Tommy Lee

The conversation opens with small talk about Tommy Lee's diamond tooth. Rogan says his friend Cam just got a gold tooth and that he is thinking of swapping out a cap from an old root canal for one of his own. Lee says he can't stay long because he is flying straight back to Los Angeles: his son is getting married.

Lee frames the wedding as a contrast with his own life. His son has been with his partner for seven years, and Lee says the couple have "basically" been married already and are "just making it official now." Lee says he is proud of him and credits patience, love and time for what he calls a much better "survival rate." Rogan adds "your happiness rate" and suggests that a child who grew up with Tommy Lee as a father and "such a fucking crazy chaos" would want to be sure his own relationship is real.

I'm so proud that he did exactly the opposite of his dad.

The two then talk about how easily a young person in Los Angeles, especially one with a rock-star parent, can be pulled off course. Rogan says "It's so easy to ruin your life if you're in the wrong circles" because "everybody else is doing it too," and he uses meth as his example. Lee says he knows good people who have "fallen down that rabbit hole." He calls L.A. "the hub of that" and blames shady friends and "weird circles."

They're not bad people. They're not even stupid, man. They just made a bad decision for whatever reason.

Rogan admits he doesn't live in the rock and roll world, then speculates that it is "probably" the world that most attracts unstable people. In it, he says, sane, balanced people who have their lives together are close to "impossible" to find, so people judge themselves against the chaos around them. He calls being the drummer in Mötley Crüe "the craziest life of all time" and asks how anyone in that position could be expected to stay normal.

Lee says he has put his sons to work on tour so they can spend time together. One worked with the lighting crew. The other wanted to run the after-show passes, so he could hand them out during the show and invite women backstage. Lee says watching his son run that job brings "a cheer to my eye."

Rogan asks how surreal it feels to look back on living out the dream of every young musician. Lee says he still pinches himself every day and considers himself lucky. He says success comes from a few factors that have to line up, and that it all moves so fast that much of it is a blur. Sometimes other people have to remind him of things the band did.

Lee's factors behind success: "There's some luck, some talent, some timing of things." Once these line up, he says, "it just happens at fucking supersonic speeds where like a lot of it's a fucking blur."

Rogan asks whether any older rock star mentored Lee on how to survive fame. Lee says no and can't think of anyone who did. Rogan jokes about pulling Keith Richards aside for tips. That leads to the Rolling Stones: Lee says he saw them at the Circuit of the Americas "a couple years back" and calls them "incredible." Neither man is sure of their ages. They guess Keith and Mick are around 80 and marvel that Mick is still dancing and singing.

Lee tells the story of Mötley Crüe opening for the Rolling Stones. He hedges the details: it was on Halloween, he forgets the year, and he thinks the stadium was in Toronto. After the Crüe's set, the Stones' tour manager told him that Mick, Ronnie and Keith wanted to see him. Lee says this was 20 minutes before they were due on stage. The Stones travelled with their own bartender. Lee says Mick wasn't drunk, but Keith and Ronnie were "walking on their lips" and falling over with their guitars. He was convinced they could not perform.

Lee walked to the stage with them. When the lights went out, the band opened, he thinks, with "Start Me Up", and he says the change was instant: the musicians were suddenly "100% fucking rocking out." Rogan explains it as long practice: they are "masters of the controls" who know how impaired they can get and still play. Lee says he saw it himself: the musicians "could barely talk" and then "ripped it."

And it was like a switch flipped.

Lee says some musicians want to be intoxicated to "feel the experience" and "ride it like a wild bull," landing wherever they land. Rogan calls rock and roll "the heart of that" pre-show habit. Neither endorses or condemns it, and the conversation moves on.

Lee asks producer Jamie to play a clip he has been sending to everyone: Rick Springfield, whom he describes as 76 years old, singing "Jessie's Girl." Rogan notes that Springfield looks like he's "working out every day or something" and says "He looks like a 30-year-old guy." Both are most impressed that Springfield isn't going through the motions but sings the song "like he just wrote it."

And passion and enthusiasm is what kills me.

Rogan contrasts Springfield with people his age who are "basically waiting to die." Lee replies, "That's going to be me. Still 10 years from now." Rogan recalls that in the 1980s there were no old rock stars touring. When the Stones released a new album, which he dates uncertainly to "like 88 or 88 and 89," people asked whether they weren't done already. He says that older acts touring has since become normal, and people now ask why they would stop doing what they love.

Rogan says hip-hop used to be treated as "a young guy's game" too, but older artists now tour and get appreciated. His example comes with a self-correction: he first says Run DMC, then Public Enemy, who he thinks appeared at a Bruce Springsteen concert. Both details are given tentatively.

Lee suggests that older acts may be enjoying a revival because so much music is now released. He says Spotify releases "like 300 fucking thousand songs a day." He doesn't cite a source for the figure, and it should be read as his rough estimate. His argument is that the sheer volume becomes "static" and that much of it sounds the same. He admits he isn't sure he's making sense. Rogan sums up the point as "Something has to be undeniable to break through."

dude I'm in the business and if I can't keep up how can a fan of music keep up

Lee says "The authentic stuff still fucking pulls water," and Rogan agrees that one exceptional song can still resonate and go viral. Rogan also says there is plenty of great music he knows nothing about until a friend recommends it, and he blames the loss of real radio. In high school, he recalls, a new Mötley Crüe song would be on the radio, and MTV later made new videos and albums impossible to miss.

Rogan doesn't present the change as purely negative. He calls open publishing "overall positive" because more people are making music, while comparing the volume to trying to watch every movie ever made. Lee extends the point to film and television, saying people subscribe to many services and still "can't find anything to watch." Rogan compares this to dating apps, where people swipe past someone for a small flaw and "don't get a chance to know anybody," and to Netflix viewers who switch shows after a few seconds of boredom.

Rogan says he'd like to see Netflix's data on how long people watch before turning a show off. He guesses openly that in the past most people finished movies and that now "it's like 20%," and Lee adds "If that." These are guesses, not cited numbers. Rogan calls this "short attention span life" and "very bad for you," and says it pushes creators to grab attention within "three or four seconds."

I'm dealing with a bunch of fucking six-year-olds here

The only real disagreement in this section comes here. After agreeing that creators feel forced to put "the best shit up front quick," one of them objects: "Yeah, but they don't have to give into that." The other replies that nobody has time for suspense anymore. The exchange is left unresolved, and the transcript doesn't make clear who said which line.

After a DraftKings sponsor read, which includes betting promotions, gambling-help hotlines and legal terms, Rogan returns to the topic with a counterexample: classic songs that he thinks wouldn't survive today's expectations. He cites Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love," with about "a minute and a half" of strange sounds and cymbals before an "insane guitar solo," and calls it "the most bizarre song ever." Lee describes the section as "kind of drum solo-y" and going "Off into nowhere." The segment ends mid-thought.

The segment opens with Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird" as a warning about industry judgment. As told here, the record company pushed back because the song took too long to get going. The speaker calls it "like a seven-minute song" and the label's view was that listeners wouldn't have the attention span. The speaker counters that it became "one of the greatest anthems in the history of the world" with perhaps the greatest guitar solo ever, and describes live crowds going "bananas" when it starts. The point is that commercial gatekeepers misjudged it, and the speaker blames that on who was giving the advice: "it's always the people that are the money people."

The criticism gets sharper from there. The money people are described as "pimping out the creative side," caring about buying a Rolls-Royce rather than about an artist's reputation, because there is always another act to push (Nickelback is named as an example). The conclusion is about incentives:

So they always have shitty advice because their advice is based on making money.

Then comes a concrete example from the band's own practice. While they were on their label, label staff were never allowed in the studio. The one time someone was let in, he started suggesting changes and edits and was thrown out: "You'll get it when it's done here." The complaint is that this kind of decision often comes from someone who is "not a musician" and has "no idea about what key the fucking song's in," and who only knows that a song is "too long."

The conversation then reaches for a Zach Bryan song about the music industry. The speaker isn't sure of the title, offering "damn cold vampires or cold damn vampires." It's cited for the image of executives feeding off artists, and the speaker paraphrases its key line as "trying to make an empire of the things that you create." The diagnosis is that these people have "ego for no real reason": they sell other people's great work and come to believe it makes them great too.

They're making an empire from other people's work.