Joe Rogan Experience #2159 - Sal Vulcano

Sal Vulcano joins Joe Rogan to promote his new YouTube special Terrified and his upcoming tour. The conversation is a sprawling, comedic free-association covering Sal's ADHD, vitamin habits, and a wild story of being overdosed on caffeine and Vyvanse before taping his special. They spend long stretches on terrifying animals (bears, mountain lions, chimps, tigers, pythons, bats) and Sal's many dangerous Impractical Jokers stunts. Other threads include Sal discovering via 23andMe that he descends from Otzi the Iceman, the engineering of fighter jets and mid-air refueling, rabies and parasites that hijack animal behavior, and shared anxieties about AI. They close reminiscing about comedy legends like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Don Rickles, and Sam Kinison.

• Sal recounts being accidentally overdosed on three caffeinated Berocca tablets, a B12 shot, and a high dose of Vyvanse minutes before his first-ever special taping.
  00:06:45
• Joe explains that the 1981 movie Roar used real lions and injured many people during filming.
  00:39:34
• Sal reveals his 23andMe results trace his paternal lineage to Otzi the Iceman, a 5,300-year-old mummy.
  01:21:23
• Joe claims rabies makes animals aggressive specifically to transmit itself by biting.
  01:51:59
• They discuss a parasitic worm that hijacks a grasshopper's brain and forces it to drown itself so the worm can be born.
  01:55:35
• Sal describes the Netflix doc Operation Odessa about a drug runner who bought a Soviet submarine.
  02:32:18
• They watch early clean-cut footage of George Carlin and contrast it with his later hippie transformation.
  02:54:07

• Corn subsidies in the US originated from World War II efforts to stockpile food.
  00:21:54
• Corn cobs were used as toilet paper by early North American settlers before toilet paper existed.
  00:25:33
• Black bears are more likely to try to eat a person, while brown bears mostly kill defensively.
  00:33:52
• The Everglades is overrun with invasive Burmese pythons that have wiped out about 90% of its mammals.
  00:58:17
• Giant fruit bats in Bali can have a wingspan of about five feet.
  01:08:08
• Researchers died from a hemorrhagic virus after being covered in bat droppings outside an African cave.
  01:09:43
• Otzi the Iceman had 61 tattoos, possibly part of an ancient healing technique.
  01:24:18
• Blue Angels pilots use a muscle-straining 'hooking' technique to force blood to the brain under G-force.
  02:18:06
• Lenny Bruce was arrested repeatedly for obscenity and later read his legal papers on stage instead of doing comedy.
  02:55:41
• Sam Kinison was a tent-revival preacher before becoming a comedian, giving him a powerful stage voice.
  02:59:50