#818 - Mike Schmidt

Joe Rogan (0:00)

And that, right when we go olive.

That is over 10,000 Viking fans with the Viking clap. They're Icelandic fans. And that is a coordinated clap that could not be done in the United States of America, ladies and gentlemen. We got a little too much independent thinking going on over here. Can you imagine if we had that kind of organization, we could do a clap, an America clap?

Jamie (0:51)

It'd be awesome, get a group haka.

Joe Rogan (0:53)

Why can't we do that? How can we watch the haka? We watch those awesome Samoan dudes, are they Samoan that are doing that? That is New Zealand? Right, New Zealand. That is one of the dopest fucking war dances the world has ever known, and it's going on right now. Like, it's not some Viking shit that they forgot about, that they probably used to do, but everybody who did it got slaughtered, or died off, or they didn't tell their grandchildren because they didn't want them carrying on the way.

This is some real shit, they're doing it right now. Yeah, at a soccer game.

Soccer's replacing war, right?

Mike Schmidt (1:27)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (1:28)

That's what's going on.

Mike Schmidt (1:29)

Yeah, it's a good chance for your country to go fuck up another country.

Joe Rogan (1:33)

Yeah, and you, nobody has to die, you still get to do the war cry. Boom, boom, ah.

Mike Schmidt, ladies and gentlemen, pull this right up, man. So, let me tell everybody how this podcast got started, and why I wanted to talk to you. Because Mike works at The Comedy Store, seemed like a very cool guy, and one day we're hanging out in the back patio. And you know, like all the employees of The Comedy Store, it's kind of a hang, you know? It's an interesting place to work, right?

Mike Schmidt (2:05)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (2:05)

It's just a hang.

And during the course of this hang, you started telling me about your past before you worked at The Comedy Store, and you started telling me some really disturbing shit that you saw in the criminal justice system while you were working there. And I was like, this is a fascinating subject, and let's talk about it on a podcast. So here we are.

Mike Schmidt (2:28)

Yep, yep. I figured, why not?

It's fucked up, so I may as well tell people.

Joe Rogan (2:33)

Yeah, well, tell me what you did for 10 years.

Mike Schmidt (2:36)

So I was a criminal defense attorney for about 10 years. I was for the first year or two in central Wisconsin, and then I moved down to Dane County, Wisconsin, which is where Madison is, you know, University of Wisconsin, all that fun stuff.

It's the capital of the state.

Joe Rogan (2:53)

Shout out to my friend Doug Durin, powerful Doug Durin. He lives there.

Mike Schmidt (2:58)

Yeah, it's got a great comedy club.

Joe Rogan (3:00)

Yes, it does, yeah, it really does.

It's an awesome town. It's a very liberal town.

Mike Schmidt (3:06)

Very liberal town, and you would think that because it's very liberal, that black people are treated well there, and it is absolutely not the case. It is the, like, if you're black in America, I mean, you've seen the studies, you've seen the statistics, you've seen riots, like, things are not good. You're not being treated well. And you would think that the worst place to be would be where you see riots happening, like Ferguson.

But actually, it's Madison, Wisconsin.

No place are black people more poor in relation to the white people around them than Madison, Wisconsin. Nowhere else do black children get arrested more often in comparison with white children than Madison, Wisconsin. You would think it's Birmingham and Alabama. You would think, where are those pictures that I saw people getting hoses turned on them or dogs sent on them? I bet that's where they treat black folks, like shit. No, it's Madison, Wisconsin.

Joe Rogan (4:05)

What do you think is causing that? I mean, why is this one area in your assessment from working there for 10 years? Like, why is it like this?

Mike Schmidt (4:13)

There's, well, the, I mean, there's a ton of different factors, and all the factors boil down to racism.

I know it's kind of condescending for me to be a white guy from the Midwest calling racism on everybody, but I'm just gonna tell you what I've observed and what the numbers show, because the thing is that you can't argue with the statistics. If this ever came down to an argument about whether or not these numbers are fair, these people are being treated fairly, we know where they are. They're in prison. We can point to the actual people. They could raise their hands if they wanted to and say, but-