Yakov Smirnoff

The conversation opens with Yakov Smirnoff confirming that he painted a mural at Ground Zero. He says Paul Harvey covered the story on his radio program and that he offered the show a video of that broadcast. Rogan and producer Jamie decide they probably cannot play it because the radio material is likely copyrighted. They mention an earlier problem after playing a Taylor Sheridan clip in full. Instead they show a photo of the mural, and Smirnoff mentions "a couple of other little paraphernalia."

Rogan then plays down his own success. He calls the podcast mostly luck. He grants that persistence helps but rejects the idea that he planned it with a vision board: "I just kept doing it and it got big." He describes the show as ordinary conversation, the same kind he has in the green room, except that many people listen. In his view the remarkable part is the guests.

there's a giant percentage of it that's dumb luck that's a fact I mean I'm very persistent that helps

Rogan points out the American flag on Smirnoff's phone case and tells listeners, "Don't get fooled by the accent." He says he wanted to record the episode after hearing Smirnoff's story in the green room, which he sums up as "when the wall fell, so did your career."

Rogan remembers Smirnoff from the Tonight Show as a Russian comedian doing stand-up in the US, known for his "in Russia" jokes. Smirnoff marks the turning point with David Letterman's top ten list of things that would change now that the Soviet Union was gone. Smirnoff says he was number one on the list: he would be out of work. At first he found it funny. He was living in Pacific Palisades next to Tom Hanks and Arnold Schwarzenegger and "thought American dream will never end."

He says the joke soon came true. About six months later, none of his contracts in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Reno or Tahoe were renewed, and comedy clubs would not book him either. He compares his situation to a popular John F. Kennedy impersonator (the transcript renders the name as "van meter") whose career collapsed right after the assassination. In both cases the act was tied to something that suddenly disappeared.

The fall was steeper because his career had been rising fast. Smirnoff says he was helping President Reagan write jokes for speeches during visits to Moscow and calls himself "a joke supplier for the White House." Then the work was gone. Rogan says this makes no sense because the jokes were still good. Smirnoff's explanation is that audiences tied him so closely to the Soviet Union that he no longer seemed relevant.

When Rogan asks whether the problem was clubs refusing to book him or audiences staying away, Smirnoff says it was both. People stopped buying tickets, so the clubs stopped booking him. People decided "Yaakov is done," he says, and Rogan adds, "It was that quick." Smirnoff describes himself as canceled while stressing that nothing he did caused it.

I was canceled. Yeah, I was counsel. And I didn't have anything to do with it. It's not like I had a scandal or something.

Rogan suggests the timing made it worse. Before social media, a performer could not post clips to show they were still working, so once a narrative took hold, "you were done." Smirnoff turns the story into a joke about Reagan: he was helping to chisel down the wall but missed the writing on it.

Smirnoff says he could not pay his mortgage and had two young children. He jokes that he started looking for a place that had not heard about the collapse. He ended up in Branson, Missouri. He calls the move "a blessing in disguise" because his humor was family-friendly, which suited the town, and Branson took to him, though he notes that "it wasn't right away." Rogan says that in Los Angeles, Branson had a reputation as a "freaky Bible town" with creationist museums and ark reconstructions. He adds that he has never been there.

I start looking for a place where they did not know that the Soviet Union collapsed. And I ended up in Branson, Missouri.

Smirnoff says he did not want to go to Branson and eventually had to sell his house and move there. His agent got him a spot co-hosting a Farm Aid concert with Willie Nelson. Smirnoff doubted farmers would know him, but he says the crowd of 50,000 gave him a standing ovation. When he went backstage to thank Nelson, he says smoke poured out of the door, and he jokes that he could no longer claim he had never done drugs. Through the smoke, Nelson told him to go to Branson.

He went to look in March 1993, after about two years of struggling. At a matinee by Shoji Tabuchi, a Japanese fiddler playing country music, he found about 2,000 people. The Andy Williams show was also full at about 2,000. He decided that if they could do it, so could he.

His own start was slow. In May he rented a small theater, and 17 people came to one show. He responded by serving breakfast in the showroom made from his mother's recipe, which he called "yuck in the box." He hoped word of mouth would bring more people in. He played two shows a day, morning and evening. A year later he was averaging about 400 people a show, helped by tour buses, which he calls the town's big business at the time. He later bought a 2,000-seat theater and says he has entertained more than 6 million people there.

He describes himself as now "kind of the only" nationally known performer still in Branson. He has cut back to about 30 shows a year, toward the fall, from about 400 a year at his peak, when he played more to earn more. Rogan credits him for adapting and says the period must have been frightening with small children. Smirnoff agrees, calling it "nightmare all of a sudden."

Rogan argues that the idea a great comic can only do one subject "is so stupid." Smirnoff takes a more grateful view. His act had been "kind of a one-note tune," and the collapse forced him to drop a topic nobody cared about anymore. He jokes that the Soviet Union was a pain in the butt and he was Preparation H: once the swelling and itching went away, nobody needed him.

The career change came at the same time as his divorce. He reasoned that laughter had helped make the world better, since he believed his work with Reagan had in some ways helped end the Cold War. So he asked why couples laugh early in a relationship, while in a divorce "the only people laughing are attorneys." When Rogan asks whether the move to Missouri broke up the marriage, Smirnoff says it added strain. He was looking for a deeper cause.

His evidence at this stage comes from his own audiences, which he calls his "laboratory of laughter." He asked people whether they remembered laughter in the honeymoon stage of their relationship, and he says they all applauded. When he asked who would go on a second date without laughter on the first, he says no one applauded. He concluded the pattern was universal. These are informal applause polls at his own shows, not controlled measurements. He links his approach to his father, an engineer and inventor, saying he likes to reverse-engineer why laughter disappears from relationships.

He says he used magnets to explain the divorce to his young children: two magnets attract, and when things go badly they repel. He tries to demonstrate this on camera. Rogan reminds him that many people are only listening, and Smirnoff drops the demonstration, saying, "Okay, so I'm going to abandon that."

He says he studied the question formally, earning a master's degree in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate at Pepperdine while still performing in Branson. He set his own performing schedule and travelled to in-person classes on weekends. Rogan calls this exhausting and asks why he did it. Smirnoff says he was searching for a purpose and wanted to prove to himself, scientifically, something he had noticed that seemed universal.

Smirnoff's main model comes from how jokes are built. The setup meets the audience's needs, meaning a topic they are curious about. The punchline supplies the humor. If the audience does not care about the topic, the humor hardly matters. He mentions a green-room conversation in which Rogan said he needed more topics for an hour of material. He says relationships work the same way: the needs vary while a person's humor stays the same.

He applies the same idea to business. He says a restaurant succeeds when it figures out what its community needs. He paraphrases Apple's model as making products people don't know they need until they can't live without them. He says the podcast works for the same reason: Rogan found what listeners need.

we develop product that you don't know you need, but then you can't live without it

Rogan objects to the word. For him, needs are food, shelter and community. "That's the real needs. Everything else is desires," he says, or interests. Smirnoff points to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where needs go higher and higher, and admits he could not find a better word. Rogan accepts this. He adds his own view: beyond being funny, which comes first, what matters most is that a comedian is genuinely interested in the subject. He says he gets invested in people who are fascinated by their hobbies, even ones he has no interest in. Smirnoff agrees and says that whoever understands that need or desire succeeds.

Smirnoff then states his new focus: he moved from the Cold War between countries to the Cold War between couples. His core claim is that men and women are different and have different needs, and that understanding this matters a great deal. He continues that his aim is understanding partners’ needs and anticipating his wife’s needs, then introduces Willard Harley’s His Needs, Her Needs; this is his explanation of the relationship focus, not a report of dissertation methods or results.

Yakov Smirnoff says he is now happily married. He describes his main goal in the marriage as working out what his wife needs. If he can anticipate those needs, he says, the home has "love and laughter"; if he cannot, or if she cannot anticipate his, the couple starts arguing, which he says happens in every family. He opens by suggesting that a person who lacks this understanding does not know what they are looking for.

He bases his framework on His Needs Her Needs by Dr. Willard Harley. According to Smirnoff, Harley worked with many couples who were heading for divorce (the transcript renders it as "getting the voice") and tried to help them through marriage counseling. Harley identified about 10 emotional needs and asked men and women to rank them. Smirnoff says Harley was shocked to find that the top five needs for men were completely different from the top five for women.

Women's top five, as Smirnoff lists them: affection, conversation, openness and honesty, family commitment, and financial support. He qualifies this as "Not for every woman, but that was majority." Men's top five: sexual fulfillment, admiration, an attractive spouse, recreational companionship, and domestic support.