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Joe Rogan · 2024-06-27 · 2h 59m

Joe Rogan Experience #1969 - Sam Tallent

Comedian Sam Tallent and Joe Rogan riff for three hours on the stand-up grind, religion, conspiracies, mad honey, and the Austin comedy scene.

Joe Rogan Experience #1969 - Sam Tallent
The guest

Sam Tallent — Stand-up comedian and author of the novel Running the Lights; from Colorado and deeply involved in building the open-mic comedy scene around Rogan's Austin club.

The gist

Sam Tallent joins Joe Rogan for a loose, freewheeling comedy hang that touches almost no single topic for long. They trade road-comic war stories about eating out of dumpsters, sleeping in bathtubs, and bombing at college gigs while chasing the dream, then pivot into religion, cults, atheism, and the Dalai Lama controversy. Mid-episode Rogan brings out psychedelic 'mad honey' from Nepal and the two sample it on air, with Tallent noticeably feeling it later. The back half spirals through nature's brutality, UFO and ancient-alien lore, gold, the pyramids, cannibalism, and the Bud Light / Dylan Mulvaney culture-war discourse. It closes with Tallent plugging his novel Running the Lights and his shows at the club.

Big reveals

  • Tallent says there's video of him as a toddler doing a stand-up bit, and he has no memory of ever not wanting to be a comedian.
  • Tallent describes grinding as a young comic by eating croissants and bagels out of 7-Eleven dumpsters and riding Greyhound buses to gigs.
  • Rogan brings out 'mad honey,' psychedelic honey from Nepal, and both try it live on the show; Tallent feels it kick in over the rest of the episode.
  • Tallent reveals comedian Doug Stanhope is the reason his novel got noticed, hand-delivering copies to other comics.
  • Tallent recounts cutting from 320 to 275 pounds in weeks for high-school heavyweight wrestling, once urinating out 8 pounds of retained water.
  • Rogan discusses a jiu-jitsu lawsuit where a man's neck was broken in a roll, leaving him paralyzed and awarded $46 million.
  • Rogan lays out Zecharia Sitchin's Anunnaki / Nibiru theory that aliens engineered humans to mine gold for their atmosphere.

Things worth remembering

  • Among the Amish, married men shave their mustaches but keep their beards; only unmarried men may shave their beards, functioning like a wedding-ring signal.
  • In Tibet, sticking out one's tongue is a traditional greeting stemming from a 9th-century myth about an unpopular king with a black tongue.
  • The first recorded kiss dates to roughly 1500 BC, and some researchers believe kissing began with mouth-to-mouth feeding of children.
  • The LA River is a concrete channel that funnels street pollution straight into the ocean, which is why surfers get sick surfing after heavy rain.
  • Hornets that breach a beehive can decapitate around 30,000 honeybees and eat the larvae to bring nutrients back to their own young.
  • In UFO lore, sightings exploded after 1947, the year of the Roswell crash and the fat-man / little-boy bomb detonations.
  • Only about 208,000 tons of gold have ever been mined in human history, roughly two-thirds of it since 1950, and almost all of it still exists.
  • Cleopatra lived closer in time to the invention of the iPhone than to the construction of the Great Pyramids.

Recommended in this episode

Books, products and media the guest or host genuinely endorsed here — with the buy link.

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Guest’s ownBook

Running the Lights

Sam Tallent

“buy it off my website by the way fuck Amazon buy it off Sam talent.com and I'll give you a signed copy” — Sam Tallent 02:58:38
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Zima

Coors (inferred)

“Comics were making fun of me for drinking zema I'm like I'm sorry it's delicious it looks like a 10 things about Z” — Sam Tallent 01:21:09
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The Great Gatsby

Baz Luhrmann (inferred)

“I love that movie with Leonardo DiCaprio he's the man I love the fake car like a car that didn't really exist” — Joe Rogan 02:52:24
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Succession

HBO (inferred)

“and then you have succession right yeah you know don't spoil it I'm not spoiling all right it's great though” — Joe Rogan 02:54:58
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