There's a moment Joey Diaz describes that cuts through everything: pulling up to his house and genuinely not recognizing it as his. Not because he's lost his mind, but because the distance between where he started — no GED, felonies, stealing lawnmowers outside a Boulder Kmart — and where he ended up is so vast that the mind refuses to connect the two. That dissonance, he argues, is the most honest form of gratitude available to a person. He paid for that house with $15 sets. Nobody gave it to him. Nobody could take credit for it but him.
The Knee, the Cream, and Managing a Broken Body
The conversation opens with Diaz barely three days out from knee surgery, moving faster than anyone expected. He credits preparation: peptides, BPC-157, TB-500, hyperbaric chamber sessions twice a week, and a topical anti-inflammatory gel — which he struggles to name, cycling through "Voltron," "Voltrax," and "Voltran" before settling on something approximating Voltaren. Rogan pulls up the details: prescription-strength, over-the-counter, non-steroidal, used for osteoarthritis and joint pain.
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Phone screen showing Voltaren arthritis gel product information
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Rogan adds DMSO — a veterinary-origin topical used for pain and injury recovery — handing Diaz a bottle from his personal bulk supply. The exchange is casual in the way only long friendships are: two middle-aged men who have broken their bodies repeatedly, comparing notes on what actually works. Rogan's own knee has been a recurring problem, a missing section of meniscus grinding toward bone-on-bone. He mentions stem cell therapy and biological matrix gels being developed in Germany, impatient with the standard American clinical answer of cortisone and more cortisone.
Steroids, Cadaver Hormones, and the Al Alcindor Warning
The talk drifts to early anabolic steroids — specifically what athletes were actually putting in their bodies in the 1970s. Rogan asks Jamie to look up cadaver-derived human growth hormone, and the answer comes back grim: yes, it was real, used from the mid-1900s until 1985, when it was discontinued after transmitting prion diseases, including Creutzfeldt-Jakob — the human equivalent of mad cow disease, the same neurological destruction seen in people who have consumed human brain tissue.
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Search results showing history of cadaver-derived human growth hormone
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This leads to Lyle Alzado, the NFL defensive end who admitted in a Sports Illustrated piece that he had been on anabolic steroids since 1969 and never stopped. He died at 43 from brain cancer, which he publicly attributed to his steroid abuse. Rogan reads the quote directly: "I started taking anabolic steroids in '69 and never stopped. Now I'm sick and I'm scared. I was addicted mentally. 90% of the athletes I know are on the stuff." Alzado described becoming violent, chasing drivers through Denver neighborhoods, pulling men from cars. At the end, he wobbled when he walked and had trouble remembering things. Diaz notes quietly: that's how old he is right now.
The Drug Test Arms Race and the Boulder Years
What follows is one of the funniest and most self-incriminating sequences in the conversation: Diaz walking through his years of failed attempts to beat probation drug tests in Boulder, Colorado, circa 1987 to 1991. The methods escalate in both creativity and futility — iodine (burned his skin, didn't work), white vinegar mixed with Gatorade every Monday morning (didn't work), Sure-Jell fruit pectin mixed into a sports drink (a folk remedy with no scientific basis, confirmed by a quick search), and finally, Drano.
The Drano entry destroyed the testing machine. Foam started emerging from the sealed sample bag on the counter. The probation officer called days later to report he was taking Diaz to court for equipment damage. The whole saga ended not through legal maneuvering but through a chance encounter: Diaz met a man on the street who turned out to be Boulder District Attorney Bill Wise. Wise reviewed the situation, had Diaz's attorney draw up a statement, signed off on ending probation, and that was that. Wise was later caught up in the fallout from the JonBenét Ramsey investigation and lost his position. "I still won't go back to Boulder," Diaz says. "I'm ashamed of what I did to that city."
The shame is real and specific. He describes returning stolen merchandise with floating receipts, cleaning out Radio Shack during a Broncos playoff game while everyone watched the TVs in the mall hallway, running a small extortion operation on an Italian knickknack store owner who had mistaken him for a mob witness in relocation. The man paid $200 a week for three weeks before closing his shop and disappearing. Diaz wants to book the Fox Theater in Boulder, donate to something, and apologize in public. He is 63 years old and still carrying it.
The Ilia Topuria Fight, Justin Gaethje, and the Art of Controlled Chaos
The conversation finds its footing around the upcoming Topuria-Gaethje fight at the White House. Rogan makes the case for Topuria as one of the most dominant runs in championship history: three consecutive knockouts of all-time greats — Alexander Volkanovski, Max Holloway, Charles Oliveira. The odds reflect it. Caesars has Topuria at minus-600. But Rogan refuses to dismiss Gaethje.
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Fight footage of Justin Gaethje vs Michael Johnson showing Gaethje's aggressive forward pressure
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He pulls up the Michael Johnson fight — Gaethje's UFC debut — as evidence. Both men threw themselves into pure chaos from the opening bell, both got hurt, both kept coming. What changed over Gaethje's career, Rogan argues, is not the violence but the management of it. He stopped throwing himself into the fire indiscriminately. He controlled the chaos just enough to make it technical rather than reckless. "He fights like a pitbull," Diaz says. "No concern for his safety. Just dive in." Rogan adds that Gaethje once hurt Khabib with calf kicks in the clinch — that the power and the leg work are always there. It is, by any measure, a dangerous fight for anyone holding that belt.
The discussion expands to Ciril Gane versus Alex Pereira at heavyweight — essentially a pick'em, with Gane's footwork and technical movement posing genuine problems for Pereira's straightforward power style. Rogan makes the case that Pereira fighting at heavyweight for the first time without any weight cut is a massive physiological advantage, comparable in effect to performance enhancement. If MMA eliminated weight cutting entirely, he argues, performances across the sport would improve by 20 percent. Fighters arrive with dehydrated brains. Twenty-four hours of rehydration is not enough.
Paying for Your Life with Comedy: On Gratitude and the Long Game
The episode's emotional center is a stretch of conversation about what it means to have built something from nothing — not inheritance, not lottery, not a family business, but a dream pursued on $15 sets and a jar of rolled pennies and nickels. Rogan describes having his car repossessed, living check to check, never having money in the bank until his 40s. Diaz describes setting a goal of $4,000 a month as the definition of success, not because he was thinking small but because he genuinely could not imagine more than that.
Neither of them dreamed of houses and cars. They dreamed of making a living. The houses and cars came later, as a byproduct of persistence. Rogan talks about a comedian he tried to help in the early days — connected him to his manager, believed in him genuinely — who had the talent but couldn't hold it together long enough for it to matter. The point is not the talent. The point is staying.
"We're not in the comedy business," Diaz says. "We're in the karma business." His daily goal is to make one person's day — a woman at the supermarket, a stranger at a gas station, somebody who needed to hear something kind. He is not trying to save the world. He is trying to keep the ledger somewhere near balance after Boulder, after the probation, after all of it. The gratitude is not abstract. It is specific and earned and paid for, set by set, at venues most people have never heard of, in a life that had no business turning out this well.
