The guest
Howie Mandel: Comedian, actor (Dr. Fiscus on St. Elsewhere) and TV host (Deal or No Deal, America's Got Talent) who speaks candidly about living with OCD, anxiety and depression.
What this episode covers
Joe Rogan and Howie Mandel open by tracing comedy's history from the Comedy Store under Mitzi Shore to the Austin scene Rogan built at the Comedy Mothership. Howie recounts how his entire stand-up act began as genuine onstage panic and a rubber glove pulled over his head, and he opens up at length about his OCD, depression and how conversation and constant work keep him on a 'ledge.' A long middle stretch becomes a freewheeling debate about artificial intelligence, with Rogan laying out a theory that AI could become a 'digital God' that erodes civilization, while Howie argues for embracing and licensing it. They close on UFOs, including Howie's own sighting near Toronto, flat-earth believers, media propaganda, and the threat of AI deepfakes and voice-cloning scams.
Recommended on this episode
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Laird Hamilton Coffee
Laird Superfood
“it's really good it's good stuff Laird Hamilton coffee which is pretty bomb diggity”
“no I'm still drinking this layered it's really good it's good stuff Laird Hamilton coffee which is pretty bomb diggity”— Joe Rogan
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Proto Hologram
Proto
“you should talk about having one of these in your club because you can have any comic at any time”
“I work with this company I sit on the board of this company called proto-hologram you know and and I came to it because I saw it online”— Howie Mandel
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The Coddling of the American Mind
Jonathan Haidt
“wrote a great book about it”
“Jonathan hate wrote a great book about it the coddling of the American mind and he talks about the negative aspects of social media”— Joe Rogan
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Freddy Got Fingered
Tom Green
“hilarious movie that does not get the credit it deserves”
“Freddy Got Fingered is a hilarious movie that does not get the credit it deserves it was just so wild that people didn't know what the fuck to do with it”— Joe Rogan
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
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Dude Wipes
Dude Wipes
“in the back of the car was dude wipes I asked the guy what's that is it for your balls what is dude wipe”— Howie Mandel
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ChatGPT-4
OpenAI
“I think chat gpd4 is as groundbreaking as the printing press I think it's bananas it's some new thing that's going to completely change how people interface with information”— Joe Rogan
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Neuralink
Neuralink
“if neural link or something similar to that connects you to artificial general intelligence in your own mind and a given time that's going to be the option that most people take”— Joe Rogan
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Apple CarPlay
Apple
“you press a button on Apple carplay and say play Taylor Swift better man and it'll just play it right instantly”— Joe Rogan
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Outliers
Malcolm Gladwell
“you ever read um uh the outliers yes Malcolm Gladwell yes and when he talked about the Beatles in Hamburg about how well they went to Hamburg”— Joe Rogan
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South Park
“I just introduced my 12 year old to South Park does she have that sense of humor my god when you have not heard like the whales of hilarity”— Joe Rogan
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The Walking Dead
“she likes to binge watch shows like she's into the walking dead right I'm like you could binge watch this at the end of time”— Joe Rogan
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No Agenda
Adam Curry
“now he hosts this podcast called No Agenda it's a very big podcast but he's literally the guy who came up with the first podcast”— Joe Rogan
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St. Elsewhere
“and I got this thing called saying elsewhere and apparently it had been shooting for a week and they wanted to recast some of the parts”— Howie Mandel
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Deal or No Deal
“I had a great time doing Deal or No Deal I had a great time doing AGT I have a great time even doing I'm doing a podcast with my daughter”— Howie Mandel
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Mr. Saturday Night
“he won he I got nominated for an Academy Award for Mr Saturday night I think he played Billy Crystal's brother in Mr Saturday night”— Howie Mandel
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Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip
Richard Pryor
“he uh come out and he was putting together what became live on the Sunset Strip and he would get up every fucking night”— Howie Mandel
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James Fox documentary on the 1996 Varginha UFO (Brazil)
James Fox
“the new James Fox documentary about um a UFO landing in Brazil in 1996 holy shit it's incredible”— Joe Rogan
Big reveals from this episode
- Howie's stand-up act was born from real panic and embarrassment; he pulled a rubber glove over his head out of OCD-driven habit and the crowd roared.
- Howie wasn't diagnosed with his mental-health issues until his 40s, and says everything he was once expelled or punished for is what he now gets paid for.
- Howie says at any given moment he is 'not that far' from a Howard Hughes-style breakdown and uses conversation as the cable holding him on the ledge.
- Howie reveals he licensed his AI likeness to a Korean company, which upset his wife.
- Rogan plays Elon Musk recounting that Larry Page called him a 'speciesist' for prioritizing humanity over AI super-intelligence.
- Howie describes personally seeing a UFO, a roughly half-mile-wide line of lights that shot into the sky, with his wife near Toronto in his 20s.
- Howie says models his son knows have been deepfaked into porn and that AI scammers ran fake commercials using his podcast with no real recourse.
Worth remembering
- Joe's Comedy Mothership is housed in the former Ritz Theater (1927), once a punk-rock club that hosted Butthole Surfers and the Misfits.
- Howie's career took off via HBO's 6th Annual Young Comedians Special alongside Jerry Seinfeld, Richard Lewis and Harry Anderson.
- Howie played Dr. Fiscus for six years on St. Elsewhere, the show that launched Denzel Washington, Mark Harmon and others.
- A 60 Minutes piece on AI 'emergent properties' showed a Google program teaching itself Bengali after minimal prompting in a language it wasn't trained on.
- Rogan cites Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers on how the Beatles' grueling Hamburg hours made them great.
- Seymour Hersh's substack claimed the US blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, with the New York Times suggesting maybe the public shouldn't know who did it.
- They reference the Sinclair montage of local-news anchors reading an identical script warning about 'fake news.'
- Joe recounts the Betty and Barney Hill case, one of the first UFO-abduction stories, surfaced via hypnotic regression.
- Rogan says he asked ChatGPT who makes his podcast and it invented three fake producers before correcting itself.
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