Joe Rogan Experience #2550 - Rick Springfield
18 claims didn't hold up. False, distorted, or one-sided. Unverified claims don't count against it.
Enough got stretched that you'll want the sources open.
Claim by claim(20 claims flagged)
DraftKings' football profit boost promotion is available in all 50 states.
This is sponsor copy, not Joe or his guest talking. It sits in the middle of the DraftKings read, right down to the sign-up code and the fine print. Advertising claims belong to the advertiser, so the row is withdrawn rather than checked.
The Rolling Stones were the first rock stars to continue performing into their later years.
The Rolling Stones were not the first rock stars to keep performing into old age. Chuck Berry, a rock and roll pioneer who was already a star before the Stones formed in 1962, kept doing regular live shows into his 80s, including a monthly residency he held since 1996. That timeline shows older rock era performers were touring into their senior years well before or alongside the Stones, so calling the Stones the first does not hold up.
Rick Springfield's song 'Speak to the Sky' reached number 10 on the music charts in the United States.
Rick Springfield's "Speak to the Sky" peaked at number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States in 1972, not number 10. It did reach number 10 on the Canadian chart and number 6 in Australia, so the number 10 figure seems to come from mixing up a different country's chart.
Creatine should be taken at a dosage of 10 grams twice a day.
Standard sports nutrition guidance from the International Society of Sports Nutrition calls for a maintenance dose of about 3 to 5 grams of creatine per day, with larger athletes sometimes going up to 5 to 10 grams. Twenty grams a day, taken as 10 grams twice daily, only matches the short loading phase some people use for 5 to 7 days to saturate muscles faster, not the ongoing daily amount. Recommending 10 grams twice a day as a regular dose overstates what standard guidelines actually call for.
Eric Clapton was born in the UK to Canadian parents.
Eric Clapton was born in Surrey, England, and his biological father, Edward Walter Fryer, was a Canadian soldier stationed there during World War II. But his mother, Patricia Molly Clapton, was English, not Canadian, so saying he was born to Canadian parents overstates it. Only one of his two parents was actually Canadian.
Rolf Harris had a hit song in England titled 'Tiny Kangaroo Down Sport'.
The real song is 'Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport,' written and performed by Rolf Harris, and it really was a hit in England, reaching the UK top 5 in 1960 and charting again with a 1963 re-recording. The title given in the claim is a garbled version of the actual name, but the underlying fact that Harris had a UK hit about a kangaroo is correct.
The Beatles' popularity in the United States was largely driven by a desire for a distraction following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
This is a popular story, but historians point out real problems with it. The Beatles were already massive in the UK, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere well before JFK was killed, none of those countries had just lost a president, and 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' was already topping British charts and being pushed by Capitol Records before the assassination happened. The timing lined up, but crediting the JFK killing as the main driver of Beatlemania oversimplifies what was already a growing wave of popularity and marketing.
The Jackson 5 and The Beatles both started their musical careers in 1964.
The Jackson 5 did form in Gary, Indiana in 1964. The Beatles, though, did not start their career that year, they formed in Liverpool in 1960 and had already been a working band for years, including a number one UK hit before 1964 even began. 1964 was the year the Beatles broke through in America, not the year their career started.
The song 'Billie Jean' by Michael Jackson was forced onto radio airplay after a music executive threatened to pull all their artists from the station if it was not played within 10 minutes.
This mixes up two different things. CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff did threaten to pull all CBS artists, but the fight was with MTV over airing the Billie Jean music video, not with a radio station over airplay, and no source mentions a 10 minute deadline. The real story is about music video television, not radio.
Pat McGee made a werewolf prop for Rick Springfield that was criticized by Rick Baker for having incorrect physical proportions.
Pat McGee did build a werewolf statue from An American Werewolf in London that Rick Baker said had off proportions, pointing out the arms were too short. But that prop was made for Joe Rogan's own podcast studio, not for Rick Springfield, so the claim has the wrong owner.
Rick Springfield took a role on the soap opera 'General Hospital' for $500 per episode.
While Rick Springfield did join 'General Hospital' as Dr. Noah Drake in 1981, confirming the specific contractual payment of $500 per episode is not possible without access to private payroll records or primary source contracts. The figure remains an anecdotal claim within entertainment journalism.
The four solo albums released by Kiss members all featured images of the individual band members printed directly onto the vinyl records.
The four 1978 Kiss solo albums did have individual painted portraits of each member on the cardboard cover, done by artist Eraldo Carugati, but the standard original vinyl records themselves were plain black, not printed with member images. Picture disc versions with images pressed into the vinyl did exist as limited or later reissue editions, but that was not how the albums were normally sold.
The most popular soap opera currently has about a third of the viewership that General Hospital had at its peak.
General Hospital's most famous peak moment, the 1981 Luke and Laura wedding, drew about 30 million viewers. Today's most watched soap opera, The Young and the Restless, draws around 3 million viewers, which is closer to a tenth of that peak than a third. The claim understates just how much soap opera audiences have shrunk since that era.
Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers introduced the concept that 10,000 hours of practice are required to achieve mastery.
Malcolm Gladwell's 2008 book Outliers made the 10,000 hour idea famous, but he did not come up with it. It's based on a 1993 study by psychologist Anders Ericsson on violin students, and Ericsson himself has said Gladwell oversimplified and misrepresented his research, including treating an average as if it applied to everyone. So Gladwell popularized the concept rather than introducing it.
There are more camels in Australia than in any of the Arab states.
Australia does have the world's largest herd of wild camels, somewhere between 300,000 and one million roaming the outback. But that is not more than every Arab state's total camel count. Saudi Arabia has about 2 million camels, Sudan about 4.8 million, and Somalia about 7.5 million, so the claim only holds up if you're talking about wild camels specifically, not total camel populations.
The band Zoot existed from 1969 to 1970.
The Australian band Zoot was around much longer than one year. It started in Adelaide in 1964 under the name Down the Line, took the name Zoot in 1967, and did not break up until May 1971. Rick Springfield joined the band in 1969 and stayed until the 1971 split, so the band's run was not limited to 1969 to 1970.
Circuit of the Americas amphitheater has hosted concerts with audiences of 100,000 people.
The amphitheater at Circuit of the Americas, now called the Germania Insurance Amphitheater, holds a maximum of 14,000 guests, not 100,000. That figure is not close to the venue's real capacity, so a claim of 100,000 person concerts there does not hold up.
The guest was invited to perform in North Vietnam during the Vietnam War with an offer of helicopter extraction in case of trouble.
Rick Springfield really did tour a war zone in Vietnam in 1968 to 1969, flying by helicopter into forward fire bases to play for Australian and American troops while under rocket and mortar fire. Every account of this trip, including his own retellings, places the shows in South Vietnam entertaining allied troops, not inside North Vietnam, and none mentions being invited into the North with a helicopter extraction plan. The claim keeps the real danger and helicopter element but misplaces where and for whom he was actually performing.
Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland was written while on LSD.
Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. LSD was not synthesized until 1938 by Albert Hofmann, and its mind altering effects were not even discovered until 1943, decades after Carroll died in 1898. This makes it physically impossible for Carroll to have written the book on LSD, and there is no credible evidence he was on any drug when he wrote it.
The guest was present near the DMZ during the Tet Offensive.
Springfield's own accounts and his Wikipedia biography place his Vietnam tour in Da Nang and Saigon, not near the DMZ, and date the tour to around October 1968. The Tet Offensive's documented phases ran from January 30 to September 23, 1968, so his tour appears to have started after it ended. There is a real kernel of truth, he was in a dangerous war zone in 1968 and came under rocket and mortar fire, but tying that specifically to the DMZ and the Tet Offensive is not supported by the record.
All of this ran on its own. The claims got pulled out of the transcript, then checked against live sources.
This can get things wrong. Follow the sources and decide for yourself.
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