The Joe Rogan experience. Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. Did he?
Mm-hmm. I don't know what that's something. Yeah, I know. The whole argument of, you know, a species living long enough to, surviving long enough to actually have a facetal idol, a facetal idol, is a tough one.
It is a tough one. We're on? I think they probably have some unique propulsion system that has nothing to do with moving in one direction to another. I think they fold space and time.
Yeah. What is it? The wormhole that brings the two things together so you skip all this. Yeah, I think that's the theory.
But I mean, obviously, in practice. But then that species existing long enough, because we're getting close to it. Yeah. You know, and we're nowhere near that.
So the species living long enough to achieve that and then come here is the, you know, that's the stumbling block I have. Yeah. Well, a lot of people have that stumbling block. I think it's also the possibility that they didn't evolve in the same violent world that we did.
So that's the question, well, then what gave them the motivation to innovate and move forward? Because for us, a lot of it is survival and competition. And that's the reason why people innovate in the first place. Yeah.
It's the worst career, great innovation. Yeah. I mean, the real, the more interesting theory is that they're monitoring us to make sure that we can successfully pass this sort of adolescent phase of evolution that we're currently in. Yeah.
That's why they hover over nuclear bases and shit. Yeah. We hope we get there. It's very debatable.
Yeah. Well, listen, man, thank you for being here. Yeah. It's kind of cool to meet you.
It's fascinating. I mean, I was in high school, which is crazy. And to see you look as good as you look now, I mean, we played a video. I don't know if you ever saw what we were freaking out.
Like, this guy's like, how old are you? 77. 77. That's fucking incredible, dude, because a lot of your contemporaries, when they've, you know, even guys younger than you, they're falling apart.
And you were out there singing Jesse's Girl like you wrote it a week ago. It was crazy. That was actually a great comment. I really appreciate that because it's, I'm still very passionate about playing music.
And you know, and they say, how can you deliver a song that you played a million times because it's the energy of the audience, you know? I mean, I wrote the song to see an audience react like that to it. It's pretty difficult to just sit back and go, you know, so it charges me up to. Well, it's nice that you still enjoy it and appreciate it because I think even though it's the dream for everyone to become a rock star, for some, I mean, for some people, something happens along the way and they just get so accustomed to it and they get, you know, worn out by it and then they don't love it anymore, which is crazy.
I know. Well, I obviously depends on the person, you know. And it depends on whatever experiences they have. I've had pretty good experiences.
And I just, I've always wanted to do it. You know, I mean, since I was 11 years old when I first saw and held my first guitar, that was what I wanted to do. And really, it's kind of centered around playing guitar, although that's not what I'm necessarily known for, but that's what I enjoy the most, you know? And when I started to write that kind of changed everything for me too.
You know, it gave me a great forward focus rather than just playing but going somewhere with the writing. How old were you when you first started performing in front of people? About 15, 15, I started playing. You know, I had a school band together and then I got kicked out of school.
I said, I got kicked out of 11th grade. For what? What happened? I didn't show up anymore.
I just, you know, I discovered the guitar and I was having, I had serious depression when I was a kid. I didn't still deal with it, but I was failing in the only arena that was available to me at the time, which was school, you know, with friends in school and work and all that school work. And I just wasn't doing well and it was really dragging me down and I started, discovered the guitar, started staying away from school because I couldn't face going to school. But you know, instead of playing video games and getting stoned, which wasn't available to me at that point, I was reading Robert Block and August Erlith and great writers because I loved horror and playing the guitar and that was my education really.
That's what I learned to read and write, you know? That's what I took out of school. Where were you living? I lived in Australia until I was 10.
And we moved to England until I was about 13. That was a big, that was a game changer for me. Because your accent is weird. It's like it's all over the place.
I'm trying to lock it in. What the hell is going on? No, there's some words I can't say with American accent. I can't say Australia without, with an American accent.
This is not possible. Yeah, we moved to England. That's when I discovered girls and guitars and that was like, this was the beginning for me. It was a band called Clifford in the shadows, Clifford in the shadows that were before the Beatles.
And yeah, it was, and then I moved back to Australia and then I went to Vietnam for a couple of months. It was in Vietnam, 68, 69. There was promoters in Saigon and Da Nang and they were looking for the closest occidental country was Australia. So the GIs wanted to see girls that reminded them of home.
So it was on, we had a couple of girls in the band. They would hire you. And you could tour Vietnam during the war zone. Wow.
It was pretty insane. We were there for about four months. What was that like? It was insane.
I thought, oh, great. We'll make money, you know? Of course we didn't make any money. We spent it all at the PX and we weren't making much money anyway.
We based out of Saigon and Da Nang and we toured from Cameron Bay up to the DMZ. We were at the DMZ, the Tet after the Tet where they crossed over, the vehicle and crossed into the cities and everything and like then the big assault, you know, the Tet assault. We were there, I was two miles from the DMZ on that next Tet. And I remember near Z and the parachute flares got going off like this and there's like a line of guys heading towards us.
And it was freaking freaky. You know, they kept them from Bay, but we got shot at and rocketed and we'd be planned and we'd be mortars landing. Shit. We befriended some Navy guys at Marble Mountain which is outside the Nang and we went back there for, to give them a free show, you know, because they were so appreciative, you know.
I mean, they loved seeing the girls, but they wanted connection with home, you know. So they took, taken into the tents and we'd play Hendricks and get stoned and you know, I mean, even though we were Australian, there was a connection there. And so we met these guys, maybe really got along well and we stayed overnight with them and we went out and we all got in the bunkers, in the perimeter bunkers and I stayed in the radio shack and we got attacked and I'm throwing mortars down the freaking tube. The radio shack and it was, it was throwing mortars.
It was freaking, as it was before, you couldn't do any of this now. This was 1968, 69 and it was, you know, you see traces going off of the guys, the rest of the bamber and perimeter bunkers and it was, it was pretty insane. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. If you're thinking about building a website, you should try Squarespace.
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Holy shit. We actually went up on a mission and a Apache helicopter too. Because they said, you guys want to calm them? We're like, yeah.
But it was, you know, it was pretty hairy. Holy shit, man. That's got to be insane. When you're over there, we're like, what the fuck have I done?
It was fear. Sorry. I went down the wrong way. It was pretty much a fear factor at all time.
Holy fuck, man. You know, we slept with, hang on. As you get older, you get a dry throat. We slept with a lot of times where the GIs slept in there, you know, their Hooches and wake up with dust.
Is that you over there? Oh, yeah. There we are. Holy shit, man.
That's what we slept in the Hooches a lot of the time. How old were you then? I was like, 67, 68, 67. I was 18.
Wow. Wow. Yeah, and those jeans hadn't been washed in about three months. You had to be like rethinking that decision to go over there.
I was there and it was okay, we make the best of it. I mean, it was, you kind of fall into a mindset, although I wasn't, you know, I wasn't going out, you know, shooting with the GIs and you fall into a mindset there that everything's legal, you know, anything goes. We did some pretty nutty things. At one point, we were standing in line with 40 other guys in a, you know, a hut and being serviced by this one, one Vietnamese hooker and it was 40 guys waiting for one hooker.
Yeah, it was a ton. Holy shit. And there was nothing much to do but smoke, you know, I smoke dope, start smoking dope there. That was the first time?
Yeah. But I haven't, I haven't, I haven't really been a dope, you know, but I did there and it was kind of considered just a thing to do. Everybody was stoned, all the soldiers were stoned. All the time.
Yeah. Wow. You know, the last thing I want to do is be high in a war zone. Dude, we were in a, we were in a, we were in a train, right, which is a beautiful beach town and they go there for R and R because they could surf, right?
But it was still dangerous. And we were in a, we say in these, sometimes if we weren't with this, staying on an army base, we're saying these old villas that were all French villas that were once beautiful and now we're rat infested, you know, I mean, we'd be sleeping on cots and rats would be gone underneath. We got stoned. I remember when I was going to stone and the next thing here, machine gun right outside the house and you hear the guy goes, hit the lights, hit the floor.
So lights go out and we all hit the floor. And he didn't know what was going on, but when you're stoned, it's like, oh my God, it could have been anything. Holy shit. It was, it was freaky, but that's being stoned helped you deal with it, you know, not have the constant fear, although when the fear hit, a few stones, it's like you go over the, over the top, you know, but it was just the way we deal with it.
I remember, I remember we'd be playing for the truth, you know, we'd be playing on the back of a truck and we played in, in, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, fire bases. We didn't, we all thought it was going to be like a Bob Hope tour, you know, you're coming to fleet of helicopters, you play it, you know, they were sitting in bleachers, they'd fly out, you're getting a helicopter fly away, it was nothing like that. It was just a guy out of Saigon that hired, hired us and, um, uh, I was like, I was talking about, I get lost very easily, I had ADHD and there's so much awesome shit around here that I'm going to go over. Um, we're talking about getting stoned and, uh, yeah, and we were sitting on a, on a, on a, on a backup truck and there's the guys sitting there on their helmets with their M16s, right?
Just watching the show and we finished and this guy comes up to me and he's stoned out of his head, you go, I'm going to go out and see what I can kill him out, man. And he put this helmet on and walks out and goes with the, with the company, but it was just bizarre experiences like that, but now I look back and go, what the fuck was I thinking? You know, it was, uh, it was unreal and it's so weird because I remember Arthur C. Clark telling the story about how he's sitting with a guy on a plane.
He said, what do you do? He said, oh, during the war and he went on for two hours about what happened during the war. And he says, what do you do now? He says, I'm sure and sales me.
And that was it, you know, like what he does now was a, yeah, but the whole, the war experience, you know, it's, it's, it's, you can go on forever because it's so much happens and it's such a, in a space so much has lived, you know, and the fear is, uh, kind of when having that much, that much fear constantly is, is, is pretty taxing. And now it wasn't, we weren't even going out and shooting. Although we did, uh, we'd shoot everything from 45s to tanks and we, and um, you know, we'd be driving along and get shot at and like I said, we'd be playing in the rockets or the mortars would start landing and they'd hustle us into a, into a bunker. But it was, uh, you know, we weren't actually going out like those guys were in walking point, you know.
Well, that was also one of the strangest wars ever because it didn't make any sense that why we were over there and then when the soldiers came home instead of being greeted like heroes like they were in World War II. Yeah, I mean, it was, uh, it was really a terrible for them because I know it's meeting them over there. Like, oh, you know, you think, oh, when they get over there, probably, yeah, we're here, we'll do a job. You know, all the ones I met were, dude, I know why we're here.
I don't know what I'm doing here. All of them while they were, you know, fighting. So it's, uh, it was a, it was a bad war for sure. No, one of the worst wars ever.
And these guys coming back from that, it was just that, that experience just must have been so different because you're over there, you're killing people, you don't know why you kill people. And then, then you're in the grocery store like that scene from, uh, what's that movie? You know the movie I'm talking about? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, hurt locker.
Remember when a guy comes back, he was, uh, you know, uh, diffusing IEDs, he comes back of these walkers at the grocery store and he's like, what the fuck am I doing? Like the contrast between the two places is just too much. It's too crazy. Yeah, it's, my mom said when I came back and I picked me up at the airport, she said a car backfired and I like jumped and I don't remember it, but she said, you know, my eyes look kind of haunted.
How can I imagine? It took me a while to kind of get through it. Did you see people die over there? Um, we saw trophy albums, which were kind of scary.
They said a lot of the guys kept trophy albums where they photographed like body parts or a guy that had a 50 millimeter shell. Girl that we said, you know, and it was pretty freaky. Um, the leader of the band actually died when we got home from a disease he picked up over there, a lung disease died at 25. Well, it wasn't.
Um, his name was Pete Watson. He was the leader of the band. I was a guitar player in the band. I wasn't a lead singer or anything.
And he, um, he must have gone somewhere where we didn't go on the days off and, you know, picked up something. Just some jungle disease? Yeah, the doctor said he'd been anywhere exotic lately. He said, I just go back from Vietnam.
Why? He said, well, you got this thing in your lungs that is pretty rare. So, you know, I don't know if it was Agent Orange or if it was something he picked up from, you know, whatever was in Vietnam that, yeah, he lasted about a year. Oh, wow.
Unfortunately, none of you guys got it. Yeah, we all, we all recently got, you know, just actually isn't, but it was okay. That, yeah, he's weird. I was looking up at the other day and it's, uh, didn't realize he was so young when he died.
You know, he was older than me then. So, seemed like an older guy, but he was only 25. Wow. How much time in total were you over there for?
About four months. Holy shit, man. And there was a point where they wanted us to go play in North Vietnam. He said, we'll keep the choppers going.
There's a troop over there that wants you to come and play and we'll keep the choppers going. So, if we, if we're going to trouble, you can get, you know, and luckily he said, no, we're not doing that. The weight is over. Football is here and so is DraftKings.
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Enough of that experience. What was the decompression like when you got back home? I don't really remember because it's just one of those. The hardest thing for me was that I'd thrown a mortar down and I'd hit somebody and they came in the next day and said, Hey, you got one.
That was to still has a place, hard place to land in me. That's really the one thing I brought back with me that I couldn't really find a place for that to land. It still seems like years ago, another guy another place. Explain to me how this is happening.
Where are you? Were you throwing these mortars down? I was in a place called Marble Mountain outside Da Nang and it was a Navy encampment on the beach. I was in the radio shack.
The band members were in the perimeter boxes. It was like the movies. Radio came in. Actually, I was seeing movement over here, checked for friendlies.
They said, No, no friendlies there. They said, Hey, you want to throw some mortars down too? It was John Waintine. As a young kid, I didn't really understand what I was doing.
I said, Oh, yeah, let's fire a gun. I threw the mortars down about five or six mortars. I could have easily lost a hand. You cut that kind of thing.
And then came in the next morning and said one of them had hit a VC. Wow. How long did that sit with you for? How long did that sit with you for?
I think it's still there. I mean, it doesn't, it's hard for me to kind of face that I was responsible for the end of a life, even though it's distant and it's war and I didn't really have anything to do with it and didn't really know what I was doing. But as a kid and playing, like I said, John Waint, but it was, it's pretty heavy. When I think about the reality of it.
Did you read any songs about that experience? No, I wrote about it in my own biography, but it's not really, well, not yet hasn't been so material. Yeah. Because it seems like there's probably something there.
Oh, yeah, there's definitely something there for sure. I have a, I mean, not to commercialize it, but I have a record new record coming out that deals with, which probably could be elements from that it deals with getting older and, you know, like my first album, Working Class Dog was, I was 29, 30, it was all about getting laid, you know, because that's all the guy thinks of and that's what you're right about. But as you get older, there's other things to think about. So there's, you know, getting older, you know, the thinking of death isn't somewhere out there.
And so you write about stuff that I think about and that's what I've been thinking about. You know, sex is still in there, but not as much as it was when I was 29, I was 30. Of course not. Yeah.
And that's kind of amazing because when you were young and when you first started on this musical journey, there were no 76 year old rock stars. It didn't exist. And it was thought to be a young man's game period. And when people got to be a certain age, they just stopped playing.
And you know, the Rolling Stones were like sort of the first to defy that. Yeah. And I remember in 88, they put out an album and it was a big deal. They got the Rolling Stones put out a new album.
This is crazy. These guys are going to go on tour. This is crazy. I know.
And they just recently said, I don't know if I can do it anymore. Keith's dead, right? I've recently now. I saw them at a Circuit of the Americas, the racetrack out here.
It was like 100,000 people four years ago, three years ago, whatever it was when they played in Austin. It was fucking incredible man. Mick has two trailers that are just gym equipment. He has two huge tractor trailers and the inside of it is just a gym.
That's awesome. And that guy works out every day just so he can keep doing it. Yeah. I mean, he's the inspiration as far as how far you can push it.
He's the canary in the coal mine. The last, I mean, the last album, he sounds incredible. He's like, he's 18. You know?
Paulie has now started, you know, I love Paul McCartney. He was the guy I looked up to as a kid, you know, and he's gotten to get a little, you know, a little weaker. But, but he's still amazing. I mean, to me, he's one of the great rock voices.
Oh, for sure. But Jagger, it's crazy. I mean, he still sounds the same. Not just sounds the same, but when he's on stage, he's moving.
Non-stop. Non-stop and dancing and moving and singing with emotion. And it seems just like when I saw you perform Jesse's Girl, like he's singing it like he still loves it. He still appreciates experience and never got jaded by it all.
Yeah, I think, I mean, I saw an interview recently with him and he said, and the guy said, you know, do you feel different? Because, you know, you've been this all your life because, yeah, I feel different than other people because of it. You know, I feel separate from them. And I understand that there is a degree of that that just happens because it's not normal to get up in front of, you know, a thousand, a couple of thousand people and have them want to be there and to be with you and to see, you know, it's, I guess that's kind of the element of everyone wanted to be a rock star is, as an actor, you're not an actor's done on film or whatever and then played, you know, but the rock star has it on record, plus he's got it live.
That live connection is so, I think what everybody kind of looks at in the end as far as that's what I'd love to do. Yeah. It's had all those people. Go, yeah.
Well, it's also that experience is such a positive experience for everyone. Totally. For you, for them, it's when you, when I go to a live concert, I'm always amazed at how good it feels. Like there's a, it's like you're on a drug, like you're feeling it.
It's like everyone is loving the music, the sound, the performers there. And the fact that they're actually right there, there's so much going on that it's like you walk out of there like that was fucking awesome. I know I feel like it's kind of taking the place of, of church, you know, where we go to commune with, with our fellow, you know, humans and we're all, it's different. The sports event is sports event is generally two sides.
Right. But when you're at a concert, everyone's pointing the same way. Also, it's all positive. Like if your team loses, you don't leave there and dejected.
Yeah. If you're there to see, you know, fill in the blank, whatever band and you leave there, like fuck, that was awesome. Yeah. And actually, our job is to give the audience 90 minutes, two hours of freedom from the crap that bothers them during the day.
Yes. And it frees us too, frees me when I'm, I don't think of all the shit that, you know, that the monkeys talk in my head. So it's a mutual, you know, mutual good feeling. Yeah, 100%.
And it's also, it's like such a uniquely positive thing that you can give to people. And if you can perform to your fans every night, the amount of positivity you're spreading and the amount they're receiving and you're receiving is just what a unique life. Because the average person will never experience what you experience on a normal night. Yeah, that's probably true.
I think there are different, very, you know, versions of that. I mean, like you're, you know, you understand that. You get a lot of attention for what you do, you know, it's basically somewhat, in somewhere inside you going, someone's noticing me what I do. I'm not just, it's not just, you know, because we create art, art, art, we create art because we just have to.
Art doesn't exist to be liked. Our ego wants it to be liked. And it's our ego. I think that that whole thing charges, you know, the whole audience in charges.
But I think if you don't have any ego, you're not going to get into the business anyway. Right. And I think it feeds that. And I think it's the smart person who can try and put it into perspective and not, you know, like certainly Mick Jagger has put it into perspective.
He's certainly a time to put it into perspective. And his is, you know, a huge experience. I think Paul McCartney is the same way. It seems very, it seems, you know, considering what he's done, he's amazingly grounded, I think.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, just to be not completely insane. Yeah. When you're that famous for that many years.
The most famous. I think everyone has to have an ego and the ego kind of gets you to the dance. But if I think if you're objective about it and if you're smart about it, you realize that like serving the ego is a fruitless effort. That's not the way to do it.
No, I agree. I think the way to do it is to eventually transfer from, I want all these people to like me to, I want to put all my energy into whatever it is, the craft, whatever it is and making it amazing and don't think about anything else like, Oh, they're going to love me for this. I think that poisons the well. I think I agree.
And I think that's what I meant by, you know, art just is you just create art out of, you know, because you have to because you need to. But it's the ego that makes it want to be like, you know, which is not, I don't mean that's a good thing. I just mean that's. It gets you to the dance.
Yeah. And most, most people who start out in it, they start out from a place of being an outcast and feeling like they don't get enough attention. So I want me to. And then you decide, Oh, this will get me way more attention that I've ever had in my life and it'll fill that hole.
Fill that hole, but it never does. Never does. But I think once you become centered or grounded in this experience, then your focus should not be on you and attention. All of your energy should be into what you're doing, whether it's making songs or writing jokes and performing them, whatever it is.
It's like, then it becomes, okay, now the new task with all this energy is just, let me do the best I can with whatever this thing is that I'm doing. Yeah, I agree. I think like the first, I always say the first couple of years when I went to first hit for me, I thought it was all about me. And then I realized it was all about the audience, all about the fans.
Was Jesse's girl your first big hit? I had one when I first came over here and 72 from Australia. I had a song called Speak to the Sky. That was, it got me the deal over here.
It was a first hit solo hit I'd had in Australia. And it was like number 10, I got to number 10 over here and was hit in Canada. But it was kind of a weird country, you know, Holly Roller kind of song. I wrote it for my mom.
And that's cool. Very different than what I became known for. But that was kind of the first hit. And then they kind of, they managed, I started getting picked up by Teen Magazine, which I'd never seen before.
In Australia, they didn't have them. They had one music paper and that was it. And they're asking me, you know, I'm doing all these music interviews. And I look at the finished article and it's like, you know, cuddle up with Rick.
Is Rick too tall to love? What's this? This is not what we talked about. I talked about, you know, I come over here.
I'm a songwriter and I went up, you know, I always kind of stopped. What is this? So I started, you know, my ego got the better of me and I started going, well, I'm getting noticed in America. It's a big apple.
So I should I kind of lean into this, I guess, you know, because I'm getting a lot of press. So I did it for a little while and it was going nowhere. I wasn't writing the music that, you know, I was writing songs about the guy that committed suicide, writing songs about a woman that was trying to decide if she should leave her husband because he cheating on her and they're going, where's Cherish? Where does somebody want to be wanted?
We're giving him all this press, you know, and there's no hits here after speaking to this guy. So I eventually left my managers to kind of pushing me in that direction, which was a drag because I loved one of the guys was Steve Bender, who I should still talk to, who was the director of the Elvis special, the comeback special. And I met Elvis on a plane once and I said, you know, my manager, Steve Bender, I love Steve. You met Elvis on a plane?
Yeah, yeah, going back to Australia because I was having trouble with getting a visa here. I had to prove I wasn't putting an American out at work, right? That was the phrase. Who was president back then, America?
What year was this? This was 71, 72, 73. So that was post Nixon, was that Lyndon Johnson or was that Nixon? When did Nixon get kicked out?
I think it was just Nixon. When was Watergate? Watergate was when I was over here. 74?
So it was Nixon. Yeah. Yeah, so I had the program and we're taking all these, like it was really weird. We're taking these scrapbooks full of these crappy stories in the team magazine.
Uh, I'm going to cut it off with Rick. Yeah. Look, here's the president. Look how much president I'm getting.
You know, an American, this is not going to put an American out of work. Anyway, so the planes stopped at Hawaii before the kids were to refuel because they couldn't go all the way to Australia back then. And they get on the plane and I walk in and this Elvis sitting, like right there, I was in the back of the bus back then. Elvis sitting in the first class.
He looked great. He was skinny, jet black hair. He's skin looked great. A powder blue suit on.
Look really, just, I wasn't a fan really back then. I was more into the British invasion and everything. They said, oh, that's Elvis. That's cool.
So I go back there and I had a girlfriend that's right there at the time who was a giant Elvis fan. So he did a thing I've never seen anybody do. Now when you get on a plane and you see a celebrity, I got like a hood on the glasses and they're like, they're looking down. You got up before the plane landed in Hawaii and walked back signing autographs and taking photos with all the people in the plane.
Wow. And he got to me and I went, hey, Steve Benton, my manager, because I know him and Steve got along really well on the Elvis special because the Colonel wanted it to be Elvis in a Christmas sweater singing Christmas songs. And Steve walked into the dressing room one time and his Elvis playing with his buddies. I want to put that on film, which became him jamming in the boxing ring.
And of Colonel, absolutely not. We were keeping it a family thing. And so they bluddered heads like crazy. But Elvis was on Steve's side.
And for once Elvis took, yeah, I want to do this. He didn't go with what the Colonel said. So I know he got along really well with Steve. So anyway, I'd heard that before I met him and I said, yeah, I was Steve.
He's a great guy. And I said, would you sign this to Allison? It was my girlfriend at the time. And he signed it.
I had my little tape recorder that recorded all my songs and I put the autograph in there and went through Australian customs and they saw my tape recorder and said, oh, we're going to see what's in this. It might be porn in here. Who knows? And came back in the Elvis autograph was going, they stole your Elvis autograph?
These motherfuckers. I know. Don't trust them. They passed it.
Oh, back in the day, too. They didn't have any cameras on them. No, exactly right. I know.
Darity people. Oh, that must have been so wild. His relationship with the Colonel was so creepy. That movie was fantastic.
What, Tom Hanks, kill it as the Colonel? It was just like, what a creepy relationship. And it's so common for whatever reason, for these really talented people to have some person managing them. It's like fucking creepy character.
Lulis. Yeah. And then I think the Beatles were rare in the respect that they ate. They had Epstein Epstein, how are you pronouncing his name?
Brian Epstein, that was a smart guy and on the cusp of pop really happening and did good things with them. Clean them up, told them about. The music was music. But he was one of the really few that really, I don't think he knew what he was doing, but he had a good intent.
And so he found ways to do the right thing. But I've never met anyone who read anything that the Colonel wasn't a freaking jerk. Yeah, I just don't understand how Elvis had no one who was capable of separating him from the Colonel. Yeah.
Well, if anyone could have stayed binder coated, but I think he felt secure around the Colonel like this. Yeah. Well, there's certain people that, especially because Elvis had a pill problem, right? So it was probably, he was his enabler.
He was shielded everybody from him, kept him safe and isolated. And he felt great to do. Yeah. I was great.
I was a performance, you know, he was overweight. Yeah. Ah, it was great, Daniel. Great.
One of my favorite performances of his was when he was really fat, when he was singing in Vegas. And he sounds like he's mumbling. And then what is the song that, do you remember the song, Jamie? We played it before.
Once he starts belting out the song, you're like, my God, he's good. Oh, on the piano. Yeah. What is it?
Yeah. Yeah. I'm a chain melody. My God, that's good.
And you just realize like you see him and the way he's talking, he's clearly high as a kite. It's something wrong. He's so fat. It's like so sweaty and he looks terrible.
He's like, Oh my God, poor Elvis. What's wrong with him? And then you see, you hear him sing, you see him sing and it all goes away. Like, who fucking cares?
Who cares? My God, that's magic. That's magic. That is live performance like personified.
There's something about the magic of an insanely talented person performing live. And that one Elvis song was that. And it came through all the drug use and everything. Yeah, it's pretty amazing.
I mean, I know exactly the thing you're talking about. Yeah, here it is. I can't play it. It's getting harder and harder and harder.
Yeah, we can get kicked off YouTube. We can copyright strikes and shit, you know, which is unfortunate because like, look how fatty it is. Poor guy. And that's when he was performing.
Was that when he was living in Vegas? Oh, I think it's probably, I think it might have been after that. But he was doing the Vegas things right to pay for the Colonel's gambling. Yeah, isn't that nuts?
Well, I bet it also was probably easier for him to not have to go anywhere. Yeah, he didn't like playing as I heard that. 1977. Oh, God.
So that's right before he died, right? Didn't he die in like 78? When did he die? Yeah, I think that's, yeah, I know where I was when he died.
That was two months before he died. Wow. Two months before he died. Wow.
And he got how old was he like? 40? 42. In that insane.
That's crazy. And look at you. You funch rocket dog. What do you do to stay healthy?
I work out every day, oh, six days a week. I eat well. My dad died early. My dad died when he was, we died twice actually.
He died when he was 51 and they brought him back. And he hadn't ulcer on his major artery and he's stomach. And he was worried about it and he didn't, he thought it was cancer. And so he didn't want to go to the doctor.
He didn't want to hear the bad news. You know, he thought what you don't know, you know. Right. So, and he eventually, I was at home actually when he passed out and they took him into the hospital and he's in bed and he's, but the ulcer burst and he started bleeding, coming out, blood coming out.
He was a doctor just down, couple of beds down, but he rushed him into emergency. But he did die and his heart stopped and they took 15 minutes to get it going. Oh my God. And he came back, you know, he's a real in charge guy.
Just really loving, really amazing person. He came back because he was basically a five year old. Oh wow. And I remember sitting in the backyard trying to help him remember who was who in his life.
And he, so Michelle is married to, no, no, George, Michelle is George's daughter. He's married to Nan. He go, okay, so Nan is a daughter. No, and it was just, it was a hard break and trying to get him to remember his old friends.
And so I, that stuck with me because he hadn't paid attention to it. And so I'm kind of the opposite now. I do pre-nouveau. I do blood draws.
It's pre-nouveau. Pre-nouveau is a body scan, MRI body scan. I mean, you were asking about, you know, just how I said, this is all part of it is knowing what is going on inside you, you know, not ignoring anything, which is not to say, you know, I won't sip off a curb and take my bus from you. You know, you do what you can as you know.
Yes. I have a blood draw as soon as I get home, actually, just to keep an eye on things. Anyway, so he didn't pay attention and that's, that kind of stayed with me. And so I started focusing on what I ate.
I started being aware that earlier, maybe the normal, that, you know, there is a use by a date, you know. Yeah. And I guess I started, I started running, running just happened to be a new thing in the early 70s. So I started that and I'd always loved running.
The only thing I was good at at school was actually was running in English. And so I started running and that kind of got me into the whole, well, if you're running and you may be miserable, eat well and then you want to get some upper body strength and work out. So I just started doing, I've run all my life until about 15 years ago when my knees suddenly said, no, I'm not going to do that anymore. That's pretty good.
That's something else. To get that long running is pretty incredible. Yeah, it was great. I did love running.
Like on the tour bus, I'd get up to the tour bus and wherever we were, I'd just run and close and start running around 20 minutes, one way or 20 minutes back. Sometimes I'd go into some pretty weird areas of a city and start worrying about who was around. But it was a great way to stay in shape. We actually came off the road in better shape than we went on.
We'd go to gyms and work out and I wasn't a big druggie or alcohol guy back then. So that was what I did with my time off. I was staying in shape and watched what I eat and my wife's an amazing chef and we always eat real clean, organic. And I have, she turned me on to skin routine back when I was kind of too embarrassed to tell my band members that I took care of my skin.
I got no guys' skin different from women's skin. We got whiskers, we don't need all that stuff. The skin is skin. She got me in my girlfriend then.
She got me into taking care of my skin and I still do that. I still take care of my skin. I'm actually in a trial with a company called Demi that is really unique. I've been in the trial for four years with this stuff where they take a sample of your cells from beyond your ear and they grow yourself and they pull the growth serum from that and put it into something that you put back on your face.
And have you heard of a skin medica has one? Only they use baby foreskin. Baby foreskin? Yeah, newborn foreskin.
Really? Yeah, that's what they get the growth factors from. But this is your own growth factor. You're putting that back on your own body, back on your face.
It's been pretty amazing. I would prefer your method. Yeah, I'm not into baby foreskin's on my face. I know they're doing it with different stem cells.
They're doing it with what they do is they do microneedling. And so they kind of like microneedle your whole face and then they use exosomes and they also use something called mu cells which is the latest and greatest version of it. That's outside stuff. The many stuff is your own cells which is pretty great.
Definitely. I think that's a difference. I think the thing that's different is that with your own cells as you get older, they're just not as good. Hell, you think the younger ones work?
Well, they certainly seem to like mu cells in particular which is the newest iteration of stem cell technology seems to work much better than cells that they used to get from either fat, they used to get it from your fat or they used to get it from bone marrow. Yeah, I've had the bone marrow stem cell done. I had that injected into my hips. It works?
Yeah, well, it definitely works. It just doesn't work as well. These mu cells, I mean, there's people that are going over to Saudi Arabia and doing it in Dubai. That's right.
It's always just never here. I got the Regina kind, Ortho-R-Kine. I've done Virginia. Yeah.
And because Colby used to have to go to Germany for right now. They've got bypassed the law somehow. And so I get that pretty regularly, not regularly because it lasts a couple of years, but I'm due for it now in my shoulders because that's lifting weights no matter what how heavy you go is. As you get older, where it just happens?
How long are you in town for? I'm leaving next to you after this. Oh, okay. I was going to send you down.
This is a great clinic that my friend owns in Austin called Waste2Well. And they do all the latest and greatest state of the art, all the latest and greatest stem cell technology. They have hyperbaric chambers, red light therapy, all this. And everything that's state of the art they have.
Wow. Yeah. I wish I'd known that you had a bunch of injuries. Oh, it had you come in there.
I'd make a trip back to see you. Yeah, they'd go to check that out. Russell Crockham's done all the time. He comes down specifically just for that.
So they do red light and... Oh, everything. Everything. You've done hyperbaric.
You should get one. You should get one in your house. It's a fucking game. Really?
Yeah. There was a study out of a university in Israel. They did these... Right.
They did... The protocol is 60 sessions of 90 minutes over 90 days. And they show that it lengthens your telomeres. It's equivalent to a 20 year difference in biological age.
You feel better. You have one at home? Yes, I do. And if you have a whoop strap or a ring or anything like that, it'll show that you've had an incredible recovery.
It'll specifically show from one session. You have an amazing recovery today. And it's specifically because of this hyperoxygen saturated environment of hyperbaric chamber. I wonder if that helped me sleep.
I have trouble sleeping. Do you? What? Why do you have trouble sleeping once?
I don't know. I wake up every couple of hours and haven't been able to sleep all the way through for quite a while actually. Huh. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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That's BetterHELP.com.com. JRE. Do you ever do sauna before you go to bed? Do you do sauna at all?
No, not a lot. Okay, that's another one. There was a study out of Finland that followed. Red Light.
No, no, no. The thing about Red Light is like, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I think it's good for you, for sure. But there's not robust studies on it like there is with a dry sauna.
So the Finnish have been using dry saunas forever, and they did a study over 20 years with quite a large sample group, and they found that the people that used the sauna four times per week for 20 minutes had a 40% decrease in all-cause mortality. 40% less strokes, cancer, heart attacks, everything. It's because of heat-shot proteins that your body develops when you're exposed to that. It also has an effect of increasing your endurance because it's essentially like static cardio, because as you're sitting there, and that heat, your heart beats faster, and it actually literally increases your cardiovascular output.
Wow. It's incredible. Not sure. And one of the ways that they use it is contrast therapy.