I'd rather them just say, hey, man, you know, it's good to see you.
And that's the end of the thing.
It's like, I don't want to put, oh, I got a lot of irons in the, you know, Sal
from
the Impractical Jokers?
Yeah.
He was out here one night and he goes, this is before they really hit.
He goes, yeah, I got nothing going on.
I said, never say that in Hollywood.
I'm fucking wondering.
Here's what you say.
I got a lot of irons in the fire.
I don't want to jinx it.
I'll tell you about it when it comes through.
Big plans in the works.
Check my Instagram page for future notifications.
When you said you're really not part of that, part of the business anymore, isn't
it funny
that you're so busy you don't have time to do a movie?
Yeah.
It's kind of cool.
The only movies I've ever done is the Kevin James movies because I didn't have
to audition.
Yeah, of course.
It's got me parts.
You shouldn't have to audition now.
Yeah, you should.
Yeah, if you want something good.
But the process itself is the problem with it, not necessarily for me, who's
financially
independent, but the process for a lot of people who aren't, who are
desperately needing something
to employ them so they can apply their craft.
Say, I don't need anybody to employ me so that I could do stand-up.
Neither do you.
We just do it.
And we don't need anybody to employ us to do this podcast.
We just do it.
You just do yours.
I just do mine.
We all just do our own shit.
And because of that, you could be you.
You could actually be you.
Oh, the suits have lost so much power in the last 10 years.
Yeah.
Well, we're also starting to see what is this world really about.
It's about generating income.
That's it.
It's not about art.
That's why reality shows took off like crazy.
Well, your gen