#2340 - Charley Crockett

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Joe Rogan Experience #2340 – Charlie Crockett

Release Date: June 19, 2025

In Episode #2340 of The Joe Rogan Experience, comedian and musician Charlie Crockett joins host Joe Rogan for an in-depth conversation that traverses a wide array of topics, from the evolution of the music industry to personal struggles with addiction and health. Their dialogue offers listeners a blend of personal anecdotes, cultural critiques, and philosophical musings, all underscored by a shared appreciation for authenticity in art and life.

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1. Nostalgia and Venue History

The episode begins with a reflection on iconic venues, particularly the Viper Room, highlighting its notorious history and personal experiences both hosts have had there.

• Joe Rogan shares: “I was there for a comedy show. It just feels weird. There's certain buildings that just have bizarre history.” (00:28)

• Charlie Crockett adds: “The only way I'd ever been in there was through that… But they had all the cameras out.” (00:33)

2. AI and Authenticity in Art

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the advancements in artificial intelligence, especially in video generation, and the implications for authenticity in art.

• Joe Rogan expresses concern: “We're so close to not being able to tell what's real and what's fake.” (03:33)

• Charlie Crockett concurs: “All fake people. All done by computers. Indistinguishable… It’s very strange.” (02:25)

This leads to a broader conversation about how AI might affect creative industries, emphasizing that genuine human experience cannot be replicated by machines.

3. Moon Landing Conspiracy Theories

The hosts delve into the controversial topic of moon landing conspiracies, discussing historical claims and personal beliefs.

• Joe Rogan mentions Bart Sabrell’s documentary: “He puts out this documentary called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon.” (04:33)

• Charlie Crockett references a related Hollywood film: “It's a Hollywood movie. It’s a drama.” (06:52)

They debate the plausibility of such theories, juxtaposing them with personal losses and societal distrust in institutions post-COVID.

4. Coca Cola and Historical Myths

The conversation shifts to historical myths surrounding well-known brands, specifically focusing on Coca Cola’s original formula.

• Joe Rogan states: “Coca Cola is, to this day, flavored with cocaine.” (15:55)

• Charlie Crockett questions: “You mean like the Coca leaves?” (10:18)

• Joe Rogan clarifies: “They take the Coca leaves, they extract the flavonoids… But there’s no cocaine in Coca Cola.” (16:17)

This segment explores how myths persist and shape public perception, questioning the veracity of such longstanding claims.

5. Personal Stories: Addiction, Health, and Family

Both hosts open up about their personal battles with addiction and health issues, underscoring the impact of family and personal responsibility.

• Charlie Crockett reflects on his sobriety: “I'm surprised I never got heavily addicted to drugs.” (37:41)

• Joe Rogan shares his health journey: “I had open-heart surgery because I was born with Wolf Parkinson's White disease.” (35:16)

• Charlie Crockett pays tribute to his mother’s influence: “She’s the person in the family that said, I’m going to change the trajectory of this line.” (41:51)

6. Music Industry and Authenticity

A major focus is on the predatory nature of the music industry and the struggle artists face in maintaining authenticity amidst corporate pressures.

• Charlie Crockett criticizes the industry: “A lot of people are trying to capitalize on it and trying to figure out how to recreate it in an inauthentic way.” (47:58)

• Joe Rogan echoes the sentiment: “The music business has always been so predatory.” (48:12)

They discuss the importance of self-advocacy and staying true to one’s artistic vision despite industry manipulation.

7. Open Mics and Comedy Challenges

The duo examines the challenges comedians face in open mic settings, emphasizing the difficulty of maintaining authenticity and engaging audiences.

• Charlie Crockett expresses admiration for comedians: “I always was amazed by even attempt people going up at the open mics.” (49:05)

• Joe Rogan shares his discomfort: “When I watch open mics and someone bombing, I gotta leave the room.” (49:17)

This part highlights the emotional and professional hurdles in the comedic circuit.

8. Reflections on Authenticity and Success

The conversation delves into the essence of authenticity in achieving success, both in comedy and music, and the pitfalls of chasing superficial metrics.

• Charlie Crockett emphasizes personal growth: “I killed a lot of the false version of me by becoming a transient.” (72:03)

• Joe Rogan agrees: “A lot of people are prisoners to that their whole life because the only value they place is in how much stuff they’re able to acquire.” (72:22)

They advocate for finding purpose and authenticity over materialistic pursuits, stressing the importance of self-awareness and genuine connections.

9. Philosophical Discussion: Fate and Synchronicity

Exploring deeper philosophical themes, the hosts discuss the role of fate and synchronicity in their lives and careers.

• Joe Rogan muses: “Do you think synchronicity, that fate is a real thing?” (141:21)

• Charlie Crockett responds affirmatively: “I believe completely in fate.” (133:43)

This segment touches on the interplay between personal choices and perceived destiny.

10. Thoughts on Ancient Egypt and Civilizations

The dialogue briefly veers into ancient civilizations, with speculations about the mysteries surrounding Ancient Egypt and the construction of the pyramids.

• Joe Rogan questions: “How did they cut them perfectly? How did they put them 120ft in the air?” (160:03)

• Charlie Crockett adds: “Maybe AI took them down too. It might be way, way back.” (163:28)

They ponder the technological prowess of ancient civilizations, blending it with contemporary speculations about AI and extraterrestrial influences.

11. Comedians and the Scene

The hosts reminisce about legendary comedians like Bill Hicks and Sam Kinison, discussing their impact on the comedy landscape and the Texas scene.

• Charlie Crockett praises Hicks: “He's the first comic, really, that had a message.” (109:18)

• Joe Rogan recalls witnessing Kinison’s performances: “I saw Kinison live before he died.” (105:45)

They highlight the raw authenticity these comedians brought to the stage, setting a high bar for modern performers.

12. Conclusion and Future Endeavors

Wrapping up, Joe Rogan and Charlie Crockett reflect on their ongoing journeys, the importance of community, and the future of comedy and music.

• Joe Rogan discusses building a comedy hub: “Now it's the hub of comedy in the known universe.” (117:33)

• Charlie Crockett talks about upcoming projects: “I've got a third one coming after that that we're calling the Sagebrush Trilogy.” (130:12)

Their closing remarks encapsulate a shared vision for fostering authentic artistic expression and supporting each other’s endeavors.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Joe Rogan: “We're so close to not being able to tell what's real and what's fake.” (03:33)

• Charlie Crockett: “It's coming. It's the Manhattan Project for artificial intelligence.” (04:03)

• Joe Rogan: “Coca Cola is, to this day, flavored with cocaine.” (15:55)

• Charlie Crockett: “But I’m preaching the choir here. I think it's a perception thing.” (07:43)

• Joe Rogan: “You have to take responsibility. That's hard for people to accept.” (43:17)

• Charlie Crockett: “I've never been good at holding a pick. I learned how to play with my hands.” (27:03)

• Joe Rogan: “If you don't take responsibility at some point, it'll never leave you alone.” (43:22)

• Charlie Crockett: “When you go into a place and you put yourself out there… that's the only way you make.” (148:52)

• Joe Rogan: “Authenticity is the key. You have to be real.” (89:01)

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Key Takeaways

1. Authenticity Over Automation: Both hosts emphasize the irreplaceable value of genuine human experience and creativity, arguing that while AI can mimic, it cannot replicate the depth of true artistic expression.

2. Navigating the Music Industry: The conversation sheds light on the often exploitative nature of the music business, advocating for artists to maintain control over their work and sustain authenticity against corporate pressures.

3. Personal Responsibility and Growth: Drawing from personal experiences, both Joe and Charlie highlight the importance of taking responsibility for one’s life choices and growth, especially in overcoming past struggles.

4. Community and Support Systems: The hosts underscore the significance of supportive communities—be it in music, comedy, or personal life—in fostering success and resilience.

5. Philosophical Reflections: Musings on fate, synchronicity, and the mysteries of ancient civilizations add a reflective layer to the conversation, prompting listeners to ponder the larger forces shaping their lives.

6. The Evolution of Comedy and Music: By discussing legends like Bill Hicks and Waylon Jennings, the episode illustrates how foundational figures have shaped contemporary scenes, advocating for a return to raw, message-driven art.

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For those intrigued by Charlie Crockett’s journey and insights, you can follow his work on various social media platforms and explore his music catalog for a deeper appreciation of his authentic artistry.

Transcript

[Joe Rogan]

Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out.

[Charlie Crockett]

The Joe Rogan Experience.

[Joe Rogan]

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Yeah. Doing something at the Viper Room and then trying to come here the next day. The Viper Room is just notorious. Like, even when you're in the building.

[Charlie Crockett]

And just feeling it is notorious.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

And it's funny because I. The only way I'd ever been in there was through that. You know, the door on the side street there.

[Joe Rogan]

Huh.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know, and. But they. You know, they had all the cameras out and took me around the. I'd never come in through the door on Sunset before. Even recognize the place.

[Joe Rogan]

No, I've never been through that door either.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, I've only.

[Joe Rogan]

Like I said, I've only been there once. I was there for a comedy show. It just feels weird. It's. There's certain buildings that just have bizarre history.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, well, Shooter was telling me last night, man, River Phoenix died on the sidewalk right out that door on the. I didn't know that. I thought it was in front of the. I thought it was in front of the Whiskey for some reason.

[Joe Rogan]

No, no, it was the Viper Room.

[Charlie Crockett]

I never realized that.

[Joe Rogan]

No, it's up place. Hey, man, nice to meet you.

[Charlie Crockett]

Pleasure's all mine, Joe.

[Joe Rogan]

I love your music.

[Charlie Crockett]

Really?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, my friend Jake turned me on to you. Your music is like, you've lived a life. You can't fake that. You know what I mean? There's something about certain dudes. Voices and songs. They're like, all right, that guy's done some living, you know? You can't create that with AI.

[Charlie Crockett]

Right. They're gonna try everybody. I mean, it's crazy. We're. I mean, we're. We're. That. We're kind of reaching singularity, you know?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

Where nobody can tell the difference.

[Joe Rogan]

I know. I think we're right. Right about there, there was a new one that just got released today. Just hear the new one today. It's even. Even better than the Google one. That was insane. It was released last week. Yeah, it's weird.

[Charlie Crockett]

What. What are you talking about?

[Joe Rogan]

Some new AI engine that does video. I'll send it to you. Jamie, It's. It's pretty incredible. This. The. The. The way they're able to make stuff now where it looks exactly like. Like real human beings. Like, it doesn't. It doesn't fake even a little bit. Yeah, I'll send it to you. Jamie. Is called Bite Dance. So is that the China one?

[Charlie Crockett]

That's the company.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, okay.

[Charlie Crockett]

Dance is the company that Owns like.

[Joe Rogan]

Tik Tok and stuff. Oh, yeah, China. Yeah, yeah. This is their new AI. So this is all fake? All fake people. All done by computers. Indistinguishable, you know, it's like. It's very strange. You got it. Throw that up. Give me some sound. You gotta click on it. This is all fake. I mean, what the. Man, we are living in the weirdest time ever, Charlie Crockett.

[Charlie Crockett]

Oh, man, you're right.

[Joe Rogan]

This is the weirdest time ever to be alive because we are so close to not being able to tell what's real and what's fake. We're so close. I mean, we're essentially right there with video. And then eventually it's going to move into some sort of perception. It's going to be feel. You're going to be able to put a helmet on and go into some.

[Charlie Crockett]

Bizarre world, and you can't stop it.

[Joe Rogan]

You can't stop it.

[Charlie Crockett]

It's coming.

[Joe Rogan]

It's coming. It's in the people that are working on it in America. Like, we have to, because China's working on. I'm like, okay, I guess that's just what we're doing.

[Charlie Crockett]

Space race. Even if it's just a show.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. It's essentially the Manhattan Project for artificial intelligence. There's a race around the world.

[Charlie Crockett]

Joe, did we go to the moon?

[Joe Rogan]

I don't think so.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know, I don't think so either.

[Joe Rogan]

I don't think so. It makes you sound completely insane to.

[Charlie Crockett]

Say it, but I lost a lot of friends when I was younger when I talking like that. I did, too.

[Joe Rogan]

I gained a lot of friends too, though. I gained a lot of skill. Listen, man, I've talked to scientists that don't want to talk about it publicly. Yeah, scientists.

[Charlie Crockett]

Well, see, you know what I figured, I figured that would be the one time in the history of civilization that human beings got to a new place and said, nah, I'm good. And turned around.

[Joe Rogan]

Exactly.

[Charlie Crockett]

I don't want to look around there anymore.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, Bart Sabrell, he's this researcher that's been doing these documentaries on the moon landing. And he's been saying it's fake since, like, I met him sometime in the early 2000s, I believe. And he put out this. This documentary called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon. And he's got a great quote, and he says there's not a single thing that's not easier, faster, and cheaper to reproduce today from 1969. Except the moon landing. It's the one thing. Well, and everybody go oh, but they spent so much money. Why would they spend the money on that again? Well, why would they spend money on all the things they spend money on? Like, what are you talking about? It doesn't make any sense. The moon is. Has trillions of dollars in rare minerals on it. There's all sorts of shit on the moon that would be very beneficial to society. And it was always going to be that we're going to have a base on the moon and they were going to use that to go to other places. I don't think so. I mean, if you look at the. Just the. The way they filmed it, like when you watched it on television, the people that watched it on television, it was the first time ever where there was a news thing where the. The news stations, the networks, didn't have a direct feed. What they had was they filmed the moon landing. They. They showed it on a projection screen, and then the networks pointed their camera at the projection screen. That's why it looks so shitty.

[Charlie Crockett]

Wow. Do you remember there was a movie that came out, it wasn't that far back, and it's all about this, like, a legit movie. And I should remember this actor's name because he's getting better and better known. He's a really great actor. He played the. He played the lawman in Killers of the Flower Moon that shows up there at the. Near the end and finally kind of takes them down. But he's been on a lot of other stuff, and it's this really great movie about faking the moon landing and all that stuff for, like, you know, American kind of cultural and economic dominance over Russia and all that.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, so it's like.

[Charlie Crockett]

It's a re. It's recent.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, okay. Hey, Jamie, can you tell Jeff to bring in some coffee? So it's. So it's a doc, A drama.

[Charlie Crockett]

It's a drama. Yeah. It's a Hollywood. Hollywood movie.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh. Jamie will find out what it is when he gets back.

[Charlie Crockett]

I only saw it once, but it's good. And you know this actor because he's been everywhere, man. He's been in everything. I should know his name. I need to call him out. I think I saw him at the airport in Burbank a few months ago, actually.

[Joe Rogan]

It seems like a stupid thing to say, but I don't think it is. I don't think. And then after Covid realizing how much stuff they can lie about, how much stuff the government can hide, how much stuff that people would just accept as being true despite all the evidence to the contrary, how much experts will go along with things. How easy it is to keep a secret. It's not that hard to keep a secret. Especially a secret that is essentially set up to. Let us thank sir.

[Charlie Crockett]

Dang. That's how I know my wife stopped by.

[Joe Rogan]

Yerba mate, what you're into?

[Charlie Crockett]

I love them, man.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, they're good.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know why I like it? Really? I didn't realize it for like a year or two and now I realize it because it tastes just like Coca Cola. It does. It's close. I think that's the secret. It tastes like Coca Cola. Yeah, you know.

[Joe Rogan]

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[Charlie Crockett]

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[Joe Rogan]

Would like to try the original Coca Cola with cocaine in it.

[Charlie Crockett]

Oh, I wonder what that was like. Non habit forming.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, allegedly, right? Another lie.

[Charlie Crockett]

Is it? Was it true, right? That that bear Bear at first had heroin in it or opium.

[Joe Rogan]

Really.

[Charlie Crockett]

The original version of it. Yeah. Really? The original product.

[Joe Rogan]

We'll find that out.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, I think, I think it did.

[Joe Rogan]

That makes sense.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, sure.

[Joe Rogan]

That's real great for headaches. I mean, more lies, right? How many times have we been lied to?

[Charlie Crockett]

But, but you know what it is? It's, you know, I think it's. I'm preaching the choir here. But I think it's a perception thing, right, with, you know, it's like planning that flag on the moon was a cultural thing. Yeah, you know, a. An American pop culture thing.

[Joe Rogan]

Sure.

[Charlie Crockett]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, they wanted us to be dominant militarily over Russia.

[Charlie Crockett]

Worked.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I mean, sort of. Kinda.

[Charlie Crockett]

Kinda, I guess.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. I mean, we definitely are dominant over, you know, militarily. We definitely were back then, essentially. Here it is. Heroin. Whoo. Wow. Bear had heroin.

[Charlie Crockett]

Non habit forming.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Charlie Crockett]

I gotta get the non habit forming kind.

[Joe Rogan]

But I mean, like, what is the difference between that and doctors prescribing oxycontin? It's not that much. Sears Roebuck once sold heroin. Jesus Christ. Must have been a wild time back then, man.

[Charlie Crockett]

That's a great, that's a great illustration there.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, look at that. Two needles, two vitals of heroin. Only a dollar fifty. Less than dollar fifty, adjusted for inflation. Wow. This is the 19th century. So the 1800 Sears catalog. He used to offer a heroin kit. I think the actor you're talking about was Jesse Plemons, but I don't know what.

[Charlie Crockett]

That's him, bro. See if you could find Jesse Plemons.

[Joe Rogan]

Just Google.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. Moon. Moon. I did.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, the flowers of the summer moon keeps popping up.

[Charlie Crockett]

But do, but do. Do. Space discovery.

[Joe Rogan]

Discovery. That's 2015. No, 2017.

[Charlie Crockett]

Try Jesse Plemons. Moon conspiracy or Space conspiracy.

[Joe Rogan]

Huh? Are you sure it wasn't AI? Because there's a lot of those. I, I thought Keanu Reeves really wasn't a new Dracula movie. Fake.

[Charlie Crockett]

I don't know.

[Joe Rogan]

I'm just gonna look. I'm just possibly fake. What was the other question we had? We had. Oh, bare heroin.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Man, they've been, you know, they've been tricking people for a long time. You know, if they can make money, they'll trick you.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Back then they're probably being tricked themselves. People didn't really understand what was addictive and what wasn't. You know, doctors used to recommend cigarettes for people with emphysema. You got asthma?

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You need cigarettes?

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, they were drinking. Athletes are drinking Coca Cola on this, on the, on the court.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, you know who drinks Coca Cola? Floyd Mayweather. Floyd Mayweather, after training, would drink Coca Cola. And there's actually some science to that. Like having sugar, like right after a really hard workout, actually replenishes. Replenishes glucose in the body.

[Charlie Crockett]

Like Gatorade.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, it's probably not a bad idea.

[Charlie Crockett]

My wife's got me drinking Gatorade again.

[Joe Rogan]

That shit's not good for you.

[Charlie Crockett]

There's.

[Joe Rogan]

There's better versions of electrolytes, you know?

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, you're right.

[Joe Rogan]

Electrolytes are good for you. Gatorade's okay. It's just. It's got a lot of in it.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Corn syrup and. There you go. Here it is. Fly me to the moon. Channing Tatum. Oh, Channing Tatum. Is that it?

[Charlie Crockett]

Oh, that's the one.

[Joe Rogan]

That's it. 2024. 2024. So.

[Charlie Crockett]

Oh, that's the one. Yeah. He's not. He's not even it. No, he is in it, I think.

[Joe Rogan]

But historical romantic comedy drama. Huh. Tasked with creating a false moon landing.

[Charlie Crockett]

Apple tv and see it.

[Joe Rogan]

Interesting.

[Charlie Crockett]

What year was it?

[Joe Rogan]

Came out last year, like a year ago. I never even heard of it.

[Charlie Crockett]

I think it's still.

[Joe Rogan]

How do you have a movie with Channing Tatum and Scarlett Johansson and you never heard of it? Isn't that crazy? There's too many goddamn movies, bro. You know what I saw last night?

[Charlie Crockett]

I think I'm still thinking of a different one, but that I never. There's another one.

[Joe Rogan]

There's another one. Really?

[Charlie Crockett]

I think so. I saw it, man. It was a. It was a wild movie. And they. They find. They realized that. That the whole landing is. Is being faked. And then they. And then. And then. I mean, I want to spoil it, but, you know, then they get taken out.

[Joe Rogan]

Apparently.

[Charlie Crockett]

Moon landing, jfk. I mean, what's the damn difference?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, there's a lot of those, man. There's a lot of. I mean, there's almost nothing. Vietnam, Gulf of Tonkin. There's almost nothing from history. That's exactly as we're being told. Almost nothing.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, it's Coke and Pepsi, you know, because I was thinking, like, you know, that's the one thing that. That they did that everybody liked, and then they've kept that as long as they keep that flavor. Right, right. You. They can. They can muscle everybody out. You know, it's like. That's like my RC Cola like that.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Nobody's into that.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. And only if you can't. Couldn't afford the Coca Cola price.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Charlie Crockett]

And the. You Know Coke machines.

[Joe Rogan]

Excuse me.

[Charlie Crockett]

Bless you.

[Joe Rogan]

Thank you.

[Charlie Crockett]

When I was a kid, that was the only reason we drank RC Colas. Because it was 25 cents.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. Because it was cheap. That's it. And you drank it and you knew it wasn't Coke. Yeah, yeah. They tried New Coke. Do you remember that? When I was a kid. God, I think I was in high school, they came up with a new formula of Coca Cola. Somewhere around the 80s, I think. It was terrible. They ride it New Coke, and everybody's like, what the fuck are you doing? Why would you get rid of Coke? It's perfect.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. Don't change that. They can. Yeah, they can change and try everything else and buy everybody out. As long as they keep Coca Cola flowing.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. And then Pepsi is always, like, for weirdos, people who prefer Pepsi.

[Charlie Crockett]

I never liked it.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, it's weird.

[Charlie Crockett]

I like Dr. Pepper.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, you know, Coca Cola is, to this day flavored with cocaine. Do you know that?

[Charlie Crockett]

You mean like the Coca leaves?

[Joe Rogan]

That's the secret to the flavor of Coca Cola. Coca Cola, the company that makes Coca Cola, they are the biggest producers of medical grade cocaine. For real.

[Charlie Crockett]

Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

So they take the Coca leaves, they extract the flavonoids out of the coca leaves, and they extract the cocaine. So there's no cocaine in Coca Cola. But then they take those Coca leaves and the flavor goes into Coca Cola and then the cocaine goes into medical cocaine.

[Charlie Crockett]

Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. To this day, I think they're the only company that's allowed to use Coca leaves. I think they're grandfathered in. I think that's exactly. Is that how it works? I believe they're grandfathered in. But to this day, that's what they use. As I sniff, as I sniffle. But these are real sniffles, folks. These are allergies. I watched the fucking craziest movie last night. The Substance. Have you heard of that movie?

[Charlie Crockett]

I've heard of it.

[Joe Rogan]

That's that new Demi Moore movie.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. I was afraid to watch it.

[Joe Rogan]

Holy shit, man.

[Charlie Crockett]

It's intense.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, my God. One of the most insane movies I've ever seen in my life. It's about this lady who's getting older and someone approaches her with this new experimental drug that allows you to live as a young person for seven days and then you have to switch back to the old person for seven days. I don't want to spoil it for anybody, but it was insane. Like, Like I left. I was like, I got to watch something stupid YouTube for a couple hours before I go to bed because I'm I'm weirded out by this movie.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, that's the reason I haven't watched it yet. Hard time. That's the. I'm just saying. Yes. I never, like. I never liked, like, the Sensory Overload. Like, horror movies. Oh, yeah. I like classic horror movies.

[Joe Rogan]

This is a sensory overload times 10. I mean, it's. It's insane. It's an insane movie. It's really good. I mean, it really grips you. It's very entertaining, but just. Good Lord.

[Charlie Crockett]

Have you seen Uncut Gems?

[Joe Rogan]

Yes. Love that.

[Charlie Crockett]

Isn't that a good movie?

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, my God.

[Charlie Crockett]

It was, like, a little much for me, but it was so good and it wasn't so crazy, you know?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, well, I grew up with a lot of gambling addicts, so for that movie. That movie, like, really hit home for me. I was like, oh, God, gee, like, got anxiety.

[Charlie Crockett]

Howard. Is that his name? Howie Howard? You know, Sandler's character?

[Joe Rogan]

Is that what his name is? Howie?

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, and he's a. He's selling diamonds on 42nd street or whatever. That's. That's. That's. That's. That's every manager in the music business. A lot of them, a bunch of gambling addicts that. They're. That guy right there, you know, they're. They're juggling all these balls in front of you, which is fine. I don't mind guys juggling. What I don't like is when somebody's got all these balls in the air. They're juggling in front of me and they're like, charlie, I'm not juggling.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, yeah, the music business.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, there he is. He's great in that movie, man.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, he's incredible.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, I never knew he could act dramatically, you know, I mean, he's always been great in comedies, but he's. He's incredible in that movie. Incredible.

[Charlie Crockett]

He had another one he did real. That was, like, a serious flick way back. You remember Punch Drunk Love? Do you ever see that one?

[Joe Rogan]

No, I never saw that.

[Charlie Crockett]

That's a masterpiece.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I never saw it. Yeah, but Uncut Gems, the. The gambling aspect of it, like, that sickness that. The gambling sickness is a wild sickness.

[Charlie Crockett]

I grew up around gamblers, too.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. My uncle was always a big gambler, and my cousin. I spent a lot of time in casinos with him down in New Orleans on the Mississippi coast and all that.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, riverboat gamblers, man.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yep, exactly.

[Joe Rogan]

Craziest man.

[Charlie Crockett]

I did. I did. I. I didn't mind. You know, he let. He let my. Me and my cousin run all run all over the place.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh.

[Charlie Crockett]

So we were, we were stoked.

[Joe Rogan]

So you like the fact that he was a degenerate?

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. On anytime he won, like if he won big, we used to play his bingo. He used to run this bingo hall in, in New Orleans. And me and my cousin, we got, we could, both of us with those bingo daubers, we could play like, we could play nine card pages for him. We got that good. That we could keep up with it. And because he was running the place, nobody in there ever said about me and my cousin being like, you know, 8 and 11 or whatever. And if we hit, though, it was always a good time. It was Toys R Us and fried shrimp.

[Joe Rogan]

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[Charlie Crockett]

Where'd you grow up?

[Joe Rogan]

Well, all over the place, really.

[Charlie Crockett]

But where were those pool halls?

[Joe Rogan]

New. New York. When I moved to New York, when I was in my 20s, my early 20s, like 23. And that's when I got indoctrinated into pool culture.

[Charlie Crockett]

Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, it was just the most fun group of degenerates and weirdos and outcasts and, you know, as a comedian, I never felt like I fit in, in normal society, you know, and then I'm around those dudes, I'm like, okay, you guys are just like me. You don't fit in either.

[Charlie Crockett]

Like, you're a bunch of weird, you know, thing. What I just thought about Joe when I was on the street in New York, you know, I played up there, and I'm sure, you know, but I'd play on the street all day. And at first I was playing in the parks, and then I went. Moved downtown. I was trying to play on street corners in the Villages and all that. And you're dealing with traffic and cops. And that's what drove me down into the. Into the subway platforms. And those were really competitive, too. So even there, I started playing at the stations that nobody wanted or, you know, weren't desirable or weren't, you know, nobody's really competing for the spots or whatever. And I would do that all day, and then I would hit open mics all over the five boroughs every night, everywhere. And the comedy. The comedy guys were always the coolest because all of them. Because we weren't in competition, you know, Like, I know comedians can be really competitive on the circuit, and obviously, same thing on the music side, but I ended up, like, playing a Lot of. I would open up for a lot of guys. Like, I'm, like, at the Red Door and, like, in the circuit there in the city and.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, cool.

[Charlie Crockett]

Open guys up with two or three songs or play their breaks or whatever. And, you know, all the comedy folks liked me, I think, because, you know, I wasn't one of them. Yeah, we were cousins or something.

[Joe Rogan]

Right, right. That's. There's always been a relationship like that. Like, Oliver Anthony was at the Mothership this weekend, and it's the first music act we've ever had performed there.

[Charlie Crockett]

That's cool.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, you could perform there, too, if you ever want to, man.

[Charlie Crockett]

I know where it's at.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, it'd be fun.

[Charlie Crockett]

I like that you got it down there, man.

[Joe Rogan]

It's a great spot. Sixth street is just a. Such a wild place.

[Charlie Crockett]

It is.

[Joe Rogan]

To have it right there is perfect. And to have it at the old Ritz. Yeah, it's amazing. So, you know, it was great.

[Charlie Crockett]

Is that. Is that what it is in the old Ritz?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, yeah. We bought the old Ritz.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

We have to keep the red sign because it's, you know, one of those historical buildings.

[Charlie Crockett]

That's a great sign.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, it's a great time. It's got so much history. In the tunnel on the way to the stage, there's a big picture of Stevie Ray Vaughan on the stage in 1983. Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

You like SRV?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

Come on.

[Joe Rogan]

Come on, man. Come on. He's the only dude who could play Voodoo Child. Doesn't make me sick, man. You know, other than Hendrix.

[Charlie Crockett]

That's right.

[Joe Rogan]

Two dudes.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, you're right.

[Joe Rogan]

Hendrix and him. I mean, other people. I'm sure other people can do it. I've never heard.

[Charlie Crockett]

No, that. Just them. Oh, yeah, man.

[Joe Rogan]

There's certain songs. There's certain songs that you can't with. Although I did see one time I saw Honey, Honey, and Gary Clark Jr. Played Midnight Rider. And I didn't think anybody else could play Midnight Rider. And to hear Gary's song with Midnight Rider with that, you know, like Gary's signature sound.

[Charlie Crockett]

Oh, man.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, that signature.

[Charlie Crockett]

You've seen Gary. You've been. You've seen Gary live?

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, yeah. I'm friends with Gary, man. Yeah, I've seen him a bunch of times.

[Charlie Crockett]

Y' all love Gary, too.

[Joe Rogan]

I love that dude.

[Charlie Crockett]

That guy. He's so good, man. I remember.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, I gave something to him. And I got it for you, too.

[Charlie Crockett]

What is it?

[Joe Rogan]

This is a real genuine woolly mammoth guitar pick that is made out of woolly mammoth tusk.

[Charlie Crockett]

Damn that something fierce.

[Joe Rogan]

But 10,000 plus years old. That's a shout out to my friend John Reeves from the boneyard in Alaska. I got a buddy of mine who has this spot in Alaska where they just pull all kinds of crazy mastodon, woolly mammoth, cave bear, all kinds of skulls and all kinds of wild out of this one piece of property where a lot of animals died. And he's taken a lot of the woolly mammoth. That's where I got this too. This is a tooth. This is a tooth that was carved.

[Charlie Crockett]

Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

Into a piece of art with a mammoth in it.

[Charlie Crockett]

That was a big old goddamn tooth hunt.

[Joe Rogan]

Imagine.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. How heavy that is.

[Joe Rogan]

Isn't that crazy? It's crazy, right?

[Charlie Crockett]

It's beautiful too, man.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. So that, that guitar pick is yours, brother man.

[Charlie Crockett]

Thanks, Joe.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Any cool guys who play guitar, give them one of them picks.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know, I've never been good at holding. Holding a pick. So I've learned how to play with my hands and I. Because I could never hold a pick well. But some, a lot of guys I know that are really great pickers, they play these really hard picks, you know, and can real precise with them and I just, I still can't hold them.

[Joe Rogan]

You learned with your fingers?

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. Yeah. I never, never. I just couldn't hold the pick. I would try to hold it and it get sideways and I never like all this, you know, like the straight cowboy chords, you know, cfg, whatever. I couldn't hold any of those chords. Like when I was teaching myself, the positioning was weird for me, you know. And so like I kind of threw away the book and I did what you call choking the chicken on the. On the fret, you know, kind of hold it like you're choking the chicken. And that's kind of where I developed my style. And then I learned all the regular chords many years later, you know.

[Joe Rogan]

Did you. Are you totally self taught?

[Charlie Crockett]

Oh yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow. When did you start?

[Charlie Crockett]

I was 17. My mama got me a guitar out of a pawn shop in South Irving.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Charlie Crockett]

This honor guitar and you just started.

[Joe Rogan]

Messing around with it?

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. Yeah. You know, my mom had tried to get me on the piano when I was younger and I just couldn't focus. And. Yeah, I don't know, 17 was like the right age. I needed it, you know. Started banging around on that guitar and. And I mean it must have sounded terrible. And we. And my momma lived in this little ass place, this tiny place and I didn't. I was like scared to play in front of her, you know, But. But I was at first, and I would say, mama, am I any good? You know, she wasn't gonna lie to me. She said, well, son, when you play, people will believe you. She wasn't gonna lie to me and tell me I was good, but she was trying to say, you know, just be honest with your music, and the rest will take care of it.

[Joe Rogan]

That's great advice.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

When you play, people will believe you.

[Charlie Crockett]

You. That's what she said. Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yep. And then the next time anybody believed in me wasn't until I started hitchhiking. And I remember because I've been out in California a bunch recently, and it was. I had caught a ride with this guy. We were playing at this place called the Shanty, up in Farmers Branch, Dallas, Fort Worth areas years ago. And there was this witch lady that. I mean, they called her a witch, this kind of. Kind of magic woman who had a barn out behind her house, and they called it the Shanty. And she would have people over on the weekends and just kind of any random night travelers, misfits, whatever, back there in the barn, and everybody'd be telling stories and trading songs and, you know, taking potions, stuff like that. Long story short, this guy I met one night, his parents had, like, worked. They worked for, like, Texas Instruments. And he had disowned them, you know, because his parents were, like, scientists. And he woke up one day as a young man and realized they were, like. His parents were manufacturing, like, weapons, you know? And I never saw this guy again. But that was his whole deal, why he left Texas.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, wow.

[Charlie Crockett]

And he was just back visiting this. This gal that had this shanty deal. And I talked. That guy that he promised he would. He was describing this town of Boonville, which is this community in Mendocino County, Northern California. And the way he was describing it to me at this. In this barn or whatever, it sounded like the Garden of Eden or something, you know what I mean? Like, and. And I wanted so badly to go with him. And he promised me and this other guy that was playing guitar, too, that he would take us. And we passed out at the lady's house. We woke up that next morning, he was still there. And I was like, man, you ready to go to California? And he was like, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? Like, when I pressed him, he's like, man, I was on acid. I was on acid. I. I don't remember any of that. I don't have any room for you. And I. I begged that I begged him like my life depended on it. And he took me, and this old boy who was playing guitar actually taught me a lot of songs back then. He took us to California. But as we got closer to Boonville and we were talking to naive young Texas boys who had never been anywhere, he realized he, you know, didn't want us going anywhere near those hippies he was living with there in Boonville. So he left us, like. He pulled into, like, a grocery store and left us in this parking lot in Vacaville. And that's when I really started hitchhiking in my life is like when we kind of got abandoned in a parking lot. Wow. Kind of along the five, right?

[Joe Rogan]

How old were you?

[Charlie Crockett]

21. Probably 22, something like that. And I had done some hit, a little bit of hitching before, like around the South, Texas and, like, Louisiana, but I'd never really been way out there. And anyway, I started hitchhiking around because I had to. But I remember it was in California the first time about anybody besides my mama ever looked at me playing guitar as it having any kind of value, you know, like any economic value, or, like it was a. It was a. A trade of, you know, recognition, you know, it was kind of the. Was the first time I was out there. Out there.

[Joe Rogan]

So you'd been playing about four or five. Four or five years back then?

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

I was playing outside because our place was so small. I wasn't playing outside to, like, make money or anything like that. I would go to this park, had, like, a baseball diamond on it, sit on these bleachers or whatever. And I'll never forget the first time anybody threw, like, just a pocket full of change. In my case, I'm sure it's because they, you know, were worried about me, felt bad for me.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

What. Or whatever, you know. And it wasn't like that. It wasn't like that money hit the case and then, like, a light went off or anything. You know, it was a slow. It was a slow, gradual deal. Like, I was playing outside because there was, you know, there wasn't enough room to play in the house. In the house or whatever, you know. And then, you know, I got in a lot of trouble with the law, which kind of put me on the run, put me on the road. And what was the trouble with the law? You know, my. I've said it a lot, and it's funny. I'm a lot better known than I used to be. So it's like, you say stuff about your family and they hear about it and they get mad, they get mad. But it's so funny because it's all over the Internet. And they're the ones that had the government on their ass, not me. But anyways, yeah, we just kind of, you know, hit the fan, got up in the newspapers. My brother didn't go to high school, you know, neither my sister, neither of them went to high school. They both dropped out, you know, because I'm from South Texas. I was born the Rio Grande Valley. They were born up in Dallas, but my mama had moved down there to South Padre island area, McAllen, Harlingen area there. And anyway, it's poor and pretty hard living down there. And, you know, hell, I didn't wear shoes till I was probably 9 or 10 years old, you know, playing outside. And my brother and sister, they're 10 years older than me, half brother and sister. And we have different daddies, and they really lived wild, you know, it was. Things were pretty. Pretty tough back then or whatever. I'm telling you, that background because my brother became a hustler, you know, because he had to, because of a lack of education, lack of access, you know, because of poverty. And I've honestly always respected him for that. You know, he took. He used to take me around door to door selling newspapers when I was 11, right? And you want to know why? Because I had broken my arm. And he realized if you carted that young boy out in front of those. Those apartments, when that lady answered the door, and it's these two brothers, and one of them's got a broken arm, she's gonna buy the. She's gonna go ahead and subscribe.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know, bad. Yeah. And in a nutshell, man, he, you know, through all that stuff, you know, he. He started out as a door to door salesman, you know, hustling newspaper subscriptions, right? Then he started, like, selling neckties and like, men's clothing door to door in downtown Dallas office buildings, you know, and as a very young man, and eventually he graduated. You know, hard knock, boiler room type of guys. You know, you keep knocking on those doors in that wild west business scene of towns like Dallas, you know, or Houston, you know, eventually you're gonna find what you're looking for. And he got in with some big old wolves, you know, and eventually it. It knocked everybody out. And a lot of people died. A lot of people went to prison. And, you know, we were in the paper and I couldn't. I found myself not being able to get a bank account. And nobody I knew would go near me, you know, and so it ended up being like a Bob Marley type of thing, you know, like, you know, he said, if you're not living good, travel wide. Right? And I literally just walked out of town because, you know, we had scarlet letters on our chest. And that's when I. That's when I really started learning how to stand behind that guitar and write songs and slowly but surely start. I. I learned how to play basically in front of people. And people just were giving me money kind of over time, that and, you know, food and shelter in exchange for my story at their back door.

[Joe Rogan]

This episode is brought to you by Netflix. You think your family's got drama, Wait till you meet the Buckleys. I'm talking about the new Netflix drama, the Waterfront. Set in a coastal town in North Carolina, it follows the powerful Buckley family who've ruled Havenport for decades. But now their fishing empire is falling apart fast, and their legacy is on the line. There's power grabs, addiction, legacy love. From the creator of Scream and Dawson's Creek, the Waterfront is messy, twisty, and totally binge worthy. Watch the Waterfront now only on Netflix. You know, do you ever wonder, like, how things could have gone? Because things turned out great. Like, look, you're popular music artist now.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, worldwide. You're famous.

[Charlie Crockett]

I'm surprised. I. I'm. You know what I'm surprised by? I'm surprised I never got heavily addicted to drugs. Yeah, I am, you know, as my. My sister passed away 10 years ago from substances and hard living and all that kind of stuff, and hell, my whole family's in aa. Everybody, top to bottom, left to right, turn them inside out. I think about it a lot, but I really do, you know, and I remember I was living with that guy who was at the shanty that was playing guitar. He's on the football team. I knew him from sports. His name was Daniel Harmon. And he went out there to California with me that first time. And we were living on farms, and I was working for ganja farmers, working on horse farms, working for winemakers. All kind of people, you know, just. Just doing grunt work for them, doing the fence work they. They didn't want to do. Moving soil for people, you know what I mean? Digging ditches, you know, land pipe across really hard, you know, rocky roads. Not anything anybody can do. You just need, you know, broad backing up, you know, to be young.

[Joe Rogan]

Right?

[Charlie Crockett]

And. But before I ever left Texas, I moved in with his sister. And I remember, and she was just my friend. I was never in a relationship with her or anything, but she was working at Silver City in West Dallas, the Gentleman's Club, at 18 and making more money than anybody I'd ever seen. The girl was 18, you know, and just making crazy, crazy money. And she let me rent a room from her and kind of gave me a deal and all that. And I ended up writing a song kind of about it, more recently called Easy Money that I did with Shooter on this, on the Lonesome Drifter record. And that's kind of that thing, you know, if you're poor kid from Texas, there's no such thing, you know, as easy money. But not. I can't remember why I was telling you that, but it was hard on. I just remember, like, seeing. You'd see, like, young women working in strip clubs, making big money. And the ones that I was around and have been around, very, very hard for that line of work, my line of work. Your line of work. Not to become addicted.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know, and I don't have a problem with, you know, a lot of the best. Most best artists ever saw struggled. Struggled with addiction, you know, But I have. In that way, I have been very fortunate. Very, very fortunate.

[Joe Rogan]

How did you avoid it?

[Charlie Crockett]

I don't know. You know what it is, man? I never had no kind of. No. Had. Had no kind of tolerance. You know, I've always been like, I just get drunk off of one drink, and it's never changed. I just felt it all, like, really strong, you know.

[Joe Rogan]

That's probably good.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Maybe it's a survival instinct, too.

[Charlie Crockett]

I've never really thought about why, you know, but I have considered it because my brother's been through, you know, he. He did a lot of time in prison. And, you know, my. My sister had. And my mama, you know, I mean, they both had their first kid, you know, when they were teenagers. You know, a lot of it I do credit to my mama. You know, it's like, you know, she told me something I remember, that stuck with me. I've been saying this all the time, Joe, and like, we had a lot of trouble in our family, and a lot of people that we knew, a lot of dysfunction, a lot of trauma. But what my. My mama kind of got out of that, she kind of is the person in the family that said, I'm going to change the trajectory of this line. And now in my generation, you know, and she didn't have an education and, you know, she took herself back to school after I was born, you know, and cleaned up her act and. And got out of it and isolated me from a lot of that, and which I think is a big part of the reason that I maybe didn't.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. You had a role model.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, I had a role model. You know, I didn't. There was no male role models, at least not at home. They were only. They were only pro athletes and coaches at school. You know, I mean, it's increasingly difficult for young men to find strong men of courage and vision that can help them grow into good men, too. I mean, it's. It's almost. It seems almost impossible these days. It's unbelievable.

[Joe Rogan]

It's very difficult to find in your personal life.

[Charlie Crockett]

It's hard, man.

[Joe Rogan]

You have to find it in other ways. You have to find it people online.

[Charlie Crockett]

I found it in the world, athletes in. In. In like. Like excellence in, like, athletics.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know, where the only way you.

[Joe Rogan]

Can get there is hard work.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. And odds are stacked against you, and it requires incredible focus. I mean, I just. I think that's why I'm always so. So, you know, in such awe of those people when they're able to succeed like that. But what I wanted to say to you, that my mama said. She said, what happened to you, and you were young, it's not your fault. But now you're a man and it's your responsibility. And I've been living. I've been living off of that, you know, for a long time, you know, because it's like, if you don't take responsibility at some point, man, it'll. It'll. It'll never leave you alone.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. You can't think that you're a victim. Yeah. You can't think that it's not your fault. You got to take responsibility. That's hard for people to accept when they know they've been victimized, when they know they've been dealt a shitty hand of cards, you can just kind of wallow in it. But that's a trap. That's a trap that'll you up. It'll up everybody around you, too.

[Charlie Crockett]

Damn right.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. But it's a mindset thing. It's like you can. You can think your way out of that. You just. You have to have an example, though. Either you have to be your own example, or you have to find a. Find an example of someone else who thought their way out of it.

[Charlie Crockett]

And for my brother, you know, for my brother, for all the trouble that he's been in, you know, in a way, like, you know, he. I think he was trying to. He also was trying to help me, you know, and so, you know, his hustle and his work ethic, in another sense, you know, was. That's been helpful to me too, you know, because I remember he used to hand out flyers and all over the place. And when I'd be like a teenager, he'd be like. He'd be like, listen to me now. If you go. If you leave an event at the other day that you're handing out flyers and you're flooding it with promotion, if you can even see that pavement underneath the, you know, pamphlets that you're handing out, you didn't promote it. So what he used to tell me, I was like, 15, 16. And that all has come. That mentality came in handy for me because, you know, I was just a street performer, just an itinerant performer. And, you know, I did have to learn how to market myself, you know, and part of the reason that I was, man, sometimes being underestimated is like, the best thing that could happen to you, you know, Because I think one of the biggest challenges for, like, in the music industry at least, is that the way the business works now is they're almost exclusively, you know. You ever seen Moneyball? Brad Pitt flick, Moneyball? Yeah, Right.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

How they, you know, they introduced that concept of looking at the data to like, maximize the potential of the athletes and all kind of stuff, which has totally changed the game, you know, all the games. I kind of call it Money Guitar, right? Which is like, you know, the business is seeding the young amateur and for the way that they spend and invest and can move on if it doesn't work out, it's like kind of a, you know, it's kind of a pump and dump, you know, and the thing about that. And it works like, if somebody has a. You know, if somebody. Like some of these guys mentioned Oliver Anthony and some of these guys, they have a viral hit out of nowhere. They've never played a venue or anything in their life. You know, it can happen really fast. And then obviously, there's tremendous challenges, you know, down the line, trying to keep that, you know, astronomical, you know, quick rise up there. But back in the day, the business deals weren't any good. You know, that they were terrible.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Charlie Crockett]

What they were good about, though, in a lot of cases was developing these artists on these rosters. Even if they were taking advantage of these poor farm boys, taking advantage, you know, of, you know, poor black artists from the south or women or whatever, Nobody was getting a good deal, basically. But, you know, like, guys like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, those guys were making two, three records a year wow. You know, and you think about when Whalen breaks through right, in the mid-70s, you know, like, as he's doing, you know, coming into his own in seven, 1974, 1975. I mean, how many records in is he at that point? You know, he's. Yeah, how many? I mean, you know, Willie's Redheaded Stranger, which revolutionized country music, or like the Outlaws compilation record that the two of them were on together, which was basically a compilation and kind of marketed as the outlaw sub genre. You know, Those guys were 15. Those guys were 15, 16, 17 records in. You know, Aretha Franklin popped off on her ninth or tenth record.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know, and these, most of these artists, the way the business works, they won't make nine or 10 records in their career.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Charlie Crockett]

That's crazy to me.

[Joe Rogan]

That is crazy. And what better way to develop than to just keep constantly producing new music and learn along the way in.

[Charlie Crockett]

In being neglected or misunderstood by their business. When I was first dealing with it, that was the. It was a really, really a blessing because I ended up making so many records, you know.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, the music business has always been so predatory, but it's, It's. It's like. It's the way I describe a lot of things. It's like when you get something that's good combined with a bunch of people that want to make money off that something that's good. You know, whether it's medicine or whether it's music or even in comedy, you get the same thing. You get a bunch of people that just think they can make money off you.

[Charlie Crockett]

Man, I always thought comedy was the hardest. Always figured it was the hardest, Right, because you mean, like, you got to make them laugh or they're gonna kill you.

[Joe Rogan]

And you have new all the time.

[Charlie Crockett]

There's nothing, but there's nothing behind you. There's not even a guitar covering you up.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Charlie Crockett]

That's crazy to me, just to watch all those guys do their bit. And so, like, I was always amazed by even attempt people going up at, like, the open mics and, like, trying out their routine, you know, that always terrified me.

[Joe Rogan]

It terrifies me still. When I watch open mics, I watch open mics and I watch someone bombing, I gotta leave the room because I fear that it's contagious. Like, if. If I was on the road and I didn't get to pick my opening acts, like if I was working at a club and they had some local act in Florida or something like that, and the guy was terrible, I would literally have to like, not listen. I'd have to leave the room and just sort of time when I was gonna go on stage. So I'd go on stage with a fresh mindset. I couldn' Think that this audience had been poisoned by this guy's shitty comedy.

[Charlie Crockett]

I get that.

[Joe Rogan]

You know what I mean?

[Charlie Crockett]

It's like. Yeah, you're.

[Joe Rogan]

It's. It's terrible. And it's like you. You think that nothing could be funny.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

He just. It's like this. Like he's hypnotized them right into this like mediocre state of mind. Like, I can't listen, I gotta hide.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. And it's crazy that they could have that. That strong and effect on the audience like that, that quick. I mean, somebody can be up there. It up like crazy musically.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

And you kind of get a pass, you know, poetic license or whatever.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, you know, people. It's tolerable. If the guy's into it, you know, he could be into his own music. And you're like, I'm not into it. But he's into it. At least. He's like doing his song. If you're not into. If you're doing comedy and the audience is not into it, you're fucked. You're like, really? You have to engage those.

[Charlie Crockett]

I see that. It's unbelievable.

[Joe Rogan]

You got to be connected to those people and you can't fake it. Like, you can't even be saying the words perfectly and not be thinking about it. You have to be thinking about what you're saying. They know. They're little animals. They smell you. They know. They know if you're faking it. And you just gotta lock in, man. And you gotta learn how to lock in. It takes about 10 years. It takes 10 years of eating just.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Bombing and traveling around and opening up for people.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And barely getting by.

[Charlie Crockett]

That's the same thing with music, though. About the 10 year deal, you know, the 10,000 hour thing, there's no doubt about it.

[Joe Rogan]

I think it's probably almost everything.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, almost everything. Anything you dedicate yourself to, you know? You like Noam Chomsky?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, sure. You ever like old Noam Chomsky? Yeah, I listened to him today. I'm like, jesus, stop talking.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, he's popping off, isn't he?

[Joe Rogan]

Well, he just went. The COVID vaccine stuff. He was out of his mind. He wanted people to be isolated and quarantined and taken away from society if they weren't willing to take this experimental.

[Charlie Crockett]

I haven't kept up with him in recent years.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, he's old, right? And old people, unfortunately. Also, he's an academic, so academics tend to trust experts in whatever field they're in. And if he doesn't have an understanding, like, he has a deep understanding of how compromised people are politically by money, you know, and he's written some brilliant work on essentially, the way the. The media is compromised and the way, you know, politics are compromised. I don't think he applied that same skepticism towards the pharmaceutical industrial complex, which is strange. Well, people have their blind spots.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. We all do.

[Joe Rogan]

And they trust experts. And if he. You know, he's got experts that are academics and you trust them, and. And also he's old. And old people get real scared of diseases. They get real scared because they know how vulnerable they are. All the people that I knew that were old had the craziest reaction to Covid. Terrified. Even my own parents tried to, you know, talk them through some of this stuff. They didn't want to hear it. They only wanted to listen to doctors. Someone like. I don't think this is what they're telling you.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, you know, doctors are crazy. They're just. They got a cabinet full of pills that they've been. They've been sold to. Sell you.

[Joe Rogan]

And they're incentivized. That's what's really crazy. When I found that out. That mean. I learned so much during the pandemic about the medical industry, where I just thought they were there to. I didn't even. I'm so naive. I didn't even realize that hospitals are privately owned. I thought these were things set up by the government to make sure that people can get healed right. You know, I thought it was all about making people better.

[Charlie Crockett]

Well, they're not public, the closest thing to public. They're as if they're owned by, like, a, you know, religious organization. A church.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

Not crazy.

[Joe Rogan]

It's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. And they're just fucking shuffling people in and out, trying to prescribe them as many things, and they're financially incentivized to prescribe things. And then they have extreme overhead because they have liability insurance, they have student loan debt, and they have, you know, a high overhead to keep their practice running.

[Charlie Crockett]

And where's Bernie Sanders when you need them? Yeah, well, no, see, so I had. I had open heart surgery right here in Austin to fix it. What was wrong with your heart valve here? Well, I was born with Wolf Parkinson's white disease. It's a. It's an electrical issue in your heart, basically, like your heart misfires all this electricity is moving through it all the time, you know, like a semiconductor or whatever. And there was like a section of it that was like misfiring and it would cause my. An arrhythmia with me. Wow. And when I was a kid in South Texas, we were told that was all I knew about. And we were told that it was an annoyance because I almost died a couple times. And I was really, really young from it. And, you know, my mama noticed and saved my life a couple times by getting. Driving in, you know, into the city there in the San Benito and them hooking me up to all the wires and saving me. Anyways, they told me as I got older that it would just. I could get, you know, a blade, an ablation for it, where they apply heat basically, and close this electrical channel that's stuck in a loop or whatever. But it. But it wasn't life threatening. And then I got out here, you know, I was on the street for years. And then when I was coming off the street through kind of blues jams and I had been, you know, I was working on ganja farms and it started selling, you know, weed in the mail and all that to kind of get off street, buy myself some better clothes, get myself a good guitar and amp and all that. Started showing up at blues jams. And then I could, like, you know, because everything takes money, you know, like. Problem with being a street player was you can go play the open mics that have a two damn drink minimum, right? And they'd see my crazy ass come in and knew. Knew that I was, you know, pretty wild. And they didn't have any money and it didn't smell, and I didn't smell good. So they really didn't like me for the, you know, for the longest time or whatever. But I threw blues jams. I started leading bands and bars and deep Ellum. First gig I ever got in Austin was right there at Darwin's Pub, you know, on 6th street, playing kind of solo in the afternoon. It was the only guy. CJ was the only guy that gave me a gig even on 6th Street. I always owed him for that. And, I mean, he was giving me 50 bucks, you know, he wanted me to get paid out of the well whiskey and those, those. What does he sell over there? Those giros or whatever the hell he's got over there. Anyway, I get on the road, I get an agent. I had. I was. I was standing out of green hall handing CDs out on a street corner because I couldn't get into the show, handed a guy a cd. His name's Evan Felker. I didn't know who he was at the time, but he's front man for Turnpike Troubadours. I gave him a CD and he, well he took it home and he listened to it with his then girlfriend and now wife and lo and behold, his agent, John Folk called me up and started booking me. And then that's when I started playing the old Red dirt. I like to call it the Hank Williams circuit, you know, the kind of old country chitlin circuit. John Folk had kind of inherited it. Inherited it from like Buddy Lee attractions from an earlier generation that goes all the way back to Lucky Molar and that old south circuit that all the R B and the in the hillbilly country boys were on. And Folk kind of inherited it and re built it. And then they, you know, then Coke and Pepsi came in, you know, CAA and William Morris and Wasserman and bought it all off, you know, bought it all out. And you had no choice. I mean they were going to part it out no matter what. And that's the way that it works, right. When you get Coca Cola's attention, right. And they show up and they're like, good job, you're taking some of our money away from us. We're going to buy you out, son. And yet, right. I think you can refuse them once or twice and they'll come back with a better deal right after that. If you keep turning them down, then they put all their energy into knocking you out, you know. Yeah, that's what I mean. As long as Coke doesn't change the flavor of Coca Cola, right. They can, you know, that gangster, all the other gangster they do works really well as long as they don't up the original flavor. Right?

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Charlie Crockett]

So I'm on that circuit working my ass off, 200 and whatever shows a year for a bunch of years in a row playing all over the place. Seems like Sometimes we play 21 nights in a row out there you know, for kickers at Bonita Creek hall and punk rock clubs in New Jersey and you know, playing at the, you know, Saint, that little club, the Saint, Asbury Park. It's like a 40 cap. It's a badass place. Anyway, my, I was like blacking out. I moved up to a bus and. And I was like my, I was getting really light headed and I'd be sitting in the back of the bus and I would be so lighted I'd be blacking out a lot. Right. Just sitting There short of breath. But I just thought, you know, I'm grinding, I'm playing all these shows, I'm going. I'm going as hard as you can go. Taking potions, you know, just doing all this dumb. Working hard. And I was playing at the old Shady Grove here in town that's now closed down. They used to do. It was the KGSR radio thing. Marsha Millen put it on or whatever and then it turned into, you know, ACL radio and then Shady Grove closed down there on Barton Springs, whatever. But I played it a handful of times. First time I played it, there was nobody there. Second time I played it, it was packed and I had. I had Willie's old tour bus, the redheaded stranger. It was one of the ones he lost in the IRS era that he never got back.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, wow.

[Charlie Crockett]

In this shyster, Chuck Ligon, I remember he saw some. Was selling this thing on the side of the highway up in Oklahoma. The reddited stranger with the murals on it. And it's a beautiful bus. Somehow this guy gets it right. I shouldn't call him a shyster, but he definitely shies to me.

[Joe Rogan]

That's the shyster then.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. Yeah. You know, the music business is crazy because it's so.

[Joe Rogan]

There it is.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Charlie Crockett]

That's the one, man. Yeah, that's the one. It on the other side, it says, driven only by the finest bass players.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know, because somebody in the band always drove those old buses. I had that bus. I used that bus exclusively for about a year or whatever. And we get off the stage at Shady Grove and my heart had gone out of rhythm. I just say this. I almost died in the back of that bus. I end up finding because it won't go. Here I am 30 something years old, in my early 30s. My arrhythmia is out. It's. It's going out and it's getting harder and harder to get back in, to shock it back into normal rhythm. And I just kept ignoring it because somebody told me in South Texas in the 80s not to. Not to worry about it. Anyway, you know, it turned out that my heart had enlarged and all this shit was going on when I had to get surgery. The point, long rounded point that I'm making to you about medical industry that I learned the hard way, man, is like, no one's advocating for you, only you. You have to be your own advocate. They don't give a fuck. You know, they don't. Like they were just going to automatically put a mechanical valve in my heart right Automatically didn't present any other options, anything. Right. And I get there on the American Heart association webpage or whatever, because I have insurance at the time or anything. Nothing. You know, the only reason that they covered me at the time was the Affordable Care act. And I had the right window where they could not deny me. Right. Otherwise, I don't know what I would have done. And that is absolutely an imperfect system. Right. I just didn't have health insurance. So here they are covering me and probably because I don't have money and they're dealing with, you know, how it is, you know, American business practices or whatever. They're like, here's this mechanical valve. And I go and look it up, Joe. And it's like, you know, if you have a mechanical valve, you automatically are on blood thinner the rest of your life. Automatically. No matter what there's. And you can't. That's just how it's gonna be. It lasts twice as long as a prosthetic valve, which I had not heard of at that point, but that was the whole thing. This can last up to 20 years. But guess what? You have like 300% higher risk of a stroke with a mechanical valve as a prosthetic, a bioprosthetic cow valve. And then the third thing was that you can hear that thing clicking. You can hear the valve.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

Ticking.

[Joe Rogan]

My buddy Everlast has one of those.

[Charlie Crockett]

Really?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. He could go like this.

[Charlie Crockett]

You can hear it.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

And I was reading about that and man, I'm like neurotic. Like, I knew. I'm like, I'll never get over it. So that's when I found out about the. About the bovine cow valve.

[Joe Rogan]

So it's made out of a cow.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. Edwards Scientific makes it. I carry a little card around in my wallet with the tag of the. Of, you know, that product number in case somebody sees me on this, finds me on the sidewalk. Wow. You know, and in that.

[Joe Rogan]

How long does that last?

[Charlie Crockett]

They're supposed to last around 10 years. And I had mine. And I had mine done. And right there at Seton, you know, Seton Medical there on 38th in January 2019. So we're coming back around to it, kind of.

[Joe Rogan]

So you have to get another operation.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. But what they did is they put a. They put a. The way they did it. And here's the thing about. Right. Medical and anything. Right. The medical industry is, I think, really fucked up and really predatory. Totally profit driven and like, you know, people's health and preventative well being and all that. I mean, we don't get. They don't give. We don't give a fuck about that in this country. You know, I mean, there's no money to be made off of. People look, taking care of themselves and eating right and being preventative and like.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know, there's. There's nothing in that. The part about it that is amazing though, even in the like kind of insanity of all the land of cheap traders is the technological advancements. Yeah, the technological advancements in the medical field, though not really, you know, available to the common person. They are incredible advancements. Right. So it's like they're moving so quickly that by the time I need to get another one, I don't think they'll ever have to open me, cut me up open again. Because they can like go in through a scope now. They could do it at that time it was just more experimental and they didn't want to do it. They were only doing it on really high risk older patients, you know. But I think it's already kind of gone more mainstream from where when they cut me open to like, if I did it right now, I could probably get around cutting it.

[Joe Rogan]

Right, so they'll go in through an artery.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And then what do they have to do to it?

[Charlie Crockett]

Well, so with me, what was happening was, is so I had the wolf Parkinson's white had to get the ablation first to deal to before I could deal with what aortic valve disease is what it's called and what it, what it basically is is that over your aorta there's these three valves that sit on the over the top of your aorta that they look like a Mercedes symbol is what they look like. It's like the best example, it really looks like a Mercedes symbol. And some people, it's a bicuspid or whatever. Some people are born with two of the three fused together or just one missing altogether. And it turned out that I just missing one that's like a leaky carburetor, you know. So like as the time goes, that old carburetor in that truck over time just leaking more and more and more, you know. And I mean, I just got lucky, man, because I was like in the back of that bus and there was this lady driving us back then that like was like holding seances and burning sage over the top of me while I was like laying in the back of that bus. Like that was gonna heal me. That didn't work. And she doesn't drive me anymore. Get yourself a good bus driver. You have to get A good bus driver, you'll never get good sleep.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Because you'd be freaking out. You'd be thinking, what if this person falls asleep?

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, there's a lot of them, especially.

[Joe Rogan]

The late night drives.

[Charlie Crockett]

Oh, man.

[Joe Rogan]

Who? Late night drives are scary. That that highway starts hypnotizing you.

[Charlie Crockett]

There was this guy, there's a video going around. He drove us around for a little bit and there was this video passing around the industry, this guy called Jimbo. There's this bus driver that was like, you know, just a speed freak. And it was like this video of him where he was like on whatever he was on and somebody had recorded him or like they'd put a phone up or something because they knew his nuts. And he was like having one of those like, you know, methamphetamine freakouts, like, you know, driving the bus down the road and it was getting all passed around the industry. And I saw it because like he was driving us at the time. I remember we woke up and I remember we woke up somewhere in New Mexico one morning because we're going on this road all of a sudden and I get up and I go to the front of the bus and he's. We're like on some fucking two track, you know, caliche dirt road that was like behind. Behind a gate in a bus. That bus, right. And I get up there and he's looking all crazy in the door handle, the inside door handle. The bus had been pulled off and shit. It was crazy, man. We got. When we got to the. When we got back down here in Texas, man, I never saw a fool again. Jesus Christ.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, you got to think if you're driving buses all through the night, there's a high likelihood you're on amphetamines.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, exactly. Yes.

[Joe Rogan]

For the business. It's like probably the best way to stay awake.

[Charlie Crockett]

Oh, no doubt about it.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. And then obviously that shit's very addictive and you need it. This band has to get to Cincinnati. Yeah, you got to get to Cincinnati. It's an eight hour drive. There's only one way to do it. We gotta drive through the night.

[Charlie Crockett]

That's why all the old performers were all on pills, you know, they were getting prescribed. I mean, you know, they were getting prescribed that shit by the doctor. Yeah, you know.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, yeah. Does this give you a. A greater appreciation for life? The value of life, like knowing you almost lost it?

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I hadn't thought about immediately after that. I just started think. I just started thinking about My mortality, you know, I hadn't really thought about it before, you know, of course, everybody.

[Joe Rogan]

Feels invulnerable when you're young.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Especially if you're young and you're living that wild, you know, transient, moving around, no roots.

[Charlie Crockett]

When I was in my 20s, I guess I really, looking back now, I was like, man, I was young. Like, I thought I could live like that forever. I thought. I thought I could live hand in mouth and, you know, sleep in people's pastures and, you know, do the gentleman hobo thing forever. But, you know, I was 26.

[Joe Rogan]

There's something romantic about that, too, right?

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. Oh, I love that. I. I wouldn't take it back, man. I mean, like, you know, I believe that, you know. You know, I think mental slavery is something that is real and. But so much of it is us. Like, we do it to ourselves, you know?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

And so that's what I was going to say about Chomsky. I haven't kept up with him in years, but I remember something he said a long time ago that stuck with me where he was talking about, like, American, you know, consumerism. Over the last hundred years, it really kind of illuminated my. My kind of mind was. He was saying. He was like, there are people working really, really, really hard to eliminate your sense of purpose for the explicit goal of making you a more efficient consumer. Right. All human beings live for and desire a. A life of purpose. Yeah, purpose. It doesn't matter what it is something that you can dedicate yourself to. The 10,000 hours, the 10 years. It can be, you know, anything. Wood making or your buddy with the. This ancient tooth that he's carving into this beautiful piece of art or whatever it is, you know?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

I don't know. I guess it's like a heavy thing. But I kind of realized when I became a transient that a lot of who I was was like this amalgamation of a bunch of people just trying to sell me products. You know, 90s radio just blasting my brain as a kid. Right. Like, programming that, like, it's like the. So much programming is so hard for me to watch because you know that it's only a vehicle for the commercials. Right, right, right. So whenever I'm watching something, and as soon as I think that it's not that good, I can't stop thinking about, like, well, the only. This is just a vehicle for me to, you know, think I need whatever the. They're selling.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know, so I feel like I. I feel like I killed, like, a lot of the false version of Me, that I was becoming. That I. I only realized when I walked, When I, like, walked away from Crystal City, you know what I mean? And then, and then I could. And then I really started becoming, you know, me. That's when I really started becoming me.

[Joe Rogan]

A lot of people are prisoners to that their whole life because the, the only value they place is in how much stuff they're able to acquire. That's the only value that they see in life. They look at numbers on a ledger, so they look at numbers in their bank account, and they look at the stuff they're willing to acquire or that they're able to acquire.

[Charlie Crockett]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

And that's their only measure of success in this life.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. The very definition of the word rich has changed so much over the last hundred years. It's kind of moved entirely. It really. Richness wasn't a material idea, you know.

[Joe Rogan]

But it, what did it used to be?

[Charlie Crockett]

You know, richness of life, fullness of life.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know, fulfillment. Fulfillment, purpose, Health. Health, you know, community.

[Joe Rogan]

Community, Family. Yeah, yeah. Friends. Yeah. Real life. But so many people, they, they, they forego all that. They'll throw everything out the window just for the numbers, for numbers. And they, they think they're successful.

[Charlie Crockett]

I mean, it's the way that it's being run, you know, like, I mean, there's no such thing as a free lunch. You know, all this free social media ain't free.

[Joe Rogan]

No. You know, you give up your attention. Your attention is very, very valuable. Your data.

[Charlie Crockett]

Privacy.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Your privacy.

[Charlie Crockett]

The transparent society.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

But, man, like, you know, you're pulling. Y' all pulled up that AI stuff. I remember. I, I won't tell you the whole thing, but I, I was playing on the street in Europe when, When I was younger, I'd met a guy down on the Lower east side. It's a Danish jazz singer. And he would show up over in the States a couple times a year. And he was doing really well there in Denmark, and the, the state really sponsors the arts there in a big way. And it's a small country, high quality of life. Like, he really had it made over there. And when he was coming over to States to play music, it was almost more of a leisure thing for him. Benjamin Ogerbuck is his name. Great singer, great jazz singer. And he'd show up at the open mics and all this, and he. I think he really liked me because he saw the way that I was living this American gypsy lifestyle. And he eventually helped me get over to Europe and I played the club circuit in Copenhagen for like six weeks or whatever. And I was really rough around the edges. And like, the American novelty in the folk in like, blues clubs around Copenhagen wore off really quick, and I wound up back on the street, but this time in Europe. And as soon as I started playing on the street in Copenhagen, man, then being a real Texan in Europe in front of tourists on the street, man, I start. That's when I started making money. It was crazy. My money, like, quadrupled because all of a sudden I was like a truly exotic. Texas is exotic. And everywhere you go in the world, it means something, right? They either want to shake your hand or they step back. And it doesn't matter where you go in the world. There's no. There's not an inch of the world that hasn't heard of Texas, you know, and. And that said. And so musically, you know, it. And I think culturally it means something no matter what, you know. And to play music and be a Texan is worth a lot on its own, you know what I mean? It's a big part of it. It's just being a Texan. Gary Clark Jr. Learning how to hold his own under the tradition of Austin blues players in Texas, guitar slingers, I mean, that's. It's second to none in the world, you know. And so if you've seen them live, you know what it is. And. But I remember seeing, like, there were no self checkouts at grocery stores and in the United States back then, not one. And then I was like, I ended up down in France because it was getting cold in Copenhagen, and I had like. I had like 2 or 300 kroner left, and I put it all on a bus ticket to Paris because it was my mama's favorite city. And I grew up quite a bit in Louisiana, having some of that French heritage. And I went down there. I'm glad I didn't think about it, man, because the language barrier was really difficult and I didn't really realize it. So I was pulling into the city, you know, and actually there was an Algerian guy who spoke English that was like, man, go to Montmartre, go to Le Sacre Cor. Go to Le Sacre Coeur. That's where the tourists are, whatever. And I kind of learned how to hustle tourists with gypsies, kind of that would. Were. Let were using me kind of as a decoy on the steps. And I thought, this is great. These gypsies love me. And I'm sitting there playing, and while I'm playing, I realize that I'm Just a distraction while they're pickpocketing these tourists. It was a good trick. Of course I didn't say anything. Also, I didn't stick with them too much. But like, so like the automation thing, you know, they're, they're. Europe is way ahead of us on all of that because in a lot of ways America, when you try to like analyze America against Europe and these countries over there, like in some ways it's similar, but we're more similar to Latin or South America in a lot of ways with just how big the country is, you know, and you know, the, the ag. The, you know, because the country's so big, we got the states that are divided up, all that type of, those kind of technologies to like hit the people and become mainstream. It's slow. It's a slower process here. Right. And one of the things, you know, about the pandemic that is obvious to me now is, you know, a lot of people realize that they could speed that up, you know. And you know, I mean, I think they'd been trying to eliminate, you know, the, the risks and what's the word? What are they like, you know, externalizing cost. Right. Once, like, how do we get, how do we get these machines in here and these people out? And it, we've probably jumped ahead in that process in America a decade or more in just a couple of years. And I just remember this was probably 2010, you go into a grocery store in Paris and there was, there was only one person working there and everything else was self checkout. And that was years before I saw it here. And then you think about the way that that's hitting in every single industry in America. Yeah, right.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, it's so easy for people to be completely disconnected from other people now. You know, you don't, you don't have to interact, you know, and that's part of it. And if they don't have to pay people, they can maximize their profits. And then it becomes a very impersonal experience.

[Charlie Crockett]

Soylent Green is coming, baby.

[Joe Rogan]

It's coming.

[Charlie Crockett]

You seen that movie?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

Good movie.

[Joe Rogan]

That's a good movie. It's a scary movie.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, I think all the dystopian movies about the future, they undersold it. It's going to get real weird real soon. And because automation is not just going to apply to self checkout, it's going to apply to everything. All the, all that truck driving shit, that's all gone. That's gonna be gone.

[Charlie Crockett]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

It's all gonna be self driving Trucks, and they're gonna be more efficient, less accidents, safer.

[Charlie Crockett]

Just remember those big business people. Remember those people. I know a whole lot of people who have relied on undocumented workers in this state for decades, voting against the very thing that they were using themselves this entire time.

[Joe Rogan]

Yep.

[Charlie Crockett]

Rely. How you gonna rely on undocumented workers?

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yourself.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Charlie Crockett]

You ain't paying taxes on it. You're not. You know, those people got no safety net or anything.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Charlie Crockett]

And then, you know, here comes the. That's where it's going to happen. You know, I'm not saying just as a negative thing, like I think you can already see in social media. I do think there's this. This exhaustion even in the youth with this. With this monolith, you know, with this thing, the phones. Yeah. You know, and I've been saying that in the music business, like in country music, you know, like Mark Twain said, history doesn't. It doesn't repeat. It rhymes.

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know, and so it's like it's 25 now. But I was thinking of it last year in 2024, because, like, 1974 in music was this crazy year, you know, and, like, thinking about the Nashville System, the reason that Waylon Jennings is different than anybody else is because Waylon's the specific guy who breaks the stranglehold that the Nashville system has on its artists. That you can't use your band, you can't choose your studio. Right. Like any of that. Like Whelan, you have to think how crazy that is. You couldn't use your band, and you couldn't even pick the studio. You couldn't produce. You didn't have creative control at all. Whalen's the guy that breaks that through that wall.

[Joe Rogan]

How did he do it?

[Charlie Crockett]

I think. I think a couple of ways, it's all. It's the yin and yang of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. They are both on rca. Willie was, you know, at first, you know, it's like Stapleton. Stapleton made his career as a songwriter early on, you know, and. And that's what catapulted really, for everything, you know, that he's got going on now. There's a really great foundation there of a guy that's spent his whole life writing songs. And that's what Willie did, you know. So Willie actually had success pretty early when he got to Nashville with, you know, songs like Nightlife and Crazy and all that kind of stuff, and Baron Young and Patsy Klein and these kinds of really big artists were cutting his songs pretty early on. Right. But he was so weird to the establishment at the time. And so, you know, kind of had this like, philosophical thing. It's his writing that was going over the heads of the Hillbilly deal. So he was really neglected as a. The, you know, Willie Nelson records with him singing them. Waylon was more favored, actually by like, Chet Atkins and them. But like, you be. You'd be number one on the country charts in Nashville in the mid-60s and be in debt, you know, that's what Waylon said. Waylon was like, man, I'd be number one all the time. And I was dead broke, you know, he's like, man, they got you out there seven nights a week and you're coming back and Lucky Moeller's telling them that you owe him ten grand. You know, that was. It was a crazy system. Willie ends up leaving rca. They're over him. He leaves RCA because Jerry Wexler is coming down and A R and Texans out of this progressive central Texas scene of that era that was so unique and it happened then and just totally unique. The whole scene, everything here, the movement, the hippies and the cowboys, the. The. Where everybody could. Like here in the capital of Texas, you know, it was weird, but they were in the same rooms. We're still doing that here, you know, which is what I'm. What I'm really proud of, you know, and glad that this town never turned into Nashville or LA or of any of those towns. The best thing that ever happened to us is that the business didn't grow up like that.

[Joe Rogan]

Right?

[Charlie Crockett]

I really do believe that because it's allowed our unique culture to continue to grow, even if it's like I said. And sometimes it's. It's good to be neglected by that machine for sure. But so Willie leaves because Jerry Wexler pulls him out of there. Because RCA doesn't give a about him anyway, right? He goes to Atlantic, sells 400, 000 records. The boys up in New York don't even realize there's a country division after Willie sells 400, 000 records, which is a lot, right? They close the division. And that's when Willie lands at Columbia and he's having success. Well, they were starting to think that Waylon was past his prime too. But then Willie's blowing up on the other label. And Willie and Waylon got the same manager at the time, Neil Russian. And what's Russian doing? Russians leveraging it all. And so Waylon was about to leave RCA and they doubled down and matched kind of Willie's deal because they didn't want. Because they didn't want to lose Whelan. And Whalen was like, I'm only. I'm only Stan. You know, if I, like, I got to be producing my own records, I got. It got to be my band and I got to pick the place that I'm playing, you know, and he. He manages to do that. So it's not just Whalen. I mean, it's Willie and Waylon together. That's why they're so tied together, you know, as these two guys, that their careers just kept, you know, they just kept chasing each other kind of through the record books, you know what I mean? And, you know, because you'd be in Nashville, it's still like this now, right? Like, when I got signed to Nashville by 30 Tigers, it was purely because John Folk was my agent. And those guys, they tell you this themselves, they didn't understand what is that what I was doing. They didn't get it. I was only put on the roster as a favor to my agent because they were having success with some other artists openly saying, I don't understand this. Right? Which at least they're being honest about, you know. But then what they would do that was so weird is like they'd give you, like, if a major label would give you, you know, half a million dollars on your deal, these guys would give you 50 grand, right? Like a tenth of that, you know, kind of on the independent, alt country, Americana circuit. But they would. What frustrated me, what frustrated me about it, Joe, was that they're only giving you a tenth of money, but they're behaving like major labels with these like two year record cycles. That just kills an artist that's like that. No, that hasn't broken through. It just kills you. That's a. That's a 100 industry model. Because they can always get another horse, you know what I mean? They can always get another horse and they can always, you know, they bet on 10 young guys and. And one of those kind of amateur realists blows up, you know, they're good, right? But you're never going to get Awaylon Jennings out of that model, right? It's not gonna. You know what I mean? It's not. It's not gonna happen, you know, and so how did.

[Joe Rogan]

But how did Waylon get it so that he could do whatever he wanted?

[Charlie Crockett]

Because Willie left, right? And they. Because Willie left and all of a sudden Whalen was really going to leave. That's all of a sudden.

[Joe Rogan]

That was his leverage.

[Charlie Crockett]

They gave him everything they Gave him everything. And. And. And everything was changing. Everything was changing in Nashville because we're talking about. When I say, like 1974 here, you got to think about it. You know, this is America in Vietnam. You know, this is America coming out of the 60s. You know, it's coming. Everything was. You could. I feel like in a lot of ways what was happening is like the, you know, the commercial culture was really starting to take off. You know what I mean? And then by the time we get to the 80s, you know, it's like this level of, like, pop culture and like American pop culture as a global export, you know, by. It's like, I guess maybe it's finally truly realized by maybe by the time Michael Jordan becomes the like, most visible person on the planet, you know, kind of in the 80s and 90s. It's like Nashville was such an old system. It's kind of like in country music today. Like, one of the reasons everybody's sprinting into it, right, is because it's one. It's like one of the only places left where there's like, loyalty, long term loyalty in the fan base compared to, like, you know, what happened with pop music in the last 20 years with pop and hip hop and all that. I mean, I can't. Every one of those guys called me at one point were like, I want to get into country music because you got loyal fans.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Charlie Crockett]

All hip hop industry guys.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Charlie Crockett]

All of them. Every last one of them. And they've had success with a whole bunch of guys since then. I just didn't do it well.

[Joe Rogan]

Country music has always been connected to authenticity.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And that's the reason why you keep the loyal fans.

[Charlie Crockett]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

Because people know that it's real, whether it's Colter Wall or whoever it is, it's authentic. You hear it and you go, this is not mass produced. This is not a bunch of executives sitting around looking at a focus group trying to figure out what's going to hit.

[Charlie Crockett]

That's right.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, man.

[Charlie Crockett]

You mentioned Coulter. I wanted to say this. This is something I wanted to bring up with the Willie and Whelan thing. And I've been meaning to tell culture this. I'll just tell him on your show. So we were Both on the 30 Tigers roster for years. I met Coulter out at Willy's Ranch. Goddamn. Ten years ago. Right. And he's one of my favorites. I've always, always loved his songwriting. I mean, everything he puts out is great. Don't you agree?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

I love him special, you know, really special.

[Joe Rogan]

Some people Jamie turned me on to him when I heard Kate McCannon the first time.

[Charlie Crockett]

Jamie Johnson.

[Joe Rogan]

No, Jamie. This.

[Charlie Crockett]

Oh, this Jamie.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. He texted me and he's like, you're gonna love this guy. Yeah, he sent me that song. I was like, holy. When I found out he was 21 when he made that song, like, you got to be kidding me. That sounds like a 60 year old chain smoker, man.

[Charlie Crockett]

It bowed us all over. And you know what's funny, man? He's just getting better. Yeah, you know he is.

[Joe Rogan]

And he's incredible.

[Charlie Crockett]

Here's something about that. I told him I need to. I'm gonna. I wanted to buy him a pickup truck as a gift for this. This is why. So he was on the roster, I was on the roster. And I started way down at the back of the line, right, and made a lot of records. And more and more of the labels are calling and each record I'm putting out is doing better than the previous one. And there's more money and promotion going into each album. But all a lot of outside guys are calling, you know, all the coastal labels are calling. New York and LA are all over me. Culture ends up pulling up stakes and going to rca. And he didn't just go to rca, he took everything with him and he took the whole catalog over there. And I wasn't really aware of that. I didn't know what was going on. And RCA wasn't like they had hollered at me like through one of their A and R guys or whatever, but it was. Their big guys were never really interested in me out there, right? So they weren't one of the ones that was like really hot on me. But David Macias at 30 Tigers, very similar to what I'm saying is, is Culture to me is kind of like Willie left RCA back in the day and when he left, all of a sudden those guys, because he took everything with him, were about to lose me and they fucking handed the keys over to me, you know what I mean? Because. And I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that Colter had left and just took everything. And so that ended up happening on a record cycle for me for an album called $10 Cowboy. And I was this close to going to the New York Boys. And Macias comes in last minute and beats them all on the royalty rate, on the money, on everything. Right. So I guess what I'm saying is Culture is kind of my Willie Nelson. Appreciate you, bud. And you're doing good.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, he won't do podcasts I try to get him in.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Sent me a bunch of records. Sent me some cool. Said sorry, but no. Yeah, but I mean, that's probably better.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

He wants to just be as authentic as possible. The dude spends time actually working on a ranch.

[Charlie Crockett]

Well, that's what he loves to do.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

You ever been up there to Saskatchewan?

[Joe Rogan]

No, man.

[Charlie Crockett]

It's in their blood.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

That's the. What that land is. That's what they do up there. Yeah, I've been right through Saskatoon, even that big town there, you know, and he's. I guess he's not too far down south from there, but, like, it's a. Those are ranching folks.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, well, it's in his music, clearly, you know, I mean, that. That guy screams authenticity.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yep, he does. And he grew up on. On, you know, Whalen and all that stuff, you know, and all the cowboy and all the, you know, he knows that cowboy music probably better than anybody.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Yeah, that. Well, that's. That's the thing that when you're talking about these hip hop artists and pop artists, that. That's what they feel. You know, all artists. I mean, even someone is a pop artist, what do they want to be? They want. They want something that resonates with people. They want something that really connects with people, you know, and if they think the vehicle to doing that is a hit pop song, they'll take that route. But then they'll hear something like Kate McCann and like, God damn, that's what I really want to do.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. You know, you can't do. You can't duplicate that. The only. The only way to do that is to live it.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. It's got to be real. It's got to be. You know, there's something just like I was talking about with comedy, like, they have to know that you're really thinking that it's something in music, too. They have to know that this is. And they like when you write your own too, you know? You know that it's coming from someone's. Someone's mind and their. Their soul. It's coming from their life experience. It's who they are as a human being. This is their art. This is a true expression of their. Their being. And that. That's what makes people loyal. That's.

[Charlie Crockett]

Those pop artists just want to take a picture standing next to authenticity.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, they do. Well, they want to be it, but they don't know how to get there and they don't know how to do it, and they've never lived it and they've been you know, they've been paying attention to all the polls and the focus groups, and they've been listening to the executives. They've been taking the advances and driving the Mercedes. They're doing all the shit that leads you down the wrong path. And then one day you realize, like, it's not what I want. You know, it's. It's interesting because it's like, you know, there's always going to be these examples of something that pops through that's real, that people gravitate towards. And then there's always going to be these people trying to capitalize on it and make money off of it and trying to figure out how to recreate it in an inauthentic way. It's not possible. That's the one thing that might save us from this AI. Yeah, exactly, because AI is going to create a bunch of really catchy songs, you know, but it's never going to create an Oliver Anthony song. It's never going to create Hard times, you know, it's never going to create some of your shit. It's not.

[Charlie Crockett]

It's.

[Joe Rogan]

It's not going to. It's got to come from a real human being. And there's a thing that people are always going to want, you know, you're always going to want something that, you know, a real human being made. There's something in it, you know, that's why this building's filled with art. You know, I love looking at something that somebody made. You know, it came from their. Their soul. It came from whoever they are as a human. They laid it down. Whether it's music or whether it's art, comedy, whatever it is. It's like that. That's coming from a human being, you know, and that's. We're always going to want to be connected to that.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. I was looking at you saying that with your Joe Rogan Experience sign and you telling me in the hallway that it's f. Named for Hendrix.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Yeah. I stole it from Jimmy when we first started.

[Charlie Crockett]

The Great. The great. The greats never reveal their sources.

[Joe Rogan]

I couldn't help it.

[Charlie Crockett]

I'm just kidding.

[Joe Rogan]

I had to. I had. Well, it's obvious. I had to give it.

[Charlie Crockett]

It wasn't obvious to me, man. That's what I'm saying. I'm kind of slow.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, I had to give it up. It's like.

[Charlie Crockett]

But, you know, Austin, Texas or bust, it says right there.

[Joe Rogan]

I used to listen to Jimmy all the time on the way to the Comedy Store. That was like Jimmy and Led Zeppelin. I Listened a whole lot of love and if six was nine I'd listen to that all the time on the way down Laurel Canyon Doo doo doo.

[Charlie Crockett]

Doo doo doo doo can you imagine how that crazy that must have sounded coming through the radio or coming through, like people's sound systems in America in the. In the late 60s?

[Joe Rogan]

Well, my friend Phil Hartman, when he was a kid, he used to work at the Whiskey. He was like, you know, like a grip. And it was his job. The speakers were precariously placed on the edge of the stage and Jimmy performed there. And it was his job to stand there and make sure that Jimmy didn't kick over the speaker into the audience. So he stood right there. My Hendrix played right above him. And the way he talked about it, man, it's like it was just. To him, it was like this magical moment because I think he was a teenager at the time and it was.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know, like in somebody else's band or something.

[Joe Rogan]

No, he was just working for the club. You know, he was just a guy that was hired to work there, you know, just a kid. And he was basically literally just there to make sure the speaker doesn't fall into the crowd. And, you know, Jimmy was playing right above him, just right there. He said it was incredible. It was insane. He said it was just like this magical moment because Jimmy live, you know, there's something about seeing someone live, you know, like I was talking about when I saw Gary play Midnight Rider. There's something live. And I was with my oldest daughter and we were at this downtown LA club and it was like a Monday or Tuesday night, it was a weeknight and it was a midnight show. It was like a real late night show and it was sponsored by an alcohol company. I wish I could remember the company, but they put together this very small show and it was just. They. It was a total impromptu session. And Suzanne, my friend Suzanne Santo, who's the lead singer of Honey Honey at the time, she's incredibly talented. She was singing it and she didn't know the exact words, so she had to get the words off of her phone. So she's singing Midnight Rider off her phone and Gary's in the background. And I recorded it on my phone and I upload. See if you can find it, Jamie.

[Charlie Crockett]

But I have somebody else's version. Oh, that's what I'm talking about right there.

[Joe Rogan]

It was Jameson. Come on.

[Charlie Crockett]

Love when he gets into it yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Sam.

[Charlie Crockett]

The blues will never go out of style.

[Joe Rogan]

Who? Sam.

[Charlie Crockett]

Sweet. Come on, Gary, let's go. That's a nice jacket, G. Yeah. Oh, that's it.

[Joe Rogan]

Jamie, see if you can find Midnight Rider on my Instagram. I know it's on there. I wanna. I wanna play that part because it's just. It was insane. It was just one of those magical moments where you see someone perform live. There's just something about. You get a lot of it. There it is. Sam. See how she's looking at her phone? She had to read the lyrics off her phone.

[Charlie Crockett]

They're all doing that now. It's crazy.

[Joe Rogan]

She had to, because she didn't know exactly the lyrics.

[Charlie Crockett]

What if you didn't. What if you. What if you didn't have this thing, though? Well, then you might remember my hat to remember.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, she would have had to get.

[Charlie Crockett]

A piece of paper or make some up.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, make some up.

[Charlie Crockett]

But, you know, man, you know, listening to Gary do that and you talking about how much you love Stevie Ray Vaughan, it just. You know, it reminds me. It's like, you know, this. To me, it's like. You know, it's like country is everything and country's nothing. You know, because if you're in. If you're in Texas, all that over there on the other side of Mississippi, it goes away for us. You know, there's a. There's a. There's a brashness, there's a. There's a boldness in any sound, whether it's coming out of Honky Tonk or coming out of a blues joint in Texas, it's a totally different sound. You know, it's like Billy Gibbons talked about this a lot. You know, like when those guys were trying to break through on the national scene, the idea of Texas is just a total stigma. Right? It's all hillbillies. It's all provincial.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know, and all this, you know, and so it's like you go to Nashville or whatever, and it's all Appalachia. It's all. You know what I mean? It's. Because it's. And that's the thing. It's like I give a About some genres, you know, because you get classified. But one thing you can't explain away is place. Right? You can't explain away region. Right. Like, you are from where you're from.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

Gary Clark Junior's from right here.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

And he sounds like it. You know what I mean? He sounds like it. And it's like. It's not that. It's rock, blues, soul, country, whatever. It's. It's Texas. And what happens with Texans of any background, right? They discount you for sure look at us as provincial, right? I mean, people got some ideas about what Texas is who have never stepped foot in the state. That's not any different than, you know, people who've never been to California claiming to be an expert on it.

[Joe Rogan]

Right?

[Charlie Crockett]

And so it's like there's two roads for a Texas artist. You either let somebody in Nashville or New York or LA convince you to lose your accent, you know, wash the Texas off, do it our way, or. Which is the only way, is to take your brand of Texas to the world, whatever it is, whether it's Gary or Selena or anybody. Steve Ray Vaughan, Stevie Ray Vaughan, man.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's with comedy, too, man. I mean, Bill Hicks, who's one of.

[Charlie Crockett]

The greatest of all time, he's my.

[Joe Rogan]

Favorite right from here.

[Charlie Crockett]

That's right. The scene was hot, man. The scene was hot.

[Joe Rogan]

It was hot because of him. It was hot because of him and Kinison. It's Texas, you know, I remember.

[Charlie Crockett]

Did you know Hicks? No.

[Joe Rogan]

Met him once. Met him once real briefly. Didn't even get a chance to talk to him. But I saw him perform live a few times before he died.

[Charlie Crockett]

You did see him live?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, saw Kinison a few times live. I saw Kinison live before he died, too, but he had already passed his prime. Kinison passed his prime real quick because it was. He's a cautionary tale because of the partying, you know, like, he was the fucking man.

[Charlie Crockett]

Oh, y' all got a party scene? You comedians got a party scene?

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, well, that party scene in LA at the time was the cocaine party scene was a. It was a different party scene. You know, Mark Marin said that he hung out with Kennison, and they did so much coke that he had voices in his head for a year afterwards. A year. Like, literally, like schizophrenic, you know, like hearing voices in his head for a year before they stopped talking to him. Yeah, they were doing cocaine, man, and they were doing.

[Charlie Crockett]

At the Viper Room.

[Joe Rogan]

Everywhere. Yeah, he was doing it everywhere.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

But Kennison became almost like a caricature of himself. It became sort of captured by this. The. The perception, by this character that they had created. And Kinison is what birthed Hicks. You know, Hicks was. Hicks was a great comic, but he was one of the outlaws. It was Kinnison and Hicks that sort of defined the Texas style. And when we were living in. At the time, I was living in New York, and there was. There was really two places in the country. There was la, where you wanted to Go to get on tv. Everybody wanted to go get a fucking sitcom. They all wanted to be Jerry Seinfeld. And New York, which is like the club comics, that was like the Dave Attels and the. These guys that would, like, you know, the guys would do the clubs and they were. They were thought of as like the real pure comics.

[Charlie Crockett]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, and then there was this new scene, this new scene out of Houston, this new scene out of the Laugh Stop in River Oaks. And I remember the first time I ever worked there, man, you could feel it in the building. You could feel that they had been there. You know, they were both gone. By the time I had worked there, they were both dead. But you could feel it in the building, man. You could feel it in the. The comics, the open mic scene. You could feel they were pure. You know, there was a. There was a Texas quality to the way they were doing comedy. It was a. You. Yeah, you.

[Charlie Crockett]

That's what I like.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

Hicks would. With both sides of the room.

[Joe Rogan]

Absolutely.

[Charlie Crockett]

And get. And then. And then just him up and.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

Cross them over and put him in his pocket.

[Joe Rogan]

And no one knew what. Where. What he was. They didn't know what he was.

[Charlie Crockett]

That's right.

[Joe Rogan]

The first time I ever saw him, he bombed. He bombed. Except for the comedians.

[Charlie Crockett]

We were dying because, you know, there's quite. There's quite a bit of video of him from these clubs here and in Houston when he was younger, because they were even in the, you know, in the 90s, they were filming.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

And I've seen some of those clips where he's like. Like you're talking about. He just couldn't. The whole room's afraid of him. Like. Yeah. No one's laughing. Everyone's afraid. He's like, super up.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, he was the first comic, really, that had a message, Right. You know, he had like a. There was a. There was a social commentary to his. Like a dark poetry to his comedy. And so many people tried to emulate it that at the. The Green Room, the punchline in Atlanta, there was a. Like, people wrote a bunch of. On the walls in the green room, but one of the big ones that said, quit trying to be hicks.

[Charlie Crockett]

Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

I remember seeing that going. Yes, everybody did. We all did. Everybody wanted to be hicks.

[Charlie Crockett]

Dude, you come. So after Stevie Ray Vaughan passed, right. I remember, you know, we were up in Dallas, Fort Worth, and you'd come down here. We'd come down here in. In. In high school and. And go up and down 6th Street. I will never forget this. Every Single guitar player. And every Little Bar on 6th street, every single one of them was playing like, Stevie Ray Vaughan. Yeah, every single one of them. And there were 30 of them. Like, there were 30 different ones that.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

Coming in out of bars, doing all the. It was. It was unbelievable.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, there's always going to be someone like that that, like, sets this.

[Charlie Crockett]

Quit trying to be Hicks.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, quit trying to be Hicks. But it was like. That was a.

[Charlie Crockett]

My daddy died for that flag. Oh, really? How about mine at Kmart?

[Joe Rogan]

It's made in.

[Charlie Crockett]

But he could do it because he. Because he was a Texan.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

The vernacular is real. And then he'd turn around and.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know, fuck up the other side.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. No, it was genius. Well, when I. When I first saw him, he went on in Boston, and it was at Nick's Comedy Stop. And the guy who went on before him was this. He was a nice guy, but he was a hack. You know, he was just like, cops and donuts, normal shit. Stupid jokes. But the stupid jokes were working. It was cartoon character smoking pot. You know what would happen if Daffy Duck smoked a, you know, joint with Donald Duck?

[Charlie Crockett]

It was dumb, but it watered down Danger Field.

[Joe Rogan]

But it was getting people to laugh. And then Hicks went on stage and, like, immediately started bombing. You know, immediately he opened up with saying that he's tired of performing and tired of going up and telling people a bunch of. You couldn't possibly think up on your own. But the comics were dying, and there was, like 300 people in the room. By the time he was done performing, there was 50. There's 50. And there was maybe me and my friend Greg Fitzsimmons were in the back of the room just dying, laughing. And maybe 10 comics, we had all come to see Hicks because we had heard about him. And then I saw him a month later at the Comedy Connection, and he fucking murdered. The Comedy Connection was this little tiny club. It was like 150 seats, real low seat. Boston as well. This is when I was first starting. So this is like 1988 and is before he'd really popped. I'd heard about him from the Rodney Dangerfield HBO special, you know, so the Rodney Dangerfield had these young comedian specials. Rodney was the best at, like, introducing the world to talented comedians. And he had these Rodney Dangerfield young comedian specials where he'd have on, like, Robert Schimmel and Lenny Clark and Andrew Dice Clay. And that's where Kinison emerged. And Hicks. Hicks was one of them, too. And I remember I'd seen Hicks on that. So I went to see him live and like I said, the first time he bombed. The second time he murdered. It was Tiffany meeting Jimi Hendrix at the mall. He was doing this bit about Jimi Hendrix, like, Tiffany playing at the mall and Jimi Hendrix shows up. And it was. It was this just genius bit. It was so funny, man.

[Charlie Crockett]

Is that something that's out there? Can you see that wonder, man?

[Joe Rogan]

I wonder, because I don't think he ever put that on anything. It might be on an album somewhere, but it was back when there was all this, like, pop mall comedy or pop mall music, and he fucking hated it, you know? And it was. And he was just rallying.

[Charlie Crockett]

There's a genre for you right there.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, rallying against corporatism.

[Charlie Crockett]

It's gonna make a comeback, that little sub genre. Yeah, I mean, do something new with it.

[Joe Rogan]

It kind of has. Austin has a great comedy scene right now. It really does. And it's really just emerged from the pandemic.

[Charlie Crockett]

Was that, like, the main thing that drew you here?

[Joe Rogan]

Well, we all moved here to start it. We didn't even move here to start it. We moved here to just keep doing what we were doing in LA. But LA had shut down, and in 2020, we were all like. We were all without a country, you know, we were living in la. And the Comedy Store was shut down for a year and a half.

[Charlie Crockett]

Y' all were wild, man. It was so, so shut down out there.

[Joe Rogan]

It was so shut down. And I knew I'm. I'm one of those dudes. It's just like, I've never had faith in systems and government, and I'm going to keep us shut down. They're going to keep. And I came to Texas and Ron White was already here. So Ron White, who's a very good friend of mine, and Gary, I knew. I knew Gary from la. He used to hang out at the Comedy Store, too. And that's why I became friends with him. And he moved here, I think 2017 or 2018. And I talked to him on the phone. I'm like, why. Why'd you go back to Austin? He's like, man, I can't with those people in la. It's just like, I'm tired of it, man. He goes, I love Texas. I just. This is. This is real. And it's like, I need to go back home. And I was like, wow, that sounds right. That sounds right. And then when I talked to Ron, and Ron's the same way. Ron's a Texas boy, too. And he was like, I just don't want to do this anymore. I'll stay here. It's great.

[Charlie Crockett]

He goes, it's great.

[Joe Rogan]

It's middle of the country. I can fly anywhere. Fucking food's good, People are nice. And so I knew when I came.

[Charlie Crockett]

Here, that's all you need to know.

[Joe Rogan]

I was like, at the very least, Ron's here. And Ron's a good friend. And then when we came here, we could perform live into. I first started doing shows outside. Me and Dave Chappelle started doing shows at Stubbs. And we were doing outside shows where we had to test the whole crowd. Everybody had to get tested. So everybody had to show up like two hours in advance. We tested everybody for cover. They had to wear a mask outside. It was so stupid. The whole thing was so ridiculous. But we were hanging out in the back and drunk smoking weed. And it was like, it was like normal. It was like normal times. And it was like this cultural thing. Like we were the only ones doing comedy. And, you know, everybody just started coming here, man. They all just started coming here. And then we started doing shows inside at the Vulcan, the Vulcan Gas Company, which is a music club that's on 6th Street. So we started performing there. And you know, Nick, the guy was the owner, is just a wild dude. He's like, it, let's just do shows. Yeah, we started doing shows in November of 2020, and it just felt like we were baby killers. We were killing grandma. You know, we were out there just spreading diseases. We were super spreaders.

[Charlie Crockett]

If you spend enough time on 6th street anyway, it'll make you immune.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, we had developed some strong antibodies. I never got sick off of 6th Street. I got sick in Florida.

[Charlie Crockett]

That's what I mean, though. Sixth street will make you bulletproof. Yeah, well, except the bullets.

[Joe Rogan]

So. Yeah, except the bullets. And there's a lot of that going on there too. So we, we started doing shows there live. And then comics started moving, man, they started moving in droves. They started all moving to Texas because they could do shows here. We were just lost. I didn't know that without doing shows, we just all felt lost. And then by the time 2021 rolled around, there was like 15, 16 world class comics living in Austin.

[Charlie Crockett]

Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

And then I was like, it, I'm buying a club. And Ron talked me into it.

[Charlie Crockett]

He's like, you got to get a club. We got to do this.

[Joe Rogan]

Because, you know, he knew I got a bunch of money from the Spotify deal. So I was like, all right, let's do it. And so then in 20, 22 or 3, I guess we opened up and it's just been gangbusters ever since. And now it's like this is the hub of comedy in the country, which makes it the hub of comedy in the known universe. It's all here in Texas. It's all at that club.

[Charlie Crockett]

I like that. Well, that's really cool, man. Props to you for pulling that off.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, I mean, I think I pulled it off, but I think it's. But people pulled it off.

[Charlie Crockett]

People are proud of the comedy, you know, history in this town.

[Joe Rogan]

Yes. You know, and it's a, it's a great place. And it's all walks of life, man. You know that everybody likes to use that term inclusive and diversity. Well, our scene is diverse and inclusive, but everybody's great. It's only diverse because they just happen to be. Everybody's fucking diverse. We're all, you know, you get artists, they're all different, weird people. And we didn't seek that out. It was just what happened. It was just, who's good, who's good and who's really all about this? Who really wants to live this life? Who really wants to just do comedy? And we set it up where we have two nights of open mic nights. And you know, we've got Kill Tony on Monday night, so all the amateurs get a chance to, to be seen in front of the whole world. And the biggest live comedy show in the world on YouTube. And it just became this hub, man. And now it's just fucking every night. It's sold out and it's crazy. It's just, it's a vibrant, wild scene. And now on 6th street, there's five full time clubs within two blocks of my club.

[Charlie Crockett]

Comedy clubs.

[Joe Rogan]

Comedy clubs.

[Charlie Crockett]

Oh, shit.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. The scene is insane. I mean, it's the best scene in the country. It's like there's never been a scene like this before that just emerged and in the. And it had all. We had to hit every green light. Like the Comedy Store had to be closed down. So I hired everybody that was working at the Comedy Store before we even had a club. I said, I'm gonna pay you full time. You get benefits, you get all insurance, all that. Just come move to Austin. We'll call on you in like a year. It's gonna take like a year to build this place. But meanwhile, you'll, you'll get paid. You'll be able to just like live here, sell, set your roots, get established. It's a beautiful place to live. Everybody loved it. And then when we opened. We hit the ground running. We opened up one night, we did a couple of test shows. Like, let's try the venues, make sure everything works good, and then we'll say it. Let's stay open. And we just stayed open. Before you know it, it was seven nights a week. And then it was just. It's been almost three years now.

[Charlie Crockett]

You gonna keep it rolling?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

Hell, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. We're talking about doing in other places now. We just don't want to water it down. You know, we've talked about doing it in some other city and trying to figure out what the next one would be, but it would have to be a city that has a real group of talent. You have to have talent. Like, that's every comedy community. The only way it works is you have to have a lot of great comics that live in that town. It's the only way it works. And then we feed off of each other. That's the only way. There's no lone wolves in comedy, you know, comedy only. It's only iron sharpens iron, you know, there's no, like, the best comic in the world living in Pittsburgh. Doesn't exist. Like, they all live where they are. All. They're in. Not in competition, but in cooperation with each other. Like, we're all inspired by each other. You have to have that if you don't. And so we had to have, like, every green light. The Comedy Store had to be. Comedy Store had to be shut down for a solid year and a half. All those people had to be unemployed. I had to have all this money from Spotify. I had to be in a place like Texas that allows you to open up and have a show indoors when everything in California was close. They wouldn't even let you do outdoor shows. We weren't even allowed to do show. We tried to do shows in the parking lot, the Comedy Store, and they wouldn't allow us. It was crazy.

[Charlie Crockett]

No, I remember how. I remember how shut down it was.

[Joe Rogan]

70% of all the restaurants went under. I mean, it was fucking madness.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. A lot has changed. Yeah, really fast.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, real fast.

[Charlie Crockett]

Real fast. Really fast.

[Joe Rogan]

You know, so we had hit every green light, and we had to have all these people that were willing to take a chance. All the Tom Seguras and Tim Dillons and Tony Hinchcliffs and Duncan. Duncan Trussell's. All these great comics that just was like, it, we'll move there. Brian Simpson and Tony Inchcliffe and all these guys just said it. Let's. Let's take a chance. Like, I don't want to live like this. I don't want. I want to live where I can't do comedy. It's like we were just like junkies with no. No fix, you know?

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. I was on. I was still working the red dirt circuit when the pandemic hit. So to be honest with you, those old. Those boys was like. It never closed. Closed.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Charlie Crockett]

It didn't. Not those. All those. All those old dance halls and beer joints and thank God none of those places closed.

[Joe Rogan]

Thank God. Thank God they were right.

[Charlie Crockett]

It kept us working, man. You know, it was the thing. And I was just working so hard. I never really thought about anything else but something about the California shutdown that. That's funny when you. We talk. Not funny, but it. But like, the pandemic hit and I was unknown, but I had just finished that record, welcome to Hard Times. And it didn't have anything to do with anything. I had had the two surgeries. I'd, like, gone through a relationship that. That crashed and burned in a tailspin, you know, I. I'd got. I'd gotten rid of a management relationship that. That was going nowhere. And I wrote welcome to Hard Times just kind of out of my own personal, kind of dark feelings about where I was going through and just the whole, like, rigged casino, you know, America is a casino, you know, And I have thought that since I was a kid because I kind of lived in them. You know, you're talking about being pool halls. And then. And I cut the record in Georgia, South Georgia with Mark Neal. Right. Like, the whole thing. I cut it, like, I wrote the record in November, cut it in December, got the masters back, and like a week or two later, I remember me and Taylor Grace, my now wife, we were dating, and we were at a diner in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, and my manager at the time called me and said that south by Southwest was canceled. Canceled. And that for us here at that time, that's when we knew was real. Nothing could stop that machine that was south by Southwest at the time. And strangely for me, I'm not. I knew a lot of people that have known a lot of people that have passed away or anything. So I'm not saying that all the stuff that happened is a good thing at all. But for me, my career trajectory totally changed early on the pandemic because no one was putting out records. The whole. No one had any interest in putting out records. And for that reason, David Macias, because I was riding his ass, actually, thanks to John Folk at the time, he's like, don't let him shelve your record. Put that record out right now. You know, we're talking about, you know, July 2020.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know, and I demanded more money. No one, no one had ever put a dollar into marketing my records. I'm talking about nothing before the hit the fan. These guys were talking about spending like 10, 15 grand total marketing. Welcome to Hard Times.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Charlie Crockett]

Total. I mean, I spent twice that or more making it. And that's still a cheap record. But I mean, I remember a publicist told me once, like, like, you should spend at least double the money marketing your record, that it cost you to make it and at least match it, you know, and here I was like, that's what I mean. I was like caught on this like broke dick Americana scene, you know, on these two year record cycles, you know, with no money, you know, I was on a. I was in a broke dick deal just like Whelen was talking about, you know, just didn't. I don't. I'm not. I'm not bagging on Americana or anything, you know, I mean, and I'm glad I showed up on the map somewhere. But we went ahead and put it out in July 2020, and I'd been wanting to buy billboards and it just so happened, especially in California, but even in New York, I mean, everything was shut down. I mean, totally shut down. So I remember we bought a billboard in Silver Lake and in Times Square, right? Static, traditional static billboards for like 80% off because nobody was buying not a single other billboard over the course of like a nine months or a year. And those neighborhoods changed, right? And I bought a one, all those billboards. I bought like one month billboards and some of those stayed up over six months.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know what I mean? At like 75% off, you know. And you know, sometimes you write a song that get lucky. I was writing about personal experience. And it spoke for me. It wasn't a big record, but it changed my trajectory because welcome to Hard Times, the song really spoke to what was happening in America.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

And that's when my train really started rolling. That's when it really started rolling. You know what I mean? It's like. And then I did all those records and welcome to Hard Times and Music City USA coming like kind of right for the. Right for the Nashville Machine. And then the man from Waco that I made down in Lockhart with Bruce Robinson, which was like the first time really that I'd made a studio record. With my guys, you know, with more money and Bruce Robinson, a songwriting friend, that was not stopping me from being me, you know? And then that one was my first one to hit the, like, Billboard 200. And then $10 Cowboy really took off. Another big step from there. And then I got hooked back up with Shooter. See, I used to open up for Shooter because Shooter was getting booked by John Folk, too, right? And the two guys that took a liking to me early on, like, pretty much nobody else did, was Evan Felker and Turnpike Troubadours and Shooter Jennings. You know, Shooter would take me out and, like, he didn't have to be cool to me. I mean, he's fucking whaling, son. Son. But he was always so cool. He's just cool and so thoughtful, you know?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, he's a great guy.

[Charlie Crockett]

And he would give me little things to live by. Like, when he saw how hard I was working out there, he's like, it says you can't park behind the Nashville palace, but between me and you, camp there, and nobody's gonna say. And then I lived in that parking lot. That's the kind of you get by on, you know what I mean?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

And we. I've got this movie that I funded. You know how slow the movie business is that I was going to be called $10 Cowboy. And I made. It's this thing I put together. Like, finished my touring season at the rodeo finals in Vegas. And then I get back to Texas, and all the pressure of the business is mounting on me, and I'm just trying to get away from my manager and the machine and my phone and all that shit. And I decided to leave the phone at the house. And I had heard from a journalist about this secret shrine in a liquor store dedicated to Waylon Jennings in his hometown of Littlefield, Texas, there on 84. I'd known about it, but we. In the movie, I. I'm playing like I've never heard of it. And I'm going on this pilgrimage, you know, to. To find out if this little museum really exists, which it does. It's run by his youngest brother, James D. Waylon's youngest brother.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, wow.

[Charlie Crockett]

And so when to get the movie going, I needed to get on the phone with Shooter, you know, to get hooked up with James D. And them. And we got the idea to get his mama, Jesse Coulter and all that. And I was. And I wanted to use some of Whelan's music for the film. And. And I was scared to death to ask for it. But. But Shooter had always been Good to me. And so we ended up having the conversation. We caught up on a lot of stuff because, see, I'd been hearing that he was producing, right. But I couldn't make heads or tails of it where he was going with it. And truthfully, I was, like, avoiding producers altogether because a lot of these guys, it's like, you know, they're such. They're such big names. It overshadows the artist. You know what I mean? And then they have the deal. Like, they have the artist deal, right? Then the artist just kind of, in a lot of ways, gets limited to, like, acting talent, you know, showing up at the fucking, you know, movie lot or whatever.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

And. And. But I kept hearing records that he was making by people I knew, like Jamie Wyatt. I said, man, it's the best thing she's ever done. Shooter Jennings, Vince and Neil Emerson. This is the best thing he's ever done. Shooter Jennings, like, over and over. And I had been noticing that. And so we're on the phone, and he's all about the movie. Yeah, I'm gonna help you license the songs. We'd love that. You know, my mama loves your music and all that. You know, she decided she's in the movie. He just was helpful with everything. And I had almost made a record at Sunset Sound there in old downtown Hollywood, the old Sunset Sound Studio. I'd wanted to go in there because Mark Neal had told me about it. And I was tired of making records in Georgia and didn't want to go over to the wrong side of Mississippi. I wanted to make a record in California. And I told Shooter in passing on the phone that it had fallen through. And, you know, did he know such that sound? And he was like, man, Charlie's crazy. I'm signing the lease on Studio 3, the Print Studio, tomorrow.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Charlie Crockett]

Just in passing, you know, and I'm like, man, well, then let's make a record. And we're right in the middle of a trilogy now. I did Lonesome Drifter with him, man. And then the next one that's coming out is dollar a day on 8 8, which I think is a lucky number. And then I've got a third one coming after that that we're calling the Sagebrush Trilogy. And Shooter is the first guy I've ever been in a studio with, with where I truly don't feel judged. You know what I mean? And now I can. And because I've got all these. It's just a perfect timing. It's like, wow. That, like, have been out on the road with him 10 plus years ago. And then, you know, like, think. Think about what he's been through in the business. Right? I mean, he started cutting records 20 years ago. I mean, he's a crucified son automatically.

[Joe Rogan]

Right, right.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know what I mean? Walking, you know, walking in that shadow. That shadow? Yeah, man. He said a crazy line to me on the. The other day. He said in regards to some other situation he was in, he was like, I was. He said I went from one shadow to another. Just a beautiful line. I think he was talking about, like, an old relationship he was in or something, but. But like, he's overcome that because. You know what I mean? Like, he stepped into. Like, if you listen to his records, you know, when he's starting out and you compare it to the field, you know, in country music in Nashville at the time, like, he's totally. Like, he's totally swimming upstream. He's totally going against the grain. Nobody's sounding like that. They're not sounding traditional and pushing the boundaries. Like, he just was, you know, And I can tell you, constitutionally, he's. He's just like his daddy. I mean, he drink me and smoke me under the table. I'm like, you are Waylon son. And for some reason, you, like, get smarter the more weed you smoke. And my brain is like. My brain is just like pulverizing, you know, But. But I'm. I'm really proud of and excited about everything that I'm doing with him because I just taken me so long to get where I'm at, and here I've got a partner, you know, in making records that isn't judging me, but also is pushing me to take it higher, you know, because I'm trying to figure out how to transcend it, too. You know, everybody's always. There's a lot of. You know, I've always been a pretty polarizing figure for some reason with audiences. It's either. It's a love hate thing, and I've done a lot of styles, you know, and they've called me a stylistic chameleon here in Austin. Even the first time they put me on the Chronicle, you know, they called me a stylistic chameleon. And I had a hard time with that, you know, because I didn't. Wasn't taking it as a compliment. Right, right.

[Joe Rogan]

It's not a compliment.

[Charlie Crockett]

No. Yeah, but it's that whole thing where it's like, okay, I can play the blues, I can play country music, I can play folk music, learn how to play all that shit on the Street. Matter of fact. Fact, right. It's surprising to me that people would question my authenticity and point to me playing in subway cars as this aha moment that I'm not who I said I was.

[Joe Rogan]

I'm like, isn't that hilarious?

[Charlie Crockett]

Why don't you go try to play in those New York City train cars?

[Joe Rogan]

Well, that's.

[Charlie Crockett]

People that are just talking, brother. I'd rather get on a bull, you know?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Yeah. Do you think, man, like, synchronicity, that, like, fate is a real thing? Because just think about how all that lined up. I feel like sometimes. I mean, it's a very ego. Egocentric thing to think, you know, the things are meant to be. Like, there's a plan for you. It's silly, but it also isn't. You know, fate seems to somehow or another be a real thing. And sometimes the way things synchronize and the way things line up, you're like, man, this seems like it's meant to be. There's certain things that just seem like they're meant to be. And I feel like if you're on the right frequency and you're following the right path, those. Those doors open and these things do happen, and they happen when they're supposed to happen. They happen at the right time for.

[Charlie Crockett]

The right reasons, you know, I believe completely in fate.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

I don't. I don't really believe in faith. I think there's a. There's a surrender and a helplessness in a lot of ways to a lot of people's idea of faith. Right. When people are like, love your struggle. I never liked that saying. It's like, no, love the strength that your creator gave you to overcome the struggle. Don't love the struggle. Nobody fucking loves the struggle.

[Joe Rogan]

Right, right, right.

[Charlie Crockett]

It's the strength.

[Joe Rogan]

And especially real struggle.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Like, real. Real struggle is not knowing if it's gonna work out. You're not gonna love that.

[Charlie Crockett]

That's what I mean. I never understood that. I mean, I guess I get it, but, like.

[Joe Rogan]

But get it after it's successful.

[Charlie Crockett]

Fate is a thing that's like. That's destiny.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know, like Waylon. Like Shooter and like the Waylon Jennings thing. For me, you know, it's like, you know, I was out there. You know, we were. I. I did my. I debuted at the Houston Rodeo back in the spring. And for me, that was like, my career goal, you know, because of Selena and. And George Strait and. And everybody. Hell, Elvis played there twice. I mean, it doesn't matter what your background is as A Texan. Any background. The Houston Rodeo, that's the top, culturally, I think as like a stage for an artist to perform, I think is the Houston Rodeo, you know, and it was the Astrodome and now NRG Stadium.

[Joe Rogan]

And I would have never known that.

[Charlie Crockett]

It's the, it's the truth and it does, it crosses, you know, everything, economic, racial, everything. It's. It's the Houston Rodeo, you know, and it's the biggest rodeo on, on earth, you know, which is why you got everybody from, like I said, you know, Waylon Jennings, Merle, George Strait. Nowadays you got Post Malone and Beyonce both playing it.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Charlie Crockett]

I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't matter who it is. Like, that's the, that's the platform. Anyway, I played there and we were mixed. We're putting a live record out on it and me and Shooter were mixing it there at Sunset Sound. And then I stayed the extra night because he had the party at the Viper Room for the announcement of these three unreleased Waylon Jennings records. And they're legit unreleased. It's not AI, it's not remixes. This is truly legitimately unreleased music by Arguably, you know, the king, certainly the king of all the outlaws.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

But in my opinion, when it comes to like Nashville, country music, whatever you want to call it, man, like.

[Joe Rogan]

A.

[Charlie Crockett]

Buddy of mine, John Spong, a journalist here in town, a Texan, he was. We were at the Sagebrush doing an interview a couple years back and he was saying that like, like if Willie Nelson to country music is like Che Guevara, right? Waylon Jennings was the long haired prince of darkness, right? And like he's the guy that, like he's from West Texas, right? The guy learned, he. He learned how to play bass on stage. He learned how to play bass on stage backing up Buddy Holly, right? Who at the time was bigger than Elvis, man, You know, I mean, that style of rock and roll, right, it's coming from everywhere. I mean, nobody's just making their. Nowadays, they're kind of strangely making music in a vacuum, in a bedroom. But like in some ways, right? But these guys, it's like whether it's Robert Johnson or B.B. king in the Delta or whatever or Buddy Holly out in West Texas, you're influenced by the radio and all that. But there's something to be said for like what's out. How hard that earth is out there in West Texas. And like, people talk a lot of shit about Lubbock, right? Smells like shit because cows everywhere, so fucking flat. You know, the thing you can stand On a fucking tin can and like, you know, see a hundred miles or whatever they say out there, right? But like the best people to play a show for probably anywhere in America in many ways, in my opinion is like a show and lubbing. Like there's something about the people in that town where it's like, it's just the best place to play. And then like Willie Nelson is now in the Rock and Roll hall of Fame and he deserves it. Dolly Parton now too. But Waylon Jennings was always rock and roll. Like he was never traditional country. There's nothing about him, if you know what you're listening to, even on his very first record, like country, folk, folk, country, right? There's nothing straight ahead. Listen to anything coming out of Nashville in like 1965. Anything next to Waylon Jennings, he's the long haired prince of darkness, you know, he is like, he is going to be the. Their undoing of the. Because what they did is they built a. They built a wall around Nashville because the coast had all the money and all the zeitgeist power. And in response, Nashville walled themselves off, right? You know what I mean? That's really what they did, did. And then Waylon, Waylon busted through. And I know I'm going back on that a lot. But like my path that led to making records with Shooter was that when I started figuring out like the map is when I like cracked the code and realized why what Waylon was doing musically, like I just, I finally fell in love with him musically. And it was on this specific record from 1968 called Hanging on, right? And like every swinging dick in this business that I ever knew coming up in Texas, that anything to do with Texas songwriters or country, every one of them wanted to be Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Townes, Van Zant and Billy Joe Shaver, every single one. And I naturally stepped wide of that because everybody I knew was trying to do it and like imitating an artist like for the advanced part of their movement on. In and of itself, that's worthless. It's. It's not that it's worthless, it's that you will never touch it if you don't go walk your own path, right? So a lot of guys I knew when I started playing all the shows with Willie, Willie called me up and got me on with his agent and. And put me on like 50 shows. And a lot of guys I knew were like looking at me like, man, why do you get to play with Will? You know? And at first I didn't even. I didn't know, right? Because I was realizing guys that I knew, like, they knew Willie Nelson's in and out. We're literally trying to sing like him. So, like, you. I should have that spot. And, like, you know, I'm nobody at the end of the day, right? I'm. I'm the best at being me, Right. You know, when sometimes, right? But like, how I think I've landed with Shooter and his family and playing all those shows with Willie and getting married on his ranch and all that stuff is because. Not because I worship Willie Nelson, but because I think Willie looked at me and was like, I like what you're doing. I like how you got where you're at. You can play with me. You know, you don't ask to take your picture with Willie. He fucking lets you know when you're gonna take your picture with him, you know, I mean, you're gonna let you know it's time to get your picture taken with Willie. That's how. That's how they did it.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Charlie Crockett]

And we're standing there like a hundred nitrous cans behind us, and it was like the greatest photo of my life, you know?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. It's a natural inclination that people have when they want to be authentic, to imitate authenticity. That's the thing is you got to find your own path.

[Charlie Crockett]

You gotta. You gotta. You have to put. You have to put yourself out there, you know? Like, when I was playing on the street, people knew I was different. And artists, the hipsters, like, in the Brooklyn scene and in Bushwick and Williamsburg and all over the boroughs and like, to be on the street playing, like, there's credibility to that, right? But. And like, I didn't want to play in subway cars. Actually. What it was is young rapper Jadon. Jadon Woodard is his name. And he kept seeing me at the Metropolitan Avenue stop, playing there at the platform, you know, for the. For the. For the cars coming by on the L train or whatever. G train down there on Metropolitan. G train sucks to ride on. It's great for subway performers because there's like, it's the slowest train in the world, right? So you get huge audience between every, you know, train. So it's a gold mine for. For a street performer and a terrible drag for the, you know, New Yorkers waiting on it, Right? Anyways, this kid kept trying to get me. He would always show up with, like, a different guitar player and shit, with, like, an amp on his shoulder, which I copied. I got an amp camp ran off a 9 volt battery. You get about 7, 8 hours of it in this Telecaster. And I learned it from this guy Ghost, who was already doing it, that was playing with Jadon, who was like, kind of part of Citizen Coke, Clarence Greenwood street team. And he kept trying to get me to go on the subway cars. I was like, man, this kid's crazy. Like, he's rapping and shit. And man, the subway cars. Like, I'm all right, you know? And eventually he, like, that kind of cornered me, actually what it was. I kept dodging him. And then I was finished one day. And I get in the car, it's on the L train. And I'm riding in the car, and I'm just sitting there looking down the train. And all of a sudden I see that skinny in a white tee walking toward me. And he's moving, but he can't really. You know how the trains can be loud. And I'm looking at him trying to put together, and when he gets closer, I realize he's rapping. And he's got that guitar player with him with the amp behind. It's playing this, like, really badass bluesy hip hop beat. And he's freestyling like, you know the hatch you're wearing. He's rhyming to it. The next stop, he's putting it in the verse and shit. And he's got all these mixtapes in his hand and he's handing them out. And he sees me and he hands me one. And that's how he got me. Because I saw like it working and he was making money and, like, dropping product, you know, I thought, holy, right? Because so like, comedy scene, music scene, whatever. Say you got a place on 6th street holds, right? 100 people. And you play there 30, you get a residency. You play there 30 nights a month, right? And you get a hundred. You different people show up there every night. That. What is that? 3, 000 people? It's like, dude, we could. You could hit 3, 000 people in like half a day on the. On the train cars. Once we started working it. And so it was like it was his. It was his. And he was a spoken word poet. This kid. This kid started rapping on trains like 15.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Charlie Crockett]

In, like, Philly, which is. Man, Philly's tough. I don't have to tell you. Philly's tough. Like train cars in Philly. That's mind blowing, you know? And then he comes to New York with that and, like, takes that spoken word improvisational thing. And like, all the best rappers I saw in that Town. They were all like spoken word poets because, you know, they just were smart and quick, you know. And like we. Then we got together and like mashed it up. And again, like I went from making where I would make $30, you know, all of a sudden, like we would make 300 and split it, you know, 50, 50. And we turned that into a whole, like a really fine, pretty well oiled machine where there started being five or six of us. And we were bringing guys up and down from New Orleans and shit. So that's where you see the trumpet players, different spoken word rappers. We were squatting in warehouses, you know, owned by Hasids that were like renting out space that was supposed to be for rehearsal, but really everybody's living there and selling drugs and wiling out. And, you know, I cranked that up. We cranked that up. And did get. And did get discovered by like the heart of the pop machine right there on the R train.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Charlie Crockett]

In like. Like just what you would think. You can see video of this stuff, but it's like they saw that we were believable. Yep. And we're just trying to figure out. And that's one of the spoken word dudes right there was Eric, he's from Jacksonville, Florida. And that hippie right there, that was my friend of mine's younger brother from high school. Down here in Texas.

[Joe Rogan]

There's something about street performing that is. There's no net. Does you. You. You're performing for people that are involuntary.

[Charlie Crockett]

Oh, man. They don't want you in there. And you're breaking like 10 laws. You're breaking 10 laws and they don't want you in there.

[Joe Rogan]

Right. But if you're good, if you're good, it means a lot. You ever see the video of Biggie when he's performing? He's 17, on a street corner in Brooklyn.

[Charlie Crockett]

Oh, yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, my God.

[Charlie Crockett]

You pull that one up.

[Joe Rogan]

That video is like you watching this kid, this kid with this talk about.

[Charlie Crockett]

Even though he. I mean, I know he's the king, but he's still underrated, you know what I mean? Yeah, he's crazy underrated for that. How smart he was.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, he was so good. He was so good.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah. Standing on. Standing on a street corner. Yeah, that's the one.

[Joe Rogan]

Let me hear this. Perfect competitor, my scoop, my music, and I'm not a booster. So what you got to say?

[Charlie Crockett]

The blues never goes out of style.

[Joe Rogan]

Never.

[Charlie Crockett]

What do you. What do you say? Like a. Like a. You say like ice cream. I'll scoop you.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

It's so clever and like, oh, he was so clever.

[Joe Rogan]

It was so clever. There was comedy in. In his lyrics, you know, it was just. It was.

[Charlie Crockett]

I met his aunt on the train.

[Joe Rogan]

Really?

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, we did. And like J. On knew who she was cuz he. He ran that. He was running the trains before I was. And like he knew all those people because he'd been working it so hard and it was like, it was crazy. Some of the people that we come in, like, who you come in contact with on those subway cars, you know what I mean? It's like, like I saw Jake Gyllenhaal on the train one day and then some other day on the, you know, 6 train, it'd be like the NBA commissioner and gave us a hundred dollar bill.

[Joe Rogan]

Wow.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know, it's like to me, that's like, that's all, that's. That's all it is. You know, it's like whatever the circuit is, it's like putting yourself out there. And when you go out in public, man, and when you go out in public and you put yourself out there and you really do that, that, that's. That's a transformation. That's a metamorphosis, you know, for anybody.

[Joe Rogan]

For anybody.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. It's. It's just undeniable. It's the most authentic form of performance ever. You know, that's not your audience. They don't know you. You have to earn it. You have to. You have to break through.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yep.

[Joe Rogan]

You have to break through it as the. It has to hit.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

It has to be real.

[Charlie Crockett]

That's all I've been doing is swinging on the whole time, Joe.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, man. Well, you're killing it.

[Charlie Crockett]

They used to cut. Sometimes they call me the Muhammad Ali of country music. That's too good a compliment, but I like it.

[Joe Rogan]

But this, you know, that's the only way you make Charlie Crockett. You gotta. I mean, your story is important for people to hear because it's the only way you make someone like you. You know, you don't make someone like you in a mall. You don't make someone like you with a bunch of executives making these decisions based on what they think is going to be popular.

[Charlie Crockett]

Man, it was crazy. They were doing that you'd think they would do. So this woman, Nell Mulderry, saw us in the R train and she was in the Sony system and managing artists and like kind of the star maker, that pop machine of like 2010, 2011. So they bring us up into the offices in Koreatown, right? And like on the edge of Hell's Kitchen there. And her office was off the side of this Sony Legacy, like, kind of catalog room, because at the time she was married to Rob Santos, one of the guys at Sony Legacy, and she had the social. This little office off the side of the, like, library thing, whatever. And she brings us in there, and they're putting us in front of these, like, computer screens and showing us like. Like gym class heroes and the gorillas and Odd Future and Janelle Monae and, like, all doing these focus group training things, you know, and where they're gonna plug you in to the thing. And it was like, what was so difficult about it for me? I'm not. They didn't do anything wrong. You know, we were young, desperate men playing in public transit. You know, you.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

Be careful what you ask for, you know? And, yeah, I was mad for a long time, but I've been eating off that plate forever because it. I realized, man, I was like, man, if you don't know what you want, if you don't know where you're going, if you don't know what you're selling, they're gonna sell it for you.

[Joe Rogan]

Yes.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know what I mean? Yeah. It doesn't matter who it is.

[Joe Rogan]

Yes. It's not their fault. That's what they do.

[Charlie Crockett]

No, I need. That was. The best thing that could have happened to me, is because, like, I believed that there was some deal. I wasn't on the trains for it, but I knew we'd find it. I really did. I had. I had. It was fake. Fate. It was fate. And, like, you know, it's that whole thing. Like, I got there, it fell apart quick. It wrecked me, man. And I got. That's when I found. That's when I got the street and I went back to California, started working on the Ganja Farms, because I realized, you know, like, Big L said or whatever, you know, I was gonna get street struck. You know, you can't stay out there forever. You really can't.

[Joe Rogan]

Right?

[Charlie Crockett]

And that's when, you know, that's when I looked at. That's when I looked at it, and it's like, man, okay, what. What am I willing to sell? You know? Like, what. What is Charlie Crockett willing to sell? And I think that that's stronger than playing it cool, right, and letting somebody else figure it out for you, you know? That's where it. That's where it is. It. It gets dangerous, you know? And so it's like. I know a lot of these guys in the business, they're like, oh, man, you know, I don't pay attention to the business and all type of stuff. You're crazy for that. Because all like, I don't care if it was Willie Nelson or James Brown. They were poorer than you. They both picked cotton and they learned the business because they had to. So someone gave me that.

[Joe Rogan]

We need to understand the business. If you're in the business, if you don't understand it, you'll be taken over by it.

[Charlie Crockett]

There's no doubt. Even if they got you on top of.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. And then you have to have autonomy. You have to have. You have to. This personal sense of self. Or you could avoid the influence. You have to be able to just stick to your guns. And that's the hard part, right? Because then they dangle that carrot in front of you. That carrot is juicy, Especially if you've been out in the street.

[Charlie Crockett]

It's right there.

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, it's right there. It's right there. It's so juicy. And a lot of people bite it.

[Charlie Crockett]

It.

[Joe Rogan]

A lot of people bite it, and then they don't want it anymore. And then they don't know how to be authentic.

[Charlie Crockett]

Were you. Were you. Were you dealing with the, like, in the. On that circuit? Because, I mean, I know you're a comedian, and you. I know you also, like, got into the, like, dealing with the network TV shows, all that kind of stuff. Like, did anybody ever fucking get you pretty good?

[Joe Rogan]

Well, I got lucky in that. I got on television so early, and I didn't want to be on television. It wasn't something that I wanted.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

But they offered me so much money to be on tv.

[Charlie Crockett]

I was like, what?

[Joe Rogan]

Okay. But I kept growing and doing my comedy at the Comedy Store. And that was the most important thing that I just kept doing comedy. And then the money was just like, fuck you money. So it's like, because I had the fuck you money, I could kind of be myself.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah.

[Joe Rogan]

And, you know, there was a lot of temptation. Like, I remember the producers of Fear Factor like, what are you doing? Like, because some of my comedy was just out there. Like, you know, this gets you in trouble. This people gonna. This is not network television comment. It was like, well, then I won't do network television anymore. Like, once I had a certain amount in the bank, I was like, all right, this is more money than I ever thought I'd ever have in my whole life. I never thought I'd ever be wealthy. And then all of a sudden, I have money. So if you have you money and you don't say you. What's the point? What's. No one's going to say you then if you're going to be a prisoner right to that money. Like, you're the.

[Charlie Crockett]

Like everybody says, man, just afraid to be you.

[Joe Rogan]

Afraid to be yourself. Like, that's the only time you can really do it is when you have. You know, it's like the universe gives you this gift. And what is the gift is the gift of freedom. And you have to choose to either accept it and take it and. And run with it, or be captured by it and then want more and more and more. Forever. Forever. And there's no end. You know, we were talking about. My friend Brian has this friend who's worth $3 billion, and he feels poor because his friend is worth 80. You know how crazy that is? Think how crazy that is. Like, this guy's just constantly chasing to keep up with his friend who's worth 80 billion, man, because he's got 3. Yep. That's how it works. You could get trapped and then, you know.

[Charlie Crockett]

Still keeping up with the Joneses.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. You got a hit show. You want to hit movie, you got to hit movie. You want to be. I want to have a Grammy. I want to start singing. You know, you start getting crazy. You start.

[Charlie Crockett]

You just true.

[Joe Rogan]

You chase that demon, that demon of success that just lures you deeper and deeper into hell. And the next thing you know, you. You don't even know who you are. No one knows who you are. And if you don't know who you are, they'll decide. They'll decide who you are. They'll sell you. They'll sell you as a thing, you know.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know what's crazy about music business? The manager is in many cases the most powerful and the least regulated. You know, I think that's what's wild about the music business. There's basically no regulation. You know what I mean?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

It's like. I think that's what makes people say it's, you know, the shadiest business. I don't think it's the shadiest business, but a guy told me that in New York, actually, when I got caught up in the Sony thing with the train robbers deal y' all were showing on the screen. A lot of guys were. A lot of people were trying to sign us, actually. The guys at A R. Wu Tang, like DJ Scott Free and Maddie C. They were trying to get us into a deal. Citizen Cope had a deal on the table and all that, and it was like he was the one that that told me that he was like, man, what you heard, this is the shadiest business. Now, I had come from a background of dealing with some pretty crazy in Texas, you know, and with everything. But even in that business, like, people that are. If you're trying to play the stock market or whatever, Wall street, it's a corrupt business, and it is really up. But it's highly regulated. Com. By com, I mean compared to the music business. Right. You know what I mean?

[Joe Rogan]

Right.

[Charlie Crockett]

And you're dealing in, like, you're, you know, it's the. The stock exchange there. It's like. It's like you're like. It's like they're like dealing in culture, cultural power. Right. Cultural wars, whatever you want to call it, it's on. And there's no. There's just very, very little regulation.

[Joe Rogan]

And a lot of power, man. It's so much power and influence. And the people that make the most money, the people that don't even create.

[Charlie Crockett]

The art because, like, you're talking about, like, let's say you got a. Old boy's got his Buddy, it's worth 80 billion or whatever. Still doesn't make you a. It doesn't make you a star. Right, Right. It's still not fame, actually.

[Joe Rogan]

That's what's crazy.

[Charlie Crockett]

You know, I have a friend who's.

[Joe Rogan]

A billionaire who desperately wants to be famous.

[Charlie Crockett]

It's. That's what I. Well, I think it seems like a lot of them want to be.

[Joe Rogan]

Because that's the thing they don't have. Right. They have everything.

[Charlie Crockett]

You can't exactly buy that.

[Joe Rogan]

They can't.

[Charlie Crockett]

Well, you kind of can.

[Joe Rogan]

Kind of. But then it turns on you.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, that's what I was.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, it turns on you. Yeah. To be the rich guy, like, then you.

[Charlie Crockett]

Lots of those. I mean, I see some of that stuff playing out, like, man, I don't want nothing to do with that.

[Joe Rogan]

Nothing. Nothing. Look what they did to Elon. Yeah. You don't want that. Yeah. It's. It's a harsh world because there's no sympathy for you. You know, you're the wealthy oligarch.

[Charlie Crockett]

Oh. And you want everybody looking at you, right?

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

And then all of a sudden, they're looking at you.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

He just got nervous.

[Joe Rogan]

They got you under that eye of Sauron. They're trying to find all your flaws, and that's what. Everybody's got them.

[Charlie Crockett]

So I got this little bird right here.

[Joe Rogan]

What is that?

[Charlie Crockett]

Tells me all the secrets.

[Joe Rogan]

What is that?

[Charlie Crockett]

I didn't know what this was when I Bought it. Right. This is, this is Horus, right?

[Joe Rogan]

Oh, wow.

[Charlie Crockett]

And I just, I found it in this place, this, this found Items place about 10 years ago. And I just liked it, actually. I just thought, I thought it was native. Right. I didn't realize it was like Egyptian. And I've always liked this one because it felt like it was a little bit of both. And I, I didn't know anything about it at first, but the reason I never take it off anymore is like, when I started reading about, like, what it meant to the Egyptians was that it meant like, safe passage as you journey through this world and get ready to go on to the next one. You know what I mean? And protect you against evil. Protect you and, you know, and for health and happiness. They called it initiation. So it makes a lot of people, people tie it to stupid like a, you know, Illuminati and all that kind of stuff. But I mean, it's just a. It's just a thunderbird.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, you know, the eye of Horus is essentially the pineal gland where. The seat of the soul where the brain produces dimethyltryptamine. That's the eye of Horus. Have you ever seen the image of the eye of Horus next to the pineal gland?

[Charlie Crockett]

I'm not sure. Maybe I have, but I'm. I'm ignorant. I didn't.

[Joe Rogan]

The. The ancient.

[Charlie Crockett]

What's pineal gland?

[Joe Rogan]

The pineal gland is a. It's a gland that's in the center of your br. Brain. It's essentially the third eye in reptiles. It actually has a retina and a lens.

[Charlie Crockett]

Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

Or a cornea and a lens. And it's, it's where they. Now they believe that DMT is actually produced by the entire brain. It's also produced by the liver and the lungs. But it's like the most spiritual of all the psychedelics. And they believe that the Egyptians had some sort of. They, you know, there's so little understood about truly ancient Egypt. But look at that. Look what it looks like. I mean, the, the eye of Horus essentially is. It's a diagram of the pineal gland, which is kind of crazy. It's kind of crazy when you see it that way.

[Charlie Crockett]

Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

Because they knew things and we don't know what they knew. We don't understand how they built the pyramids. We don't understand how old they are. There's so much speculation about the true.

[Charlie Crockett]

Age of that civilization figuring out like, how they harnessed energy and all that stuff.

[Joe Rogan]

We have no idea. I mean, there's this group of scientists that believe that there's structures under the pyramids that go two kilometers deep into the earth.

[Charlie Crockett]

Right.

[Joe Rogan]

And there's a lot of about that. But these guys are, they've multiple readings of these things and they're pretty sure that they're accurate. And they've been accurate with other things, like other temples that are underground that are 50ft underground. They've mapped those things out with the same technology. So there's a precedent to it. These people knew things and we don't understand how they knew it or what they knew. And we don't know if the people that lived in ancient Egypt, that we considered ancient Egypt, like you know, 2000 BC we don't know if they found those structures or if those people built those structures. There's so much weirdness with Egypt because the construction is so beyond anything else that exists anywhere on earth. And especially when you're dealing with 4,500 plus years ago ago. 4,500 years ago is the conventional estimations. But there's a lot of these heretic archaeologists that think no, it's, this is a lot older than that. I mean there's a king's list that goes back 30,000.

[Charlie Crockett]

That's what I've been hearing. They're saying like 30,000 years.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, I mean this, it sounds nuts to people that want to have this conventional dating of the, you know, the dawn of civilization being about 6,000 years ago. But there's a lot of evidence that that's not accurate. There's a lot. And I think the most profound evidence is just the vastness of the Egyptian empire and what they're. Just the vastness of the construction. The way they were able to bring these stones from 500 miles away through the mountains that are 80 tons. How, how did they cut them perfectly? How did they put them 120ft in the air, put them in the ceiling healing? Like what, what the was going on then, what the was going on with people were supposedly just getting out of hunter and gathering. I mean this is like the emergence like a couple thousand years earlier. We're supposed to be like using stone tools and throwing them at animals. And now you have these people that build this immense structure that's perfectly aligned. A true north, south, east And west has 2,300,000 stones in it. What it's aligned with Orion stars. The stars in the Orion Belt. Like what?

[Charlie Crockett]

Maybe, maybe what happened was, is AI took them down too. It might be way, way back.

[Joe Rogan]

It might be.

[Charlie Crockett]

I'm just saying right could be. It could stuff could be. I forget who said that. But it's like, I mean, I'm all for, I'm all for science, but in the end of the day, you know, no matter what we think we know it's still just like a, you know, it's like a flame in a dark night. You know, there's, there's so much out there beyond, beyond what we can see.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah.

[Charlie Crockett]

So always, I always kind of thought that myself. I mean it's a basic thing nowadays, you know, but I was like a kid, you know, a lot of people have had this thought, but it's like always like looking up here in the stars and it's like if they're saying that the stars are basically infinite, then it's infinite possibility for other planets with life on it, which basically is a certainty, right?

[Joe Rogan]

It's basically certainty.

[Charlie Crockett]

It's a certainty.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah, it's basically certainty. And the more we explore in the known universe, the more we understand that it's much more likely that this is not an anomaly. There's many, many planets out there. Who knows, maybe an infinite number that have life.

[Charlie Crockett]

So who knows what's going on with Egyptians?

[Joe Rogan]

Well, we don't know how long ago they did this. You know, there's, there's just so much speculation.

[Charlie Crockett]

Well, in the, the version of Egypt that we're taught about, it was like just the latest stage of it. Oh yeah, like I read where there was just. It went on for so many thousands of years and there was this whole evolution of those kingdoms. I'm talking about throughout Africa.

[Joe Rogan]

Yep. Well, all the Sub Saharan area, all of that too. That's where they believe that Atlantis was. I mean there's this thing called the richat structure that there's again, these heretic archaeologists believe was the site of Atlantis. I mean the, the South Saharan, the Saharan, Sub Saharan Africa was a rich rainforest thousands of years ago. There's whale bones. They find whale bones in the Saharan desert.

[Charlie Crockett]

That's crazy.

[Joe Rogan]

It's madness, man. The history of Earth is so confusing. Like Graham Hancock says it best, we're a species with amnesia, you know, and that's what's wild about.

[Charlie Crockett]

We don't remember any of that.

[Joe Rogan]

Well, we definitely don't remember shit from 20,000 years ago. It's all just speculation. And you know, and people have been in this form, you know, the form of Homo sapiens now for 300 plus thousand years, like who knows how long and who knows where they learn this stuff from? I mean, who knows if they learn this Stuff from visitors. We don't know. We don't know. I mean, if we did get visited 20,000, 30,000 years ago, what evidence would be left? Left, you know. And are we being visited now? Well, we're about to find out. Because if this keeps popping off with Israel and Iran and they start going nuclear, you know, that was the only the, the, the, the great hope of the people that really believe in aliens is that what they're watching over us is to make sure we don't everything up that we're so close to emerging as a type one civilization. We're so close to getting out of this barbaric, you know, territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons. We're so close to passing this stage that we're in right now. As long as we don't it up and who knows how many times people might have it up in the past that mean that might be what we're looking at. When we're looking at ancient Egypt, there might be the remnants and there's also natural disasters.

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, and that's all I meant by AI.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. I mean that could be our greatest natural disaster.

[Charlie Crockett]

You get there and. But I like to your, there's a, it's a very positive outlook though. You're talking about getting to the next.

[Joe Rogan]

Yeah. Would you call it type, type 1 civilization?

[Charlie Crockett]

What does that mean?

[Joe Rogan]

Okay, there's, there's, there's type one, type two and type three civilizations. And I remember who was the one who formulated this. It might have been Sagan. Jamie, pull it up so I don't.

[Charlie Crockett]

This up but come on, Jamie.

[Joe Rogan]

It's essentially our. Here it is type one civilization known as a planetary civilization, defined by our Kardashev scale as the one that's harnessed and controls all available energy on its planet. This includes utilizing all forms of energy from sources like solar, wind, geothermal, and potentially even harnessing nuclear fusion. A type 1 civilization is also characterized by a global technologically advanced society with a high degree of, of interconnectedness and the ability to manage planetary scale resources and weather. So we're on the way to that. And AI in best case scenario helps us achieve that. And we're, we're close. We're probably a lot closer to that than we think. Type 2 civilization is stellar, meaning we populate other planets. Type 3 is galactic. We, we, we populate the cosmos and we, we explore the cosmos.

[Charlie Crockett]

Wow.

[Joe Rogan]

We're on our way to that. And this, it's inevitable. If we used to live in caves and now, you know, we fly in hypersonic jets. This is what's coming, and it's whether or not we it up. Along the way.

[Charlie Crockett]

I was beam me up, man.

[Joe Rogan]

We should probably end on that. Charlie Crockett, you're the man. I appreciate you, brother. Thank you very much for being here, man.

[Charlie Crockett]

Pleasure is mine, man. Texas. Yeah. Thanks.

[Joe Rogan]

Thank you, sir.

[Charlie Crockett]

Come on, man. Thank you.

[Joe Rogan]

Thank you. All right. Tell everybody where they can find all your shit. Do you have a social media?

[Charlie Crockett]

Yeah, but you don't got to do all that, okay? I mean, it's Charlie Crockett. Charlie with an ey like Charlie Pride.

[Joe Rogan]

That's it.

[Charlie Crockett]

Crockett with two T's just like Davey.

[Joe Rogan]

That's all they need to know it.

[Charlie Crockett]

All right.

[Joe Rogan]

Thank you.

[Charlie Crockett]

Bye, everybody.