Podcast: Who is Joe Rogan? With Jordan Peterson

Guess the first thing I'd like to just ask you is how are you doing? I'm doing great.

So what what's great about what what you're doing? What's so good about your life?

Well right now I'm in the process of putting together my next stand-up comedy special. So I'm at the process now where I've actually put together a full new hour of material since my Netflix special which came out in October. So that's that's great for me. It's that's always a relaxing moment because it's very difficult to put that hour together.

And so how do you go about doing that? A lot of writing, a lot of performing, a lot of reading, a lot of going over notes, a lot of examining material, a lot of reviewing sets and trying to find out what I like and what I don't like. It's a long and brutal process system. It's the most fun but also the most difficult part of stand-up is the creation of new material.

So how many hours do you think you put in of work to do an hour's worth stand-up? Any idea?

That's a really good question. It's usually about, I can do I can create a solid ten minutes a month. That's usually what it is. So it takes me six months to do an hour and in that six months, on an average week I'll do eight or nine sets. So that's eight or nine either half-hour or hours of material. Sometimes 15 minutes, usually an hour depending upon where I'm working and how many other people are on the show. And then a lot of time writing.

So you're doing those sets in front of live audiences all the time?

Yes. Yeah, you have to. Let's, that's the weird thing about stand-up comedy. It seems to be that it's it's not something that you can do in a vacuum. It has to actually be done. It actually has to come alive in front of the audience. Like I can I can write in a vacuum, I can write alone, I can contemplate, go over my material, review, edit, I could all sorts of things by myself, but it really doesn't come alive until it's in front of an audience.

Yeah, well, I guess it's not so easy to figure out what's funny.

You kind of hope that people will laugh.

Yeah, it's that, but it's also there's a state of mind that you only really achieve when you're performing in front of an audience. And you can try to recreate it, but it'll be fake if you try to do it on your own. I don't write I don't write in joke form, like I don't write the way I say it on stage. I write in sort of a conceptual form. I write in an essay form and then I sort of extract things that I think are funny out of that, but they really only find their true way I'm going to do them. I only find that in front of an audience because it's like when the when I'm in front of an audience then it becomes clear to me how I should and shouldn't say things based in part on how they're reacting and based in part on how I feel when I'm performing the idea.

Like I find where the fat of the bit is, and that's where you kind of appreciate economy of words and you know what to edit out, and what to elaborate on, what people aren't totally understanding, and what maybe is over-explained, and all that stuff kind of comes together in front of an audience.

So the essays that you're writing or the writing that you're doing like are they on serious topics? Are they on things you're thinking about philosophically or are you trying specifically to be funny or you just trying to get some thoughts down? You know about the way you're thinking about the world?

Both, you know, it's like the ideas if, it's See I would say that stand-up comedy, at least the way I do it, it comes in three forms. Like there's three steps. In the beginning, you're really just trying to get laughs, you're fighting for survival out there. You're scared. That's in the early days of your career. Then you start doing what you think is funny, like things that would make you laugh. But then in stage three you start trying to make ideas funny and you try to cleverly introduce ideas into people's heads that maybe they wouldn't entertain without the humor aspect of it.

And so when I write, if I write on a subject, whatever the subject might be, I write witho...