The Joe Rogan Experience - #419 - Lorenzo Hagerty (Part 1)

Episode Date: November 19, 2013

Lorenzo Hagerty is a former attorney, corporate CEO, and US Naval officer. He currently hosts the popular podcast "The Psychedelic Salon".

Rogan experience Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day One of the cool things about the internet has been getting to find out all these other people that share these interests and really kind of what some people would think would be obscure things and one of them is talks about psychedelics these interests and really kind of what some people would think would be obscure things. And one of them is talks about psychedelics. You know, the Terrence McKenna talks, the Timothy Leary talks. It's so rare to find a place where you can find a lot of those. And in the case of your podcast, The Psychedelic Salon, it's the best one I've ever found.

And when I found it, I was so happy. I was like, this guy's got everything. You have like every McKenna recording like ever. All these Timothy Leary recordings and Alan Watts. I mean, who don't you have? Anybody essentially who's ever said anything weird about drugs. Well, I don't have Joe Rogan yet. You don't? I don't really. I drugs. Well, I don't have Joe Rogan yet. You don't? I don't really, you know, I've had podcasts.

I don't really, I could go on and we could talk about them. Well, see, you started a podcast intentionally, and mine was just accidental. No, that was the misconception. We didn't start this intentionally at all. Oh, I didn't know that. No, we just turned on a webcam once. We were doing like a Ustream broadcast, just screwing around, just for a goof. Well, we started the same way then.

How did you get yours on? I'm kind of a geeky guy, and I was looking at tech. And we were actually up at a MindStates conference, and I'd already produced this Plink and Norte talks at Burning Man. And I had them up on the web in little 10-minute increments to keep the file size down. And we're up at this MindStates conference, and a guy comes up to me and says, hey, I'm going to start a podcast. Can I use all that stuff you have? And I said, sure, go ahead. I said, I thought about it too, but I don't have an iPod, so I didn't think so. And he said, you don't need one. You can do it in your computer. So I waited a couple months, and he never started

his podcast. And so I got a hold of him. I said, are you still going to do that? And he said, no. And I said, well, if you don don't mind I'm going to use them he said well they're yours so uh I made a pot I did a podcast of a talk I gave first and then I I did one that a friend of mine made of uh Terrence the last one actually he gave in Palenque or next to last and then uh I did those two and I was trying to figure out how the tech worked and uh I so then I put up my stuff from Palenque Norte, and I was still just playing around with it. And I kind of looked, and there was 10 people and maybe 20 and 30 who was downloading it, probably my friends. And all of a sudden, I get contacted by this guy, KMO.

And I'd been up to maybe 100 downloads. And he said, hey, I love your podcast. And these guys over in England doing the Dope Fiend is doing something and he likes it. And so I started kind of hooking up. What's doing the Dope Fiend? Oh, you don't know about the Dope Fiend? No. What is that? It's a great podcast. It's on the Cannabis Podcast Network.

Podheads are so hilarious. You can find it at dopefiend.co.uk, and they're a great podcast. He's got a whole series of podcasts there. The Cannabis Network. Yeah, he has some good music shows. In fact, I first found you during my stoner bachelor days on news radios when I first saw you. Oh, wow. Bachelor Days on news radios where I first saw you.

Oh, wow. And then I was listening to Lefty's Lounge, who's one of the podcasts on the Dope Fiend Network, and he plays music and comedy, and all of a sudden there's some cuts from you, and he says, yeah, Joe's got his podcast now, and so that's how I found your podcast was through theirs. Oh, that's so cool.

I'm not even sure how I found out about yours. It was, it was probably Twitter, someone suggesting it online, or maybe my message board. It could have been, I don't really remember who, who turned me on to it, but it was more than one person. And I think it was probably because like I would occasionally, um, post like a clip that someone, uh, you know, like on YouTube for like a McKenna lecture or something like that, or one of those really cool videos that some people have done. That's one of the more amazing things about the internet is all these user-created videos. Like I just posted one today that someone made. I have no idea who did it, and they did it with things that I said on a podcast.

And it's fantastic. They did a fantastic job. It's a weird thing where you can, you know, you can, a thing that you put out, all of a sudden it gets caught on by these other people and then they add all these things to it, music and visuals and it becomes even bigger. Like some of these McKenna ones were him giving a lecture, but they've put them to visuals and sounds and they're just amazing and they're super inspirational. Oh, yeah. Every week I get links to some graphic artists.

I use the clip from your podcast and it's just wonderful to see it because I think the visuals really enhance what Terrence has to say or anybody has to say, you know. And, you know, I know you've had a lot of people spin off podcasts after listening to you and a few have done that with me and some of them haven't stuck around, but like these two guys started a podcast called Black Light in the Attic. And it was really cool out of Chicago. That's a great name. But what they did is they did a 12-part YouTube video series on how to use Audacity.

And it's still the best thing out there. What's Audacity? Audacity is a free open source sound uh sound hardware uh software it's a audio multi-track you can do lots and lots of stuff with it really but it's free open source it's probably uh more used in podcasts than anything wow and but they did a 12-part youtube thing you know and it's in every once in a while i want to learn something new in audacity i go to one of those kids podcasts oh that's so cool So you must do everything yourself then. You edit everything. You put all the clips together. Yeah. The procedure is I listen to a talk first. And a lot of them, there's questions you can't hear. So you have to cut

those out. And you've got to boost and adjust the sound. So I get the sound as best I can. And I'm taking notes at the same time. Because I put program notes and little short quotes and all. Because Google and DuckDuckGo and those other search engines don't search the audio. And so I've made, you know, I try to get like 15, 20 quotes of Terrence in each one of his lectures so that they're searchable. But then once I have that done, then I write a script where I introduce it and then I close out. And I write the script out and rehearse it and then I read it. Wow. And then, of course, you've got to cut the pieces together and add the music

and then turn it into an MP3 file and put it on the RSS feed and put it out there. So, yeah, I do the whole thing. I respect that so much because this podcast is so easy. We don't ever edit it. We go live. We just let it roll. It just goes. Once it's gone, it's gone.

If we fuck up, we fuck up. It's got every bump possible. It's all happening live. But that's the magic of your podcast. Because I've listened to quite a few of your podcasts. I listen to the comedians, and my wife listens to your serious interviews. But every one of your podcasts, I've wanted to jump in and talk. And I've talked to a lot of my friends that listen to it too.

And they say, yeah, man, he's just like one of us and I want to talk with him. And I think that's the real genius of this podcast. It's just two guys or three or four or whatever sitting around talking. Isn't it hilarious? What kind of a society have we become where just a regular conversation is novel? Regular conversation is like, what the fuck are they doing? What are they just talking? Well, you know, years ago when I was living in Tampa, on a Saturday night, there's a guy named Carol Sudler who did a chatterbox cafe.

And we go down from 10 till 2. And what the thing was, it was about 12 of us sit around a table like this, and we'd all drink and just talk. And they could have call-ins, too. And so people could essentially go to a bar without leaving their house, and you wouldn't have to drive drunk. And so the sound effects were like a bar and all, and we'd all assume characters and sit around and talk. And it was a hugely popular show. Wow. That's interesting. sit around and talk. And it was a hugely popular show. Wow. That's interesting. It's interesting.

The, the idea of audio theater, which is basically what podcasts are, is a completely new thing to me, at least. I mean, it kind of existed before because when I was a child, I'd listen to like audio recordings on a record on a large vinyl, you know, like, of course I would listen to standup comedians and Cheech and Chong and things along those lines and you just sit around and listen but the beautiful thing about podcasts is most of the time of people are tuning into this enjoying this they're doing something else like you're at the gym or you're driving your car a commuting to work or commuting to school or what have you like you're doing something else exactly and and it's like the old radio see I grew up on radio.

We didn't have a TV until I was in like sixth or seventh grade. Right. And so when I'd come home from school in the afternoon, my brother and I looked through the radio listings, just like TV Guide. And, you know, it was Fibber McGee and Molly and The Shadow. And my dad and I on Sunday afternoon down in the basement would listen to all these great shows. We had an episode of News Radio where Andy Dick became obsessed with Fibber McGee and Molly. I remember that one, yeah. He was listening to all the recordings and laughing and walking into walls and stuff because he was laughing so hard.

And that was the first time I'd ever heard of them. I can tell you where they live, 79 Wistful Vista Drive. Wow. I listened to all the Fever of McGee and Molly. It's such an interesting time in our society when the families used to sit around the radio and listen to Orson Welles and those kind of things. That's all we had. I'm 71 now, so I can go back a little ways. But I don't feel like things have changed that much because podcasts have sort of turned into the old radio. And people walk around like you say, it's a little different.

You're not sitting at home, you know, looking at a radio. Well, in my case, it's far less professional. You know, I'm not, it's a very unprofessional podcast. You know, I don't listen to any professional podcasts. I don't know if there is such a thing, is there? Well, yeah, there are, actually. I used to listen to Scientific American. They had a good

20 minute one that was good but I kind of fell away from that a nurse at this hospital that I was going to to get this procedure done

recommended radio lab and the first one that I tuned into was this one about these Kenyan runners from this very

specific village and she was just going on in depth about it and then like to hear her describe this intense thing and then to actually listen to the show like radio lab's really good they have like sound effects that they play while they're giving their their talk on things they bring in people to have interviews and they sort of interject in the

interview like they'll the guy will be talking and they'll explain like why this is so significant like they'll and then they'll let the guy talk more it's it's really interesting like the guy talks but instead of interrupting him as he's talking they just sort of edit things in after the fact so they're having an interview with a guy and they not just interview him but also interject in the middle of what he's doing like various facts and information that actually enhance the story and make it richer. Really well done. And it was all about this one tribe of runners.

It's just like unbelievably awesome. And it comes to this rite of passage ritual that they do with circumcision and crawling Oh, I heard you talking about that with Graham. Is that the same tribe? Yeah. Oh, wow. It's awful, terrible stuff. But they became like super immune to the response of pain or or to responding to pain or super you know determined or super whatever it is their level of is it either

their level of pain tolerance or their ability to suppress it whatever the hell it is but they must be converting that pain to new kinds of energy of some kind you know for their long distance running or whatever i think that and i think it's also super critical in their society that you get through this ritual. And if you don't get through this ritual, you're not thought of as a man. Yeah, we all have our rituals and they're a lot less painful in most places, you know. Yeah, that one sounds insane. What's really insane was that this guy was talking about his sons and that he didn't want his sons to go through what he had to go through.

And he thought personally, as a person who did it, that there was other ways to build character. And I thought that was really interesting. Yeah, it is. It's a step in what we would call more civilized behavior. But, you know, we'll have to take generations to see what happens there. It's also love. You know, if you love your children, you don't want them to go through the same kind of shit that you went through. We'll have to take generations to see what happens there. It's also love. If you love your children, you don't want them to go through the same kind of shit that you went through.

If you wanted to make an interesting person, what do you do? You give them bad parenting and drop them off in a shitty neighborhood. That's not what I want for my kids. No, I didn't want my kids to grow up like I did. And I had a wonderful childhood, but it wasn't perfect. I think what we're working on now as a society, whether it's on purpose or not, by you putting out those kind of podcasts, by me trying to have as many podcasts as I can, what we're all working on, I think, is we're all looking at this world that we're living in and going, do we have to do things this way? Is this really necessary? Right. And the more that word gets out, it's not a violent word.

It's just a realistic word. We're all just going, come on. We're not trying to run the world. I don't want to hog up all the oil. I don't want to steal anybody's natural gas. But I also don't want to watch you do it. Right. I don't want to watch this crazy world we're living in where it's really obvious that what things that are being done are not fair. It's really, I don't think

that you can have a society the way our society is where it's so big and so disconnected and not have people that are acting in their own self-interest. But I don't think that that's the only way it can be done. I think once we become more and more connected, and I think podcasts are a big part of that, psychedelics are a big part of that, the Internet itself, which is kind of psychedelic, is a big part of that. As those things bring people closer and closer together, I just think less of that kind of behavior is necessary. Less of it is justified. Less of it is unexplained. It's kind of all out there now. We understand people way better than we ever did.

Well, we're realizing that we're all alike. Yes. When you get down to the operating, you know, below the operating system to machine code. One of my very closest friends in the world is Vietnamese. He was an eight-year-old orphan at the time I was over there. I didn't know him then. But we've become really close over the years. I didn't know him then, but we've become really close over the years.

And once we got through all the culture and the politics and the religion, I'm just talking about people stuff, you know. And his problems with his wife were the same as I was having with my girlfriend at the time. And on a human level, we realized how just identical we are. And no matter where you go in the world, you know, people are the same, except they get the overlays of culture and religion and family and all that stuff. But if you can break through those barriers, and that's where psychedelics, I think, are very helpful, you'll find out that we're all alike and we can figure out how to get along here. We're both different and alike, but our differences are external. The actual human being, like what does a person want out of this life? We want happiness. I wouldn't want to get rid of any culture. I think they're what added all the spice and the flavor to the world. We want to see the cultures, but

I think we need to quit fighting. We never quit fighting. Well, there's also an issue that a lot of cultures evolve around these ideas that are outdated, antiquated, crazy, in fact. There's a lot of religious cultures. It's like, it's a beautiful culture. It's really interesting. Their artwork's fantastic. The way they dress is really fascinating. But Jesus Christ, look how oppressive they are to each other.

Look how they treat women. Look at Saudi Arabia. In 2013, women have to protest for their right to drive a car. Like, holy shit. And look at the way they have to dress in that heat. And they get the black clothes, not the white ones. It's completely insane. It's old as fuck.

It's ridiculous. It was from a time when people didn't know any better. Right. The idea that your God wants you to do that is beyond ridiculous. Religion is basically superstition when you come down to it. A huge part of it. And I get the idea that I get that people need a higher power or believe in a higher power, a hundred percent. But if you can't see that there's the hand of man and something that tells you that you should stone homosexuals to death, you can't see the hand of

man in that. You really think that that's the way a God would handle it. Right. Why would a God invent homosexuals in the first place? If you don't think that they're doing that because they're born that way look there i'm sure have been men who are heterosexual who are like let's see what this fuss is all about and went over and did some gay shit why not i'm sure it happened it's nothing wrong with that but the reality of being gay if you've ever met anybody who's gay, is that most people who are gay always knew it from the time they were born. Now, why would your God create that? Why would your God create someone who was born in a way that makes them, just by nature of existing, you're allowed to stone them to death? You should stone them to death.

Well, you know, my youngest son is gay. And when he finally came out, I said, well, you know, I've been talking to your sister about this for 10 years. And he said, well, I knew I was gay that long too. He said, I just had to get the courage to come out. And just last January, he got married in Washington, D.C. And he was kind of a big deal at the Kennedy Center. And so it was a big society wedding. And it was an amazing social event with hundreds of people there and, you know, people from the State Department and everywhere. Wow. And you could tell the tables that were the old established straight people who came just to be polite at first. But it turned into such a wonderful party.

You know, they had the wedding and then a dinner and then the reception all in the same place. And everybody stayed until the thing closed down they were having mainly the old people are watching the young people dance because uh well my my uh my son's husband is a principal dancer at the susan farrell ballet wait a minute a gay ballet dancer this story just doesn't make any sense you don't think there'd be well there's one or two isn't it funny that there's certain, like, if you hear guys in interior decorator, bam. Right. I mean, how many straight dudes?

I'm sure there are some, and they get mad at me saying this right now, but I don't know why it is, but there's something about there's certain professions. And, you know, what you really, you know, they don't look gay or act gay, but boy, is he a hell of a dancer when you're. He's a good dancer. Well, you know, that's always been the rumor about John Travolta. He's probably not even gay. It's probably people are still upset about Saturday Night Fever. He was too good. He was too good.

He changed the way people decided to mate. They're mating dancers. If you want to go to a fun wedding, just go to a same-sex marriage because it's new for them. They're really celebrating something for the first time. It's a very joyous occasion. Right. They don't feel pressured into it. Like, you guys have been together for five years and he hasn't gotten you a ring. This is bullshit.

You need to let him know that this is unacceptable. Yeah, gay guys don't have a girlfriend like that. They're doing it out of love. And they're a wonderful couple. Where is it legal now? How many states is gay marriage legal? I think about 15 or something like that in D.C. It's happening, right?

Slowly but surely. Yeah, see, he had just moved to Florida, taken a new job, and they'd already had all these plans. But he couldn't get married in Florida, so they left everything in D.C. had all these plans, but he couldn't get married in Florida, so they left everything in D.C. Fifteen states were legal same-sex marriage, and then there's also more states where 34 that ban same-sex marriage. There's more that ban it. But recently there's been a federal decision. The tax department is going to recognize it no matter what state they live in.

This is fascinating, though. There's states where it's banned It's like they have banned same-sex marriages 34 of them. That's amazing. We had to go out of the way there. Didn't they but it's so stupid. It's so stupid It's hard to believe it's so stupid that people in this day and age decide what two people can't do because of their sex Yeah, like it if marriage is legal, okay, and I'm not sure it should be, but if marriage is legal,

why shouldn't it be legal for gay people? It's just so sensible. It's so dumb. And it's such a weird thing to get behind. It's like, what's your end game here? I don't understand how you're getting behind. Anybody would be getting behind this. Outside of some crazy religious belief,

you've lost me. What do you care? Yeah, what do you care? Yeah. And the idea that somehow or another it's going to eventually cost us money, or it's going to tax us,

there's some stupid arguments that you see the convoluted logic about why people being gay and getting married would make any difference or cost any more or less than them not getting married

or them, you know, or straight people getting... What studies are you talking about? What or them, you know, or straight people getting married. What studies are you talking about? What do you, you know, who's doing studies on this? And these homophobes that are just insane. And for what, right? They're saying, you know, that gay marriage or same-sex marriage now is going to cause everybody to go out and rape children. I mean, they're making this stuff up that's just unbelievable.

That's maybe like disinformation. Maybe like the gay marriage people who are pro-gay marriage are saying shit like that just to make it such a retarded argument. Well, it's working. It's a clever move. It is. It is. Yeah, it's one of those weird things where I can't believe it's still around. It's like, I remember when I was a kid, I've told this story, but in the interest of this

particular discussion, when I was like, I guess I was 11 story, but in the interest of this particular discussion, when I was like, I guess I was 11 years old and I'd moved from San Francisco to Florida. And there's a lot of things that I didn't know. San Francisco was incredibly open-minded. And I really remember being very aware of the difference immediately upon moving to Florida because I had a friend, a Cuban Cuban friends names candy and his dad can't candy escadito or something that is crazy last name I forget his last name but his dad was screaming and yelling slamming the newspaper on the table I can't believe this shit and I was like you know trying to figure out what was going on you know and I was like what's your dad man and

he goes like dad were you mad at he's like goes like, dad, what are you mad at? He's like, they're letting fags get married. You believe this shit? They're going to let those homos marry each other. He was mad. He was throwing the newspaper down. I was 11. And I was like, what a silly man you are. You're a grown man.

And this is something that bothers you and concerns you? I remember thinking of an 11-year-old boy. Like, wow, there's a lot of weak-ass bitches out there posing as men. Like, you dummy. Like, what do you care? You were a tough guy because you care the two guys want to kiss each other like what the fuck is wrong with you it's just so stupid it's such a dumb thing to get behind you know our our little granddaughters uh like last january they were like uh four and a half and uh just turned uh eight and i came back from the wedding and they were still saying now

two boys got married? Did they kiss? And I said, yeah, let me show the pictures of them. And so now they're really cool with it. And one of them the other day told her teacher about, yeah, Bapa's little boy is married to a boy. So it's going to be normal for these people. It should have been normal a long time ago. Yeah.

When I was a kid, I lived in San Francisco next to this gay couple, this black guy and his boyfriend, this white dude. And my aunt used to go down there and they would smoke pot and play bongos naked. They would all get together. I was like fucking seven. They would all go next door to the gay couple's house.

It was totally, completely normal. It was like, there's a black guy, there's an Asian guy, there's a gay guy. It's like another guy. It's like, it's no big deal. I didn't even know what the word nigger meant. When I moved to Florida, I asked my mother and she got mad at me because she thought I was playing games. And I said, I don't know what it means.

What does it mean? Because someone said it at school and she said, it's a derogatory term for black people. I was like, wow, really? And you were what, seven years old? I was 11. 11? That's when I first moved to Florida. Because I couldn't believe it.

I hadn't experienced hardly any racism in San Francisco. San Francisco in the 70s, it was just the age of utopia had expired, right? Which is like the 1960s, the late 1960s in san francisco but there was still an echo of like understanding and progressive thinking in san francisco like no other place right so it was a big difference to go from san francisco in the 70s to fucking gainesville florida all right which is just back-ass retarded. They were feeding alligators marshmallows in this fucking lake near my house.

I mean, it was ridiculous, the difference. I moved to California from Florida, and that's where all of my kids live, but it's not fit for human habitation. I would not go back to Florida. It's a crazy fucking state. And, you know, I lived in San Francisco in late 66 early 67 and I had just gotten married as my now ex-wife but she was a Texan born and raised in Houston and and she had a three-year-old son who's my son he's my

oldest son and you know I adopted him and was in the Navy but we're in San Francisco it's our first month living together and she grew up in the south and called black people niggers and I said you know we're in San Francisco. It's our first month living together. And she grew up in the South and called black people niggers. And I said, you know, we're going to have more kids. We just can't have that. And she said, well, that's just what we do. And I said, well, let's make a deal and not do that. And she said, well, you're smoking. I don't want them smoking. And that's the day I quit smoking. And she never said nigger again. And I quit smoking cigarettes, but our kids are pretty well balanced. Wow, that's a great story.

You know, sometimes it just takes one thing to get you to quit something as stupid as smoking. Just one realization. I had to have a really important reason, and I didn't want my kids growing up like that. That's beautiful. Well, you shouldn't want them growing up around someone who smokes cigarettes too, right? Well, that's true. It's just a weird thing that they did where they got that through. I mean, if you want to really look at problems that we have right now in our culture, there's a big one. And there's a big one that all these people who run for office, who get into

office, they're all concerned with the loss of lives. They're all concerned with health and safety. They're all concerned with environmental pollution. They're concerned with economic growth. They're concerned with all these different things to benefit human beings. But yet they never mention cigarettes. I mean, you want to talk about one of the biggest and most obvious pieces of evidence for a conspiracy. A conspiracy where half a fucking billion people die every

year. I mean, how many fucking people die every year from cigarettes? It's like 400,000 in America. Right, just in this country. I don't know what it is worldwide, but it's got to be something crazy. Jamie, find out what the number is. Nobody's ever died from cannabis. An OD of cannabis. Just imagine that there was an issue

where 400,000 people died in your country a year. 400,000 and yet no one brings it up ever. That's insanity. That's so hard to believe. You're not talking about 400,000 lifetime, which is an insane body count.

That's an insane body count. More than all the wars. Except civil. Think about whenever they found out that cigarettes were bad for you. It was the 1950s or 60s or whatever it was where they first started going, hey, I think there's a connection between these people dying of fucking cancer and smoking on these burning chemical-soaked rags. You know, I think there might be a connection there. Think about how many people have died since then.

Millions. Many, many millions. Each year, an estimated 443,000 people. And now they're pushing them on the Asian kids. They're really pushing cigarettes over there because it's not growing here. Put that back up so I can read all that. Here it says, each year, an estimated 443,000 die prematurely from smoking or exposure to secondhand smoke, which is even darker. Another 8.6 million live with a serious illness caused by smoking.

Wow. Approximately 46.6 million U.S. adults smoke cigarettes. Wow, that's scary. Both my father and my brother died from smoking cigarettes. That's an insane number. I didn't know it was that high. Wow. That's like four million a decade.

It's also like knowing that you've been, like your society has been infiltrated by like aliens that are designed to kill people. If it was aliens that were killing people and not cigarettes, we would be terrified. We would feel like we're under attack. There'd be a war on cigarettes. Yeah. These aliens are killing 400,000 people every year. What do we do? They're making 800 million people

sick as well. Like, fuck. What do we do? And, you know, people that say, well, I'm going to smoke until I'm 45 or 50 or whatever. My father and my brother both smoked until they were about 50. And they each only lived about 10 years after they quit smoking. They both died at 63.

So, you know, it's all smoking that did it. You know, it's horrible. It's amazing how many people go for that. It's amazing. Well, it's so hard to quit. You know, you have to have some kind of really big motivation because nicotine is more addicting than heroin. Well, I've heard that before.

It sounds like it makes sense. Well, you know, the heroin addiction isn't what everybody thinks. It's not 100%. It's closer to only about 30% really get physically addicted. Really? Yeah. Nicotine's about 75% and heroin's about 30%, something like that. We need to find out who those lucky bitches are that are like 25% non-addicted to cigarettes

and 30% non-addicted to heroin. Figure out who those guys are. Yeah, check their genes. Yeah, what an awesome fucking trait to have. Not get addicted. You know, it's, it's really sad. It's just, it's really sad because it's, it's just evidence that as long as money is around, you're not looking at people's health and welfare. And, and most of us are addicted to caffeine, like it or not that, you know, when you do a diet for ayahuasca, you have to go off caffeine for at least a week ahead of time. Do you?

Well, in our tradition that I'm involved in or was involved in, that caffeine was one of the things you gave up for at least a week ahead of time. And I had to start weaning myself a month ahead of time just cutting it down less and less because when I go cold turkey on caffeine within three days i'm up standing up all night with cramps in my legs not just the headaches really caffeine it takes you go cold turkey on caffeine for even if you only drink two or three cups a day well i used to um when i would stay up late writing i would drink a shitload of coffee and all i was concerned with was getting the writing right and then um i realized one day I woke up and the next morning I had a fucking pounding headache. And I was like, oh, my head hurts. And I realized I just hadn't had a cup of coffee yet.

And I went, no way. Like I allowed myself to get this hooked on this shit. So I quit. Good. And then I took like several months off. Then I started drinking coffee conservatively since then. But I went without it for quite a while because I was just like, I don't like that. Like I had a coffee conservatively since then. But I went without it for quite a while because I was just like, I don't like that. I had a headache from not having something that

didn't make any sense. That's stupid. Well, after I've been off it, we do a week before and a week after. And after I've been off it for two weeks, a half a cup of coffee will have me buzzing all day. I mean, it's a real drug. It's a great drug if you only use it once in a while. It's legit. You know, another thing about coffee is it's everywhere. Oh. I mean, you want to talk about a drug that you can just tap into every five steps. Well, it's the only drug that labor contracts require. You have to have a coffee break.

Yeah. That's interesting, isn't it? Yeah. When, you know, back in the old days, they used to smoke cigarettes in the office. Oh. The old days. Let's see. Well, I guess, yeah, it was a while ago.

But about 18 years ago is when they finally got rid of it where I was working at Verizon. Wow. Verizon, 18 years ago. It wasn't Verizon. It was GTE then. Wow. Yeah, and, you know, cubicle hell. And there was one corner.

They put all the people in the one corner that were smokers, you know. And, of course, it filled the whole room anyhow. But you could see this little cloud over this one area. What year was it where they did it with airplanes? Because I remember the airplane thing. I remember it, but I remember a lot of airplane rides smoking, though. It's so weird. The airplane thing was so weird because I had to sit in smoking a couple times with

the only seats that were available. What was the difference between smoking and not smoking? It didn't matter, but, you know but when you're trying to get a seat and that's all they have, sorry, all you have is smoking. No, but I mean the smoke was the same no matter where you were in the plane. That's what I felt like. And how much filtration are they even doing?

I mean, how much can they do? Where are they getting air from? I know there's been some lawsuits by flight attendants who got cancer from secondhand smoke. Oh, I would imagine. Look at the flight attendants are smoking in this picture. What happened to our world where people just smoked up

a fucking storm like this? Well, so there's some improvement. Yeah, but what a weird, weird, weird habit. A habit that kills half a fucking million people every year in just this country. Worldwide. What is the worldwide?

Do we find out what the worldwide cigarette deaths are? Let me find out right here because I need to know this. This doesn't even make sense. No, and I don't think we're still subsidizing tobacco farmers, but we may be. We have been up until very recently, I know. It's hilarious, isn't it? Well, we subsidize oil companies.

I didn't know about that until Anna Kasparian told me about it. I heard her talking about that, and I'll tell you what. The oil depletion allowance is part of the reason Kennedy was murdered. The oil depletion allowance in Texas is huge. Tobacco use kills 5.4 million a year. Oh, my God. What does that one say, 8 million? No, 5.

5 million deaths? That would be 8 by 2030. The one I'm looking at is World Health Organization. I'm on the CDC. I don't know which one's more legit. Which one's more legit? Either one. Five million.

Bro, five million. So five million deaths per year. That is so many goddamn people. How can you work for that company? How do you be that company? Right. You know, but you know what? Here's the other problem.

I'm pro you doing whatever you want to do. I don't have a problem. Well, as long as it doesn't harm somebody else. Well, you know, when my dad died, that harmed my mother. Yes. So smoking is harming people no matter what you're doing. And that secondhand smoke, a lot of people get cancer because they live with a smoker. Well, there are some studies that say it's even worse than smoking itself.

Oh, that's ridiculous. And, you know, I grew up in a house with secondhand smoke. My dad was a smoker. My mom was a smoker when I was really young. She gave it up, I think, by the time I was like seven. We had a basement workbench, and back then all the beer was in tall bottles. And my dad would be down there working in the basement, and my little brother, who was four and a half years younger than me,

he had a habit of going around draining the bottles that my dad had. Well, he left a little bit of beer in the bottom one and my little brother, who was four and a half years younger than me, he had a habit of going around draining the bottles my dad had. Well, when he left a little bit of beer in the bottom one for his cigarette thing, and he dropped about three or four butts in it, my brother, I can still see him spewing his puke as he ran up the stairs. Oh, God. Can you imagine what that must have tasted like? I don't think he drank beer as a teenager. He had a bad taste in his mouth.

That's hilarious. That doesn't even seem real, does it? I mean, that seems like something if you had to explain to someone who didn't understand human beings, you know, the expression that's always used, if an alien came here and was viewing our culture and they saw this aspect of it, they'd be like, what the fuck are you people doing? I started smoking freshman year in high school. You know, it's the thing everybody had to do.

My sister did as well. I tried it. I was a year older than her. I tried a cigarette. I was like, what the fuck is this? This is stupid. Oh, I hated it. It took me a long time to like it, but I wanted to be in the crowd, you know?

I wanted peer pressure. Well, I know a lot of people. Brian Redband, who is on the show, he's quit a couple of times. He just can't do it. He quits and he gets right back to it. He got sick recently. He took off like nine days and got right back to it. He just gets pulled right back into it. Even those e-cigarettes, he doesn't even use those. I don't understand how people can see all these numbers and not think it applies to them. That's an addiction. I know, but it's a weird one. Why would you kill yourself? That's the weirdest one ever. Because it's so slow.

God, but it's got to be pretty fast, though. It's almost inevitable. You say slow, but those people, they feel like shit when they walk upstairs and stuff. That's not slow man Because that's like diminishing your life right now what it means to me if you can't go up the stairs fast If you're a normal person and you you're not old you're not You're not injured and you can't walk up a flight of stairs without being out of breath right your life is on like real like Low wattage you got something wrong Yeah, and you're not you know if you don't that's all the energy you have you're missing energy like

something is robbed you of energy I don't know if you realize it because this new life that you have this is just your reality it's like having water in your ears and then you clean the water out and you're like oh now I can hear like or when you pop your ears and you're coming home from an airplane ride and you're you know you feel stopped up and you pinch your nose and then blow on it so the air can't get out and your ears pop. And you go, oh, this is what it sounds like. Well, you know, my aunt and uncle, she lived into her 90s. But my poor uncle died a lot younger.

And they were both smokers. He finally quit because he had emphysema. And he'd be sitting there with the oxygen and she'd be smoking right next to him. Outlived him by 20 years. Of course she did. She poisoned him. It's just what a weird thing. Yeah.

People poison each other. Husbands poison wives. There's a great Bob Newhart stand-up. It's one of his old things where he'd sit on a stage and play. What is that, Jamie? Is that black lungs from cigarettes? Black lungs, yeah. Black lungs are smokers, and the other ones are.

Why is it hooked up to a machine that's making them inflate? That's all that does inflate. Oh, so it's showing you what an actual black cigarette smoker's lung is like. Wow. And this is a regular lung. A healthy lung. Oh, my God. What a difference.

What a difference. That's insane. Now, you need to put your wallpaper on your computer if you're a smoker. Just the color, though. Yeah. It's so horrifying. So you know they're not working very well. Oh, my God, they're not working well.

Yeah, I know smart people that love cigarettes. It's so weird. You know this old Bob Newhart routine. He'd sit on a chair and put a shoe to his ear, and he was Sir Walter Raleigh. He was a guy in England, and Sir Walter Raleigh was calling him, telling him about the stuff he sent him back. And he says, it's called tobacco, and it's a leaf, and you light it on fire, and

what do you do with it? It's really a classic non-smoking bit. That's funny, and that was probably from 1960 or something? Oh, probably the 50s. I don't know when he started. It was one of his early things. Is this it? There it is. There it is, yeah. Harry, pick up your extension, will you? It's Nutty Walt again. I don't know when he started. It was one of his early things. Is this it? There it is. There it is, yeah.

Harry, pick up your extension, will you? It's Nutty Walt again. Hi, Walt, baby. Good hearing your voice. Things are fine here, Walt. The boatload of turkeys you sent us over here last November, they're still here, Walt. Yeah, they're walking all over London.

See, that isn't a holiday over here, Walt. Just in America. You got another winner for us, Walt, have you? Tobacco. What's tobacco, Walt? A leaf. You've got 80 tons of it. You bought 80 tons of leaves, Walt? Oh, you're beautiful, Walt. Walt, I don't know if you noticed last time, we have plenty of leaves over here in England. See, come fall, we're up to... It's a special kind of leaf.

Some kind of food, is it, Walt? Not exactly. What do you do with the leaves, Walt? Lots of different things. Are you saying snuff, Walt? And what's snuff? You take a pinch of tobacco and you stick it up your nose and it makes you sneeze. I imagine it would, Walt, yeah. Goes over very big there, does it? Goldenrod seems to do it over here, Walt.

Tobacco has other uses. You can chew it or stuff it in a pipe. Or you can shred the leaves, put it in a little piece of paper, roll it up. You don't have to tell me, Walt. You stick it in your ear, right? Between your lips. Okay, Walt. And then what are you doing?

Is that fire to it, Walt. And then what are you doing? You're so fast, Walt. Eric, you want to get on the intercom? I don't want the boys to miss this. Oh, this is so funny. You spilled your coffee. What's coffee, Walt? It's a drink you make out of beans.

You roast them, and then you pour them in a cup. You drink it in the morning while you smoke your cigarette. I'm still here, Walt. Look, Walt, I'll tell you what to do. Put some of those on the boat. If you can hook them with a burning leaf, I'm sure they'll go for the beans. I'll talk to you, Walt. Put them on the boat. Don't call me anymore. oh that's great what year is that from

i i saw it actually on the ed sullivan show we used to watch that every sunday night uh jackie cleese on the Saturday, Ed Sullivan on Sunday. Wow. That's fascinating. The way he broke it down was really interesting. Without even bringing up the deaths, it's still hilarious. Yeah, it's like, why would you do that? He didn't state any of the health concerns at all. Well, this was before they were really known, too. Isn't that funny? You know, early 60s, late 50s, something like that. Did you ever see the Leonardo DiCaprio movie about J. Edgar Hoover?

Ah. No, I haven't seen that. When J. Edgar Hoover was young, he was kind of sickly, and so his doctor prescribed cigarettes. Maybe that's what made him so weird. His doctor wanted him to smoke cigarettes when he was a young man like his mother in the movie is like saying to him you know listen to the doctor and smoke those cigarettes wow yeah it's we're weird that you know that was a peer pressure cultural thing you started it when you're really young because other guys were doing or the movies you know the movies really push

cigarettes you can't see any of those old black and white movies without them smoking all the time. That's true, right? And TV shows, everybody always smokes cigarettes. It's like a part of being cool. The newscasters used to smoke. That's so weird. The newscasters. That's one of the weirdest rungs of show business is the newscaster.

To me, when I look at newscasting, I feel like it's like I'm watching a silent movie. To me, when I look at newscasting, I feel like it's like I'm watching a silent movie. You know, this is like some antiquated form of entertainment that we don't need anymore. If you watch an old animated or an old black and white film where it has subtitles, like Nosferatu, it's kind of fascinating because it's a time capsule. You're looking into this time where this was the relevant form of medium. This is how they got their film out. It had to be like this. There was no sound.

So they would play some music, and then there would be a script, and the script would be read, and it would break in between scenes, and the screen would go black. It would be live piano playing. Yeah, yeah. But if someone tried to do that today,

you'd be like, what the fuck are you doing? This is so stupid. Why don't you just make a movie? Why are you doing this? Let them talk. Why is it only written? That's so dumb. And that's sort of what it's like when you watch a newscast.

It's like, why are you doing it like this? They read the news. You read the news, but you barely cover anything. You cover these little tiny three-minute chunks on super complex issues. Why are you doing it like this? They read the news. You read the news, but you barely cover anything. You cover these little tiny three-minute chunks on super complex issues. And a minute of that is telling you what they're going to do next. Oh, yeah. And then there's just also a lot of nonsense and things that they know that people want to listen to and tune in, whether it's like Alex Baldwin grabbed a paparazzi by the neck or something like that.

It's infotainment now, not news. It's weird. It's weird. It's weird that they're still doing it. It seems like something that they should have stopped doing a long time ago or come up with a new way to do it where I don't feel like you're bullshitting me. I don't know anybody who talks like that. There's only one news show I watch, and that's Jon Stewart, The Daily Show. Yes, that's a great news show.

I mean, I like him because he calls out both people. He's very consistent on his... He's pretty equal opportunity. Yeah, I mean, if the Obama administration does something silly, if the Bush administration did something silly, he's really, he'll go after, he definitely leans left. Oh, sure.

But he'll go after Obama just as quickly as anybody else. Yeah, but you can't rely on that for news. It's more entertainment than the news. Well, it's the closest I get to watching a news show. For me, it's the internet by far, the internet in a big leap. But then it becomes a matter of, like, have you ever seen people getting into discussion on the internet

and someone will put up an article from, like, the Daily Mail and then they'll go, and the other person arguing with them will be like, the Daily Mail, really? You believe a fucking link from the Daily Mail and then it becomes all right well what what what where can i get my goddamn information from like and it becomes an issue of what's the source and you know who's uh who's where's the money behind uh this this organization because these organizations are going to be eventually just like cbs or nbc or fox news it's going to be there's going to be influences behind them it's not they're not going to be like just like CBS or NBC or Fox News. There's going to be influences behind them.

They're not going to be like, this is the raw data that we're collecting from all around the world. Here it is. But also some commercials. But during the peak of the Occupy movement, I spent hundreds of hours watching Ustream TV because you were watching the raw thing taking place. Yeah, you were really interesting Your podcast was really interesting during that time. You did a lot of social commentary We might not ordinarily do that and you were talking about how important the Occupy movement was I I feel like that's the the discussion about the Occupy movement is dwindled Dramatically it has but I'll tell you the way I look at the Occupy movement,

what we've seen, if they had announced in the beginning saying, okay, we're going to do phase one. And what we're going to do is raise awareness around the world that there's a big income distribution problem that we have, 1% and 99%. And we're going to show that this is true everywhere in the world and that we're living in a police state because the police are going to shut us down. That's our only objective. That's phase one. If that was put out that way, I think they'd say, oh, it was a big success. Now, just the other day, there was a thing in the news that the occupied New York people had $400,000 left in their account, donations. And they took that $400,000 and they bought $15 million worth of credit card debt that people had run up on medical bills and forgave it all. And now they're using that knowledge that they've learned to do videos and stuff to teach people how they can do that for themselves to buy their credit card debt for pennies on the dollar instead of what they're going after them for. And, you know, I've got friends in Australia and the U.K. and a couple places here in the States, friends, I say Internet friends.

I've never met them in person, that are still very interested or involved, I should say, in Occupy-type activities. But what we know now is that we're not alone, that they're all around the world. There's people that are thinking like this. So it's more of a consciousness awakening than a movement. But I think it's still simmering under the surface. And, you know, it got a lot of bad press, obviously, but like I was starting to say, I spent hundreds of hours watching and interacting in chat rooms with these people and all. So I felt like, you know, I knew a little bit better what was going on than what was coming out in the press and stuff like that, because that was all slanted and uh these people are really uh on top of things and we do now know one percent ninety-nine percent

so nothing else it was pretty successful as a movement that way well yeah pretty successful as a as a like a talking point and it became the talking point because it used to be talked about like the top percent right several percent five percent, 5%, whatever it is. But then when it became the 1%ers, the 99%ers, then it became a really thing. Yeah. Where everybody was like, oh, okay. Yeah, that was David Graber, I think, is the one that got credit for coming out with that. Yeah, that becomes a viral idea and people start discussing it.

Do you know that 99% of the people in this country don't own, 1% owns 50% of the wealth or whatever the fuck it is? And you're like, what? Well, it's actually 300 people own 45% of the wealth. That's amazing. Those guys are ballers. They win. I think that what's interesting about all this, I have a very optimistic view of the human race. I think ultimately people want to live a life that's harmonious and happy. I think if that's true with you life that's harmonious and happy. I think if that's true with you and that's true with me and that's true with pretty much everybody that I know, it's got to be true with all people. So it's a matter of spreading that idea through the population as quickly as possible to as many people as possible. And let them understand that the way that we've been living our lives for decades and generation after generation is just the momentum of an ignorant past.

It doesn't have to be that way anymore. And it doesn't mean that you can't have government and it doesn't mean you can't have corporations and it doesn't mean that you can't have people who have more wealth than other people. It just means everything should be done fairly. And if you guys are putting laws into place that allow you to fuck people over, allow you to move your factories to Mexico and have people work for pennies in the dollar, allow... There's a lot of shit that you're being allowed to do as far as

polluting the environment that shouldn't be kosher. And there should be a way to resolve that. And the way to resolve that is not you spend money to change the law to make it legal for you to do something that's horrible. What should be is figure out what the fuck you can do

to make sure that you don't pollute the environment, structure your laws so that you don't rip people off, figure out a way to make it so that you're not in control of a giant chunk of this river that your factories buy, the pollution that leaks into it. Figure out how to make it so that you're not poisoning the wells of people in town because you're fracking

and you're pulling natural gas out of the ground and destroy these people's wells. Figure out how to do it without doing that. And if you can't do it, don't do it. Just don't do anything where you put money in front of humanity. It seems to me like we can still have competition. It seems to me we can still have capitalism.

It just needs to be a moral capitalism, an ethical capitalism, where humanity and people and just caring about people and realizing we're not going to be here forever. It's a fairly short ride. Just be fucking nice to people. And all the money that you make being an asshole and putting people out of work, you're not going to appreciate that money. Most likely, if you're in a position to put a bunch of people out of work and make a fuckload of money and fuck someone over, you probably already have a lot of money. You're already in a sweet spot. You're in some weird position of

influence. Enjoy what you got, you fucking stranger. You weird person trying to pollute the river. You weird asshole who doesn't care about polluting someone's wells. You should be devastated if that happens you should stop operations but no because they know they can pull billions of dollars worth of natural resources out of the ground by still continuing these practices they're like they don't even consider not doing it they just do it they just keep doing it and they find ways to do it where it harms less or it just has less of an environmental impact allegedly you know i mean i don't even know what the numbers are but the the raw data shows that they fucked up a lot of areas doing this stuff.

But no one's talking about stopping doing it. They're just going for it. See, you've hit the nail on the head, is that it's not about regulating things from the top down and trying to get people to change their ways. It's getting people to change themselves. And one of the good examples of a corporation is Dr. Bonner's, the soap company. Dr. Bonner.

That's the hemp soap. Yes. They might be hippies. What do you think? Well, he has, when the guy was, I think he was like 25 years old when his dad died and he had to take over the company and didn't really want to. But he, one of the first things he did, it says, nobody in the company can make more than five times the lowest paid person in the company.

Wow. And he's got a really, you know, very conscientious, conscious company. And I've read, you know, there's a lot of others like that. And it's got to be from the bottom up where they just start doing it and they're successful. He's competing in the soap business. And, in fact, if you go to Burning Man, it's the only soap that will get all that dust off your hands. If you go to Burning Man, you got other problems. Somebody on Twitter told me I should. If you go to Burning Man, you got other problems. Somebody on Twitter told me I should

get you to go to Burning Man. Yeah, people keep asking me to go to Burning Man. Look, I meet plenty of dirty hippies in my everyday life. There's too many of them there. Well, you know, I don't like camping. I don't enjoy the desert. I can't stand the heat, and I couldn't wait to get back. But I stopped going. I haven't gone since 2007 now. Good move.

It's become commercialized oh yeah and it's it's so expensive and and and then you're offline for like two months afterwards trying to recover but it it was the times i went were some of the most spectacular time i'm obviously talking shit because i've never been i don't want all the people that actually go and enjoy it don't think i'm being serious go have a good time and I know that most of you are probably cool as fuck. The problem is there's that small percentage that's going to be so annoying that I can't go. There's just a small percentage. That's one of the things that was kind of unique about Burning Man, I thought, is that, in fact, it was the first year we went.

A camp across from us was starting in the afternoon, you know, some loud music and all. And we had a bunch of people just sitting around talking. from us was starting the afternoon, you know, some loud music and all. And we had a bunch of people just sitting around talking. And so one of the ladies in our camp took a tray full of cold beers and popsicles over to them and said, can we bribe you to turn the music off for a couple hours? And, oh, sure. And they turned it off. And, you know, it's a functioning anarchy is what it is. Right. Well, that's very nice. That's a great. And you're right. It's gotten, I wouldn't say commercial, but it's gotten really big. But one of the people who I know was at this year's camp, and she's been there, I think, 19 years in a row, and said this was the best year

she'd ever been. Now, when I started going, it was like 25,000 people, and it was much more manageable than 60-some now. Well, for the most part, I mean, this is pretty much almost anywhere I go, when I run into people that want to talk about things, it's a cool conversation, for the most part, 99% of the time. But there's always that 1%, maybe 1 out of 100. It might be even less than that, where someone just gives you a brutal ear beating on the power of crystals. And you're like, oh, Jesus, will you stop?

Or someone who they know who's a healer, you're like, oh, Christ. Someone who they know that channels. This guy fucking talking to me about a channeler the other day. I was like, please stop. Well, they used to call them schizophrenics. Whatever it is. It's like, you know, come on, man. If you're not channeling, shut the fuck up.

If you are channeling, let me see it. Because if you're not channeling, if you've never channeled, how do you know what's going on there? You don't know what's going on there. There could be a lot of factors. That guy might be losing his marbles right there. You might be watching an act. You might be watching a crazy person who needs a lot of attention.

I guess I miss those people at Burning Man. I was into the drugs and booze part. Well, this wasn't even at Burning Man. This was just a conversation with someone. One of the weird things about the podcast is so many people have to talk to me about something. They have this idea that they have to tell me. And, you know, many times it's very interesting. But many times it's not.

And many times it's like just brutal nonsense. You're like, okay. I have this friend of mine who believes in psychics. And he's going on and on about the psychic who told him everything about his life. And I go, everything about your life? And he goes, yeah. I go, did he tell you any shit you don't know? He goes't know he goes no and I go well don't you think that's weird he goes dude he knew about my grandmother I go don't you know about your grandmother why do you want someone to tell you

shit you already know did you ever think that maybe you've been manipulated and maybe he structured questions in a way that got you to reveal certain information or think that you were were not answering it for him but he was leading you in a certain that got you to reveal certain information or think that you were not answering it for him, but he was leading you in a certain direction? Did you ever think that that might be possible? And he paused and was like, no, because I never even thought about it. I go, well, you should probably think about that. Yeah, a lot of people get sucked into these things without giving it thought.

And then some of them, in the psychedelic realm, it's even goofier. People come up to you. But one time at a conference, a friend of mine had just given his presentation, and I went up to say something to him. And he was surrounded by a bunch of people. And there was this one girl who was obviously just really whacked out on something. She had spiked purple hair, and she had piercings everywhere, and she couldn't stand still, and she's bouncing around. And she says, well, how come people don't approve of psychedelics? And he says, well, they're afraid they're going to turn out like you.

Whoa. That is an issue. Yeah. It's an issue with potheads too. Oh yeah. A lot of lazy, sloppy potheads that just, you know, they're, they're so loathsome to be around that they make you connect that behavior to marijuana. Like when I was a kid, I thought that marijuana made you lazy and I had all these negative things attached to it, until I met my friend Eddie Bravo, who was a smart guy, he was very articulate, and he liked to smoke pot and talk about all these crazy things, and liked to make his music when he was high. I was like, you make music?

I thought it was just something to turn you into a moron. He was like, I didn't want to get like that. And he was like, no, no, no, no. It enhances your creativity. And once I immediately started smoking pot, or once I started smoking pot, I immediately started resenting all the dopey stereotypical potheads. I was like, God damn it. You guys ruined something that's amazing. Shape up here.

Yeah. You ruined the image of something that's amazing by being a knucklehead. You ruin the image of something that's amazing by being a knucklehead. You know, I had the experience when I was working back in the phone company, and one of the guys I worked for was a vice president. He was pretty far up there, and we worked really closely together for almost a year. And I won't go into the whole story, but after about a year, we're out to dinner one night, and he was making a confession for a reason, and he said, Well, I smoke pot. And I said, well, I smoke pot.

And I said, really? Let's go to my house right now. Now, we'd worked together for a year in a really high-powered environment. And I found out later that he's going out to the car two or three times during the day to have a few tokes. So you can function pretty highly if you know what you're doing. Oh, you can definitely function pretty highly, especially if you get used to it. The way I describe it is it's like surfing. You watch a guy who's a really good surfer or a girl who's a really good surfer, man, they can ride some crazy

waves. But if you put me on a surfboard, I'm falling flat on my fucking stupid face. I can't surf at all. I've never done it. So if I tried it, I'm sure I would suck at it. I tried it once and I sucked at it. Marijuana smoking is like riding a psychedelic wave. And there's a wave of the psychoactive substance, THC, that hits your body. And you can either ride that wave or you can trip out on the fact that you're on this wave and freak out and start getting paranoid or going down dark places in your mind or, you know, just spiral. That's possible, too. But once you get good at it, you don't, that doesn't happen very often. It's like you understand the state.

You've probably been smoking pot longer than I have. That's impossible. I had my first toke in 1985. No, I started smoking pot in 2001. Oh, okay. Well, you're another late bloomer. I thought it was, yeah, I thought it was stupid until. Oh, okay. Wow. Yeah. You're another late bloomer. I thought it was, yeah. I thought it was stupid until I was like 30 or something like that.

I thought it was so dumb. I was like, this is the stupidest thing ever. These people are wasting their lives smoking pot. I didn't know how at first. Yeah, I'd been a smoker. And, you know, I got this pot and I wasn't inhaling properly. Really? And I smoked, I was on my third joint.

And it was like over a period of three or four weeks and finally I got really, all of a sudden I figured it out. Oh, you got to inhale it. And the woman that had given me the cigarettes, I called her at work. I was off and I called her at work. I said, it works. I got stone. And she says, don't shout.

That's funny. Keep it down. The walls have ears. But it took me a while to even learn how. Yeah, there's a lot of people that are worried about people finding out they smoke pot. Keep it down. The walls have ears. But it took me a while to even learn how. Yeah, there's a lot of people that are worried about people finding out they smoke pot. Oh, yeah. I think that's hilarious. But, you know, not out here anymore. Not as much, but still in a lot of ways. Like, I've had, you know, conversations with people.

They go, you know, hey, you ever face any repercussions because you talk about pot? And I'm like, realistically, anybody that would be upset with me because they found out that I smoked pot, I really don't want to talk to them anyway. Right. Like, if they don't like me, I probably wouldn't like them anyway. Like, that's such a stupid stance to take. Yeah. Like, just listen to what I have to say about it. And if it doesn't make sense to you, that's one thing.

But if you're upset at me because you found out that I smoked pot, okay, take care. You know, I worried about that at one time. But finally, you know, I've done the podcast podcast now and I'm pretty much out of the closet. But I still get a little resistance from people in the family that are unhappy with it. Well, I've had friends that have had some serious drug issues. And I've also had people that I've talked to that were like real straight edge. And one of the reasons why they were straight edge is like maybe they lost a family member to addiction. And I've had conversations with them about it before

where I totally understand that and I totally get that mindset. And I probably would have been in that mindset myself if it not for several people that I met in my life. Because I'd lost a friend to heroin and I lost a friend in high school to heroin, two people to heroin actually that I know. But in high school to heroin, two people to heroin, actually, that I know.

But more than that, I think I've lost at least one other ones to pills, to like opiate pills. So I guess that would be considered along the same lines. And I could get the idea where people would be upset at people that smoke pot or anything because they would connect it to losing their family members. But man, it's unfortunate that the word drug is such a broad term. Well, see, that's one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing because with proper drug education, those guys might still be alive. We don't educate.

We just say no instead of K-N-O-W. And so I think that if we can just get a couple more generations behind us where people are not so oppressed by them. One of my favorite stories I got from a kid listening to the podcast, when he was like, he just got out of high school. He's 18. His father caught him growing mushrooms in his closet and turned him in the police. And the kid wound up doing a hard time, a felon. Turned him in the police, and the kid wound up doing hard time, a felon.

And so he came back out of jail, and he just started going to church with him three or four times a week and became a fundamentalist Christian again and just went through the exercises. Then he found the salon and realized that, hey, he wasn't crazy. There's other people that do this too. He got himself a fast food job, saved up his money. He's out in the West Coast working as an artist right now. And so he got out of that oppressive atmosphere. That's fascinating. That's a great story. I've had gay kids tell me they've come out of the closet being gay, but they're afraid to tell their parents that they're psychedelic or they smoke pot. Wow. Think about that. That's fascinating. You could have a great

smoke pot or smoke pole joke there, but don't do it. It's not worth it. Don't go for it. Yeah, I did a podcast. Daniel Jabbour, a young man up in San Francisco that started the Psychedelic Society up there. He started it just two years ago and he's got 4,000 members already. They have meetings and stuff. 4,000 members? Yeah, 4,000. That's amazing.

He's a young guy. I think he's mid-20s and he said he went to college and never smoked pot until he got to college and got into pot and mushrooms. And now he started the Psychedelic Society of San Francisco and has 4,000 members. And he's a drug advocate, you know, activist. But anyhow, he did a talk that I podcast called Coming Out of the Psychedelic Closet. And I got a letter in the mail the other day from a kid that he sent a little drawing he did of the closet with his name on it. And he says, I just can't come out of it yet. Wow. But, you know, if I was still in the workaday world,

working in the belly of the beast, I, now in California or someplace with medical marijuana, I'd probably be honest about that, but I would never talk about psychedelics in the corporate world. I mean, that's a quick way to get fired. Yeah. It's fascinating that you can't talk about an experience even that you've had 10 years ago. Right. They'll label you as some crazy hippie that's trying to clean his act up. You know, you're what? You're trying to pretend that you're one of us?

Normal? You're just a fucking dirty hippie doing acid in your lunch break. Right. Yeah. Yeah, I missed the hippie thing. I was in the Navy then, so I'm doing mine at this stage of my life instead. You were in the Navy in the 60s? Yeah.

Wow. Yeah, 66 to 70. I was in Vietnam and off the coast with the Navy. And actually, my wife was a Navy nurse too. So we were both in the Navy then. That's amazing, man. What did you do back then? Was there any substances in your life? Alcohol. Alcohol. Lots and lots of alcohol. In fact, I can tell you where I was on the day you were born. Wow. You were born in 67? Yes.

I was in the officer's club at Subic Bay in the Philippines. We were on a break from the gun line. And the reason I remember it, because I was drinking my first flaming flagon celebrating my 25th birthday. Wow. We were born on the same day. That's amazing. And the reason that the flaming flagon was one of the traditions in our wardroom, and it was a brandy snifter, and you'd light the brandy on fire, and then you had to sip it down with the brandy on fire. Well, it was in the

afternoon. We didn't realize the brandy had been burning a while. And by the time, I didn't have any problem getting liquid down, but I burnt my lip on the damn glass. It was so hot. Oh, wow. But anyhow, on my 25th birthday was your born day. Wow. And you're all getting fucked up. Well, in celebration of the world. Hey, world, Joe Rogan has arrived.

The whole wardroom went out and celebrated. Wow. And burnt their lips. Only me. They weren't dumb enough to do that. But no, I didn't have anything until I was 42 years old. Was it around you at all? Did you see it anywhere?

You know, I went through college without even hearing the word marijuana. What? Where'd you go to school? The moon? I graduated in 64. I went to a small boys college in the Midwest called Notre Dame. You went to Notre Dame and you never heard about weed? Not in 60 to 64.

That's insane. How is that possible? It wasn't there. Oh, my God. That's amazing. It wasn't there. What was that like? Oh, well, it was very repressive.

I would imagine it would be very, very strange. There were no girls there. And we had to get up at least three days a week. You had to sign in outside the chapel between 7 and 7.30, fully dressed. Lights out were at 10.30, and lights out was pretty serious. You couldn't have an electric clock or an electric blanket because they cut off the electricity to your room. And I had a classmate kicked out of school for studying by candlelight. I mean, that's how repressive it was.

It was really a backward place. Studying by candlelight got you kicked out of school? Yeah, probably because he stole the candles from the grotto or something. No, it was for studying by candlelight, so I got kicked out of school. Wow, that's so dumb. Oh, it was a crazy place. That's so insanely dumb. We were the only class up until recently, I think, that never once saw a winning football team.

Four years of losses. Wow. And so I parlayed that by selling my four-year books on eBay, and I marketed it that way, and somebody bought them for 156 bucks. That's funny. That's interesting. What a weird time. But I was living in Dallas, and I was 42 years old when ecstasy hit the streets, MDMA. And I'd never taken any drugs. I didn't even smoke pot.

Came out of the Navy and everything. You were an attorney, right? Yeah. In Houston, I was an attorney. Then in Dallas, I started a computer company. I had a personal computer company that, well, in 1981, we outgrossed Microsoft. I had four-color picture in Forbes magazine, made the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Really?

Then IBM came in and crushed us like a bug. Wow. What was the name of your computer company? Ready for this is in Dallas, Texas, and I named it Dynasty. Oh, my goodness. Dynasty Computer Corporation. That's hilarious. We were the Amway of computers.

I had like 3,000 distributors around the country, and it was crazy. And we sold this machine. You want to hear this? I don't know. Sure, yeah. It was an 8K machine with 16K of RAM. Wow. And it was a 12-inch black and white monitor and a cassette tape deck is what we used for input and output.

And you'd have to load your boot program, and then you'd get a CRC error, so you you adjust the tone and rewind it and then load it again and and we sold hundreds of these for three thousand bucks each wow and and parents would say you know why do I need this you know you got recipe program and and pong and a couple games and I said I don't know why you need it but if your kids don't have this they're going to be left behind why when they're 30 years old. And later, I was talking at one of the Java conventions in San Francisco, and a guy came up to me and gave me his card. And he's CEO of a company, like 100 programmers and all. And he said, you don't remember me, do you? And I said, no. He says, my dad bought a computer from you, and you told him that it would help me. Wow. So I don't know if anybody else got help, but at least one customer turned out well.

What year was this? Let's see. We went out of business. I started in 79, and we made it till 84. Wow. And it was great. It was, you know, you heard of the dot-com bubble. Well, this was the PC bubble.

It was before IBM got in, and, you know, we'd run short on memory chips. And I'd call up my friend at Osborne. He'd ship me some. And then when I got some back, I'd ship him. And it was a closed network. It was a pretty good old boy thing. Fascinating. And it was a lot of fun. It was great fun. But we didn't know what we were doing. We were geeks. And I didn't know anything about cash flow or business. I'd been an electrical engineer and a lawyer, but I didn't know anything about business. And so we just sold ourselves out of business. And by the time we were done, the last six, eight, nine months, I was financing the thing by selling ecstasy. What? So how did the ecstasy come into play?

I was doing this computer thing and a close friend of mine, a lawyer in Biloxi, called me one day and he says, what do you know about ecstasy? And I said, what do you mean? He said, well, it's a drug. And I said, well, I don't do drugs. And he says, it's legal. Now this is in Texas. And at that time, you're getting 30 years to life for a single joint. And so there's no way I'd touch something like that. And I'd get just barred. For one joint. Yeah. And so he says, no, this is legal. And I had a friend, a friend of my wife's actually, and she was a model in town, ran with the fast crowd. And I met with her and she fixed me up.

And so I got involved. And then my friend wanted some. I sent him 50. And I started telling friends about it. And I became really evangelical about it. And pretty soon I'm buying hundreds and 500, 600. And I didn't realize that at the time, the guy I was buying from was actually the main man and the big guy that started. See, Ecstasy hit the street in Dallas. It'd been out here in the West Coast for several years with

the therapists and all. But Dallas and the Stark Club was the ground zero. And the Stark Club was just, the Stark Club was so big, Madonna moved to Dallas to be close to that club. What? Yes. There's a documentary going to be coming out soon called The Stark Project. And it was an insane place. It's really the genesis of house music before even Chicago. It was called Stark Club music. And there were bowls of ecstasy on the bar

where you'd go by, you know, give them 20 bucks and get a hit because it was all legal. And, you know, they had chill space. It was a crazy place that you would, it was like Burning Man in a building. In fact, Larry Hagman was a regular there and in this movie that's coming out,

he's quoted as saying, he lights up and he says, oh, it was the greatest party on earth. He says the only better party is Burning Man, but that's like putting a Stark Club in the middle of a desert. But some people would get all dressed up Burning Man type. And we're talking name brand people, you know, the talking heads and people like that, Madonna. Even W showed up. George W had been there.

And it was just wild and crazy. And they played this house music and they had a chill space and co-ed bathrooms. It was. had been there. And it was just wild and crazy. And they played this house music and they had a chill space and co-ed bathrooms. It was just a wild place. And that's really where ecstasy started spreading. Now, I was selling to all of my friends and a lot of co-workers and everybody. And we were really serious about it, that I would make people read whatever literature there was. There wasn't very much. There's a speech Sasha gave and a talk that Rick Doblin had given at the International Health Organization, but not much, but we were really serious. And I was sort of not in the club scene. I was getting people together in small groups and doing it, but

I sold a lot of X and I was getting deep discounts. And so I was using that money to cashflow my business. When you say Sasha, do you mean Sasha Shulgin? Yeah. A lot of folks don't know what you're talking about. Okay, I'm sorry. Your buddy Sasha. Sasha Shulgin is the guy that, he didn't invent MDMA, but he resurrected it. It was patented in the early 1900s.

And he re-synthesized it and wrote a paper about it that hit the underground. But most of what I call the ABC chemicals came from Sasha Shulgin, 2C-B, 2C-I, all those things. Did you ever see the Vice documentary where Hamilton Morris interviews Sasha Shulgin? I don't think I saw that one, no. By the way, I think that's the only time I've ever said that word in my life, Shulgin. Sasha Shulgin. I've never said his name.

He's one of those names that I've read his name a hundred times, but I've never said it. Yeah, a really interesting Vice documentary where Hamilton Morris went and met with him and had a long day with him. And he went over different compounds with him and talked about discoveries and, you know, what he found. Sasha was a regular at the Palenque seminars. And we'd sit down, and we, a whole bunch of us. I've had a few one-on-one conversations with him, but we always talked about things like the Navy. He was in the Navy in World War II, but the chemists would come on and they would start talking ABCXYZ.

What are his acronym books? He has these books. PCOL and T-COL. Phenethylamines, I have known and loved, and tryptaminesines I have known and loved and tryptamines I have known and loved are the two acronyms. And the first parts of the book are like a novel and they use fictional names. So it's about Anne and Sasha and their friends. And then the last half of the book is a recipe section. And there are literally probably well over a thousand chemicals there. And if you look in the index, the ones in bold are the ones that are psychoactive. chemicals there. And if you look in the index, the ones in bold are the ones that are psychoactive.

And so actually before 9-11 happened, I was a part of a study group where we were kind of working our way through it. And every two weeks we get this little powder in the mail and, you know, experiment with it and try it. And then, you know, 9-11 came and they started sending smallpox or whatever it was through the mail. Anthrax. Anthrax, yeah. And so, you know, this chemist was out of the country and he says, I'm not sending any more powder through the U.S. mail. So that ended that experiment. But a lot of the things you're hearing about now are things that are coming out of his books. He's really declining now, but he should have gotten a Nobel Prize.

Now, the way he would do this is he'd get an idea for a chemical. He'd say, well, what if I move this atom over to this part of the would do this is he'd get an idea for a chemical. He'd say, well, what if I move this atom over to this part of the ring? And then he'd synthesize that. And then he'd start out with what he would think to be a substandard dose, a real low dose. And he'd work his way up over the period of a month or so. And he did this with like a thousand chemicals. Did it all to himself. Until he finally found out what the active dose was. And then he had a group of people, which I've met several of them. There's only one or two of them still alive, actually.

But they were all in their 60s and 70s. And they're the ones that are talked about in the front part of the book. And then in the back part where he synthesizes it, there's all these comments of people that took them. And I've seen the original documents for these comments. For each paragraph, there's like 16 pages, single space typed. I mean, this was in-depth research that they did for a number of years over hundreds of compounds. Could you imagine being friends with that guy while this was all going on? Every day, what are you doing today? We're going to the center of the universe. You want to come?

Oh man, I did that yesterday. Don't you doing today? We're going to the center of the universe. You want to come? Oh, man. I did that yesterday. Don't you guys take a day off? And I'll tell you what. If you sat down and talked with him, he's declining mentally a little bit. He's blind now. But if you sat down and talked with him, you would think that he'd been your next-door neighbor growing up. He could talk to you about anything. And he is one of the happiest people I know.

I'm sure. He's probably never sobered up. No, but he's a serious scientist, a very serious scientist. Oh, he's a very serious. Well, there's nothing wrong with that as well. The idea of being a serious scientist and not experimenting with your consciousness, being mutually exclusive. You might be able to find a picture of Sasha in his lab. His lab was an old potting shed out behind his house.

It's still there. And they've now bottled up everything, and they want to get to the Smithsonian or something. But you look at it, and you say, God, this is a mad scientist place. All this stuff came out of just such a small little shed. Yeah, Hamilton Morris actually went in the shed. Oh, yeah, okay.

Yeah, that's it right there. Yeah, there it is. I mean, this is a leaky old pot the shed. Oh, yeah. They were reviewing. Yeah, that's it right there. Yeah, there it is. I mean, this is a leaky old potting shed. That's what your shed looks like if you've done drugs a million times. Just starts looking like that. I mean, that guy's done every drug there is a million times over.

But, you know, he doesn't like pot. Wow. I put out a podcast once where he and his wife were talking, and he's talking about this one experience that they had. And he says, oh, it was awesome. You know, we stopped time, and we actually stopped it. He says, I don't know why we started that clock again.

And she said, well, you chickened out. And he said, what were we on that time? She said, brownies. But normally, he doesn't like pot. I know probably about 25% of the psychedelic people just don't get along with pot. That's interesting. What's the number one concern? They don't the psychedelic people just don't get along with pot. That's interesting. What's the number one concern? They don't like it. They just don't like it.

I wonder if it's the self-examinatory aspects of it. Well, some of these chemicals get pretty self-examinatory. It's true. Acid, for sure. Mushrooms, for sure. There's a real abrasive quality to eating pot. It's an abrasive, self-examatory thing that a lot of people find very uncomfortable. And you've got to really practice with each dose until you get the right amount, too.

Yes, you do. And you really don't know. Like, you're getting a cookie from somebody. Even if you made them yourself, you have to test out each batch and go, well, this is a strong batch, or this is not a strong batch, or this one, you know. But we had a friend who at a going away party last night, we were in Palenque. We had this little party, and somebody made some brownies, and they said, don't eat more than a quarter of one.

And she got there late. Famous last words. And she ate two brownies. Oh, no. That was on a Saturday night, and the following Tuesday, she was still too stoned to go to work. Oh, my God. That's an excuse. She's a lazy bitch. She didn't want to go to work.

I got stoned one time that it lasted over 24 hours. Oh, God. We had this friend that was making this Delta 9. It was just pure. They'd take over a pound of hash, and it'd go down to one gram. Oh, my God. And it was in these little bottles, and you'd have to take it out with a pinhead, you know, and titrate it with.

You could smoke it, or you could titrate it into alcohol. Well, you know, it was all stuck in the bottom of the bottle, and it wasn't coming out. So I thought, well, I'll microwave it just a little bit. And I was doing five seconds, five seconds, nothing. So I went 11 seconds, and it shot out like a volcano. And I had it on seconds, five seconds, nothing. So I went 11 seconds and it shot out like a volcano. And I had it on a piece of paper, paper towel. I was living in Florida then. And the woman who's now my wife was in California. And anyhow, I took the towel and I didn't want to waste it. So I ate it. I swallowed it. You ate the whole towel? Well, it was just a

little part of the towel that had all the pot on it. And then I called her, and I told her what I did. And she said, oh, that towel has chlorine in it. She wasn't worried about the pot. And she's a nurse with a master's in health, you know, so I took her advice seriously. She said, oh, that chlorine and stuff, that towel, you shouldn't have eaten the towel. And, of course, by then I'm starting to get kind of panicky, so I took some Peptibase C, which kind of activated the whole thing. And I was stoned for a good 48 hours. 48 hours?

I was functional after 24. Wow. But I could tell I was still high. It's very uncomfortable. It's not fun. So this person, your friend, was high, she said, until Tuesday? Yeah. So what day did she start it on?

Saturday night, late. So Sunday, Monday, and then Tuesday she was still high? She went to work Tuesday, but she said she was not feeling too good. Oh, my goodness. No, you don't want to do that. That seems so crazy. Oh, it is. And that's really only when you eat.

Both of those were accidents, you know. Wow. That's only when you eat it, though. But, you know, it didn't kill us. Yeah, of course. No, it doesn't kill anybody. Unless you do something really stupid while you're in that state. It won't be the drug that kills you, though.

Well, it could be. It could be if you're really stupid. Well, I mean, you wouldn't overdose. You can't overdose sometimes. Right, you can't overdose, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, it's one of those things where should you be able to go to the hardware store and buy a saw? I say you should.

Sure. But if enough people cut their hands off with saws, will we have, like, protests to, you know, make it so that it's very difficult to get a saw? Do you have to get a license to get a saw? Or you should wear a sign saying, I'm stupid. I used a saw when I'm stoned. Well, the same argument really could be used about firearms, except the fact that people use them against other people. But the idea that if you have a firearm that it's dangerous, like, is it? Is it really dangerous if you know what you're doing?

It seems like you can control a lot of what's dangerous and not dangerous about a firearm. And then it becomes, well, bad people can have guns and bad things can happen. That is true. But does that mean that good people can't have them? Like that seems to be a weird sort of an argument. No, I was trained with guns. You know, I went hunting with my dad and in high school, the Marine Corps had a gun club that we joined. And we'd go out and shoot.30 caliber machine guns and Browning automatics and stuff like that. But we learned gun safety. We learned a lot about it.

Yeah. People are just, we have a very detached society. And I have a friend, no names will be named, who gets mad at Ugg boots because they're made out of sheepskin. He thinks that's fucked up that they take these sheeps and they skin them and they make boots out of them. Like, why the fuck would you wear that? Meanwhile, he eats meat. Yeah, wears a belt.

His fucking car has leather seats. Like, I mean, it's so bizarre. He's not even vegetarian. But this draw the line at these sheepskin boots. Like, this is fucked up. They're using the sheepskin. Like, okay. You're getting into hunting now.

And you talk about deer hunting. I mean, it's culling a herd. Somebody's just going to die in the forest anyhow. And why not you eat them rather than the wolf eat them or something? Yeah. You're going to. I mean, deer don't live forever. They die.

They don't last very long. They either freeze to death. That happens a lot. And the place where I went, Montana, they freeze a lot or they get killed by predators. But they never reach old age. It just doesn't happen. There's no old age for a deer.

And if you live in some place that deers are a problem, or deer are a problem, you want to shoot them even if you're against hunting because they can be a real problem. We don't think of them as rats. But a rat is just an animal. And a rat is just an animal and a rat is just an animal that has infiltrated entire cities and entire, you know, population areas where they know people are, they know there's a food source and they've infiltrated. The deer are the exact same way.

And the idea that, well, you know, it's our fault. We came to where the deer are. Actually, there's more deer today than there was in 1492 when Columbus didn't land here. There's more deer today than there was in 1492 when Columbus didn't land here. There's more deer today than have been ever, ever in the recorded history of this country. Right. And that's just because of land management and because also there's very few predators. And so the only way they get killed is by people killing them. And there's a lot of areas where there's just too much space. You can't kill them all.

Like, go through, like, rural Pennsylvania. My God. They're everywhere. Upstate New all. Go through rural Pennsylvania. My God. They're everywhere. Upstate New York. Insane how many deer there are. We lived out in Long Island for a while doing a house-sitting job, and they were all over the place out there. All over the place. They literally are like squirrels. Ashland, Oregon has a serious deer problem.

Well, people don't understand what would be the problem. The problem is, first of all, car accidents. A huge amount of people get in car accidents with deer. And deer can go through your windshield and kill you. The antlers, they've killed people before. Not just once. It's happened many times. And God forbid you live in an area that has fucking moose. Because that will kill you. That will land on you and crush your car. A lot of people die with just deer, though.

Yes, they do. Did you ever hear that funny 9-11 call with the guy that hit a deer, put it in his back seat, and then the deer bit him? He escaped. He was in a phone booth, and the dog had smelled the blood, and it kept him in the phone booth. Oh, it's hilarious. That's hilarious. It's a phone call, yeah. No, I never heard that one.

But I did hear the one where the cops took someone's pot and made pot brownies. I know what you mean. We're dying. And then they called the cops on themselves. They were saying they were dying, and he was like, could you please hurry up? Time's going really, really slow.

As someone who's been there before and has been way too high on a cookie going, shit, I fucked up, man. I know what it must have been like. There is proof it makes you stupid. It can. It definitely twists your reality. Yeah, that's a good call.

I don't think they knew what they were getting into. People who don't understand, it's actually kind of ironic. Because if you look at the idea behind it is, I mean, I just don't think they understand that when you keep something illegal, you restrict the information that gets out. When you restrict the information that gets out, a lot of misinformation gets out and a lot of confusion. And it actually is worse for people.

That's where this eating pot comes into place because they don't understand that when you eat pot, it gets processed by your liver and it produces something called 11-hydroxymetabolite, which is four to five times more psychoactive than THC. It's a completely different psychedelic experience. And so they eat it and they think someone poisoned them or they think that someone laced

it. Laced it is, I've heard laced a bunch of times. Like this is just, this is laced, man. Someone laced this because they're freaking out. Like, oh my God, we're going to die. They haven't been that stoned before. They've never been that stoned before. I think I'm having an overdose and so is my wife who says. I'm pot. You'd be the first ever, buddy. Well, you know, the other thing about

eating it is we all have such a different metabolism. You know, some people will start coming on in an hour and a half, two hours. For me, it takes almost three and a half hours to come on. So you have to be careful in that time and not lose your patience and say, well, I didn't have enough. And then you eat another part and then too much. And it doesn't, you know, it really, it depends on many, many, many factors. And that's another issue with the illegality of it is you're not getting the same sort of standardized doses you get if you ordered Tylenol or you ordered a vitamin C capsule or something like that.

You're getting this, you know, you're getting weirdness. And unless you know the guy who makes the product that you use, you're just guessing. It's not worth it. It stays over. Don't shit your pants. Well, there's a lot of really in-depth research going on with cannabis oils and things like that. We know one scientist that's doing some amazing things with it and working with cancer patients and all that. You know, there's so much information about being an anti-aging, an anti-cancer.

I mean, we're talking about intensive studies, thousands of them, that show all the benefits of it, and that's not even mentioning the hemp benefit, which is even more important, really, when you think about the forests and what the hemp could do. Yeah, it's a weird time where we have all this information about what could be beneficial for our society, how much money could be generated by having legal cannabis, how much tax dollars would be generated just in sales tax alone.

It would be pretty substantial. And these transactions are still going on today. There might be an increase in pot use if pot were made legal. There probably would be an increase. But the reality is if you just got what we have today what people are doing where people are doing it illegally

and made it legal you would the states and the cities would get a tremendous amount of money but see they're getting money through the war on drugs I'd only found out recently

three quarters of all the arrests are pot possession primarily three quarters and so three quarters of all the money that's going into

the war on drugs think of all the drug testing goes on they're're not testing for LSD. They're testing for pot. And that's a big industry. The prison industry is such a big industry. That's why they're fighting it. Prison guard unions. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When I heard prison guard unions lobby against making drugs illegal. Well, you know. Drugs legal rather. Partnership for a drug free American. I think that's Seagram's and a few other liquor companies are the ones that fund that. It used to be pharmaceutical companies. Oh, probably.

Yeah. They had a big part of it as well. Actually, I think pharmaceuticals, alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical companies were the primary. The drug pushers are. The way I described it was them doing commercials against pot. It was like hookers doing commercials against strippers. That's a good analogy. That's really what it's like.

I'll use that one, yeah. It's so stupid. It just doesn't make any sense. Like how can you have a partnership for a drug-free America that's sponsored by drugs? Right. Like drugs give them millions of dollars, not just a couple of bucks, not just drugs. Look, I like what you're doing about pot. We disagree about alcohol and tobacco.

I think they're awesome products and great for humanity. So I'm going to send you some money. Alcohol and tobacco are giving drugs a bad name. That's just so ridiculous. We're just in a weird time. We're in a really, really weird time in human history where, again, we have so much information, and yet there's so much contradictory behavior going on, contradictory to the evidence that's in place, contradictory to logic or contradictory to reason.

Like, why are you arresting somebody for a plant ever? Does anybody get hurt by this? Then stop. Stop. What do you do? You're a cop for who? For the corporations? You're supposed to be a cop to protect the people,

enforce the law and protect the people, and the law should protect the people. So the idea is, well, cops are only supposed to enforce the law. They're not here to protect the people. Well, the laws that don't protect people are fucking stupid, And you don't protect people by locking them in jail because they have plants on them. That's just dumb. Exactly. So we got other shit to do. You know, this is a good, good place to put out the item about jury nullification. You know, people don't realize this, but it used to be part of the judge's instruction to a jury that if you don't find

this law appropriate, you can find the person not guilty. And they don't, you know, they keep that. Now, if you hand out a piece of literature about that at a courthouse, you'll get arrested. They won't let you say it. But it's still the law, jury nullification. And I've actually been in one case where I did this as a juror that, in fact, if I'm ever on any kind of a pot case, unless there is violence, you know, that'll look different. But if it's just a simple possession case, I don't care what the facts are and what the judge says. You can still say not guilty, and there is nothing that can be done about it.

Wow. And people need to know that. I mean, there's a big jury nullification movement on the web you can find out about. But it's hard to get your head around because, you know, people hear the judge's instruction and they say, oh, I had to find him guilty. No, you don't. Yeah, it should all be legal. It's really simple. We should hire people to study it, use the government funds that you would normally spend on law enforcement, use those in a better way to hire people to study what are the actual effects of this stuff and

inform people not by basis of your prejudice in one way or another or what your biased opinion would be one way but the actual facts like here's the facts it might fuck up your memory it seems like when you get high it messes with your short-term memory you might get tongue-tied you might get locked up if you know how to do. Here's the negatives. Here's the cons. Smoking something in general, probably not the best thing for you. Eating it, you might freak the fuck out and jump off a building. I mean, eating is a little scary. You could have some nightmares.

You have to know what you're doing. Yeah. Show people what it is. Well, vaporizer, probably a really good move as far as health-wise. Probably the safest bet. Here's what happens. Here's what a good dose is. Here's what happens when you have half that dose.

Here's what happens when you have a quarter of that dose. Knock yourself out. Do what you want to do, but no one's going to die. And that would be that simple. Yeah. And then start taxing the shit out of it. And my goodness, would we have money. We would have money for everything.

If we started making marijuana legal and have a high tax, shit, let's make the tax 10%. Well, it's 25% in Colorado now. Perfect. For Denver, something like that. I love Colorado. Colorado is always on the ball. They're always ahead of everybody. They're animals.

They're living up there with bears and shit. Yeah, that altitude helps them out. They don't have the oppression of all the areas. They're just awesome. That's just an awesome state. It's just all around awesome. Colorado's one of my all-time favorite states. You lived there for a while, right?

Yeah. That 25% is a smart move because I don't mind paying. If I have to pay $4 for a joint or whatever it is and I'm paying $1 because I don't mind paying. If I have to pay four bucks for a joint or whatever it is, and I'm paying a dollar, I don't mind that. Yeah. It still is probably going to be less expensive than the black market. And it'll be fine. Look, marijuana is not that expensive. When you think about what alcohol costs, if you go to a bar and try to have a few drinks, look, if you grow your own pot, it's cheap as fuck. But if you buy it, it's really not that expensive for how much you use. And if you use a vaporizer, you can get about three or four to one on the thing, you know?

Yeah. And look, in comparison to so many other things that are really expensive, it's kind of silly to talk about it. Yeah. And that's now while it's, you know, fairly illegal. Now, pot, I can see that the war on drugs is making money off of it. Psychedelics, I think it's because they're afraid it might start your thinking. You know, before I used MDMA, I was an Irish Catholic Republican lawyer. And afterwards, I was still Irish.

And everything else went away. Wow. What a weird—how long did that transition take? Was it from the first hit you took, you knew something was up? I think it took from the night that I ingested it until the next morning sometime. All of a sudden, I realized a whole, I just had a real awakening. And I felt like I did when I was a young boy. I've helped a lot of people on their first trips.

And almost invariably, they say the same thing. Well, I felt like this before. I mean, you don't go crazy or anything. And it's really not a psychedelic. And so, you know, it's a gentle way to get in. And it's so good for therapy. You know, Michael and Annie Midoffer in South Carolina are now, I think, entering the second phase of an MDMA test. But the first phase one was treating rape victims with serious PTSD, and they had an amazing amount of actual recovery. One woman hadn't left a house in 15 years, and now she's got a job and I think something like that. But the Pentagon has now approved this study for post-traumatic stress disorder, and they're looking at some other studies for the Pentagon because PTSD is such a huge problem. And MDMA, see, here's why the drug companies don't want it.

What Michael and Annie do, I think they only do maybe two sessions with MDMA. You know, they're psychiatrists assisted and guided and all psychoanalysts or, I don't know, maybe not that high a level. But there's a lot of counseling goes on with it. And see, when you take MDMA, it lowers so many barriers that you and your therapist can really talk honestly. And they have had, like, the phase one study is just to prove it won't kill somebody. And still, they had some amazing recoveries. And now phase two, they want to do the extended therapy with the thing.

But see, the drug companies don't like it because you only need one or two pills. Ever. And then you're done. You don't keep taking it. They want things that they can keep you taking. It's interesting because it seems like they would be able to make some money using that stuff. But, you know, there's going to be abuse with that. There's abuse with MDMA for sure.

Ravers. You know, people are dying because they get dehydrated and dance, you know, they're all... And most of it's because it's adulterated, you know, it's not pure MDMA. What do they cut it with? I don't know. I think all kinds of things. And it could just be impurities in their processes, but probably some sort, you know, it is an amphetamine. And so they probably cut it with a little speed so you can feel something. But, you know, originally back in the early days when we were getting it, it was either in cap form and a lot of it was in powder, but it was pure MDMA. And of

course we knew the source and stuff like that. But today, you know, there used to be a group called Dance Safe, and I don't think they're active anymore because they were, the government was shutting them down, but They were doing free drug testing at raves to tell you if you had pure MDMA. Why would they shut that down? That's so rude and short-sighted. They thought it was encouraging drug use. But instead it was saving lives.

That's such an illogical stance to take. You should never put something in your mouth that you got from somebody you don't know. That's a good thing to say, except if you want to put your penis in someone's mouth. Well. And you barely know them. You know, I've never had anybody stranger that wanted to do that for me.

I've always gotten to know them, at least for a half hour. I'm not saying that it's going to happen. I'm just saying you should always leave that option out of the table. Okay, I'll go along with that. Especially if you're on ecstasy. Think about it. Well, you know what? In Dallas, some of our customers, there were some swinger clubs in Dallas.

And so we would sell it to these clubs because you can have an erection for hours on it. Wow. But you can't come. And so the swingers clubs loved it. Bunch of sore people. I come out here to the West Coast and the word is, oh, you're going to have a third day letdown hangover and you can't have sex on it. And I thought, wow, that's a completely different story. And everybody bought into it out here. But in Dallas, it was a totally different

story. Nobody was having that third, second, third day blase or anything. So in Dallas, you were getting pure MDMA. Right. And here they're getting this amphetamine. Well, I don't know if any place is getting it pure unless you really know the chemist. But it was a better quality of it. Yeah, it was definitely pure. And, you know, it was legal at that time.

There was no reason to cut it. Do you remember when 5-MeO-DMT was legal and you could buy it online? Yeah. You could buy like a coffee cup full of it online and get the whole world high. I know. It was like $30. I know some people that have. Yeah, that's what I heard.

I heard you know. I heard you know things. Yeah, it's weird what's still legal. Like salvia is legal in a lot of places still. Yeah. And then they have this bath salts issue, which is really nutty. They take a compound like crystal meth. They alter it so it becomes a different new compound that's

not categorized. Then they say not for human consumption, sell it as bath salts, but everybody knows that you're supposed to smoke it because it's like crack or meth or whatever the hell it is. And they can't do anything about it. It's amazing. There's been something like, I don't want to use the number because I don't have it in front of me, but close to maybe 70 new compounds that have been introduced in England this year. Whoa, England knows how to party.

Well, worldwide it's probably higher. It might only be 20. It might have been 70 last year and 20. But there's just no way to stop these things coming now. What are you doing, England? Why are you going crazy? Look, if you had to live there, you'd have to do something. It's raining right now.

It's snowing right now. Yeah, it gets a little dreary. And by the way, there's a bunch of people in England watching us right now live. Oh, yeah, for sure. I love England. I was just in Manchester. I just did two shows. Oh, really?

Manchester. Yeah, Dancehouse Theater. It was awesome. It's just fun. I love England. I like the people there. Oh, they're great. As audience members, they're amazing.

They're some of the best audience members you ever get. They're polite. They listen. They get things. They understand where you're going and stuff. They get subtlety. Well, they're sharp. They know what's going on. Well, I think, I don't know what it is. I mean, are they more educated in England? Their school system's definitely better, I think.

Even, not the private schools, but their public schools are even better. That is the one thing that irks me the most about society is that there's such a minimal amount of finances that are dedicated towards school systems. The minimum, they're always trying to cut the school budget. They're always cutting things. They should be pouring money into the public education system, pouring money into community centers, pouring money into anything that benefits young people. And they're cutting the worst things,

like music and art. And sports. They're cutting wrestling in a lot of places. You know, it makes me sick because people need these things, and it's greedy old people that had these things when they were younger that are deciding that these are the things that should be cut.

Those things should be uncut-able. It should be like, look, here's your budget. You need to spend $100 million on the school systems. After that, you can do whatever the fuck you want as far as cleaning the streets up and doing all that. But number one, you need to do this because this is what's going to take care of everything. I'll go along with that. This is what's going to make the people that are babies become cool adults. And if you don't get that right, the whole society's scrapped.

The whole generation's gone. The whole generation has to figure it out for themselves. And there's that attitude of pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. And I figured it out, you should figure it out too. Man, if you did figure it out, then you should know how goddamn hard it is to figure out. And you should also know this is not the only way to do it. This is a silly way to do it, to have unmotivated teachers that get paid $25,000 a year. I mean, how can you feed yourself? How can you expect these people who you're entrusting to educate your children to be motivated when they can barely eat? Right. And some of our best teachers are just so amazing because they're working in the inner city voluntarily. They could go other places, some of them junior college and all, but they're, they're, I have one friend who worked in the inner city in San Francisco for a

while, another one here in LA and they were amazing men. And they just, you know, they did it because they wanted to help these kids. Well, that's a beautiful notion. It's beautiful when you meet people like that and it's beautiful that they still exist it's just sad that corporations have controlled the political process to the point where when a person gets into power when a person becomes president they they never have a chance to do a real overhaul you never really are like the one person who's in control you have a million people that you owe that got you into that position that you have to pay back or do their bidding or meet their interests before you do anything right and so that's that's what you know that's where all these different laws come from that are so confusing and don't make any sense

to people we've got to figure out a way to govern people by actually governing people it's like we accept that there's going to be so much so much bullshit and so much corruption and so much thievery and so many slanted ideas. We just accept that there's going to be a certain amount of that because it's always been that way. And if you looked at that, if you looked at a lot of the decisions that get made at the highest levels of government and who they benefit, you would say this could never happen. This could never happen if we all had the right attitude. This can only happen when money gets involved. This can only happen when someone puts money ahead of humanity. And that's like the real core part of our society that's fucked up is education.

I mean, education, not just in the small sense of teaching people that don't know how to read how to read, but teaching people who are brilliant how to think about life. Exactly. Not just how to count and how to calculate the dates of fossils that you find, but how to think about humans, how to engage with each other, how to look at this temporary existence in a correct way. Well, you know, corporations set a lot of the agenda for schools as far as the curriculum, things like that, because they're looking to get, you know, passive little cubicle workers. And see, that was one of the lessons that the power elite learned

of the 60s. It was all these young kids got educated because their parents got educated from the GI Bill. And now we're educating these kids and they're getting too smart for us. And I think they've intentionally been dumbing down the school system. How do they do that, though? Just by underfunding it? Well, look at Texas. The school books in Texas are teaching creationism and they're trying to get evolution out of the textbooks completely. Right.

But you don't think that that's because they're dumb, right? They're just doing that because that's their religion. I mean, not that they're dumb. But that dumbs down the people, though. I'm sorry. Let me rephrase that. You don't think that they're doing that because that dumbs down the people, though. I'm sorry. Let me rephrase that. You don't think that they're doing that because they're trying to make people dumb. There are people using those people to do that, I think.

I think the corporations want people who aren't really thinking out of the box too much. They can get those from the elite private schools. But isn't there always going to be a large base of fundamental people in places like Texas that they could capitalize on by leaning as far as their decision-making towards them because they know that that's going to aid them to get into office. Well, yeah. And of course, I'm pretty cynical about that. I think the voting is pretty rigged anyhow with electronic voting.

Well, it certainly has been shown to be. In Texas, I practice law in Texas and lived there for a while. And it's a pretty Bible kind of, very fundamentalist. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I was doing some jokes last time I was in Houston. My friend said, this girl walked to the bathroom and said, if he talks about Jesus one more time, we are out of here. I barely talked about Jesus.

Then let me throw out a title of a book, Caesar's Messiah, a book that's out that talks about Jesus actually being fictional. It's a pretty interesting book. Yeah, I read a thing about that. Would you like something to drink? Yeah, I got it here. You got some? Do you want some coffee? No, that'd keep me awake all day.

Oh, how dare you. That's right. You told me already. Sorry. all day. Oh, how dare you? That's right. You told me already. Sorry. Yeah, I read a summary of that online where they were talking about this new study that said that Jesus may have been created and they found new documents that suggest he was. Either way, this is what I always say. It doesn't matter. I don't know if Jesus was real or if Jesus was artificial. My point is, it doesn't make sense that he died and came back to life three days later.

And as long as you believe that, we have a problem. We've got a problem. We have a disconnect in communication. We have a why would that be real? We have that. We have why, what happened there? He turned water into wine. Were you there when this happened?

Do you know how dumb people are? Do you know how much people lie? You do. Did you imagine what that must have been like back when people couldn't even write shit down? And it was 50 years after the so-called event that somebody wrote it down for the first time. Of course. And way later than that, that Constantine and a bunch of bishops decided what goes in the book and what doesn't. You know, when they wrote the New Testament, I'm like, holy Jesus.

Like, they left stuff out. They added stuff. There's so many different people's fingerprints on that. It's just nonsense. Well, it's about control. They can control the people. But the idea also that this is absolutely not saying that there's no God. If you've done psychedelics, I think you've realized after a certain amount of those, quote, unquote, breakthrough experiences, I think you realize that you have no idea what's going on in this other realm. Whatever these other realms are, whether they're individually different,

whether they're all connected, whether they're just frequencies on a dial, whether it's 5-MeO, whether it's DMT, whether it's psilocybin, whatever these realms are that you enter into, they're so fantastic and special and strange and beyond description that the idea of God does not seem nearly as ridiculous once you've had them. There's a video of me out there, an interview they did, where I told the stories about X hitting the street in Dallas. And I mentioned about the fact when I got to, at one point in my life in Florida, I decided I was going to be an atheist. I really wanted to get rid of everything. And so I was I was going to be an atheist. I really wanted to get rid of everything. And so I was trying really hard to be an atheist, but I had this friend who lived on the edge of town with a farm,

and he'd get mushrooms from the cow patties in his cow yard and bring them into me. So I'd be an atheist during the week, and then I'd eat these mushrooms on Saturday. You can't be an atheist with five grams of dried mushrooms in your stomach. Well, you can't be sure. No. That's the real problem is that you can't be an atheist with five grams of dried mushrooms in your stomach. Well, you can't be sure. No. That's the real problem is that you can't be sure. And my problem with religion is when people are sure about something that they've never seen, never experienced, you're sure because you read it or you're sure because someone told it to you.

You're sure because it's your tradition. Like, you've got to tell me why you're sure. If you're sure because it's some demonstrable science, okay, I got it. But if you're sure just because you're sure that God wants you to throw rocks at homosexuals because you saw that written down somewhere, like, wow, that doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't he tell us now? How come God only tells one person? Like, doesn't God know that game, the game of telephone?

Doesn't he know that game? He must know that game. He made everything. He's got to know that game sucks. So why would you tell one person like a few thousand years ago? Why wouldn't you tell us all the time? When somebody asks me if I believe in God, I just say, okay, define what you mean by the word God. Right.

And we really never get much past that because people, a few people say, old man with a long white beard sitting on a throne. I say, well, no, I don't believe in that. See, that's where I differ from you. Oh, really? Yeah, because the shit I've seen on mushrooms are way weirder than a guy living in the clouds. You know, I've seen things on DMT

that made a guy in the clouds with a harp and a bunch of people around him with bird wings. That wasn't even weird. No, I agree with that. So why not? I'm just, you know, the old Catholic image of the guy on the throne with the white beard. It could be.

This is why. Because life is so stupid and contradictory and weird. And humans are so bizarre and so hypocritical and so strange and self-destructive. And our acts collectively make no sense to the individual. And yet we all feel helpless in the momentum of the united species. And yet we all feel helpless in the momentum of the united species. And it's movement, whether it's the polluting of the ocean or the fucking up of the ozone layer and shit flying around space, slamming into each other because we've got so many things floating around above our Earth. Whatever it is, it's so bizarre and contradictory and crazy that it almost seems like the work of a madman.

Right. It almost seems like the work of a god.. It almost seems like the work of a god. Like just one crazy motherfucker that's designed to control this planet. On a NASA trip. He's just a crazy asshole. He's like anybody else that gets into a position of power. His fucking head gets big. He gets crazy.

He starts ordering people around. Starts doing nutty shit. Like if you eat that apple, everyone's fucked. That's it. I said it. You did it. It's over. Done.

But all of humanity forever has to suffer? Yes. Sorry. Because I said so, yeah. And the only way to fix that is you've got to get a guy who's his son to sacrifice his life. Like, what? Come on. You know, we get all wrapped up in the affairs of the world.

You've had intense dreams. You wake up and they only last for a few moments. You can't hold on to some of these dreams. I have a feeling that when we die, it could be just like that. You say, God, I felt like I was on a planet Earth or something. I can't remember. And you don't remember a damn thing about all this stuff we went through. It's certainly possible. Sure. There's thoughts that-

We don't know. Yeah. You live an infinite life that's interconnected, one life to another, and that's one of the reasons why you meet someone and they're an old soul. Yeah. Or you meet someone

and they're particularly fortunate. Like, why is this guy particularly fortunate? Why are people drawn to them like initially from the get-go? Maybe this is things that they figured out in past existences

that we're not calculating in this existence. Maybe you have a certain amount of work that you can do in this existence, but you have a certain amount of work that you can do in this existence, but you're basically still riding on the momentum of a fucking eon of different lives that you've lived over and over and over again. One of the things we can do in this life that I don't know whether or not we can do in another life, but with a human body, there's a lot of physical pleasure that you can experience.

And I think that part of what we should be doing here is having some physical pleasure and not just getting into the spiritual world. Sounds like someone starting a cult. No. I know how you do it, pal. I know how you psychedelic people think. Or a commune or maybe like a new situation. No, actually, I'm a hermit. I seldom leave my cave. Really? Yeah. Are you a hermit? You seem like a very situation. No, actually, I'm a hermit. I seldom leave my cave.

Really? Yeah. Are you a hermit? You seem like a very personable guy. Well, I can be, but I save it all up for a rare occasion. That's funny. You're personable in small doses. Right.

You know, that's actually, there's a reality to that, that the overwhelming amounts of people, if you're around overwhelming amounts of people, you could be overstimulated. Some people believe that the result of living in cities and living in high-population areas is this same thing that you're experiencing when you see people getting into road rage, the same thing you're experiencing when you see people fly off the handle at counter help

or what have you. It's just like they're just overworked. There's just too much stimulation, and you just need to sit by yourself, watch a little TV, read a book, relax. You need to be out in nature, going for a walk. We don't feel anything or hear anything. You just see squirrels and birds and shit.

Play with a couple little kids. Yeah. We just don't feel like we need that because we're so trapped in this momentum of accomplishment. It's constantly pushing forward, but not realizing that we don't stay here forever. You only get a certain amount of time.

I've quit doing conferences and workshops because afterwards people come up and they ask me all these questions that are so deep, I don't really quite understand the questions. And I'm a carnival barker. That's my role. All the action's in the tent, and you're in the center ring yourself in the main tent. But I like to point to a lot of things and I go broad, but I don't go very deep. And so I can't answer questions. And these people

want me to solve their life problems. I don't even understand what they're asking me. So I've just quit making appearances. Well, there's always going to be people that want you to figure it out for them. There's always going to be people that don't just want to discuss things that people have said, which is absolutely fascinating, but they want you to help them. It's a very selfish point of view. And it's very common. And I'm just not up to it. That's not what I do. I don't think anybody is, quite honestly. And especially if you go up to them and ask them for advice. Hey, I need your advice. Like, man, listen, what you need to do is you need to look at your own life and figure out what you're doing and why. If you to talk about like specific things like in order for someone to give you advice like

should I marry this girl like oh my god where do we begin you know I'm gonna have to like if you wanted me to give an honest answer if she should you should get married to someone I would have to see you guys interact for like weeks right after I get to know you individually I would have to really say that yes you should sign a legal contract where you give up 50% of all your earnings one person yeah go do it dude, and then if it doesn't work out you're gonna get mad at me like you have people like I'm Thinking about taking ecstasy. What do you think I don't know I don't know you man. Have you started in the library? That's where you go first

Go to arrow in the idea that you would be able to tell someone what to do or not to do or what it right like You're asking too many weird questions. We should you should be doing is figuring it out for yourself. That's a big part of life. And then surrounding yourself with people that you meet, that you become friends with and you can share ideas and experience with. You can't just run up to Lorenzo and ask him to solve your problems. Get your shit in order. I've got a friend in Houston who's a lawyer friend of mine.

Actually, we were in the Navy together too, and he has a big brass plaque on the front of his desk that says, frankly, I'd rather not get involved. So you know you're going to pay top dollar with him. Well, there's people that just want to drag you into their world, and you don't want to be in their world. And it's like, listen, you had your own break, and people helped you. Are you sure about that? Because there definitely wasn't this. It wasn't running up to people and telling them to fix my life. But there's a lot of that going on out there.

And unfortunately, it all goes down to the same issue. People that haven't been explained how to think to. They haven't been instructed on what's the most productive way to think. What's the best way to – and I don't mean by think, by form your own opinions or creatively or anything. I mean manage your consciousness. What's the best way to manage how you look at yourself in relation to the people around you?

And if you're being too goddamn needy, you're ruining it for everybody. Yeah, exactly. If it's always about you, you, you, you, you, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, that might be why you're in that situation in the first place. Because nobody wants to fucking help you, and no one's helped you up to now. You're exhausting. You know, I used to be on the motivational speaker circuit for a while. Really?

And we had all these pat things when you pointed at somebody, you got three fingers pointing back at yourself. The other one is you can walk through a room full of people laying on the floor and give your hand to each one and help them to their feet. But you let one of them climb on your back, and you're going to be down on the floor with them. And so that's what you're saying. Don't get involved in helping people. You just tell them what you can help them with, some ideas that they've got to work on themselves, but you can't solve their problem. Yeah, it's not that I don't get involved with helping people. It's that people have to realize that you as an individual.

I meant taking their burden on, yeah. Yeah, you as an individual have your own unique burden. If you want to learn things, if you want to figure, then you've got to start doing research, you've got to start reading books, you've got to start communicating. But going up to someone like you and saying, hey, I need you to fix my life, what do I do?

Like, I don't know what the fuck you do. I barely know what the fuck I do. Come on, man, you've got to find somebody. And the other problem is, what I've found, is that people who are needy, they never recover. If you keep them in your life, goddammit, they're needy 10 years later. Like, hey, man, we've gone 10 years and you're still a goddamn wreck. Like, why? Why?

Why? Why haven't you not figured this out yet? You asked me for advice 10 goddamn years ago. We spent a lot of time talking about shit. And now 10 years later, you're doing the same thing. Same thing. You're sucking me into a world of bullshit. You're just trapping me like a little vortex.

And being honest like that's probably the best thing you can do for them. No, then they hate you and talk shit about you online and they're fake names. That's what they do. They hide. They get fake accounts. Yeah, just turn it off. Well, it's just, you know, life is beautiful when everybody's trying to do their part. But life becomes a real pain in the ass when no one wants to do the dishes.

I like that. If you live in a house with a bunch of people and no one does the dishes, it becomes that, hey, what the fuck are we doing? Everybody get together here. Come on. I did the dishes last night. There's 10 of them in here today. Well, it wasn't my food. I didn't eat that.

You know, you get into that kind of nonsense. Then you've got a shitty communication system. You've got a shitty commune. You've got a shitty culture. It just goes downhill from there. Yeah, I mean, that's what our real issue is. Our real issue is that there's too many people out there that not just want attention but demand it for nothing. Right.

You know, it's not that, you know. That's who they've become. People, like, want to, hey, man That's who they become. People like want to, hey man, I got to get you to listen to my CD. Do you know what that would be like if the whole world, you know, had someone, if it was like five billion people that wanted you to listen to their CD?

Would you ever have time for anything else? It's like email right now. We don't even know each other. Why am I listening to your CD? Do you think you could help me? Do you think really I could help you by listening to your CD? I'm not a music producer.

Like, what the fuck are you doing, man? There's not that much time in the world. I can't help everybody. If you have something that's interesting, send a link. If someone wants to help you, it'll spread virally. Put something online. Two people will find it. They'll send it to four.

And then it gets going from there. I mean, that's the only way today. And they can do it. They've got YouTube and places they can put their music, you know? And that's the only issue that I ever have in communicating with people

is that sometimes people get exhausting. I want you to read this script. Do you know how long that takes? I don't even know you, man. I'm going to read your script. I get people wanting me to read their books all the time.

Of course. I've got books I need to read. It's flattering, right? Oh, it is, yeah. But I would never do that. I would never send someone a book and say, I want you to read this and then critique it for me. I'm not that needy.

I think that's a needy thing. The other reason I don't do it, besides the time, is, you know, first of all, I'm not sure I know what they're talking about. I'm not sure I know the subject. But then what if I don't like it? Yeah. You know, I don't want to just say, hey, this really sucks. Yeah, I've heard that happen before. People have sent me stand-up before, review this, and then get back to me like, oh, Christ, son.

You know, I thought during my bachelor stoner days, I wanted to do stand-up. About the time you're doing news radio. And I thought it was really funny. And I worked for weeks and weeks to get like a five-minute little routine. So you were in your 50s when you did that? Yeah. Wow. Your bachelor stoner days in your 50s. I couldn't even get my girlfriend to laugh at more than one or two of the jokes. And I thought, you know, there's no way I'm going to an open mic with this.

It's hard. You need a new girlfriend. Well, that happened too. But it wasn't her fault. It wasn't her fault. But that's hard work to do that. I really admire you guys. It's hard work when it's not going well.

That's when it's hard work. It's hard work when you're trying to come up with new material. It's hard work. When it's working, it's not hard work when it's not going well. That's when it's hard work. It's hard work when you're trying to come up with new material. It's hard work. When it's working, it's not hard work. Although I love music, I always think comedy is just a step above because laughing actually can heal you. And so I've learned more comedians through your show. And one time I heard you say something like, you thought Joey Diaz was the funniest guy alive. And so the next morning, and I usually listen to your podcast at the gym.

You know, it makes the gym time goes faster. And I came home from the gym and I got YouTube and I looked at Joey Diaz's channel. And 6 o'clock that night, I got stoned right then. At 6 o'clock that night, I'd seen almost all of Joey Diaz. I haven't seen it all yet. But he hits a tone with me. He and Mark Maron, a couple of those guys, really are in the same groove I'm in. And so I just can get lost doing that.

Joey Diaz is an animal. He's an animal. And he seems to do ad-lib riffs a lot, too. Oh, it's all ad-libbing. His best stuff is ad-libbing. Yeah. The best thing that I ever saw, the funniest thing I ever saw,

was Joey Diaz on the Alex Jones Show. It was me and Joey Diaz and Alex Jones. Alex wants to talk conspiracies, and Joey hates that shit. He doesn't want to talk about UFOs and chemtrails, get the fuck out of here with your bullshit. So he just hijacked the whole show. Did you see that?

No, is it up on YouTube? Yes. I've got to see that one. We'll pull see that? No, is it up on YouTube? Yes. I've got to see that one. We'll pull it up. Jamie, pull it up. It's Joey Diaz on the Alex Jones Show. And he went on this rant

for like a couple minutes towards the end when he left the podcast. And I literally couldn't breathe. My face was beet red. I've got to see that. He was just killing it. And Alex Jones

tried to jump in. And he fucking, he stops him from jumping in. It just gets louder and crazier. He'd be one of the few people who could stop Alex Jones, I bet. Oh, Alex Jones had no idea what...

They're just better at covering up what they do. Did they kill Michael Jackson? I don't know. Look at the movie. He was dancing and singing and next you know he's dying of oxygen. No. Not right. A junkie's a junkie's a junkie's a junkie every day. He doesn't wake up singing and dance and then he has oxygen tanks at night. Something's not right there.

And in my case, like old school, you're worth more dead than what you are alive. You understand me? And now they got a new record coming out. He ain't in debt no more. He's doing a tour next year with the people from Vegas that jump up and down the Blue Band group, whatever the hell that is. I mean, he's worth more now than he's ever been. I think Paul McCartney killed Michael Jackson. band group whatever the hell that is i mean he's worth more now than he's ever been i think paul

mccartney killed michael jackson if it was up to me me knowing what i know i smoked another joint i'll break it down i'll break it down because he bought the music from paul mccartney didn't want to get it back to him and all of a sudden they put paul mccartney in the super bowl they tried to build up the beatles to get their thing going and all of a sudden michael jackson that's right circling the building right now. We've gotten confirmation. I have the documents right here. Obama and the elite.

It's a strategy. Keep going. I don't know what to say. Keep giving. Joe Diaz here. Talking. Go. I would do you, but would you do you?

Alex isn't even talking. Yeah, he will. Why are you bringing up the Supreme? No, but not only. Why are you pissing in my pool floor? You know what I'm saying? I'm sorry. No, but I'm saying. No but would do you. Alex isn't even talking. Yeah, he will. Why are you bringing up the Supreme? There he goes. Why are you pissing in my pool floor? You know what I'm saying? I'm sorry. No, but I'm saying.

No, I love you. But I'm saying you're a character, too, on top of it. This is what we're talking about. He's way more funny. I know, I know, I know. You don't want to talk about yourself. Okay, well, let's get back to our free country. Let's get off Michael Jackson.

What are the Chinese? We need Joey Diaz so we can point the finger and say, there's the bad man. What is our motto? You know how we say the N word? What do the Chinese say about us? You know how they call us? They call us gulai, whatever that word is. You know what that means?

Round eye. White ghost. We are white fucking ghosts. That's what we are. We're here to destroy the fucking world. Trust me, I'm telling you. But at the same time, we're built. They call us that.

Guai lo. That's what they call us. White ghost. They call black people something else,. That's what they call us. White ghost. They call black people something else, but it's also a black ghost. I don't know if it's Guilo. It goes in that thing. But that's the point, man. It's not people like me and you that are going to hurt this world. It's the suits. It's the

fucking bankers. It's that fucking guy that locked people up and now is in prison. He's giving money to the club. Go to the very end of it when he goes crazy. There's a real short clip. This is what I thought we were going to play. This is actually the whole thing, isn't it? This is the whole time he was on.

He has eight minutes of it. Yeah. This is it. This is it. They have baggy clothes on. They didn't know I lost eight pounds. They said, we're going to put you through the x-ray machine. I'm standing there sweating bullets with this baggy under my fucking left nut.

Oh, that's enough. Stop. Because my left nut's bigger than the right nut because i'm a righty stop people don't know that i thought i had cancer for a couple weeks you know the opposite hand is like shaking he's talking about carrying weed under his balls going to the airport you're like rodney danger listen stop fucking rodney i had this weed that was stinking up a storm not to mention my balls i'm sweating sweating now because I'm going to go to jail tonight. And all of a sudden, the guy goes, he's clear. And he shook my hand. I'm like, my taxpayers are hard at work.

I'm snuggling with you guys. You're a politician who's talking to you like a Christian. He's lying. So do you follow what I'm saying to you? No, I know. We're talking about naked body scanners. We're talking about children being molested by TSA. We will listen to a politician with the same story every four years with that sorry-ass line of shit.

But these fucking momos will get offended because I say the word fuck. That's why you're around. FEMA camps and the Amero. Because they're too stupid to understand what's in front of them. Forget about the curse words. At least the kid's not fucking lying. So next time you listen to your bullshit congressman or your bullshit governor or even a bullshit president somebody's running for president And he's hitting you with that same poor shit that they give you every four fucking years and you still vote for the fucking Momo

And then you get mad think about me saying the word fuck with that. I'm out here. I got a smoke a cigar Very solid points don't do the don't know I know Joey you get it But this is the left the American public know, Joey, you get it. I'm with you, but this is just to let the American public know that every four years they buy the same shit they've been buying every four years and the same people

with their Harvard articulation and how they don't curse and they're Christians and they have a family and these are the same people that shove it up your fucking ass every year. The one thing that you get

about this is not the video. There's an end to it where he goes crazy and says, check yourself before you wreck yourself. It's like, here it is. Take a shuttle. Joey Diaz. Facebook, Twitter, check yourself before you wreck yourself.

Big dicks in your ass. Get out of here. You're in trouble. You know, I love that guy because he says what I'm thinking, but he says it so much better. He's so crazy. He's so fun. He's so entertaining.

He's just a maniac. It's fun having maniacs for friends. It gives you a different perspective on things. You realize, oh, that's a way to live too. Exactly. There's a lot of us that are different. Yeah, he's just one of a kind. And I hadn't heard of him until I heard him on your show,

and now I'm a huge fan. Yeah, well, the Internet has really been very kind to Joey Diaz because people, you know, it was very hard for a guy like that to show you what he can do without the Internet. You can't do that on a radio show where you just go off and go crazy. His comedy, it's very hard to see on regular TV unless it's Showtime or HBO. So he was in a weird category. And then the internet came along and podcasting came along

and then people just got to see who this really is. I'm glad he's riding high now. Yeah, yeah, finally. He deserves it. Yeah, without a doubt. The internet is just sort of catching up. There's so many things that get exposed because of the internet. I mean, your podcast would never be on a radio show.

How could you ever have that on late night radio? You know, there's no way they would ever play that. It would be impossible. No. There's no way. Well, if you, you know, coast to coast or something. I know Terrence was on there a lot. But, you know, it's too long, too late, stuff like that.

And yours, I mean, yours is very specifically pro-drug, too. Oh, yeah. That would be a real issue for sponsors. It would be. I mean, every now and then Art Bell would have McKenna on. They would discuss psilocybin, the stoned ape theory and what have you. And it would be very fascinating. But the amount of just raw information over and over and over again,

talking in a positive way about psychedelic experiences. Like, there's never been anything like your show. And if you think about it, you know, they don't talk about doing the drugs as much as about what they think about, the thoughts that come back. You know, the show really would be called Philosophy. But, you know, can you imagine having, you know, hundreds of thousands of young people listening to a philosophy podcast?

But that's the category it's in. It is, if you stop and think about it. Most philosophical people, if you call yourself a philosopher, they're blowhards. They're people who pontificate. Philosophy without the drugs sucks. It's very rare that it's right. It's often overbearing, often self-centered, often not self-aware, not objective and introspective. It's missing an element. That's a terrible thing to say. But I think that without control of the ego, it's very difficult to get philosophy right. Right. unique ideas that express the way that people...

When someone wants to express a profound thought to you, if someone wants to express some sort of a life-changing idea that they've come upon and realized themselves, it's very difficult to do that sincerely without coming off like a blowhard and an asshole there's something about expressing yourself in ways that it seems like when people are trying to make profound statements they're not just trying to make profound statements they're also trying to sound awesome they're also trying to impress people with their capturing of the english language and

their their use of prose but when when someone says something like McKenna or someone says something like, I mean, there's been a million people that have said brilliant things. Alan Watts is another one. They've said something that just really rings true in an honest and unique way. It's a little bit more than just philosophy. It's a little bit more than just philosophy.

It's a little bit more than just psychedelic. It's like a combination of the two that sparks a conversation, period. It sparks thinking. It's like it's a seed of an idea that gets planted. And when you hear it, or especially when you watch it, which is one of the beautiful things about these user-created YouTube videos.

They're so visually stunning. They draw you in that form as well. The music they attach to them and then the actual words themselves. It's like the combination of them is so entertaining, captivating, and inspiring that it becomes something way bigger than just philosophy. It becomes philosophy that's effective. It becomes philosophy that may actually change the way you think. It's very difficult to go to a philosophy class and then change your way of life.

Sometimes it's boring and dull, but sometimes they just talk too much. And they don't say anything interesting. Like that's a big part of what people like when they like podcasts. Like a guy like Joey Diaz, per se, or a guy like Duncan Trussell. They're entertaining people It's not just that they're saying cool shit They're entertaining people and when you're not entertaining and you're just saying shit you're doing it wrong You're missing a big percentage of what makes people listen to you right and retain it and retain it Yeah, I mean that is the medium of the fireside chat.

You know, that's where it came from. One person would, you know, or several people would, you know, share stories. But when you learned how to do it correctly, it became exciting for the people that were engaged in it. And it became, you know, an educational experience as well as an entertaining experience. an educational experience as well as an entertaining experience. Well, that's the way we started doing MDMA in Dallas back in the 80s is either a couple or maybe three couples at most. And we'd all take it. We'd get together with our spouse or our significant other for a while.

And then we'd get together in the last several hours. We'd just be talking, and it would be philosophical, life-changing. Hey, I noticed you doing this. See, it lowers your barrier. It's like lowering your fear barrier where you can say something to somebody and know you're not going to hurt their feelings. And so the truth serum comes out. And you can talk to your friends and your spouse or whatever and say, you know, this has been bothering me lately. Well, you know, I thought maybe it was.

You know, it's really a healing proposition that you do for yourselves and each other. Yeah. I had a conversation with a friend when I did ecstasy with him where he was asking me why I wouldn't lend him money to start his business. It was like ordinarily I would have avoided that conversation like the plague. Well, because I want to stay your friend. Yeah. You can't do that to friends. That shit never works.

I'm not a bank. There's banks. Banks are there for a reason. Nobody ever pays their friends back. No. I mean, I shouldn't say that to friends. That shit never works. I'm not a bank. There's banks there for a reason. Nobody ever pays their friends back. No. They just, I mean, I shouldn't say nobody, maybe. But, you know, when somebody borrows 25 grand from you, most likely that shit's gone. You know, when I started my computer company, the guy that was my mentor, he loaned me some money to start my business.

I need to get home and have a talk. He loaned me some money to start the business. And then years later before, I paid him back about half of it. And then we went upside down. And I was really upset about it. And it wasn't a lot of money. I owed him about $7,000, I guess. It was a lot to me.

And I was lamenting the fact that I couldn't pay him, but I would eventually. He says, no. And he had a big tugboat business. And he said, when I started this business 25 years ago, my wife's father-in-law or father loaned me the money and that business went broke and two others went broke and he died before I could pay him back. So that's his money. You've got to find somebody to pay that to in the future, but not me. Well, that's a very cool guy. He was, he was an amazing guy. That's a very cool guy. And it's very cool that you wanted to pay him back, that you're making attempts to pay him back.

It's brutal, though. I've had several friends that have lost friendships because they've loaned somebody money. And this one friend, boy, it drove him crazy. He would talk about it like this guy would come over his house and this guy would hang out with him. And the guy would never bring up the fact that he owed him all this money and you know and it would drive him crazy and he was like look man i'm gonna pay you when i can pay you you know i'm gonna but he would find out the guy just bought a new this or that he'd be like what's this is and so it became like a big part of his life it became like this thing because this guy like was a friend and he didn't want to

lose his friendship but he realized that the friendship was now all of a sudden this like really negative thing where he was constantly thinking hey i fucking pulled out money out of my account i lent it to you you have no intentions of fucking paying me back because i don't do anything about it because i don't threaten you i can't repossess your car i can't do anything that a bank can do it's a fascinating thing when you you see people that just they don't go all the way with stuff. Like they promise things, they don't follow through. They get an idea in their head and then they just fucking shut down and never finish it. You know, well, I'm going to start this business.

But within, let me tell you something, within six months, I'm going to pay you back with 25% interest. It's impossible to lose. And then six months later, what happened? Man, you're not going to believe this. We got fucked by our manufacturer, this and that. So I'm out of business. I don't know It's impossible to lose. And then six months later, what happened? Man, you're not going to believe this. We got fucked by our manufacturer, this and that, so I'm out of business. I don't know what you want to do. What do I want to do?

You owe me a lot of money, man. Hey, look, you knew going in here this would be a... I took a loss. Like, oh, Jesus Christ. And there you go. People can't pay you back. I mean, it happens over and over and over again. There's a lot of people out there,

just like when you were talking about people that need people to help them You know like people coming up to you. Hey, man. Help me. This is it. Hey, man You just gotta let me some money like there's other ways, you know, there's other ways I guarantee you the best way is not borrowing money from your friends There's got to be a better way than that. You need to figure out how to get some of that fucking money on your own It's not like we're in a totally closed system where it's impossible to get a job. It may be difficult. I understand. But other people have figured it out.

It might be possible for you to figure it out. It's just not like something like holding your breath underwater for an hour. It seems like you can be done. It's like, you know. Do you ever have people come up to you and say, hey, make me laugh? No. Tell me a joke. Are your kids old enough for Nemo yet?

Yes. So the little clownfish. Oh, you're a clownfish Are your kids old enough for Nemo yet? Yes. So the little clownfish? Oh, you're a clownfish. Make me laugh. Make me laugh. Yeah. No, I mean, people have said, like, the worst thing is when you're doing an interview. And, like, if you, like, do a radio or something like that, radio interview, and they go, give us an example of your material.

I'm like, oh, Christ. You got 15 minutes? Yeah. Well, no. It's like you can't just start up. Yeah, you can't just do a cold start like it's stupid it's gross it's like this inept inept interviewing i had a friend that was a drummer and we were in an after hours club down in kema texas and and my mentor actually got him uh wanted him to play the the drums in his band and he didn't want to he didn't want to and he said no i to. And he said, no, I'm here to party. And finally my friend drives the band, gives them some money,

and Tim gets on the drums. And he's just kind of playing a little bit. And all of a sudden the guitarist says, okay, take it. And he hits the drum one time, bang. He gets up and he says, you take it back now. That was it. That was funny. Yeah.

Oh, man. that was it that was funny yeah oh man it's I think one of the things about psychedelics

that really aids people is they get a chance to see how annoying they can be you know I've met people that have changed a lot of their behavior

and have apologized to friends and stuff for being an asshole or doing whatever just because of psychedelic trips I won't trip with anybody anymore

you do it by yourself yeah I've had so many and I won't trip with anybody anymore. You do it by yourself? Yeah. I've had so many, and I don't do hardly any psychedelics anymore. I start worrying about my heart now and all that. Right. But, you know, ayahuasca is different. You know, if I had cancer years ago, if I had a recurrence, I'd go down to the jungle and spend a couple weeks.

You think that can fix you when you do that? I think ayahuasca can fix anything. You know, I'm a huge believer and it's it's it's a miracle you know it has changed my life more than anything else i've ever done wow that's strong words pretty awesome yeah it is pretty awesome isn't it it's another thing that we pretty sweet if it was here it was legal we had ayahuasca centers where people yeah you know it's it's it's uh and it's such a weird state because it is legal with some of the churches now, but it took me, I was actively searching for it

for about 10 years until all of a sudden I found it. And that's happened to so many people when you don't find it until you're ready for it, and then it finds you. And, you know, I've had a lot of amazing experiences on it, some difficult ones, that all all in all there it gives me more positive feeling about this life and any other potential life than i've ever had it's uh but it's very earth-centered you know i i heard you talking to graham hancock about how

everybody gets ecological on it and you know whereas acid is more mechanical you know you can do all kinds of problems and code and write and stuff like that. And mushrooms are pretty mystical. But ayahuasca is earth-centered. It's an earth spirit that you're playing or engaged with. And it can be frightening and scary, but amazing things have happened to me. I try not to think too much about what happens after death because I'm close enough I'm going to find out sooner than I want to.

And at times I say, well, there's nothing there. And other times I say there's something there. But as it happened, four days after my mother died, I had an ayahuasca experience with the circle that I've been with for quite a while. And I didn't tell anybody that my mother had just died before the ceremony. I didn't tell. I didn't want to bum people out or anything. And occasionally, the Iowa's Carol will call individual people up to the front for a healing or something. And this night, he happened to call me, and I go up to the front, and it was amazing. You know, my mother, I actually saw an image, a huge image of my mother floating over us back then. Well, the next morning, you know,

we all stay in the same room and sleep on the floor at night. And the next morning we have a breakfast together and then we go around the circle and talk. Three different people said, who was that spirit that appeared over your head when you're up there? And that just really freaked me out because I thought, well, I'm imagining it. I'm making up my head or whatever. Three other people sensed in some regard that there was a spirit there. And I said, well, I think it was my mother. She just died. Is that possible that it's also both?

Oh, it could be. You know, I was thinking about it. I could have projected it into the, you know, there's no question about, you know, I don't buy one way or the other. I'm open-ended on it. So all I know is that was a very moving experience for me. And then other people saw something happen. Now, maybe they were just feeling the vibration of what I was going through. I wonder if you could, I mean, I don't understand exactly what's going on

when you're having any sort of a psychedelic experience, but I would imagine that if you are both in the same mindset, like if you and the person who's also on ayahuasca is in the room and you're all in the same sort of psychedelic mindset, there's got to be some sort of an exchange of information that's coming from your head to their heads. I mean, that's why they wanted to call it telepathy. Telepathy, yeah. Yeah, before they discovered that it was already named and it was called Harmeen. Telepathy. Telepathy, yeah. Yeah, before they discovered that it was already named and it was called Harmeen.

I have a friend that had some really demonstrable experiment like that that happened to him. And so he and another person who were thinking the same thing at the same time, having the same vision. What did they do? What was it? They had this one guy who's on one corner of the room and he's thinking he was having some UFO experience where there was a spaceship, and he was thinking about getting on the spaceship. And just as he's thinking it, the guy on the other side of the room says, hey, don't forget there's only room for 10 people. Whoa. You know, they're opposite sides of the room, quiet and stuff like that. Yeah, I've heard people have really, like, unique visuals that everyone in the room had.

And I always wonder if maybe you can conjure up something with your imagination or with your focus, your ideas. You can conjure up sort of a psychic image in your mind. And because everybody's tuned into this thing, they see it in their hallucinogenic imagination as well. Definitely possible. It's possible, right? I know. And yet on the most intense experience I ever had, I was really, I'd never had an experience as transformative as this in ayahuasca. And I can't even quite describe it, but I was shocked the next morning that the world

hadn't ended and everybody had experienced this. Nobody in the room was even close to this. And I'd had the most transformative experience of my life. And to them, it was just another night. Yeah, that's the weirdest thing about doing DMT, that you're sitting on a couch and outside your house, nothing's changed. But inside your head, a whirlwind of possibilities have opened. And you've all of a sudden seen a world that couldn't possibly have ever existed, even in your imagination, just a few minutes before. Even in your imagination is a strong statement, but it's absolutely true. Once you do DMT, if you've never done it and you have a breakthrough experience,

the one thing that everybody always says is, I never saw that coming. Right. Never would have imagined that that was possible. Yeah, it's pretty awesome some of the things that do happen. But, you know, whether they're happening in your head or somewhere else, it's just hard to say. Or both. Or both. Yeah, ayahuasca, you know, I think a lot of what happens is what your intention is going in.

Yeah. And, you know, I had one experience where I wanted to get rid of my fear. I was really, you know, I couldn't watch the fearactor because it was just so, made me fearful. Womp, womp, womp. I'm a wimp, yeah. No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm making the womp, womp, womp. Yeah.

But, so I decided that was the night I wanted to get rid of fear. And, you know, you fasted. Watching Fear Factor, you decided you wanted to get rid of that? No, no, it was in ayahuasca. It was my intention that night. No, it wasn't Fear Factor. I'd never go on it. So, you fast the day before.

I've been fasting since around 8 in the morning. I only had a few sips of water, so there's nothing in my stomach. Sometimes you purge, you vomit, and sometimes you don't. The first half dozen times I did it, I did not vomit. And you get disappointed once you get into the purging. Then you realize it's like being inside a fireworks display. It's really spectacular. It sounds gross.

Really? So as you're throwing up, it's amazing? Oh, it's amazing. It just amps the whole experience up. It's close to an orgasm. Whoa. Not real close, but that's what it will bring to mind. Wow.

Anyhow, you sit there, and all of a sudden a little voice will come in your head and said, grab your bucket. Because you sit with an empty bucket. Grab your bucket. And whenever I hear that little voice, I grab my bucket because I know I'm going to start. You got excited to throw up. Not the first few times. But after a while, I got into it.

And it said, grab your bucket. And it said, we're getting rid of your fear tonight. And so I start purging and purging and purging. And I said, grab your bucket. And it said, we're getting rid of your fear tonight. And so I start purging and purging and purging. And I said, oh, wow, I finally got rid of it. Oh, no, you got more to go. And I purged for maybe 45 minutes. And the next morning when I go to empty the bucket, there's a couple inches of black crap in this bucket. And I didn't have hardly anything in my stomach.

And according to the way the shamans speak is you're, it's psychic energy, you're purging. And so I really had a visual pouring my fear down the toilet in the morning. Damn, I would have saved that shit and sent it to a lab. Did you imagine if they isolated a new compound? I had never thought of that. And it actually comes out of your body and they find that fear is actually something that exists in your body and can be removed. Jeez, I wish I'd thought of that. I don't know what lab I'd send it to. What was it?

Maybe they find out it's just like spaghetti. Yeah. You have some old spaghetti in there. It's just indigestion. It's not fear. Yeah, it's the years when you were smoking cigarettes. Yeah. Left some stuff on the walls.

Yeah. Left some cigarette graffiti. That's fascinating. You should have taken pictures of it or something. Well, you know, at the time, you don't really think of those things. Is it possible that it was just all the ayahuasca you drank? You drank two inches of ayahuasca? No.

Oh, no. You only drink a little shot glass. A little shot glass. Yeah. So how was it two inches of liquid? What was in it? Was it just bile? What was in your stomach?

It was not real thick. It was just bile, I guess. It looked black. What did it smell like? Puke. Puke. guess. It looked black. What did it smell like? Puke. Puke. Hmm. Interesting.

Wow. You should have taken a picture of that. That sounds like pretty intense stuff. And then once it, is it possible that you were still high when you saw two inches of? Yes. I mean. I love how you answered that. That was awesome.

See, you drink at about 8 o'clock at night or so. Right. And then by 2 in the morning, 3 in the morning, most of the people are back to baseline. Sometimes you say, oh, yeah, I'm back to baseline. You find you can't stand up. But then you sleep on the floor there and get up in the morning. By the next morning, you're pretty much back to baseline as far as the chemical, but you're still in the thrall of the thing, and you're somewhere else.

Right. So, yeah, it might have been two millimeters. Yeah. But either way, there was something in there. I'm not going to change my memory of it, though. Yes, that's a good idea. Just hang on to it. That's how Jesus got started.

Write it down in about a year. He lasted for a while. Tell it to a bunch of people. Let it get crazier and crazier every time you tell it. And then a few years later write it down. But write it down in like metaphors. In Latin. Yeah, in parables. Zos spake veris.

Well there's a guy, there's a scholar in Jerusalem in, who wants to, he's trying to push the idea that Moses was on psychedelics when he found the tablets. And that the burning bush was actually the acacia bush, which is rich in DMT. And that's why it's burning. Like in burning the bush, he saw God. He's trying to say that what this meant was they burnt the the contents of this plant You're just getting many many many many translations from ancient Hebrew to Latin to Greek the fact that to this day in ancient Hebrew There's a lot of dispute about what things mean in the first place like for folks who don't know ancient Hebrew

Didn't have they didn't have, they didn't have numbers. So letters doubled as numbers. So the letter A was also the number one. Right. So words had numerical value, like the word love and the word God have the same numerical value. It's a really strange system that we lost the context of all these magical sort of definitions of things and descriptions of things because there was mathematical qualities to these words that we, to this day we it's such a unique way of looking at things in comparison to how we look at things today we look at words and then we look at mathematics as being completely separate they had it all kind of combined together in some sort of a weird ancient language right that doesn't exist anymore so when people try to translate it, and then you go from that to Latin and Greek and, you know, it's gone.

It's all weird now. So when these guys are trying to go back and look at these original descriptions, they say, well, burning bush might very well be the acacia bush. It makes sense. It's prominent in the area. And if they had figured out a way to get DMT from this bush, they had figured out a way to do some kind of a process and extract it. That could be how they described it. And that was one of the things that John Margo Allegro had said about the Bible. When they had studied the Dead Sea Scrolls and he wrote that book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, he was saying that they were trying to hide these things from the Romans when they were captured, when

people were originally writing these things down. And what they really were were descriptions of psychedelic mushroom consumption and of fertility cults. And that they hid all these in stories and in parables because they wanted to keep the information, but they didn't want other people to be able to access it.

By the way, I heard you mention that book before and you said you got an old copy, but you know Jan Ervin has republished it, so you can get it on Amazon. Yeah, it's very cool that he's done that. Yeah, you can get it now. I bought it many, many years ago because of Jack Herrer. Jan introduced me to Jack Herrer, and Jack Herrer was working on a book with this other guy who turned out to be a pedophile. He wound up murdered in jail or something like that.

Really crazy stuff. But they were working on this book about Santa Claus and the connection between Santa Claus and the Amanita muscaria mushroom. Right, yeah, I've read all that. Yeah, that was basically all his work. And then it was the connection between psilocybin mushrooms and religious experiences.

And Jack Harrow had all these old images, like really old images of ancient paintings that showed naked people dancing under this translucent mushroom. And that there was their way of describing being under the ecstasy of mushrooms. And then he showed me all these different religious institutions and buildings

and places that had mushroom-shaped doorways and had mushroom iconography and then mushrooms all over the place. So you didn't even think of mushrooms. Like the way a cardinal's outfit is red and white. Like you're saying, what they're signifying is mushrooms. The ancient images of halos, you've seen those, right? Right, right. The ancient images of halos is a mushroom cap.

I mean, it is a mushroom cap. It literally is. I've seen a lot of those old images. In the first century, the so-called Christian churches had a lot of mushrooms in them. Yeah. In their art. They didn't have that hula hoop thing floating above their head. They had this thing behind them which showed this mushroom cap.

I mean, with literally all the lines underneath the cap. Pull up images if you can. There's an article where I linked to it. It was Santa Claus was a mushroom. I wrote it in like 2007 for my website. It's on joerogan.net. And I put in it a bunch of photographs, a couple of them of ancient people that had mushroom caps for their halos. It's only about the last few thousand years that this has been suppressed,

but it was pretty active psychedelic in the ancient times. It's amazing that this is all true. This sounds like nonsense. I mean, this sounds like some flat-earth shit. If you don't know any better and you're listening to you and I talk about this, like, wait a minute, I don't a minute. But it's well documented. Yeah. There's a lot of documentation about it.

There's a lot of information that shows that there was not just the Christian religion, but many, many, many, many, many religions were aware of psychedelic mushrooms. Here, Jamie's going to pull up this. Did you find it yet? Yeah. going to pull up this uh did you find it yet oh um the the the uh the images like that jack harris showed me were really unique and i haven't been able to locate him since he was in the middle of a book before he had a stroke right that's a shame yeah it was really sad he had i'd met him and then he had a he had a stroke and then he had a second stroke as well i met him i believe after the first one he was because he was having difficulty talking then, but it wasn't as bad. And then apparently he had a bad one. But they were in

the middle of creating this book. And his story was fascinating because Jack Herro, like you, was a Republican. He was a Goldwater Republican, as he describes it. And then he got divorced, met a girl, smoked some pop there, and the world opened up. Well, you know, a lot of the UFO thing may be a DMT release. About 10 or 12 years ago, I corresponded with Whitney Stryberg because in one of his books, he had said something that to me sounded just like a DMT trip. And he allowed us, hey, that might be possible. And then about a year or so later, he did a radio show with Strassman

that you were in his movie, Spirit Molecule. And the two agreed that some of the abduction experiences could be a spontaneous release of DMT. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, when you think about it, why are all these experiences where people are getting abducted all happening in the middle of the night? And that's when your brain is producing the most DMT, allegedly.

I mean, they know for a fact now. That's been proven by the Cottonwood Research work that Strassman's done, Cottonwood Research Foundation. They've found DMT in a live rat's pineal gland. They found that recently. Wow. So they know for a fact that the pineal gland is a source of DMT. That's the first I've heard of real research because that's been speculated on, but nobody really tinned it down.

Yeah, I'll pull up the article because it's pretty interesting. Found in live rats' pineal gland. I mean, that's one thing that they've always pointed to it. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence, especially the ancient religious work of the third eye itself being this symbol of mysticism, much like the mushroom cap being the halo. But we're just now getting back, and unfortunately we've lost so much information that humans had at one time about these substances. But I think part of the transition that took place was the rites of Eleusis.

So many thousands of people went through that. That lasted for a couple thousand years. But in about 300 B.C., the state took over control of the rights. And once the government took over control, things changed. This is the article on the CottonwoodResearch.org website, which is Strassman's Foundation. It says, we're excited to announce the acceptance for publication of a paper documenting the presence of DMT in the pineal gland of live rodents. The paper will appear in the journal Biomedical Chromatography and describes experiments that took place in Dr. Gimo Bor... Wow, this guy's a weird name.

B-O-R-G-I-G-I... J-I-G-I-N. B-O-R-J-I-G-I-N. How do you say that? Dot me. Or does a J and a G together... Bitch, what are you trying to do to people? Why the fuck would you put a J and a G together?

One or the other, you greedy bitch. They're both G sounds. Pick one. What is that saying? See those images? Do you see the one up there? That's it. Oh, there it is, yeah. I mean, that is about as clear as day. That's both G sounds. Pick one. Pick one. What is that saying? See those images? Do you see the one of there? That's it. Oh, there it is, yeah.

I mean, that is about as clear as day. That's the bottom of a goddamn mushroom. Yeah, you can see where the spores would come out. Well, there's one. Don't go to YouTube. There's one on my website. I can't get to it. It's not there?

Yeah. Did you Google it? Yeah. Okay. What the fuck happened? So have you ever seen a machine elf or a self-transforming basketball? No.

I haven't either. But you know what I finally figured out? Those self-transforming basketball? No. I haven't either. But you know what I finally figured out? Those self-transforming basketballs, I figured out I'm seeing the same thing, but I wouldn't call it that. I'd call it something else. And that's why I never describe what I see, because then you plant that seed in somebody's head. And Terrence did plant the seed of the self-transforming machine elves and the basketballs, jeweled basketballs. And I think that if you get rid of those words, those labels, you'll see things that you could say, well, I could say that, but I'd rather say this about it.

So a lot of people get disappointed when they smoke DMT and they don't see the machine elves and the basketballs. Yeah, I don't know what that means, the machine elves and the basketballs and all that stuff. Is my website down or something like that? It was linking back to the new podcast site for some reason. Oh, so the links are bad? Is that what it is? Maybe. No way.

Really? Hmm. Okay, well, I found it in two seconds. If you go to WordPress, you can still find it, but the images aren't there anymore. I found that it didn't have any images, which is what I was looking for. I got to get these guys to fix my website. That's bullshit.

Although that stuff should be up there with photographs. Not up there? None of it's up there? Oh, great. Not that way, at least. It's somewhere else. How dare they? But I think it's probably pretty obvious that if you're dealing with people that lived a long time ago,

and we know for a fact that these substances existed a long time ago, they've been here forever. So people would have found them. They would have ate them. They would have freaked out, and they would have told everybody or tried to tell people that they cared about. Just like we do. Or the information, just like we do. I mean, without a doubt, it's got to be like one of the most powerful things that can happen to a person outside of dying. Yeah.

Outside of having children, children dying losing a loved one What have you one of the most powerful things and experiences that you can have is a psychedelic It shouldn't be missed whether you never have a second one or not. You should at least have one. Yeah, it's well It's just amazing that it's illegal still. Yes. It's amazing that they've been able to hold on this long With everything that we know now about what is legal. We talked about before cigarettes. What crime? What are you trying to do?

Trying to keep everybody weak? You know, if I was inclined to believe that that's there's the evidence right there. If I was inclined to believe they are trying to keep people stupid and weak. Well, I buy into Terrence's theory that nobody's in charge. You know, there's a bunch of competing groups that have a lot of power, but not any one of them is in charge calling the shots. And most of them are pretty stupid people.

You know, we think some of these people are maybe smart because they have money or something. Most of them inherited it or they got it as a derivative trader or something. But most people in Congress and politics and no matter who you meet, you know, they're like you and I. We're all, you know,

some of them have experience in these jobs, but we shouldn't give them all this credence of knowing all. No, they live a life that's the momentum of what they've done in the past and what their ancestors have done, how they've gotten to this position because of their family name

and the business that they grew up in and what have you. It's just a momentous thing. And once the family controls a certain amount, whether it's the World Bank or whether it's whatever the fuck, you know, your corporation, your family owns, once someone has that kind of power and control, they're not very, it's not very likely that they're going to be willing to let that go. And they bring their children up in that same moment. You know, they're going to private

schools or meeting the same friends who are from the same kind of families. And so it's an inbreeding kind of thing. It's one of the problems with capitalism. But I also think it's one of the yins and the yangs of life. And one of the reasons why there's so much motivation for people to get things together today is because we see so much evil and corruption and hypocrisy. We see it, so we get motivated. Well, the Internet's changed everything.

We can see things without going through a corporate sensor now, too. Yeah, that's never happened before. And I think people are way more informed now because of that. Oh, the Internet's changed all the rules. You know, if the Internet was around in the 60s, there would have been a different outcome. But I think that what's going on now is going to make the 60s look like the 50s, you know, that things are changing. Right. I think slowly but surely people are waking up to the idea that we aren't the same people that we were in just 1994. Oh.

Seven years ago, there was no iPhone. That has changed a lot of things. Yes. Apps and, you know, Twitter and Facebook and all that jazz. Just the ability to get, like, I love Twitter because I get links sent to me. Like, check out this new scientific finding. Look at this new discovery. Check out this video, this is amazing,

this guy made this, and look at that. It's like the amount of interesting information that comes to you directly on your phone on a daily basis is pretty staggering. Well, you know, when we were first trying to get the Internet going in the phone companies, there wasn't a lot of acceptance. Nobody, the banks wouldn't talk to us, the government wouldn't talk to us, but our company bought BBN, which built the original routers and had control of about a third of the backbone.

And we were watching, you know, say, oh, there's already a million people connected to the Internet. Oh, there's 2 million. Now there's 5 million. And we were comparing with how fast phones rolled out. And it was just several orders of magnitude faster. But to get to where we are today, I don't think anybody 10 years ago would have predicted it, you know, to have a billion people connected already. Nobody saw it coming, and nobody knows what's going to be here in 10 years. Oh, yeah, it would be crazy to try to predict it.

It's going to be way weirder. But, you know, and the iPhone and the iPad and wireless, you know, when I was in the business, I was at dinner afterwards. I was representing the phone company, so they'd take me out to wine and dine me. And talking to this one guy who's the president of a new combination of Netscape and Sun, they formed an alliance. And their senior vice president was saying, hey, you need to start doing more research and development in Wi-Fi. And this was before, you know, there was essentially no wireless. And this was only like, I don't know, 14 years ago or something. And I said, oh, the wireless, that's not going to work. And he says, we're putting all of our R&D money into it

because we're all living up in the hills over San Jose and there's no internet connectivity. And by the time we retire, we want high speed wireless internet in our home. That was a lot of the motivation for doing that. Wow. That's interesting. Of personal interest. And, you know, one of the things people don't want to talk about, about the internet, but since we were running part of the backbone, I could go to, you know, watch it through the network, the NOC, and watched them manage the traffic on the backbone of the Internet. And it was in a weekday around 3.30 or 4 o'clock, a big spike would hit of usage on the East Coast. Excuse me.

And as the time would go, 4 or 5, by 6 o'clock, the East Coast spike would go down and the Midwest would be up. And then it was like a pig going through a python. And it was young kids coming home from school before their parents were there downloading porn. Without porn, the phone companies wouldn't have put all that money into the backbone because it was huge business. Isn't that how it always works, though? That's how the video recorder, videotape came out, you know, because people could watch porn at home. Yeah, VHS, the VHS market. Remember those?

I bought a beta. Did you really? You were one of those guys? Yeah. They were supposed to be better, though, weren't they? Well, yeah, but you couldn't get many titles on them. The quality was better. It was a better quality.

Yeah, the quality was supposed to be better. You got to go with whatever the mass-produced thing is. Do you remember those things that you used to have to go through to look at the porn? You used to have to go through beads or saloon doors. Oh, the shops, yeah. And you'd go in a little cubby hole or something like that, yeah. You'd have to go through saloon doors in order to get to the porn section. And in the afternoons, you could see the cars from all the salesmen's cars are parked out there, you know.

Yeah, and people just look at you so squirrelly like, oh, look at that person over there. Yeah, I can't believe I'm in this place, you know. What are you doing over there? Don't sit down in the seat. Yeah, people are interesting like that. They don't want you to know that they like sex. Or like masturbating. They don't want to pretend.

They want to pretend somehow. Yeah, like they never do it. Yeah, it's a fascinating aspect of us. We're so weird. I don't think that humans have always been that way. Really? I think the last 2,000 years have been pretty repressive. What happened?

Christianity. Largely. Really? Yeah, I think organized religion. The sex thing was weird because we know there's a lot of sex going on in the clergy, you know, but, you know, the boy sex, et cetera. But I think it's been, you know, you read about the Borgia popes and stuff like that. You know, the higher elevations of the church have always been big involved in sex,

but they've been telling the people, no, no, no. Well, they used to have sex, like popes and priests and bishops They used to have sex with women. Oh, you should be like totally normal. They had kids yeah, yeah But they had they were getting so much pussy. Oh, there's got so out of control. Hey. I'm the Pope You know who's gonna say no exactly and so people go and you know what listen. That's it. You can't have sex anymore Yeah, which is hilarious unless you become a priest and join our little group here. But even then, you know, you have an undercover sex with kids. You know, like how, the idea that an undercover group of, of kid fuckers could run a gigantic cult that would encapture like a billion

people worldwide. That in 2013 is in one of the most incredible facts about our reality. Yeah. You know, I was raised Catholic and altar boy. I served Mass all through four years of college, even. Did you ever get touched? Huh? Never once. Never once? Never approached, never touched. Nobody offered you a cigarette or a drink? Not a thing. Come on, Father Callahan's room for a drink. You know, all those four years I was an altar boy in college, I never went to communion because I wouldn't go to confession because I didn't want to tell them I masturbated. That's funny. That, you know, during all that time, I was never once approached. But a guy, he became a priest.

He was a close friend of mine when he was a kid. We went to Boy Scout camp together. He turned out to be a pedophile priest. You know, it was a real tragedy for the family. We knew all these. Do you think that that happens just because of repression? That someone has access to no sex, and then when they're around kids, they just almost are overwhelmed with the need to be touched?

You know how you are when you're 20 years old, and that's all you think about. And if you're repressed, maybe go wherever the first option is and opportunity is. But I don't think he was actually molested as a child because he and I went through the same priests and everything. And I'm pretty sure he wasn't molested. This happened to him after he got to the seminary. Wow. That's horrible. Yeah.

It's a shame. It's even more horrible if the actual act of making someone celibate sort of perpetrates this and turns people in some ways towards having sex with almost basically anybody they can. Celibacy is going to go away eventually. I hope so. It hasn't been here only a few hundred years. Well, religions are going to go away too. Well, hopefully. Yeah. I mean, but the idea that people have done that throughout time is also another disturbing fact of civilization when you find out about Socrates and, you know, they had sex with young boys on a regular basis. Well, that still happens in some countries, I know, that we had a friend who told us some real, what I consider horror stories that they considered sort of normal behavior, you know? Yeah. I've had friends have gone to Afghanistan and described, you know, what they call man love Thursdays or boy love Thursdays.

I don't know how much is true and how much is not. But, you know, the idea that people have sex with young boys for pleasure and women for procreation. Right. And that this is, you know, a practice that's been in human society. Something I can't get my head around that. Well, hopefully the internet will expose that as well. I mean, I wonder what it would take

to psychically clean us up of all our weird patterns that we're caught up in and trapped in. Regular and frequent psychedelic experiences. That could help. And also communication. Oh. Communication in a way that we've never... I think psychedelics lubricate communications.

Certainly. First of all, there's a lot of things that you can't even put words around. And so you get together and you start trying to do art or music or some way to do that. Let's communicate and get a new language. Look at what all Alex Gray has done in getting that message out there. So you're right. Look how far we've come in our lifetime. We're nowhere near where I want to be, but I've been in New Orleans when I had to look at a white drinking fountain, black drinking fountain, where to sit on the streetcar.

Segregation is still here, but it's not nearly as bad as it was. It's not quite as sanctioned as it was. Women's rights are a little bit better. And my son was able to get married to the man he loved, you know. So we are making some social progress and probably making a lot more in a short period of time than we realize. Yeah, that's where the exponential growth really kicks in, is in social progress. And, you know, like I've made fun of a lot of like really heavy duty lefties, you know, people that are like ultra progressive to the point of being ridiculous.

But I kind of appreciate the effort because this powerful, strong effort for whatever it is. I mean, I've gotten in trouble for saying that I don't think a transgender man who became a woman should be able to fight in women's MMA. My point is from the safety of the athlete. my point is from the safety of the athlete, but people have defended transgender people because of the fact that they automatically stand up for someone they feel like is being oppressed. And I appreciate that. I appreciate the idea behind that. I think I appreciate the sentiment behind that.

And I think that's fascinating as a culture that there are people that if you repress gay rights, they will go after you and they will write. I think that's a good thing, whether it's misguided or not, and a lot of times it is when it comes to certain aspects of progressive thinking. The fact that heavy-duty lefty behavior exists and exists in big groups and big organized groups I think is very important. I think it's very important because it balances out the heavy-duty right wing and right leaning groups.

I think all those things eventually with education and with the undeniable truth that the internet presents, we'll find some sort of a comfortable medium of truth where really self-aggrandizing douchey behavior on the left is just as gross as self-aggrandizing douchey behavior on the right. And people realize that compassion does not have to have an ideology attached to it. douchey behavior on the left is just as gross as self-aggrandizing douchey behavior on the right. And people realize that compassion does not have to have an ideology attached to it. It should be a part of how human beings behave. You know, when I was a Republican, I was not a bad person. I was very misinformed. I, you know, and I came up from the poor side of the street. You know, my dad didn't have a car when I was growing up and stuff. And so I, you know, I made a lot of money. I thought, oh, this is great. I did this on my own, but I didn't. You know, my dad didn't have a car when I was growing up and stuff. And so I, I, you know, I made a lot of money and I thought, Oh, this is great. I did this on my own, but I didn't, you know, I, I've decided that until everybody has the same advantages as a white

college educated American male, I'm not allowed to complain. That's not even then. It's not, you know, you know, I've had some, even though we didn't have money, I was, I had so many advantages. Oh, We're running out of time here. But I would like to talk to you a little bit more. Do you want to talk some more? Sure. Let's end this and we'll talk a little bit more.

Okay. So we'll say thanks to everybody for tuning into the podcast. Thanks to LegalZoom.com. Go to LegalZoom.com. Use the code ROGAN and save yourself some cash. Thanks also to Ting. Go to rogan.ting.com, use the code ROGAN, and save yourself some cash. Thanks also to Ting. Go to rogan.ting.com and save yourself $25 off of any new phone on Ting. Bring your iPhones over from Sprint, and you can use them there.

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