Joe Rogan Experience #2512 - Joey Diaz

Joey arrives fresh off a knee replacement and the two trade notes on recovery, peptides, nootropics, supplements, and the booming world of legal weed and sports gambling. Joey recounts his chaotic late-80s/early-90s years in Boulder, Colorado, dodging drug tests with increasingly insane schemes and shaking down strangers. They reflect on how stand-up comedy gave two self-described societal losers a path to a life they never imagined, and on the karma of helping younger comics. The back half drifts into martial-arts movie nostalgia, UFC fight breakdowns, and a long riff on Cuba's current crisis, mob history, and a potential US-backed takeover.

• Joey reveals he wiped his whole stand-up act and is starting over from scratch after his hospital stay.
  00:18:32
• Joey details his years-long cat-and-mouse war beating drug tests, ending when he poured Drano on his urine sample and blew up the testing machine.
  00:52:22
• A Boulder district attorney he randomly befriended, Bill Wise, quietly signed him off probation.
  01:01:21
• Joey admits shaking down a shop owner for $200 a week by pretending to be a witness-relocated mafia figure.
  01:06:00
• Both admit they never dreamed of wealth or fame and only wanted enough money to survive doing comedy.
  01:20:23
• Joe recounts UFC fighter Daniel 'D-Rod' Rodriguez jailed eight months in Mexico over an ounce of weed, becoming a Mexican citizen to get out.
  01:32:42
• Joey predicts a US invasion of Cuba within two weeks and Vegas-style casinos returning to the island.
  02:33:09
• Joey reveals Frank Mir's father was a Cuban casino dealer who fled to Vegas when Castro shut the casinos down.
  02:36:00

• Human growth hormone was once harvested from cadavers (until 1985) and could transmit Creutzfeldt-Jakob (mad cow) disease.
  00:03:06
• Colorado reportedly taxed legal weed around 39% and people happily paid it.
  00:13:23
• Joe argues eliminating weight-cutting in MMA would yield roughly 20% better, healthier fighter performances.
  00:32:30
• Joe says the brain runs on ketones for focus, explaining the mental clarity people report on carnivore/keto diets.
  00:46:29
• Joey now needs a solid eight hours of sleep, tracked via his Whoop, where six and a half no longer cuts it.
  00:48:00
• Fruit pectin (Sure-Jell), iodine, vinegar, and Drano are all useless folk remedies for beating a urine drug test.
  00:53:37
• Radio-frequency nerve ablation burns pain-signal nerves for 6-12 months of relief, and the nerves later regrow.
  01:44:04
• Mushroom expert Paul Stamets reportedly cured a lifelong childhood stutter with a 10-gram psilocybin dose.
  01:52:52
• Chuck Norris began in Tang Soo Do before founding his own martial art, inspiring countless people to take up karate.
  02:14:29
• Tourists in 1950s mob-run Cuba could fly from the East Coast in roughly 30 minutes for cheap vice and nightlife.
  02:34:11

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