Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Brian Normand

Episode Date: October 6, 2017

Brian Norman, cofounder of psymposia, was tracked by the police for 5 months and then arrested for growing cannabis. We talk about his theories on psychedelics, what it's like to get busted, and the ignorance that fuels the prohibition.

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I, much like Jesus in the desert, much like Mahatma Gandhi, much like all the great saints of the world, have managed to keep salmon avocado cheddar biscuits out of my mouth for an entire day and a half, and I feel like I could translocate, that I could levitate, that I could shift my vibrational frequency and walk through a wall. It's an amazing feeling, but it's also not a feeling that's conducive to articulating yourself in any kind of coherent way. I feel weird, sleepy, like I've been sitting in some kind of hot tub for five hours, really comfortable yet really slow and calm and peaceful. So I don't think I could do much more of an intro here, friends. So we're just going to jump right into this podcast, but first, some quick business.

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get a Nintendo Switch. Dear God, dear God, it's so beautiful. Breath of the Wild is so beautiful. Even if you don't play games, even if you think you've gotten past that in your life, I don't care who you are. Maybe you're some kind of super advanced yogic master who somehow has begun listening to my podcast in a cave in the Himalayas. Get a Twitch. You'll love it. Give that to yourself. In the midst of sending healing vibrational peace frequencies all around the planet and softening the fur of animals with your intense astral love, give yourself a few hours of diving into Breath of the Wild because it is one of the most, I think it's the most beautiful game I've ever played outside of Fallout. It's incredible. Open World, a true open world game. If you're

going to get a Twitch, go through the Amazon link located at DuncanTrestle.com, anything that you buy through that link. They give us a very small percentage of, and I don't expect you to go the extra mile, but if you got an ad blocker, turn it off and the link will populate. If you haven't been able to find it, but you obviously aren't going to do that, but thanks for considering it, for contemplating it. We've got t-shirts, posters, stickers and shirts located at the shop at DuncanTrestle.com. All right, there we go. There, that's it. Let's do this episode, friends. Today's guest is a super cool being who is one of the co-founders of an amazing organization called Symposia. You can check them out by going to psynposia.com. I'm actually doing a really cool

event with them coming up this Saturday. That is Saturday, October 7th. We're going to be talking about micro dosing with an amazing panel of brilliant people who represent the entire continuum of opinion and understanding when it comes to micro dosing. Now, without further ado, unveil your third eye, squeeze that pineal gland, summon up the phoenix of love from the depths of your heart chakra and send it flying right into the metaphysical brain of today's sweet guest, Brian Normand. Brian, welcome to the DTFH. Thank you for making the trek up here to New York City from Baltimore. Oh, wait, hold on. Yeah, man. Thanks for having me. So I want to start this off for folks not

familiar with symposia. Can you tell people what symposia is? That's a tough one. Yeah. We started three and a half years ago. We started doing events. We were inviting researchers, scientists at UMass Amherst. We did a conference. And since then, we've really expanded into doing events. We've been doing events around the world. We have a magazine that we started. But the focus is psychedelics. Yeah, it's at the core. But drug policy, harm reduction stuff, we're trying to expand into some different areas too. Because psychedelics aren't in a vacuum. They're connected to so many areas. Right. So symposia is a, would you call yourself a psychedelic advocate or someone who is, how do you? So we do media and events. And

at the heart, we do advocate. We kind of have this sort of neutral advocacy. We want to ask questions. We think that these things can improve people's lives. But we're not evangelists. We're not going out there and telling everybody to do this. If it's right for some people, they've proven to help people. So a focus is around that. A focus is around a lot of the emerging social issues that we're starting to see. Because the door is opening up on a lot of these things, especially over the next few years. And by that, you mean we're looking at MDMA becoming prescribable and all the research that people are currently doing on psychedelics is showing that these medicines, if that's what you want to call them, definitely seem to have some,

they're calling it the next, psilocybin too, all of them, pretty much all of them. They're saying we're, this is a revolution in psychiatry. Right. That's got to be super exciting for you because you guys have been at this for how long you've been at this? We're the babies here, three and a half years that we've been doing it. Three and a half years is a long time to be running an organization. I mean, that's a pretty interesting thing to decide to start doing. That's pretty interesting to decide that you're going to start doing events that focus around drug policy, the prohibition on drugs. What made you decide to start doing that? Um, I was interested, I get interested in drugs. I don't know, as a teenager, you know,

I was listening, I was listening to Tool and Tool kind of opens you up to some of these things, you know, they have Bill Hexen and Timothy Lear and when you're 14, you're like, what's that? And so, you know, you start, you start to read and of course you, you will eventually stumble on the doors of perception and it just kind of spirals from there. And then I, the first time I smoked weed, I was playing music and it was super helpful for writing music and getting into that creative spirit with other people, which led me to start growing weed. Were you sneaking around or were your parents cool with it? Um, so this fast forward, this is in the minimum mid 20s at this point now. So you, so this, you, that you first smoked marijuana when you're in your mid 20s?

I'm 23. Yeah. Kind of a late bloomer there, huh? Yeah. But when was your first experience with drugs, high school or 20s? For any psychoactive, really? Yeah. Early 20s. Early 20s. Yeah, I waited. I was like super conservative in high school. Oh, you were? Not, not Republican conservative, but yeah, I wasn't. No drink. Just say no. No, I wasn't just say no. I drank, you know, I learned about that on my own, but as far as weed, no, I think I was 23. And then it had this awesome synergistic effect with writing music and getting into that. And I couldn't believe it at that point, you know, because you're told all these things, you know, and like what you're told it's good cause it's brain damage, you're going to be a wasteoid, you're going to be couch locked.

I never had that hard, hard line. I went to, I went to Catholic schools. I went to Catholic schools from kindergarten until 12th grade. There wasn't really ever a, you know, a complete anti drug focus. I don't really recall that. I didn't have to go through a dare or anything like that. My household was kind of drug neutral. It wasn't, it was just what you pick up kind of culturally, you know, it wasn't any, nobody was really against it. It's just the shit you hear on the news. How old are you? 33. Okay, got you. Yeah. So you kind of, like there was, when I was in high school, it was, this was the full on Reagan war on drugs was in full effect. The just say no to drugs commercials were on TV. People were fucking freaking out. This was the

war on drugs, man. And like it was considered to be the very worst thing that could happen to you. My mom was, would go through my shit on a, you know, fairly regularly rifle through my drawers, you know, it was, and I was having these incredible experiences on amazing LSD, just amazing. How old were you? Oh, probably 16 or 17. And so I was like, I somehow just got lucky enough to have access. At the time, I didn't even know how great the LSD I was taking was because I had no idea, you know, any, I had no reference point. And so, you know, there was this throughout my high school, this was in the Grateful Dead was touring. So we were enjoying on a monthly, at least basis these massive spiritual epiphanies, these deep realizations, these incredible moments of

joy and bliss. And we were having to completely hide this at all costs from our parents and from our teachers, because the mere mention of it would get you in kicked out of school, kicked out of your house, put in a fucking rehab facility. So it was like, I was forbidden to hang out with a person who introduced me to marijuana, because they, my folks started, my mom started dating this cop and started grokking that the person I was hanging out with was into drugs, God forbid, God forbid. And so like, literally, like a friend of mine, I couldn't hang out with. This is like some intense shit, man. And it's something that I think is kind of just glossed over, which is that a lot of us went through a decade of our lives, at least where we were being

told absolute lies by the state, lies that weren't based on any kind of data at all. And simultaneously, our parents were becoming vassals of the state and beginning to become like secret police working for the US government, breaking up friendships and going through our shit so that we couldn't get into our bloodstream stuff people have been using for millennia. That, if you ask me, is so fucked up and it will never stop infuriating me and it will never stop perplexing me. So it's interesting to imagine being in a drug-neutral household, because my household was not drug-neutral. My mom was terrified of the idea of me taking psychedelics, which is a big shame, because I think if she'd been like,

what is this stuff? Let me try it. I can't even imagine the different direction our family's life would have taken. Yeah. My dad, I've never had a conversation with either of my parents about drugs. It didn't exist. My dad isn't like that. And I think secretly, because he grew up on Pink Floyd and everything, I think he secretly liked it, even though he might not have talked about it. You think you took psychedelics? I don't have no idea. I don't know. I still don't know. You can't ask him. I wouldn't get a straight answer. He knows you're part of an organization dedicated to psychedelic addicts. Oh, no. He emails me shit all the time now. But you can't be like, dad. I don't know. That's wild, bro. Yeah, it's just, you know how it is.

Oh, yeah, I know how it is. But my dad, at least, as far as I've gotten with my dad, is he just, if I put out something particularly weird, he'll be like, you need to get a new drug dealer, son. I'm not at that stage yet. I'll get there. But think about it. It's just, I, you know, like a popular word right now is normalization. People are using it. They're like, normalization. Like, you get a crazy president. We normalize things that formerly were completely unacceptable. But I like to think, what have we normalized? And one of the things we've really normalized is the idea that, first of all, our parents, generations, generations of Americans were, didn't have access to psychoactive compounds for a lot of different reasons.

But if we start with a Nixon prohibition, the reason was because the state did not want them to have access to these compounds, and they didn't want them to have the kind of revelations that were happening through access to these compounds. So what we're looking at is gradients of conditioning. Our parents deeply conditioned. Our parents' parents, many of them were unaware. I mean, many, our grandparents were alive when LSD was discovered, you know? And so they didn't even have access, but maybe psilocybin, but this was something that was, people didn't even know. That wasn't known until the 50s. That's right. You had to be deep in it to even have heard about magic mushrooms, because that wasn't until like 38 or something. But if we fly our beautiful time

machine back far enough into the past, suddenly we enter into an America where they're putting cocaine and Coca-Cola. Suddenly we're in America where you can go and get a lot of them from the pharmacist with no prescription and be slurping back fucking opium any time you wanted to. So we have this America, the dream America that people reminisce about all the time, early America, the beautiful early America, where these, the things that all the fucking right-wing, racist sons of bitches fantasize about, America was high as a fucking kite, man. We were, we had cannabis was legal. You could have access to so many substances. Yeah, I don't know how popular cannabis was back then.

I think George Washington was puffing on it. I don't know. I just read a biography about him, and I don't know. I don't know about that one. I think he was, I think that most people back then, it was, I think when you make something prohibited. You know, there's a, one of my philosophy professors used to talk about how there were some people, I don't know from what part of the Middle East who came to the United States to like spend a semester studying overseas and they had to, they couldn't deal with the fact that women were wearing skirts. They couldn't deal with the fact that they could see women's ankles or something.

Like seeing women's legs was driving them up the fucking wall because they weren't used to seeing that much skin on a woman because women have to cover it up. So it like inflamed them. So simultaneously, if you prohibit a thing, suddenly it takes on this incredible glamour. Sure. Yeah. So probably people were smoking weed and not just, it wasn't like a thing. It was just like a type of plant you could smoke or eat. It was some, a medicine maybe. I don't really know historically what people's relationship with the substance is, but I'll tell you this, you're not going to get the whole picture because our fucking textbooks went through a period of becoming consumed

with anti-psychoactive propaganda. It's not based on any firm evidence. So, you know, this entire fucking, what is it that Terrence McKenna calls it? The archaic revival? Is that the word? I think he calls it the, I'm going to fuck up the word, the pharmacological, the pharmacological inquisition. Yeah, I think it's Jonathan Ott's, the pharmacocratic inquisition. Yeah, that's it. That's what we, that's what we are at the hopefully tail end of, but that's what we all just went through. That's what we all just went through. I think that's a cycle that goes through human cultures continuously. I think it moves through, it moves, it's a historical thing that goes through cultures, I think. I don't know,

I don't know. People trying to maintain order, power trying to reinforce itself. Prohibition goes back in time in human population. It's not just the United States, you know, when Columbus came here, they brought back tobacco to, to Europe. And I think there was initially this, this people killed over tobacco. There's the counter blast to tobacco or something issued by the king. Yeah. The king was telling people not to smoke cigarettes? Yeah, I think it's called the counter blast. Counter blast? Yeah, to Google it. Let's look that up. I like the term counter blast. Let's see. Counter blast tobacco. I think that's what it's called. Let's see here. A counter blast to tobacco. Oh my god.

Who's the king? Okay. A counterblast, whatever. It's a treat see written by king James the six of Scotland in 1604 in which he expresses his distaste for tobacco, particularly tobacco smoking, as such it is one of the earliest anti tobacco publications. It is written in modern, early modern English and refers to medical theories. And in it, James blames natives Americans for bringing tobacco to Europe, complains about passive smoking, warns of dangers to the lungs and decries tobacco's odor as hateful to the nose. James dislike of tobacco led him to authorize Thomas Sacksville, the first Earl of Dorset to levy an excise tax and tariff of six shillings and eight pence per pound. Wow, that's so fucking nuts, man. Oh, here, let's read a little quote

from it. Have he not reasoned then to be ashamed and to forbear this filthy novelty so basely grounded, so foolishly received, and so grossly mistaken in the right use thereof, and your abuse thereof sitting against God, harming yourselves both in person and goods, and raking also thereby the marks and notes of vanity upon you by the custom thereof making yourselves to be wondered at by all foreign civil nations and by all strangers that come among you to be scorned and condemned, accustomed loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless. He fucking hated smoking. I don't blame him,

man. That's actually an incredible, that's exactly how I feel when I'm around somebody fucking smokes. Summed it up for you? Yeah, it's the smoke of hell. You're inhaling the fucking smoke of hell. You know, at least he was on to something because he's right, smoking fucks you up, and it stinks. But what we're experiencing now is a repression of what I consider to be one of the most vital aspects of a creative life, which is being able to experience the effects of psychedelics and from that to ascertain a different facet of the human identity that nobody knows people are illiterate. It's a form of illiteracy. It is. It doesn't exist. There's no education about it whatsoever. There's none. Where do you learn about it? You learn about it from

your friends. There's no kids aren't taught honestly about drugs. That doesn't exist, which is a total shame because we've limited access to psychoactive plants. No shit we have a problem with mental health. You've eliminated that from the diet. It's gone. You don't have that. So hopefully that reversal is going to address the importance of mental health because our system of medicine doesn't really address it at all, and they pretend it doesn't exist. They exist at all. Yeah, there's no. It's like, it reminds me of there being a set of organs that doctors aren't supposed to talk about or acknowledge. Something like lungs, a liver, a kidney, some facet of the human physiology that can get sick.

And these are the aspects of what people call the unconscious or the subconscious or the hidden self, but these are vital components in a healthy life. So shit man, you end up with not experiencing psychedelics, not having ever inhaled dimethyltryptamen or taken a psychedelic, and you're going to think some, there's some things you're definitely going to think. One of them, what's, let's just go through a list. What are some things people who haven't smoked DMT or taken up what people call a therapeutic dose of some psychedelic? What are some things you're probably going to think about the universe? You're going to think there's no life after death. I was just going to say that, that probably when you die it goes black or something like that.

You're going to think there's no... You probably have that pretty fundamental definition of death. Yeah. I think. Yeah. Which is going to affect everything. Oh yeah. Which affects, it's like kind of the base. Yeah. It's like the framework of the psyche there of what you think, you know. Yeah. It's going to influence everything right there, I think. Everything. Keep you in that state of fear. Not to say if you've taken a psychedelic, you don't still have that fear of unknown. I think that's, I think that's normal. But I think you can transform that totally, you know. Yeah. I don't think, I mean this has been for me, it didn't, I only was able to experience that heightened state of consciousness after many, many years of taking psychedelics. It didn't

happen all at once. Again, I mean it's the classic thing. It's all based on set and setting and hopefully you're around the right people and you're ready for the download. Because otherwise you're, it also depends on the substance, you know. Like, but there is a, you know, when it's, to me there's like a few things that are really funny about and brilliant about the, what people who are studying psychedelics as a medicine have decided to do the studies on. One of them is the effects that psilocybin has on people with a terminal prognosis and the fact that it seems to help them overcome their fear of death. And so, you know, this is the thing, interestingly enough, you can read about and kind of just casually overlook the implications of what

that means. You just think, oh, I guess it just like, it just must smooth like a, there must be like a muscle spasm in their brain that it like, it must smooth out when the implication to me is that, oh yeah, the reason it helps you overcome your fear of death is because when taken therapeutically in the right circumstances, you die. And when you die, you see what's on the other side. And when you see what's on the other side, you realize, oh my fucking God, I have been completely brainwashed by having a lack of access to information about the true geography of the universe that I'm living in. And that is what, that is a cure all. I mean, it's got to be the same experience when you take somebody from a totalitarian fascist regime and bring them over into a like America. It's got

to be the same thing of like, what the fuck is this? Yeah, or bringing someone from a few hundred years ago now that shock. Yeah, absolutely. And that feeling that this is just a kind of a phase. Yeah. You know, this is like a chapter. Yeah. In everything. A chapter or a laboratory or a condensation of matter for a little bit here. Yeah. Whatever that is. A condensate. Well, that's, I mean, I think it's a one thing that comes to mind is people who haven't taken a haven't had a therapeutic psychedelic experience, experience purposelessness. And so there is a feeling of purposelessness to their life. Because when you die, it all blinks out. The thing that you come from is just like, you know, whatever, you know, combination of Caesar salads and bloody

marries that your parents were drinking before they fucked you and the whatever your mom was drinking or eating during your gestation period in her womb, that that's it. You just sort of swirl out of the big bang out of the void out of chaos and you pop into time. You're just some ultimately random bit of harmonization based on the forces of evolution. And when you die, you go into, you go back into the nothingness again. But the other version of it is like, fuck no, man, you're here for a reason. You've come here to heal this place to work on the place. You're here to work on this particular part of the time space continuum. And you might keep coming back here over and over and over again to do the job. Now, if that's true, if that's slightly true,

if that's remotely true, and there's some state propaganda that's trying to keep people from understanding that there is a purpose to this existence that's based on making this particular sector of the universe a little more beautiful, livable, empathetic, happy, joyful, sparkly, beautiful, witchy, whatever you want to fucking call it, then wow, man, that's some sinister shit. I don't think it goes that deep though. I think it's just ignorance. Are there other actors or they're bad actors? Yeah, totally. I think so much of is ignorance. Really? You know, I don't like to necessarily construct those sinister kind of guy, you know, calling the shots on things. Well, I don't think it's a guy. Or a group. I think it's one lady and she's a cunt. She lives in

fucking Yugoslavia. Well, no, I know what you mean. I mean, nobody wants to, because again, I think it's just ignorance. Population is very ignorant on these things, and that goes all the way up to the fucking politicians. You think they're not taking psychedelics? The politicians? No. Really? Do you think they are? Yeah, I think there's a lot of things we like to think our politicians don't understand. One of the things that we like to- Maybe a couple. We like to think our politicians don't understand the internet. That's one thing people like, oh, the bumbling old senators, they have no idea what's going on with the internet. They're just, they don't know how to use technology. They're all 80 years old. Oh, yeah, that's one. And I think that

this is all part of the strategy, which is like, yeah, you definitely want to imagine that the United States government, the Gestalt of the United States government is composed of 80-year-old bumbling senators and congresspeople who have no idea about technology or about the internet. They're just sort of flying blind, crazy internet stuff. Who the fuck knows? I don't think that's the case. I think we're talking about the largest military budget on the planet that spawns much of the technology, or has spawned the technology we get to enjoy today. So to imagine that this cabal that is comprised of some old people, but some not so old people, and also some people that we don't even know who they fucking are, isn't aware of the internet, or isn't aware of the power

that the internet holds over controlling the paradigm? No, I think that that certainly serves power structures goals for the thing it's trying to govern, to not understand how absolutely, acutely aware it is of one of the dominating forces in the place that it's governing. I think they do know, man, and not to get conspiratorial or anything like that, but I would say that another aspect, another thing that you would want to control, if you can control the thought patterns of the people that you're governing, or the ideas that they were having, is you certainly want them to think this is an accident. It's just an accident, man. We sort of accidentally sort of happened to outlaw the thing that makes you aware of your true identity. I mean, we didn't mean to, man.

It was just like, we don't know. We don't know anything about this substance that we studied during MKUltra. We know nothing about the substance that the CIA purchased en masse from Sando's laboratories and secretly gave to people and documented experiments throughout the 60s. This stuff, we don't know anything about it. That's when we were studying it, we were just like, what's this funny, funny juice? We don't know what it is. Come on, man. I hear you, but I mean, politicians can't get away with shit if people are more informed, though. They can't, you know? Really? I don't think so. How is that? Really? Look at what's happening right now. You look like an asshole if you're a politician now who's against medical marijuana, for the most part.

Look at the states that it's... Look at Jeff Sessions. That's the people. No one's controlling Jeff Sessions. Jeff Sessions is tooting around about how fucking marijuana makes you a bad person, and he's still in office. It's an act of Congress to change it. Yeah, but they're... And the people need to be more informed about things and pressure politicians. Politicians are gonna kind of go in what direction, I think, that the people are... That's still optimistic. I don't see that as optimistic. I don't think politicians can get away with shit if the people won't... People need to demand these things. This is the difference between you and me. You think we're in a representative democracy. I

think we're in a corporate... I think a politician like Hillary puts her finger up to the wind, and she's gonna go in any direction, and that's why when you look at her past, she's... On Monday, she's for this. On Tuesday, she's for this. She's just going with the flow, and I think most of them are like that, or a lot of them are. No, I think this is a great disagreement because I want to talk about it. So, this is my understanding of the way it works, which is that the decisions that are being made in the United States government are not based on some kind of studying what the majority wants, but the decisions that are being made are being made by people who have been

given lots of money by lobbyists who represent different corporations, and this is... We know this. There's no question about it. Hillary Clinton, fucking Obama just was... Obama's on tour giving paid speeches. Hillary Clinton giving paid speeches to bankers. Jeff Sessions is paid off by the tobacco companies. This is all documented. We all know that they... So basically what we did is... We're in agreement. Okay, we're in agreement. So, these people are being bribed by massive corporations with the intent of manipulating their legislative decisions. This is not a representative democracy if that's happening. If these people are actually bending to the will of the lobbyists instead of the will of the people, which is definitely happening,

then it doesn't matter. It's not sticking your finger in the wind. I think it goes both ways, though. I think our different perspectives here, this is the middle ground somewhere. Let's find it. Let's find the middle ground because this is the... I would like to find the middle ground and I would love to imagine that the people who are currently... I guess you could say let's find the middle ground. The middle ground is healthcare. It's desperately as the Republicans have been attempting to get rid of Obamacare. They have not been able to do it. They've wanted to, and most of them, most of them outside of three, have been attempting to get rid of Obamacare, which according to various studies, leaves countless people uninsured, sure to die.

And so, yeah, I guess you could say in that case, the massive outrage by the people was enough to apparently influence three Republicans. I don't know how many are voting. Three. Three. One of them who's got a brain tumor, one of them who's not long for the world, and the other two just people with a lot of characters. So in that case, yeah, I guess there is an example of the people in some way or another overcoming what I guess the lobbyists are the wealthy want. But in general, I think we're looking at a situation where the people are not being represented. And also, our means of representing the people are pretty fucking archaic. I agree with that, yeah. Yeah. So not only are we not being represented, but the way

that we have so many advanced systems for our voices to be heard, and no one's even utilizing those. And maybe the reason we're not utilizing those is because these motherfuckers don't really give a shit what we think. They don't care. This isn't a new, by the way, this is a new thing. Look at the fucking industrial revolution. Nobody gives a shit about the people. Like this whole idea that these politicians get, they really care. Oh, they really care about us secretly, you know, they're just kind of like accidentally constantly fucking up. I think they care about their job and being reelected. Yeah, that's, there's a big difference. I think they care about that. Yeah, there's a big difference between caring about your

job and caring about the people. I agree. Because then if you just care about your job, then you just lie your ass off to the people in the election cycle, and you get reelected because people just want to believe the shit you're saying, even though we've been shown again and again, this isn't how it works. I mean, look, man, this is a scary thing for people to realize. And the reason it's scary is because it requires action and nobody wants to act. Everyone's like, my God, that we just paid, how many billions did we just pay for the military? Was it 60 billion? Let's look it up. I think they just passed the 700 billion. 700 billion. Yeah. So, okay, we just are paying 700 billion dollars for our military. Think about that.

Meanwhile, fucking Puerto Rico, we're not doing shit over there, man. That's what it costs. That's what it costs to keep this whole status quo going, keep this monetary system going, keep the military of Europe. That's what we're doing. It's post-World War II world. Yeah. We'll fill that vacuum. We're going to be there for a little bit. That's all. What do you mean? We're not going to stay. Stay where? As the global hegemon right now that we are. What do you mean we're going to, like, let go of it or just naturally be surpassed? I'm not going to be a conscious thing, but it will be a collapse. Oh, you think a collapse is, there's like an impending collapse?

I don't know one in history that hasn't. What do you think it's going to look like? They're going to try to grab it. Who's going to grab it? People who have the most to lose. Who? I don't know. The fucking cobble, motherfucker. See, now you're getting conspiratorial. Who's going to, who's grabbing it? Who's it? Who's it? They're doing it right now. This whole fucking administration's doing it. Trying to. And that's what kind of, to me, shows that no one's in control. Because I don't think anyone, if you were in control and you let this happen, I don't think you get too much control. Let what happen?

This horseshit that's going on right now. Which horseshit? This whole administration. And this, this is like this whole fucked up period right now that we're starting to acclimate ourselves to, I think, and it's becoming a little normal that this guy is in office. And that's dangerous to me. Yeah, it's. That's super dangerous of thinking that where we are right now is normal in any way. That it is not normal. Yeah, but it's kind of exciting, I guess, right? Sure, it's interesting. You can look at it that way. Because it's like that idea is it sort of wherever there's, you know, I think to quote

Trump, he did say something along the lines of like when there's like economic collapse, that's when he makes the most money. Sure. And so if like the government is wobbly right now, or if there's like obvious, like if it's at this point, it's obvious. Like if our system is set up in a way that that fucking dude has clambered into power. And it's like saying like literally the most ridiculous shit that really like any if you heard any of your friends say it, you might not hang out with them anymore. Like things like I think his connections that his neurons and think he's crazy. I don't think he knows what's going on. I don't think he has any grounding.

I think there's just a fucked up like mess in his brain. Puerto Rico. Just in that big water. Surrounded by big water. Ocean water. I think it's just this complete. He's crazy. Fucking mess. Robert Anton Wilson called him crazy in an interview. He said, Trump's crazy back back. And that was probably 20 years ago, 15 years ago. Yeah. What is it? What does the nervous system look like? Well, he's a disaster.

So, but then here we are. Trauma. Mess. So we've got a malfunctioning meat computer that's made its way into the fucking presidency. Right. And we can't stop it. And so in, but I think that is a beautiful thing because what it does is it indicates to everybody outside of the whatever his like constituency is that we have to redo the systems broken. It's a 200 and some year old system that we based on when we were this agricultural country that existed from the coast to like Ohio. It's the operating instructions are not appropriate.

It needs an upgrade. The whole thing needs an upgrade. The operating. Two senators from each state. What would you mean? How can Wyoming have the same in Montana have the same say as New York? Right. What? It doesn't even make sense. Yeah.

The system is a mess. Yeah. And then we have this, I understand the upholding the constitution and all that, but we've turned it into this fundamentalist Bible thing that we have to operate in the 21st century like we're in the 18th century here. It doesn't, the world changes. Things have changed. Well, yeah, we're still going by this old system.

Yeah. And not only that, but what is it how presidency is seeming to be like kind of too dangerous to even have. Have a president. Yeah. Why does this guy have this ability to just control? And this is the unpopular shit that guys like Dan Carlin have been plugging away and Skahill have been plugging away all throughout the Obama administration,

that this fucker is getting too much power still it's accumulating it. He's your guy now and you trust him. And so now you've let him accumulate that. But when it's not your guy, just remember. Just remember that he's going to use everything that was accumulated and do the reverse. What do you think there should be instead of a president? I don't know. I've been trying to think about it.

Yeah. Like a Supreme Court or something like that. Like why is there one American who's like this three hundred and seven million? Why is there one American human that just sits there and just fucking plays this stupid ass role? It's a stupid character. Yeah. And Trump is being exposed now because he acts like this asshole.

And it's exposed. I don't care about this role, but yet it does carry weight. That he can just sign something? He's a fucking president, man. He's a president. It does it. I mean, that's like, he's the president of the greatest country on earth. And this is why I think he is the ultimate president that we've ever had.

Because what he has done for us is not enact some great new social system that embraces service and empathy and figures out ways to get people the resources that they need. But what he's done is just what you're saying. He's exposed an antiquated, archaic, fucked up system. And also, as he continues to rampage through the presidency, knocking shit over, terrifying us, freaking us out, flying the plane in fucking insane ways, then it moves us one step closer to rethinking the way we're running shit here. And that's pretty exciting to me.

I think some people have that conversation. But I think people ultimately want to go back to it. Just want to go back to normalcy. Whenever Cory Booker gets in, or Gillibrand, or who else is running now? Who else is going to run? I don't know. Harris out of California. Those are the three that are positioning themselves right now.

To run for president? Yeah. And I think that people will just accept that normalcy again once we should analyze the thing. If we had AI up and running right now, just say, ah, that fucking, you need to upgrade. Just upgrade this, this, this, this. Well, this doesn't work. This doesn't collapse. Here's a projection of the future.

It's just going to collapse. It's going to collapse. It can't keep up. Well, this is, I think, something that's maybe one of the real weird things about being a human is that people just want things to be normal. I was talking to my friend. I was at a party once talking to my friend. And he's like, you know, why do people want to, you know, people are voting for Jillstein?

Why do people want to vote for Jillstein? Why do people want to vote for Bernie Sanders? Shit's running okay. Let's just keep it running the way it's running. And everything's going to be fine because shit's kind of okay right now. Now, my friend, of course, is experiencing the benefits of being a white dude, right? And it's easy for us. The fruits of the empire.

Yeah, this is one of the things like, and I'm not bashing white dudes, but definitely I think one of the cool things, because I resisted it in the beginning. But one of the cool things about the talk about, what do they call it, privilege. One of the cool things about the talk, talking about this, is that in the beginning when I was hearing it, I'm like, that's a bunch of fucking bullshit privilege my ass. And then I started thinking about, I'm like, oh my God, oh my God. And it's invisible.

Oh, apparently. Right. Well, I mean, it's not invisible if you're, if you're like, the difference between you and me is when we get pulled over by a cop, it's a little bit of a novelty. You know what I mean? I experienced the whole thing when, so going back to what we were talking about before, I eventually got raided when I was growing, when I was growing weed. They got me with 47 plants, and I had, I had a roommate living with me at the time,

and he had a fairly large mushroom set up going on. And I had, I was being monitored by the police for five months, and I didn't know it. Wow. They were watching me, and they were building a case. They were watching my trash. Every time the trash would go out, they would pull up. I never knew it. They'd take the trash bag, bring it back to the police station, looking at for evidence.

They finally got some stems in there, and that was enough to go forward with the warrant. And I'm sure they were taking pictures. I'm sure they were just monitoring everything. And I had eight felony charges at that time. I had two school zones. It was a mess. I had no priors. I experienced that privilege going through the whole criminal justice.

Because when they kicked your door in, you were, you were, did you think you were going to get shot? Never. They pulled me over in a car when I was going down the street. You know, a guy comes up to the car, you know, gets my information, goes back to the car, confirms it's me, comes, goes back to me, and you know, can you please step out of the car? And I resisted until he told me, look, man, if you don't get out, I'm just going to pull you out. So that's when I got out. Because there was no other option at that point.

But I never saw. Where were you growing weed at? It was in Dartmouth mass. Oh, fuck. You were selling dope in Dartmouth. Yeah. And they had everything arranged. They had the news crews there from Providence.

They did a segment on me at night. They arranged that in like the grocery store parking lot, by the way, beforehand. Why did you think you could get away with selling weed? I didn't think that. Oh, you thought you were going to get busted? No, I lived at the risk. I lived with that. I knew that was a possibility.

How many plants did you have? I had 47 at the time. So it was like, see this room that we're in? Yeah. Two of these. It's not, 47 plants is not a lot. It, that sounds like a lot. That's not crazy.

You sound like somebody who's going to get busted for weed. I don't think that's crazy. It's only 47 plants, man. We'll be fine. No, I'll tell you what. It's just 47 plants. You know, the bullshit is all these states right now that have some sort of legalization where, oh, you can have six.

Well, congratulations. Yeah. You can have six. That's not cool to me. That's not cool. You mean you should be allowed that more? You should be able to have, yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Talk about privilege in the weed industry. You get to have a ton of money to even play the game. Right. So we've suddenly changed the word legalization. I can't, if I'm in Massachusetts, it's my understanding. I moved right after they legalized there.

But it's my understanding now. I cannot sell it if I grow it. I have to give it. That's sweet. That's nice that the state is enforcing the sharing economy. Yeah. That's nice. That's weird.

But you can't sell it. It's great. It's illegal. Well, it's illegal to keep people from selling it. It's illegal if I grow in Massachusetts and I can legally have between six and 12 plants on me. If I'm growing for you or whatever and you come over, I can't legally sell it to you.

That's fucking legal. Listen. And so the word legalization has come to mean this new thing now. Yeah. And then we've become pacified. And to me, that is, is it a step in the right direction? Yes. Am I going to be pragmatic about the whole thing?

Yes. It moves slowly forward. But I'm still going to call out bullshit on that. That's not right. That's just not right. I would, even in Massachusetts where it's legal now, I would still be a felon. Are you allowed to vote anymore?

Yeah. So what happened is that I got popped. I got all those charges on me and then that dragged on for 15 months. And so when you get busted, they're going to get your criminal charges and then they're also going to have a separate case. That's your civil case. So they're going to seize your assets. So if you were a weed dealer out of here,

you were a drug dealer out of here, they could come in and take your assets. Right? You have money that was legally getting, you know, it doesn't matter. Yeah. You could approve now that those assets weren't obtained through illicit means. Right? Yeah.

So you're not going to approve that probably. The chances are you're not going to approve that. And chances are you probably did buy that with your drug money. Right? Yes. And so you now have those two cases. And those two cases are completely separate from one another. So you can be found not guilty in your criminal case,

but you can be found guilty no problem in your civil case. So a jury can find you not guilty and another jury can, because for the criminal case, it's beyond a reasonable doubt. But for the civil case, it's preponderance of the evidence. And so if they think you did, 51%, whatever, if most of them think that you did, you did. And so they seized all of my assets. They found a key for the bank.

And so they actually raided the bank too and took everything out of the bank. How much money were you making off of this? I, you know, you could pull in, you could pull in 25, 30,000 each grow or so, you know. How many grows per year? I did three. So 90,000 a year you were making off of that. Sure.

And you're investing quite a bit of money. It's a business, you know. And you can just talk about it now. It's okay for you to talk about it. This is all over. I'm on the information side of it now. How are you selling it? Friends.

So you're just selling it to your friends? Yeah, good friends. And like selling in mass to your friends who are then selling? I mean, I'm not talking about giant amounts here. You know, you might sell a friend a pound or something like that. A couple. How much are you selling a pound for? I don't know.

At the time, I don't know what stuff goes for anymore. I have no idea what the whole thing is like now. At the time, you know, probably between 35 and four, I'd say it went for. 35 what? 3,500 and 4,000. For a pound? Yeah, I think that's what it went for. You're moving pounds.

It really depends. You're just a farmer, man. You're just a farmer growing tomatoes that it's no more than that. It's fun. It's great. You dive deep into the universe when you're doing it. It's a really wonderful... Oh, how do you mean you dive into the universe?

You have your magical garden. You have your magical garden with all your lights here and like Eden when you're in there. You're smoking a little bit, got music on, and you're observing plant growth. You're observing change. And that's the... To me, that's the beautiful part about plants is they teach you about time and change because you have to pay attention to every little plant. When you watch a plant grow, it's wonderful because you get to see it over time.

And then so you start seeing your plants change their forms, start producing new things, and you've been putting a lot of love and care and energy and intention to growing these things in the perfect environment, you know? And so it completes this whole cycle of like the intention of you wanting to do it and then growing it and then, you know, you sharing it or selling it and then consuming it. And you start the cycle again. You're tuned into the universe. You're very tuned in at that point, especially when you're in,

you want it to cold out and it's snowing out and then you go in your secret place and you have your little paradise room that's 80 degrees. It smells beautiful. Was it literally secret? Did you have it? Yeah. Yeah, I had a thought. I had a fake music studio that I built and you would go into the room just like in here, right? And you'd push on the sound foam on a door and a trap door would open up. And it was a secret room behind that.

You had a Batman bat cave filled with weed. Wow, that is so cool. It was awesome. It was a great time. And I did nothing about it at one step of the way. It was fucking unethical. Nothing that I ever did was ever unethical. And what would be an example of like?

Did nothing wrong. What was wrong was the law. Oh, right. Yeah. What was wrong was the law. That's what was unethical. Right, right, right, right. And that's in and you sent that to me. Martin Luther King's quote on that.

It's your obligation. You might be able to say more on that, but it's an unjust law. It's your duty to break it. Yeah. You know, and so anyways, getting back to privilege thing. So now I have these two cases and you motion for the judge to push your civil case to the end of your criminal case. So you don't want in your in your desire to defend yourself from your criminal case.

You don't want to like, you don't want to complicate things. I'll just simplify that. So they push your civil case to the end. So 15 months goes by. And we end like the we end we end the discovery phase. And then we move in. There was a lot of delays because there was bullshit going on in Massachusetts at the the Jamaica Plain drug lab.

Totally corrupt drug lab that they had that corrupt chemists there. This was in 2012. They found out one of their chemists who was working there. She was not weighing any samples because if you get popped with something, they're going to send it to the certain lab. Right. And then the chemist who is there, it's supposed to be weighing it. It's supposed to be testing it.

Yeah. She was corrupt and she wasn't doing that stuff. So as a result, they let Massachusetts let something like 200 some people out of prison. Who had her as the lab technician. So that was it was this huge case. Wow. So that went on during my thing. It wouldn't really it didn't really affect the marijuana thing

because you don't need to test that it's marijuana. It's just clearly just way a bunch of Christmas tree like you can tell. So anyways, going into like the motions. So this is where you can suppress your lawyer is going to suppress things. And when you, you know, you might be able to get the whole case thrown out. If something didn't lead up in the war. Right. So we have 50, 50, 50, my lawyer is like, you got 50, 50 here.

I can argue this. Maybe the judge agrees with me and everything's thrown out. On the other hand, he might not agree with me. And now we lose some leverage here because at that point, the defense, the prosecution thinks that they can also lose. Right. And so they don't want to, they don't want to do that. So you get this, it's a game.

So we just, we made it, we made a deal. We'll give you the money. We'll drop the civil case. You dropped the criminal case. And it went down like that within a couple minutes, couple minutes. What do you mean we'll drop the civil case? I said that I wasn't going to, I wasn't going to pursue the money. I wasn't going to defend myself enough.

Oh, you're like, I'll give you my money. It was a legal bribe. Oh yeah. That's how it works. Yeah. I had eight felony charges though. Sure, you paid them off. I think that's where privilege comes in.

If I was a black guy, I would have not been given that deal. Oh really? I don't think so at all. You think if you were a black guy? Well, there's so many circumstances that went into it. I come from a family that has money. I was able to buy the best lawyer in Boston. This just happened in a room when you did this.

You were just sitting with a judge, who are you sitting with? Or did that, you weren't even there. Is it just your attorney did it? No, I'm there. So you're sitting with you? I have to go. You have to go there and you meet with your lawyer. You talk to your lawyer on the phone.

He's driving in from Boston. And when you have a good lawyer, and my lawyer used to be a former homicide prosecutor for the state, who then he went into private practice afterwards. And so when you have that kind of representation, who you know is politically connected, it's like, that's your avatar, man. That's your warrior that you have. And when you have the money to be able to buy that for you, you feel protected. So if you don't have money, and I don't want to generalize and say,

all public defenders suck. I'm not doing that. And people have told me that public defenders, plenty of them are great at what they do. So I don't want to do that. But I am saying that when you do buy that lawyer, you're not just buying the skills that he has as a rhetorician or whatever it is. And you're not just buying his ability for rhetoric and knowing the law and all that. You're also buying his political connections.

Because his, and I found this out, that my lawyer's assistant, so the guy that was in his law firm, used to be the boss of the guy who was in charge of the civil asset forfeiture for the prosecution. Oh my god. It was, it was, so my guy's partner was the, I believe was the former boss. So that's how it works. How much did you end up paying them off?

Um, I think it was around 30, 40,000. 40,000 dollars to not go to jail for how long? A minimum of five years. So it was a minimum because that was, I had two school zones, which were two and a half years. Where does that, so when you give the state 40,000 dollars because you are growing bad plants, where does that money go to? So the way that it went down for me was we're sitting in the, we're sitting out in the hall and my lawyer, so instead of going in and arguing what was on this paper,

we just make them a deal right there. And we say we'll drop the civil case and then my lawyer explained to me, it's going to be split 50-50. The DA is going to get 50% and the police department is going to get 50%. So the prosecutor, I had heard him talking to the lawyer, he comes up and he says, okay, sounds good. I'm just going to call my supervisor, see, make sure he okays it. I'm going to call the chief or whoever is at the police station, make sure they're down with it.

And there's a couple minutes later, yeah, we're down, it's all good. And, you know, less than an hour later, we're in the court. The prosecutor is now defending me. The prosecutor is saying, you know, the state doesn't feel that the defendant deserves jail time. He's made some good decisions, decided to go back to school. He's come from a good family. We don't want to pursue this trial or whatever.

That's what they do. That's what happened. It was just instant reversal and then the judge okayed it. Whole, glee, shit. And so that's the privilege. That's the privilege that you get. You come from that you have the cultural capital. You have parents who have money.

You have white skin, which the judge now might not think that you're going to commit a crime again. There's all the baggage that goes with that, right? Wow. And that's how the system is set up. That is so spooky. And what was great is that I had for years been trying to like, I was always totally rebellious, you know, trying to convince my dad of the shit and really work. And then he got to go through it with me.

So he saw how the state works. Wow. At least in this case. That was my own experience. I'm sure that people's experience is different. But I don't regret one fucking second of it either, because it was an awesome experience, the whole thing. And here's the other thing is that people think that the police are just totally against

marijuana or any of these things. No, that's not the case. Yeah, and in my experience, they were the sergeant who was in charge of my case after I'm arrested. We're all sitting just like this in my living room. And my living room house are on it. And they were like, yeah, nice art. It's cool.

And while I'm sitting there handcuffed, and so he's like talking about mushrooms upstairs, because there was mushrooms in a bedroom. And he was very scared of them. And he was scared of the chemicals. I remember him saying that he's like, ah, it's mushrooms. I don't know, chemicals. And it was ignorance. He didn't know what that meant.

He didn't know anything about that. I got you. It was fear and ignorance. Gotcha. And the general sense was that they kind of felt bad about what they were doing. And actually a couple of weeks later, I was going to a cafe. And as I'm walking out of the cafe, I see this sergeant who was walking in. So I'm walking in my car and he calls for me.

I go up to him and said, we're talking. And I'm kind of nervous at this point. Sure. Because the case was ongoing. Yeah. So I didn't want to say anything. But he said something to the effect of like, hey, man, how are you doing? Like, is everything going well with you?

He's like, I just want to say that your grow is really nice. It's one of the best ones that I've seen. He's like, you remind me of this dude who we busted, who was trafficking down at, trafficking weed from Jamaica down at the, because I live near the ocean. Yeah. And so they got a guy, he's like, you remind me of him. And he's like, I have your phone. I have your iPhone.

It's at my, it's at the office. We're going to use it for evidence. We decided not to. If you want to come pick it up, come pick it up. And he's like, you know, man, you're going to be good. This, he's like, we can't look the other way when it got this big. It comes across our desk. We can't just look the other way.

Right. You're not the type of guy that we're going after. We're going after the guys in the next city over who are like, selling a lot of pills to young kids. You know, you'd be good though. And then, and then I call my lawyer and my lawyer, he's like, don't talk to him, man. He's like, if you don't need the phone, don't talk to him. So I didn't.

The case ended. I call him back. Matt and that one, this dude keep my phone and call him back. So we're, yeah, we arranged for me to go in. And we're sitting in a room talking about the Warren drugs. He gives me my phone back. And yeah, it's just like, he believed in it. He believed in what he was doing.

He seemed like he was conflicted. I think a lot of them are conflicted. I like what you're saying, Matt. It's good. You're calming me down. Because the idea is like- My ex at the time was like, fuck the police. No, I got you, Matt.

I was like, I got you. It's like, because the premise is like, what you're saying is this. And I think this is why we need folks like you and things like symposia. Because what you're saying is, look, problem isn't some evil fucking Illuminati thing out there. The problem is there's police officers who think that there's some kind of weird chemicals in mushrooms. That's the problem.

We have a- People. People just aren't informed. And we got to get the data to them so that they can be informed. And so that police officers know if they're enforcing certain laws that are putting people behind bars for things that are ultimately harmless. And the police officers themselves, maybe they're going to try to change things.

You know? That's cool, man. I like that. I think that's a- I think- Because the truth of the matter is, what the fuck is some weird shrill asshole with a beard? Yapping about,

and ah, man, they don't want us to go to that room because if we do, we'll know it. That doesn't do anything. The idea is, let's get the data to people in a responsible conservative way that isn't so fucking shrill. And then maybe we can change things. Also, man, I've talked to a few different police officers. And many of them enjoy marijuana. You know, they-

They like marijuana. They're- And they understand the problem. And they're like, you know, they're all in their own way sort of wrestling with it. And I think that that's happening because people are in a smart way getting the information out there that, look, man, this isn't the-

Marijuana's not the problem. Mushrooms aren't the problem. Cilicide isn't the problem. LSD isn't the problem. The problem is fucking these opiates that are getting fish hooks in people's brains that the pharmaceutical companies are putting out. These are real problems. I think it's all deeper than that.

Yeah? I think it's all deeper than that. Yeah, how so? Society, meaninglessness and life. Like, you know- Oh, you're saying like the reason people are slurping these things back. It's deeper than all that. Well, this is where I'm gonna get shrill again, man.

This is exactly what we were talking about before, which is like, yeah, I agree. I think the problem is that a tourniquet has been wrapped around the metaphysical juggler vein of an entire society of people, and people aren't getting the blood flow that they need, and so they feel exactly the way you feel when you're not getting blood flow. Numb, confused, dizzy, and empty. You just feel fucked up, and that's because you don't know. You're like, we're the head of a snake protruding into time that doesn't understand. There's a whole snake body that emerges from the transcendent,

and this is what produces the feelings of hopelessness, and what makes people want to snort fucking rails of oxy-cotton or however you take this stuff. I took it once a long time ago. Time-release oxy-cotton. It was the worst night of my fucking life. I was puking every, like, on the dot every hour whenever the shit was being released. Rotten stuff. But yeah, man, I think it is deeper.

I agree with you, and the reason I think we disagree on we disagree on one thing, which is you think that it's like ignorance that has produced the lack of- I don't think that- I don't think it's definitive. I don't think it's just one thing. I think there's a blurring of these things. Are there people in control who are setting agendas and doing all this?

No, not individuals, but I think when we look at corporations, what we're seeing is like a, you know, and another podcast that one of the things we talked about is how corporations are kind of a form of superintelligence, that a corporation takes on a mind and a life of its own, and so an industry takes on a life of its own. So it benefits, I think it probably benefits, certain corporations producing narcotics or antidepressants or smoking cessation drugs to have a prohibition on other drugs that are going to lower the amount of the way people are going to-

Sure, and I think that lobbying that goes along with that is undeniable. Yeah, so- It's undeniable, of course. And then when we realize there's a kind of murky connection between corporations and the state, that the rules corporations are have to follow are being created by the state. So a corporation has a set of rules that are- The corporations are the state.

Well, that's exactly right. That's what the state is. There we go. The state is like the snapshot and time of the power. What is the status quo? What's the character of this thing? That's what the state is. I don't see the state as the government at all.

I see the state as the- The state. As, yes. The state. Right, right. Yeah, this is the state or the state of the art, or this is where we're at right now as far as who's running the show. And so when we're looking at these kind of like crazy entities, these little demigods

that have really, that actually interestingly end up have the names of gods. Pfizer, Halliburton, we're looking at demigods. We're looking at these like archons or entities that are emerging from some kind of shared group intention. Well, do you think that corporations are part of evolution? Do you think they're natural and just, you know, if you accept everything as it is? Oh, yeah. And they evolved in this way?

Yeah, I think so. I think that they're a, I guess you could say a part of evolution. I think they're a, I mean, on one level, everything's perfect, right? This is happening and here's the way it is. And in that way, it's beautiful and perfect. But, you know, if we live in that way, Ram Dass talks about this. If I'm playing a game of Monopoly with you and we both play the game of Monopoly, like everything's perfect, this is perfect, man.

We're just having fun rolling dice and moving things. It's no fucking fun. So on another level, well, maybe a couple of levels down. No, I think what corporations are perfect in their malevolence, not all corporations are malevolent, but I'm saying the ones that are like making addictive poisons that people are taking and lobbying to make sure that they get more of these poisons to people. I think that like it's the worst form of malevolence because it's like they want it to seem accidental.

Like, whoops, we just happened to accidentally be putting this stuff out in the world that's killing shit tons of people. So, but to answer your question, I think that corporations are a sort of the, are to tribal society, what the black mass is to Catholicism. It's a example of a group of people working together to produce some end result, except the reasons that people are working together are the disjointed thing. Everyone's got. Yeah, I see a lot.

I see kind of corporations have how you're seeing it now is just this like kind of like cancerous thing that started out probably creative or trying to solve some problem. Singing in the field. And then it was just taken over by people forgot the initial thing. Tribes gathered together. Imagine tribes, groups of people who love each other. Just imagine being with a group of people that you really fucking love outside. Like growing, you're in your wizard garden, except it's outside and you're with a group

of people that you love around the beautiful, beautiful cannabis plants blowing in the wind and they're dancing for you and you're harvesting them and you're singing together. You're singing songs to the plants and when you don't feel like working out there, you're sitting down and taking naps and having beers. You're just being, you mean? What? You're just being. With a group of people and it's beautiful and you're singing songs to God and the songs are

floating up into the sky and you're together as this group. So that is what I think could be and maybe was. And I think corporations represent that same idea, groups of people working together, except the way they're working together is we're going to drug test you once a month. You're going to get here at eight o'clock. You're going to clock in. You're going to clock out. We're going to have you fill out a myriad of fucking forms every few weeks.

We're going to give you a paycheck or a certain percentage is being taken by the state. If you like, you're being harassed. You should talk to human resources and suddenly we deal with this completely bureaucratic, insane, awful corruption of what could be. Yeah, the idea was corrupted. Yeah, the idea has been forgotten and corrupted. Exactly. Yeah.

So now people, when you talk, even mention work to some people, they fucking cringe. In the same way if you mentioned sex to someone who's been sexually assaulted, because we, our idea of work has been corrupted into this imposition and exploitation, a kind of horrific thing, a prison. A wage leave. When work used to be one of the most beautiful games you could play with a group of people that you loved, you would work and you would, and work was organic. It was, it was a, it was a, it was the breathing.

Look at lions, look at wolves, look at any natural pack at the way they, they live. And it's, there's something about it, even in its brutality that is hedonistic and beautiful and is incredible and sweet. It's beautiful. Lions aren't fucking clocking in, you know, lions aren't, there's no lion that's like, Hey man, are you investing in your 401k to make sure that you have enough meat later on down the line when you get too slow to run? No.

That's not how it works. So it's, it's a, we're looking at a kind of mutation that is, that serves a, the group interest in a certain way, but it certainly doesn't serve the interests of the soul. And that, and it creates a kind of malnourishment of a sort of spiritual famine, which we are, we've been in for a long, long time. And this is why I think that we need psychedelics in the bloodstream of as many people as we can get them into in a responsible way, because the more that you begin to go down that path, the more you begin to understand that there are alternate, alternate ways that we can

be running this thing here, that we don't have to be fixated on one specific thing, just cause it happened before. Money. Yeah. Money. Yeah. And if it's going to be money, we don't have to demonize money. Maybe there's ways that we can, you know, I know people like the Bronner's people, they put salary caps on themselves.

There's ways that you can, you can, you can do capitalism that doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to demonize capitalism or, you know, there's ways to do this. As long as the pursuit isn't about money, the pursuit can't be about money. Yeah, I agree. When that's what the pursuit is, then stop what you're doing. You're doing the wrong thing. Yeah. Wow.

Yeah. It can't be about money. That's true. Money is, money is essential, necessary, but it can't be at the top. Oh, it's depressing. The moment you, I mean, it's, it's one of the most depressing things that can happen to you when you realize you're doing something just cause you want to make some green. Right.

And that's why I like what Bronner's is doing with the Public Benefit Corporation. Money isn't the most important thing. Which, it's a means. Which it certainly isn't. I mean, this isn't even like an evil. Who are you fooling when you do that anyways? Like when it's just about money? Nobody.

You're fooling yourself. You're not even fooling yourself. I think you are. I don't lose like the, I'm just doing this for money. That's the problem, I think. I think that's one of the big problems. Everybody's just doing what they're doing for fucking money. That's miserable.

Hold on. Let's take a pause. I have to pee. Can you imagine if you had to pay your heart to beat? Like if your, if your heart was beating, or if you had to pay your mother to be kind to you? Like it's, it's like the, in society right now, the family unit is like considered to be like the most sacred thing.

I mean, we protect our families. It's all about our families. It's all, most commercials are about your fucking family. When you're buying the car, you're buying it for your family. Everything you do is about your fucking family, right? And what are families? Families are not about money. Families are ultimate socialization.

Nobody's charging their kids to be, to, for, for food. Your kids aren't, you're not like, hey, bud, bud, let me, you're not leaving fucking bills on the table after you serve your family a meal. You know? Like we are, the whole family unit is based on absolute pure communism, generally. It's, it's like real communism.

Like people are like, communism doesn't work. And that's probably true. At least what we've seen in the past because fucking, anyway, we'll get into communism some other time when I actually know what I'm fucking talking about. But the point is the, the, the family unit itself in general is for most families are, are completely a sharing economy. They might be like dictatorships and they might be like.

The good ones are. Yeah. But I mean, what family, name a family, name a family that's charging their kids money to do the duties of a parent. I, I've never heard of one. And if there was one, they did up on some kind of like morning show. Yeah. So, so let me just get this little poodle out of here. Poodle invasion.

It sounds like a good sci-fi book though by Philip K. Dick about the commodification of, of heartbeats and family love. Or nature, like we start having to pay trees. Yeah. If we have to, if we start having, having to pay food to grow, if we start having to pay crops to grow, or we had to start like, you know, actually like bribing the wind, you know, it's, this is the, we're talking about like the, just the realization that when you have as your focus

something that is ultimately one of the most unappealing things ever. You know, when you pay somebody, when you, when you're, when you become someone's boss and you're paying somebody and you know, when they're working for you, the reason they're doing it is maybe they kind of like you, but they gotta do it. Because if they don't do it, they don't have money. And if they don't have money, they can't live. I've been doing this for kind of a while now, especially when I was growing and I haven't had that job for a while, like going into work.

And recently, the other day, I worked under someone. I was like, oh my God, kind of like scared me a little bit, scared me. I was like, what am I doing this for? Money. Yeah. And it kind of scared me. How's your boss? Is he cool? It's not, it was one couple, I'm setting up an Airbnb with somebody,

but I was doing it under them. It's like, I don't like this feeling here. There's no spirit to it. There was no spirit. There was no, I'm, there was no, I want to create. Because it should be about creation always, I think. Right? Yeah.

That's what the focus should be. Yeah. The focus needs to be is about creation. Yeah. Um, so just that fucking mindless, only here for a little while, you can't spend it. I understand if you have family and you're doing it for them, that's the noble path to me as well.

Your parent, my parent busted their ass. I look back at it, everything they did was for the kids. Yes. Everything. Yes. So I can't, I can't say, what did you do? You were working the jobs or whatever, you know? No, this is the world we're in.

And, and, and it's, it's, there, there's no, like, I, I think, yeah, it's important to note, this is the world we're in. This is where it's at right now, whether you like it or not. Right now we're living in a world set up where there's bosses and there's people who work for the bosses or there's entrepreneurs. But this is the world we're in right now. I just, and I acknowledge that and anybody doing what they can for their family. You're fucking right, man.

That is the noble path you're, you are sacrificing yourself so that your little babies can have food and a good life. So that being said, I don't think there's anything wrong with creating a little space in your brain where you start projecting other potential paradigms. Even as without, you know, one of the things in Hillary Clinton's book that I read in an essay about her book that she said, and for a second I was like, that kind of makes less sense.

One thing she said is like with Bernie Sanders, she was using an example of like ponies. Like, how are you going to pay for the ponies? Some kind of weird thing like that. Whatever Bernie Sanders wants. How do you pay for the pony? Whatever. And a lot of times when you see interviews of people suggesting socialism

or any kind of movement away from capitalism or the way things are right now, the marketplace or whatever, people ask a really obvious and logical question which is like, what's your fucking plan? How are you going to pay for this little fucking little commune of people singing to the goddamn sky in your pot farm? What's your plan there? Are you going to defend the pot farm from people who don't want to sing to the fucking sky?

What's your plan there? So damn good questions and it makes a lot of sense. But just for fun, just for fun, take Tucker Carlson out of your brain for a second and allow yourself to just imagine the space minus the way you pay for it. That's the first step. Just imagine the space. Imagine a fantasy world. Fantasyland where small groups of people who really love each other

assemble together to make really cool shit for the universe with the intention of inspiring on people, novelty, making people go, whoa, that's amazing. Just that, just think about that. Forget how you would do it, why you would do it. And then now we have created a temporary imaginary cabal. Only this is a cabal that is a group of people who are non-anonymously gathered together once a month, once a week, every few months to make super cool shit that they're going to give away to the world for fun to inspire awe.

Wow, dude, that's exciting, man. That's exciting. And we, if little collectives like that started popping up, not like we all live in the same place, not like we live in a fucking house and we all got to go fuck Jehovah or whatever the cult leader's name is. We got our own spots, we got our own places, but just every once in a while we get together and we put our fucking heads together and we do little projects to make cool shit.

And the only reason we're making the cool shit is because when we show it to the world and we put it out there, people go, what the fuck is that? Who are you guys? And you're like, we don't know who we are. Right. We just make cool stuff. And then like, then, so then you start creating, theoretically, if little bubbles like that started popping up in society, just groups of friends instead of getting together for game night,

they're getting together to plan some kind of awesome thing. And it doesn't have to be some holier than thou bullshit boring lofty shit like giving sandwiches to the poor either. It could be just to create art, something beautiful that you're going to give away or create some kind of moment of awe and joy for people. Oh man, if enough people started doing that in groups, oh my God, that kind of movement would be unstoppable, wouldn't it? What are you going to do?

Make it illegal to get together with your pals and make novelty for people? You're going to outlaw groups of people getting together to make cool shit to give away for free? Are you going to outlaw that? How can you can't? And then what happens when you outlaw the drugs that they use? What's that? You outlaw the drugs that they use and you demonize them. Yeah, yeah, that's what was done.

That's what you do. But the problem is, is like the moment that the genie gets out of the bottle about the drugs that they're using and you begin to realize like, oh shit, I think we're going to have to reschedule marijuana. I think that, oh, what? Whoops, MDMA. It seems to treat PTSD. So we can't call it a schedule one anymore.

It looks like psilocybin is treating nicotine addiction. Oh shit, we got to reschedule it because the research is shit. So at least these things start becoming rescheduled. And also we get the information to the police officers who are already on the fence. So it's like, the point is like what's happening right now is so exciting is that the substances that were picked as an excuse to make people stop gathering together in groups and making cool stuff together. These substances are becoming slowly and surely they're moving back into the light.

And that's cool. And again, man, the other thing is don't get fucking busted crazies when you're out there making your badass LED glowing hummings, incredible gizmo that you're going to reveal to some folks wherever you're going to do it. Don't get busted. Be smart. Don't get busted. Don't put the fucking cops who are already on the fence in a position of having to take us down.

If the cops are already like wavering on the fence or teetering on the fence, maybe let's not do 40 plant grow operations. It's cool and fucking awesome as it is. Maybe let's make it like let's try to keep. Let's play a little game, shall we do three? So your electric bill isn't shit tons play a little game where it's like, okay, we get it guys. You guys don't want to bust us.

We don't want to get busted. Ultimately, the thing that you're enforcing, you know, is is something that your time would be better spent enforcing other things. But let's play a little game. Let's not get busted. Let's play it cool. Okay. And then if we do that and get together in these little groups of people,

call whatever you want, man. Just experiment once a month with a small group of your friends on making something together that you're going to give away and just see how that feels. And what is that like? That's cool. I think that's more doable now than ever to absolutely pursue those things now. Yeah. With Symposia, we have like 17 volunteer people who are working all the time on things

right now. We've proven that that model works. If you're doing a project that you're passionate about, people do exactly what you just said. Yeah. Oh, cool. This is cool. Yeah. Like, you know, and we try to always encourage, we're just building this platform here.

Like, we have very minimal procedural like rules, but we want creative freedom. We want you to come on the platform and what are you passionate about to do and do that? Because then it can go in a direction that you weren't anticipating. Right. And that's what it should do. Yeah. It should have that chaotic element to it. That it goes into that spider web, but we didn't know what it was going to be.

Yeah. It's, that's how I envision this going. That's where I want it to go in that direction, you know, because it's not about it. While to me, if I can look forward as it, it starts about drugs, you know, you're interested in these, you're fundamentally interested in these things. But I think that the, the meetings behind them, like everything's cool. Everything, you get to integrate those things into other things. Right.

That's what I feel. Yeah. Yeah. I got you. Sure. The message behind it is, McKenna has the, the quote, the psychedelics teach you that the world is beautiful without psychedelics. Right.

I think that they just, I think they're just that, they can be just that catalyst or that boost, break these walls down a little bit. It's not like you thought it was, whatever, you don't work till you're 65 and retire and then go to the Garden of Eden, you know, like that myth. Heaven, not the Garden of Eden. Oh, whatever. Yeah. You go to heaven.

You go to God, even then you go to heaven or whatever it is. Garden of Eden is way fucking, you don't get to go to the Garden of Eden. Nobody goes to Garden of Eden. You fucking go to heaven. It's boring. It'd be amazing if there was some intermediary Garden of Eden trip that you got to go on before you had to go to fucking boring ass, gold covered metallic ass to heaven. Yeah.

No, I, man, listen, I love it. And, and, you know, I think symposia is an example of something that the idea is just, just, again, it's just, all we have to do is use our imagination because we have, we right now are running like the most advanced simulation processor out there. We can instantaneously simulate all kinds of realities, just, just playing around with our heads, but it's just fun to imagine what would happen if corporations started emerging in the world, ridiculous corporations with like ridiculous names that consisted of thousands of people that were outputting non commodified novelty into the world.

They're just novelty engines. Suddenly these weird communities of people start exploding all around the planet with hilarious fucking names that are like just popping out cool shit. I mean, this is an example of the cacophony society. This thing bubbled up that was just like, no, we're going to do culture jamming for fun. And it's going to be awesome. And who knows what the end result of that's going to be. So that's not, to me, that's one potential way to make some really interesting change

happens if decentralized groups of people begin to form these little novelty bubbles where they're cooking up novelty for no other reason than to spit it out in the society with no reason behind that outside of the fact that it's fucking cool and it's completely legal. But if enough of us started doing it, it would fundamentally alter the way everything worked, whether they wanted it to or not, there would be no way to stop it. If you got enough of these little groups of people together, gathered together under a decommodified concept of producing awesomeness for no reason, man, you're just doing it because it's fun to do.

You don't even know what you're doing. You don't even know. You just let go into this thing of like, oh yeah, here we go. We're making this thing. It's fun. It's a fun idea. That's the stone, right? What?

That's the stone. What's the stone? That. Yeah. You mean what do you mean? You ever read Dale Pendle's Pharmacopia books? No. Oh, you got it.

They're great. And the first one has the ground state calibration. Before you're going to experiment, you need to calibrate. You need to calibrate and get your ground state. But he talks about the work and the stone with the philosopher's stone. The stone isn't something that, and he says this, the stone isn't just something you find lying on the ground. It's something you create.

Oh, cool. I love it. And that's what you're talking about. That's the great work. Yeah, the great work. Decentralized bubbles of novelty producing anti-corporate corporations that are blasting out beauty and light and hilarity and comedy absurdism. Even darkness.

And that's the trend. The decentralized everything is the trend right now, right? That's the direction that we're going until that it's decentralized to the point that the revolutionary is going to be the centralizers again, right? Well, I mean, I think when we're thinking of like these little soap bubbles of communities that are coming together, it's going to be real hard to control them. Like it's not, I don't see even how you would do it. Like you can, if you get enough of these, that's the main thing,

which is why you keep the numbers low in a weird way. You only want like a small, you want your bubble to be relatively small. If it gets too big, I don't know. It just becomes disorganized or who knows or it breaks apart or whatever. But all these little bubbles that would pop up, so many of them. Again, this is a fantasy. It's a thought experiment. But it's out there though, right?

All these little online communities and little digital tribes and burning man. You're right. And I was going to say that I was like burning man is the example of like that manifesting in society that you take a vacation out of out of out of commodified society. Yeah. And you step into this other dimension that you are free of that. Yeah. Of those chains of, right?

Well, yeah. But you're also looking at just like, oh shit, all these people are making this stuff just because it's cool. And then you're like, wow, man, like this is amazing. These people are just making cool shit. Like they're just giving it away too. And they're being kind of worshiped for it. So there is, I guess you could say there is an exchange happening and the exchanges

suddenly looking around at a group of people who are wanting to weep tears of joy because you're giving them amazing food or looking around at groups of people who are in ecstatic dance because you're amazing, glowing, led lit, badass, our car is producing high powered, incredible sound that they've never heard before or you're fixing their bike or you know what I mean? And you're doing it just because it's fucking cool. And that's it. And then it's like, then suddenly what's happening is what's really cool about it is because people are like, yeah, but burning man, that's cause all this money to get there.

Oh, it does. Exactly. But what you're witnessing is all this fucking money is being transformed, purified, ritualized, converted into this alternate version. It's a good way to look at it. I'm always the skeptic fuck when it comes to that. Yeah, because it's like it has become the commodity. What?

Burning man. Well, no, I mean, it's become like the great commodity. Right. Well, you can look at the, uh, they, they published. I told you I have the burning man come much in the other day when we were talking to you. Yeah, no, but they published all the, they published the data on how much it cost them to run the thing. They got to pay off a lot of people, obviously, to make it happen.

Getting a city of 70,000 people to work. And when you look at like whatever the price tag is for a ticket, if you get it early 450 bucks for a week of free booze and food and music in that $450, they break it down where it's all going to there. So it's like, you can look it up if you're a curmudgeon, you can check out how much. Yeah, it's cool. But there, so, um, but yeah, but, but the truth is this man, like all those fucking our cars cost money, they're coming from people who have jobs.

Like it's not like all those our cars are like being produced, except for the ones that are being produced like drug addicts advocate a little bit. No, I don't even think you're being devil's advocate. I think it's important to like point out like, well, here's what we're looking at here. What one thing is this, we're not talking about like overthrowing the cap, this, this state here. We're not talking about that. We're not talking about like taking down or eroding or anything. Let the game keep running the way the game is going.

However, it's running. Let it let them keep playing the game. We're just going to all start experimenting with playing a different game. Sure. And we're going to start playing the game, not imagining we can play this game year round. We're going to start playing around like, let's see what happens if we play this game twice a year. We all get together, me and my friends, people I know, and we're going to make something cool,

and we're going to give it away. Or let's see what happens if we play this once a month, right? It's a game. That's how we're just playing a different game. And then if enough people start playing that game and these little bubbles and everyone gets mad when you quote Hakeem Bey because I guess he's a controversial figure. He did some weird shit. I'm not sure.

But you produce these temporary autonomous zones where for a little bit, a little bubble pops up in society where things aren't commodified. And you know the bubble won't last. It's temporary. It's going to go away. But you start producing these just for fun. Then you don't know what could happen because if enough of those bubbles popped or ballooned out, and there was enough of them happening at a random chaotic rhythm.

So when one goes down, another one's popping up. So you could always, if you wanted to, be entering a bubble. Just all you have to do is just keep walking and you're going to come into contact with one. Then my friend, it doesn't matter what they fucking do. You can't put it out. Little groups of people getting together and making shit for free to give away. Put that out. And then simultaneously, you're converting capital into novelty.

And the thing is we don't know where that would end up. Where would that end up? What does that look like? If all of a sudden, even 20 million, 10 million, what would it look like if 10 million people broke up into groups of 60 and once a month or twice a year just got together to make something cool to offer their communities? What the fuck would that look like? And think how contagious that would be.

Dude, that would be pretty fucking contagious because people would want to get in on that action because they'd be around it and they'd be like, whoa, this is trippy, man. I don't even know what this is. We don't have a word for it yet. Embrace the bubble. Sorry, guys. I don't know what I'm talking about. But it's a fun idea, man.

I think there's all kinds of ways that we could play a game that in the game starts with a bubble forming in your brain. First, let the bubble form in your imagination. Produce an imaginary, temporary, autonomous zone in your mind where you just imagine what you and a few of your friends could make just for fun. And then discard all the how you're going to pay for it. What's it going to? How's that going to work?

What does that look like? Are you going to? I think that's the most important part of it. Just do it. Yeah. It sounds so cheesy. Yeah. Yeah.

It's so terrible. You're just going to do it. Yeah. And then if you're me and you're not afraid to really go deep into cuckoo land, allow yourself to imagine this temporary, imaginary bubble that you let form in your mind where you imagine even a group of people that you haven't even met yet. Gathering together to produce some novelty that you're going to give to the people around you. Just for fun, imagine that that bubble is actually condensation coming from the transcendent realm,

that it's actually not of your own working, but the thing is actually sort of forming inside of your consciousness in the way that condensant forms anywhere, that it's just literally emerging from the other part of the snake. It's forming in your mind from another place. It's not even you, man. And then just look at that thing for a second, like you're holding a magical little sphere, a little, one of those like what are the little snow globes, an interdimensional snow globe that you've allowed to form in your mind and you haven't allowed the state in any way, shape, or form to

manipulate that little snow globe because you've removed all the hows and whys and winds and what's from it. And then look at that little beautiful thing. That's a pretty little thing. Whatever your mind produced in that moment, whoa, shit, man. There might be unicorns in that thing. How are you going to get unicorns? I don't know, but maybe you're good.

I don't know, but that's what we do. Start with it in your mind. Let the bubble form. Let the bubble form. Let the imagination create the temporary utopia and then see if you can temporarily manifest that utopia into the time space continuum with a group of people. And if enough of us started doing that, then I don't know what it would look like, but it'd be pretty cool.

I think people are doing that. Oh, yeah. Yes. This is going on. Oh, it's going on. You're only thinking about it because it's going on somewhere. That's real. I just saw it.

I've witnessed it. I've laid eyes on it. I just want to, it's fun to imagine that we could keep spreading it around a little bit. That's kind of what's exciting is the idea of like, oh, shit, maybe we could, how would this look? You know, as long as we, if we look at the way communes break down or like attempts at utopias break down, it's the permanency that ruins the fucking thing. People imagine they're going to create some permanent utopia. No, we imagine that we're going to create temporary utopias.

That's what we're doing. We'll temporary utopias that are designed to not last. They go down until they grow again, like any other flowering anything. Brian Normand, thank you for creating a space for me to rant. Anytime. And thank you for sharing with me that beautiful story and for putting yourself on the line and the way that you did and for not coming out of it jaded or cynical. But actually saying you enjoyed going through the process of arrest and litigation.

You're a very special person, man. Thanks for having me. And people can find you. Yeah. This Saturday. Yeah. Saturday the seventh. Saturday the seventh.

We're going to be talking about micro dosing. Tell us the details of this event. You're hosting it. What? I've changed my mind. You should host it. Yeah, it's going to be fun. It's at, you can go to symposia.com.

For that tickets around there. We've sold a lot of tickets so far. It's on, it's in Bushwick. It's going to be you hosting Hamilton Morris, Catherine McLean, Sophia Corb and Paul Austin. And conversation circles surrounded by the crowd. It's going to go in whatever direction it goes in, you know, it's on micro dosing, which has been, you know, it's huge, huge thing. And it's happened fast, you know.

Yeah. And so there's a lot of, there's just different perspectives on it. Yeah. You know, there's each side and in between. And there's a lot of. Highly, highly political. Yeah, yeah. It's cool.

It's going to be cool. It's a cool group of people that you've assembled. And it's going to be a fun night. I think it's a balanced, a really balanced panel. You know. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's great. It's going to be, it's going to be wonderful.

I don't know if we'll come to any kind of conclusion, but it's going to be interesting to see all the different angles in some, something of something that, you know, I've always thought of as a kind of part of everyday life, which is actually controversial. And I didn't even realize some of the controversy attached to it until we talked. And I'm really excited to talk about just little things. I didn't know about the 2B receptor. That's really scary. I was just reading, I was just reading on some of that.

Yeah. You know, I don't, I don't think anybody knows. I don't. Hey, it's going to be great to get it out there, man. Yeah. Tell about asking questions and just kind of being informed. Wonderful panel. That that's an option.

You know, that's, this is a concern. Yeah. You know. Yeah. And I'm excited to hear everyone's thoughts on it. It's going to be a fun night. I'll see you guys there. It's going to be a great night.

It's this upcoming Saturday. That is September 7th. It's during, it's after day one of Horizon's Perspectives on Psychedelics in New York, in Manhattan. So I'll see you guys there. Thank you, Brian. You're welcome. It was a really scintillating conversation.

Thank you. That was Brian Normand, everybody. Make sure you go to symposia.com or even better if you're in New York this Saturday, which is the 7th. Why not come to an amazing event on micro dosing? Links will be at dunkanddressel.com. Much thanks to Casper for sponsoring this episode. You can go to casper.com forward slash family hour, enter an offer code family hour

to get $50 towards a brand new mattress. And thanks for listening, you guys. I will see you next week potentially with a conversation with Alex and Allison Gray. I'm heading up there to cause them to have a little chat with them. One of my favorite things to do on planet earth. Until then, Hare Krishna. It's Macy's friends and family. Get an extra 30% off great gifts for her just in time for Mother's Day when you use your

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