The Joe Rogan Experience - #564 - Sturgill Simpson

Episode Date: October 20, 2014

Sturgill Simpson is an American country music singer-songwriter. He has released two albums independently, "High Top Mountain" & "Metamodern Sounds in Country Music" available on Spotify.

the Joe Rogan experience fresh off the road Sturgill Simpson ladies and gentlemen thanks for doing this man I really appreciate it yeah man you kidding me yeah i'm here you're here i you know i had heard about your music from several people online i don't remember who made me take the plunge and download your shit like a bunch of people had recommended you i had shooter jennings on and along those lines like people said like hey man if you really dig shooterer Jennings, you got to check out Sturgill Simpson.

Right. And so somewhere along the line, I downloaded, I think it was, well, I downloaded two CDs, but the Turtles All The Way Down song, that was the first song I heard.

I was like, oh shit, this guy's doing something unusual. You're doing some psychedelic country music, man. You're mixing shit up in a very bizarre way. Yeah, I don't know. I grew up listening to everything. But for whatever reason, if I go to write or sing a song, I can only do one of two things. That's either sing country or bluegrass is what i primarily grew up on

so uh i don't know the the first record i did was a very traditional country record in terms of thematical and lyrical elements and uh i said this before but it's true i just i reached a point where i was like i'm i'm very happily married i'm i'm sober you know for the longest period and just so drinking songs and heartache and all that wasn't something that i was particularly very excited about tackling again you know right so do you feel like you have to like hit certain themes if you're doing country music because it just sort of falls into that it seems to be somewhat self-restricting in a lot of ways. It hasn't evolved very much, even since, you know, 60s or 70s. Right.

There were periods that are very dated now, like 70s and 80s country. You can hear the production values, and it just, there's nothing, you know, even some of the most timeless singers that ever played the music, the records that they made got subjected to these really bad taste choices so right it just doesn't stand up um so i don't know date my producer who's a really close friend of mine dave cobb who actually did shooters first couple records um shooters a buddy he's a good dude love that dude yeah very very sweet such a cool guy to hang out with, too. Yes. Dave and I just kind of, you know, I came to Nashville about four years ago, almost five now, I guess.

And I just, I knew more than anything what I didn't want to do. And I met with Dave Shooter, actually, I think, told him one night we were all at a Billy Joe Shaver concert. I didn't know any of those guys. And they were sitting upstairs. It was like Shooter and Jamie Johnson and some other guys and Dave. And apparently Shooter was like, hey, man, you see that guy right there? And Dave's like, yeah, he's like the best fucking country singer in Nashville. So the next day, somehow my manager got an email from Dave and we had lunch. And I was like, all right.

He's from Georgia. We both love the same records growing up. I just kind of feel like i know this dude i can work with this guy right and there was nobody in there because i paid for both albums entirely by myself or like dug a big giant hole of debt wow and then how much does it cost to put on an album the first one um i i thought when i was doing it this may very well be the only time I ever get to do this, you know? Right. And I wanted something that I could be proud of and something my family could be proud of for once,

you know what I mean? I just knew it had to be right, and I couldn't compromise in any way. And there was a certain sound we were after, so Dave, he said, well, let's just get the guys that played on those old records. And I'm like, yeah, let's fucking do that. I didn't know how the game worked.

Right, right. So then I'm looking up, and the next thing I know, I studio there's like this guy's like pig robbins who pretty much invented country piano he played on i think his first session was with george jones on white lightning and what a fucking name yeah he's on he played on blonde on blonde yeah he's this old blind pig robbins pig hargis pig robbins what a great fucking name god that's an american name actually it could probably be english too english we had a lot of fun because he i mean he toured with everybody he played on patsy cline records and wow records and wow so you know and i knew when those sessions ended i knew that i had absolutely done my best because I had to. These guys would just bust your balls in a second.

So I feel like we sort of cleared my throat with that one. And then lo and behold, a year later, I found myself in a position where I was going to get to make another record. I was like, all right, well, maybe this one will be a little bit more selfish or self-absorber for me. I was like, all right, well, maybe this one will be a little bit more selfish or self-absorber for me. So Dave and I incorporated a lot of other elements of, I guess, sonic templates you don't normally hear in most country music. And that gave me the freedom to kind of go out there with the themes as well. So I was doing a lot of reading at the time. Always had, like, weird shit, and uh the we'll get there but uh

i don't know i mean it was the most the most truly inspirational group of songs i feel like i've ever written because it was just from such a fresh place you know maybe that's why the record's done well it's very unique you know it's very very unique in that it has a lot of country sound to it. But like that Turtles All The Way Down song, who the fuck is doing songs about mind-expanding consciousness, expanding drugs in country music? I mean, that's just not being done. But it's still really good country music.

I like a lot of country music. country music like i i like a lot of country music you know and then i even songs that are even like a song that's sort of a classic song with all those themes that you talked about before like drinking a heartache if it's well done yeah i still really like it you know absolutely no i mean if it's if it's if it's pure yeah and honest and it's great music i just didn't feel like i had anything to offer there right right right yeah um the sound though is uh i think people are starting to accept that not not even starting to accept but sort of for a long time country got classified amongst a lot of young people as being like a dumb kind of music you know and unfairly so and i think that as some young people started getting into some

of the other country like getting into some Johnny Cash songs for instance you know you start going oh this is country too okay well you you can't say Johnny Cash songs are dumb you just can't I mean they were just he had too much crazy shit going on those songs you know it's undeniable you know there's a lot going on in between the lines oh yeah there's a lot going on a boy named Sue I mean just think about that song I mean he had some great songs and then he did the highwaymen and that was an interesting song too like that thing that he did with willie nelson and uh who who else was it was it christopher yeah was it waylon yeah and they did this this crazy song about reincarnation that to this day if you never heard it um go go find that

song highwaymen and uh it's uh this really wild song because it's all different verses sung by a different guy like willie will sing one verse and then johnny comes in i fly a starship oh my god that's a good fucking song it's just whoa well you know weirdly it and it's it's so it's funny to me the country has this really rigid perception by the public yeah i mean all the if you look back at any of of the really good great country singers they were all batshit man i mean it was just like someone was colorful weird characters to ever walk through american history you know so i mean it for me it's not really much of a stretch. I didn't feel like I was really going out there too far.

You know what it is, man? It's Southism. It's like racism towards the South. It's like thinking that anybody who has a Southern accent has got to be a moron, thinking anybody who's singing country songs, they've got to suck. That's what it is.

It's an urban form of classism. You look at that style of music and they automatically, some people did for a while. But I think guys like Shooter, guys like you, you guys are opening up and Honey Honey Band does a lot of country type sound. I think a lot of people are opening up people's ideas of what that sound really is. And you hear a great song it's like god damn it that's a great song it doesn't matter if they got a banjo playing in the background you can't tell me that song didn't fuck you up right you know i think i think people are starting to realize like there's it's just good man there's just good there's good disco

songs man okay you ever heard kiss i was made for loving you it's a good goddamn disco song i don't give a fuck what anybody said i'm not a kiss hater man i love the monkeys when i was a kid dude the monkeys had some good fucking songs i don't care if they were put together neil diamond wrote half that shit did he really yeah that's why the songs are so fucking great man oh wow that makes a lot of sense wow that's incredible i like neil songs. I fucking said it. I fucking said it. I don't care what he's doing with his hair. I'd like a goddamn Neil Diamond song.

Any day. Yeah, man. That was a genius. I think when you expand your horizon and sort of open up your ideas of musical appreciation, I've tried really hard with a lot of stuff, and it just can't catch. Like every few months or so I try with jazz. I'll throw some Coltrane on

and I'll be like pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew pew I'll be in my car and then five minutes in I fucking snap. I just can't take it anymore.

And I'll throw some Kid Rock on or something just to turn it the other way. I just can't do it. It's probably the only music I never got into. Like I like hillbilly jazz but I don't like I don't know like Charles Mingus's probably the only music I never got into. I like hillbilly jazz, but I don't know.

Charles Mingus and guys like that, maybe I can listen. But even in brief doses. Because I just prefer a melody, you know? Yeah. I like a song, a good song. I think one thing that it's good for, I like jazz at a bar. Like if you're having a couple drinks and some jazz is playing in the background, it's not like a very recognizable song.

It's just interesting music. It's interesting background music. But as far as it being my main focal point, not really. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I need to find the right stuff. What do you listen to? I tried a bunch of different shit. Thelonious Monk.

I've tried some Coltrane. Obviously, they're great musicians. There's no denying they have skill, but it just doesn't grip me in any way. I don't know what it is. You ever heard Bitches Brew by Miles Davis? Yes. Yes.

That's a pretty killer. Pretty killer. I can do, I can get down with that. Yeah. I mean, there's some riffs that I really enjoy for a long, but I can't like sit,

like I can sit and listen to the same Leonard Skinner album, maybe like three times in a row, you know, I can sit and listen to the same Leonard Skinner album maybe like three times in a row. But it's very hard for me to listen to the same jazz stuff over and over and over again. I just, I don't know, whatever it is. I'm missing it. Woody Allen's got it and I'm missing it. You know? There's a saying, you know, you're going to go play jazz until the money runs out.

Yeah, I'm sure. Well, we were just in Philadelphia. I was in Philly on Friday night, and we passed by this jazz bar, and we thought, man, we should go after this show. Go fucking see some jazz. Never did it. No. No.

We thought about it. It's one of those things I always say I should do. I've never said that. I've never said it myself. Let's go hear some jazz. So how did you get into singing country music was that what you've always sang or did you do around with other forms of music first oh yeah well actually i didn't really have a choice both my grandfathers played um you know

well actually we're in eastern kentucky where i'm originally from everybody's really plays music but it's it's what you do after work, you know. Really? Yeah, my mom's brother, like all his friends, they had this house, and there's these two twin brothers, and both of them never married, so they turned their house into a fucking practice space, and they just had this PA and lights and shit that stayed set up all the time. Wow.

So I was a really young kid, and I'd go over there. I'd always play guitar, and, yeah, I mean, before I even really knew anything about music or songwriting, I think I was learning how to play in a band just from hanging out with those guys. Wow. But yeah, it was never encouraged. You know, it was never like, you don't think, oh, I can do this for a living, if that makes sense. Right.

You just do it because everybody's doing it. Right. And nobody thinks they're going to leave that situation. Or for many other reasons, sense. Right. You just do it because everybody's doing it. Right. And nobody thinks they're going to leave that situation. Or for many other reasons, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it is what it is. So, yeah, Dad's dad was a big bluegrass guy, played mandolin and just shoved that shit down my throat,

I mean, repeatedly until I accepted it. And then Mom's, my other grandfather, he was like a big Merle Hagggard marty robbins guy and had an old gibson a very beautiful voice um he he probably more than anybody we'd watch he haul and shit when i was a kid and tnn and he'd kind of tell me which of the guys were actually playing and the ones that were just holding the guitar as a prop oh wow you know yeah and like roy clark and jerry reed and guys like they're huge i mean yeah i knew by the time i was five like i don't give a fuck about anything else ever

school i could have dropped out of school in third grade it would have been the same result that's interesting so you're kind of groomed you know at least in the music sense but not maybe in becoming a professional right yeah without knowing it maybe um because i'd never really played in many bands um but yeah i had an older cousin mike too he was like six or seven years older than me so you know just older teenage neighbors with chevy novas and shit listening to guns and roses you know when you're in fifth grade but mike really i remember very vividly one weekend we'd go up to visit, they had a farm in Ohio, and I was probably in fourth or fifth grade,

and I remember he knew I was really into music, I was playing guitar already, and he's like, what are you listening to? I don't know, I mean, it probably was the Monkees or something. And he took me to his bedroom, and he had one of those like tower stereo systems with the glass door and the super headphones, and CDs had just come out you know this is like 87 88 i don't know and uh he just had this already had this fucking mountain of cds and he's

like here and it was like zeppelin box set and cream and hendrix and humble pie and traffic and all these bands man it was like a fucking bomb just went off in my head. Wow. And that was it. I was done. My life was ruined. I very clearly remember the transition between records and CDs. I remember the very first CDs showing up at the record store. Because kids today probably don't even appreciate it because of the last 10 years of the internet has dominated digital downloads ever since Napster came along

and then iTunes and everybody knows how to get shit online and there's no record stores anymore. Obviously there's a few, but I mean, it used to be like a local community spot. Well, I lived in Newton, Massachusetts and we used to go down to this place that was right across the street from a place that I worked at. I worked at this ice cream place called Newport Creamery. We made hamburgers or washed dishes and did all that shit. And across the street from newport creamery was the record store all kids would go there after school it was our own cultural it was the only like output to like the the rock and roll of the world but you wanted every week a new record came out yeah yeah and i remember when

the cds came out everybody's like what is this right what the look at it's got a rainbow in it if you wiggle it it makes rainbows well the digital thing i think in a lot of ways it's great but i i blame it almost entirely for the downward spiral of you know the quality of music yeah i mean the 70s man if you if you got a record deal you had to be bad the fuck ass you know there was no slop right pro tools and shit to go make everybody you know yeah right actually there's a quote pig said this to he's like you know what they used before pro tools fucking pros that sounds like something a guy named pig would say that's awesome yeah they used to have to you know the sound was a different sound too right i mean the people that are real um vinyl heads they'll tell you i don't recognize it i'm i'm

i'm not educated yeah i mean i'm a pretty i'm kind of an audiophile fucking are you super geek about it yeah yeah i've never gotten into it i should i should really get get a record player i know maron's really into that shit he keeps stacks of them at home he listens to them they meticulously clean them and put them down you have to have the right earphones and i guess it's got like what is the sound that's different because i don't listen to vinyl i think it's just there's a warmth to it a warmth um everything just sounds really settled and cohesive whereas in digital i hear the separation especially in stereo you can just hear it's almost like you're sitting at the mixing board and you just like some asshole decided that

guitar needed to be like a hard two o'clock right there but in a vinyl it just kind of seems more three-dimensional like it's coming from around you i feel like wow so you can sort of hear the different tracks oh yeah you know maybe i just don't have a fucking ear for music maybe that makes sense some of my my choices you gotta know what you're listening for is that what it is yeah you weren't here when uh we had russell peters on russell peters is a stand-up comic friend of mine very funny guy he's also a dj and uh we were playing some songs and he could pick out was a rap song and he could pick out what the samples were from. And I was like, what?

How do you hear that? Like, I didn't even hear it. He's like, yeah, you can hear it right here. Like, that would be ba-ba-ba from, you know, 1984. And I was like, I don't know how the fuck you just did that. I trust you, but I don't know how the fuck you just did that. He's got a separate knowledge base of old music, too. Yeah.

To reference from. Yeah, and his is all old hip-hop stuff he loves like old hip-hop stuff so the thing about the record stores that people loved was that it was like uh like a sort of like because we didn't have the internet you would go there and it was like you would see, like, these, it was on, like, a big piece of paper. Like, holy shit, here's, you know, here's the new Bruce Springsteen album. Like, it's right there, and you see, oh, wow, it's like this is what he made. This is what he'd been doing for the past year. Bruce has been, you know, writing all these songs, and bam, here we go, we got it, wow. You didn't have, you didn't have fucking YouTube.

You didn't have, you know, I mean, I think that's the worst thing that ever happened is now everything's so accessible and the kids attention span is so short they'll never know that experience to sit down and listen to an album all the way through and then just fucking obsess about it and then you know hold that physical thing that sleeve in your hand just like what the fuck are these guys doing like they got a secret laboratory and i don't know there's like something i don't know about yeah and mystery i guess was the most important element of rock yeah that's just fucking gone do you remember when uh the wall came out no i wasn't i was born in 78 i mean i remember watching it way too young but uh i was in uh high school when i found out about the wall so it was after the wall come out but i remember sitting there with my friend we had like

a like the headphone jack thing plugged in so you could have two headphones both listening to it and you how everything like ties in together it seemed so beyond human reach like that these guys figured out how to do all this that they they put these amazing songs and they just sort of flow into each other like some wild ride you're on or like dark side of the moon very similar you know like the the song they always link the album they always link up to uh the wizard of oz i mean that album just everything just flows together in this crazy way it did feel like they were in a lab somewhere well marvin gaye would do that a lot too willie nelson did a lot of concept record they call it song

cycle where you just you don't ever feel like there's an actual pause anywhere in the album. It's just this one cohesive work. Wow. And that does take time and planning. We did a little bit of it on Metamodern. We kind of, you know, Pink Floyd and some other albums were definitely referenced while we were cutting that shit towards the end. When you first decided that you were going to be a professional country music singer, did you decide slowly and gradually, or did you just fucking dive in?

I only started my career attempting to have a career about four years ago. Really? And I never would have done it, to be completely honest. It was really my wife's idea. She's the one that really kind of encouraged me to go for it. Because, you know, there's always something I did as a hobbyist. I would write and play, and I'd get a lot of grief from friends, especially in my 20s.

They're like, why aren't you out? You know, man, you should be doing something. Because we'd go to shows at clubs, and they'd be like, this is fucking cool. We'd rather be at home listening to you play, you know. And I just, I don't know why. I never thought. Was it like the limitations of your environment maybe the people that you well i moved to nashville once in 2006 i went down because you know you can play in local bands and you can you know if that's what you want out of it that's great and there's a lot of people

that do that on a hobbyist level it's what you know like i said it's what you do after work and for me that just never felt rewarding enough you know i never felt like i was giving everything i could to it right and it's a very frustrating place and i ended up putting it down a lot of times because of that because it just i felt like it was bringing me more heartache than it was uh right um so i you know took jobs and worked normal jobs and i was out working a railroad job in utah for about almost four years and my wife was out there with me i guess for whatever reason from dealing with the stress of that or i didn't realize at the time i wasn't fulfilling my fucking purpose joe rogan you know what i mean uh she kind of recognized that and i started writing a lot

as a as a result of dealing with the stress from from my job and playing at home and she just kind of told me when she's like you know you don't suck at this and uh you know you're gonna wake up at 40 and know you never fucking tried and i'm stuck with your miserable ass we sold everything and and literally man she and i and our dog and a Ford Bronco drove to Nashville. Wow. That was like four years ago. So, and, you know, now I was older. I was clean.

I was focused. I had purpose. So I just, the first year, you know, you kind of got to get the lay of the land. It's a hustle. It's a total shark tank. I just decided I wasn't going to have anything to do with that shit. I'm not a social guy. I don't go to bars and clubs and things like that and so what is it like

man it's well there's so many facets to it you know depending on what the industry there's so many sides of the industry and you that people fall into and most and i'd say the the bulk majority of it is is complete and total shameless opportunists. Hmm. But then the musicians come, and everybody, you know, the thing about musicians, we're lazy as fuck, and nobody really wants to work. So you get all these guys, these side players, they're looking for songwriters to get gigs supporting or backing up,

and they want, like, half the door of what you get paid for their services because they don't want to wait tables. And there's guys that are really good and earn that money, and then there's this side of it but it just really feels like to me the first time i feel like everybody i met it's like literally hey man how's it going what can you do for me and while they're talking to you they're looking over your shoulder to see who else they should probably be talking to it's very hollywood like it's getting more and more so is that just because your money you think because there's money in country? Well. There's a lot of fucking money in country music.

That's where really that's the only thing still selling CDs. That's why the labels are still. Still got CD players. I saw something last night. There's going to be no platinum albums this year. None. For the first time in a while. I mean, now if you have a hit record, you drop an album on a major label.

If you sell 200,000 copies in a week, that's a success. Ten years ago, if you sold 200,000 copies your first week, they'd have dropped your ass. Isn't that incredible? You know? So the whole thing's just, it really is the Wild West. When the internet and social media, it affords guys like me and a lot of other people like me doing what I'm doing the opportunity to reach people without having to go down certain avenues, I guess. And country didn't used to be like that. Like Nashville used to be like what?

What was it like? It was gatekeepers and – well, when exactly do you mean? I mean before it became more Hollywood-esque the way it is now. Has it always had an element of show business to it? Oh, for sure. Yeah, they do tacky real well. And that's kind of what it's been. But I wouldn't say Hollywood.

There's a certain L.A. element to Nashville that's kind of come on in the last two or three years more so. It's very hip. I blame that Hootie and the Blowfish guy. When he crossed over. Darius Rucker. Yeah, when Darius got in, a black guy who sings Good Country. Charlie Pryor, man. God damn it.

I know, but it's been a while. Yeah, true. Darius snuck right in there, and all those white people came running with him. That's what happened. That's what happened. He brought him in. It's a very interesting situation i don't it doesn't there's a fakeness to it yeah it's very very studied and effective yes studying the effect

is the perfect way to describe it fakeness is me falling short again i just uh it i you know a lot of journalists i've been baited i can't tell you how many times they want me to get like pulled into this negative conversation just bash and talk shit on it and and i could yeah i could do that but you know there's there's so much negativity already i don't feel like i whatever this um opportunity is i don't want to use it for that right well you know what quite honestly the the negative aspects of anything whether it's show business or you know standup comedy or music, I don't think there's anything negative about talking about them. I think the positive effect of talking about them is that young people recognize that they're not crazy, that they sense something goofy about this, and then it becomes more clearly defined what's goofy about it. And it gives them a high standard to not set a trap for themselves like i know in comedy there's a thing that guys do when they first start out which really fucks you up

you're just trying to get laughs like you're saying things you don't even believe right because you're just hoping it'll work because you're just terrified because you're on stage and i think similarly in music you could just start making stuff that you think like, you know, like one of those pros that writes those pop songs. You know, those guys, those weird dudes that just know how to like make something that clicks in, but there's like no feeling to it at all. Well, they sit in cubicles in groups of four and five. I'm not kidding. That's a reality. Yeah.

Go to work. There's a big goddamn difference between that and like someone who's writing shit like you're writing. Someone who's writing shit that resonates. I can tell no matter what your influences are in this life, musically, or even while you're creating a song, it's all filtering through your unique individual vision. And that's entirely missing from all these like poppy things. And that's like something that people connect with. And some, I mean, look, there's something personal about songs that you know the dude wrote it.

You know the guy singing it. Like my friends in Honey Honey Band. They write all their shit. So when they're singing it and they're sitting here in the studio singing it, or you're seeing them on stage, that's their creation. It's 100%. And there's a uniqueness to that, that your music has, that a lot of music, that it hits a different frequency, as opposed to a poppy frequency.

And these people that are coming in that are just trying to exploit it and monetize it, they probably, that doesn't register with them. Or or even if it does they don't give a shit because that's not where they're they're just worried about the quarterly report they're very seldom do any of the people running labels actually know anything or give a shit about music it's just really more that's really more of a recent development a lot of them are run by very young guys now like in their 30s because the old the old roost kind of went out retired and it kind of turned over and a lot of the dudes that were in la in the 80s making all those awful hair metal band records those producers and engineers once that industry dried

up a lot of them moved to nashville if you turn on the radio today you'll find a lot of that shit sounds exactly like a poison record there's a reason for that right wow that's interesting that formulaic way of creating it making hits yeah and you know and i think two or three decades ago they the label still offered up the other that you had all these great bands that were making art because they knew they were going to sell a fuck ton of copies and make their money back so they were willing to take the risk.

And now there's really no risk takers. And I don't know if that's because of it. Maybe there's a lack of visionaries. Is it just because the money's dried up?

It's just they don't... I think they're just... They're all sitting in their corner offices looking out the window wishing it would go back to 1996 and twiddling their thumbs

and pray into a dying business model because they're completely dependent on radio for sale sales and singles and cumulus and clear channels pretty much all but completely lock that out to a very politically selected group of songs which somebody paid probably at least a million dollars just to get it in rotation um you know they'll pay a million or two million dollars to make a hit um that's so crazy that's sad that's sad to hear it's a business it is a business but it's sad to hear it's just like flipping real estate or something yeah um so there's no artist development anymore so and you know luckily i didn't try to do this at 22 or 26 because now i've worked real jobs and i was able to understand that the

mechanical aspect of it all and you know there's that's not the only way to do it anymore you can just kind of bypass around that it's a much longer harder road but but then again it's not but then because if you catch fire right you know just just spreads across the internet it's much more rewarding road i can tell you that. Oh, fuck yeah. It's got to be. I can only imagine. I mean, I would imagine that being stuck singing some songs that you don't believe in and that are not really good,

but everybody is really responding to, and you have something inside you that you wish you could have got out, but now you're trapped. That's got to suck. I would imagine. Do you remember when Garth Brooks came back with a different character? Chris Gaines, man.

Yeah, put the wig on. There was nobody there to say, hey, maybe you shouldn't do this. He was surrounded by yes people. You just know. Because somebody was like, yeah, that'll be cool. Someone didn't say,

wait, what? Wait, wait, what? Wait, what what wait what you're gonna hold on what are you gonna do you're gonna put a wig on and you're gonna change your name and but everybody's gonna know it's you so what are you doing are you playing a character now you're playing a character it's high art man yeah you're a you're a goddamn superstar so you're selling some you know i got friends in low places sold a lot of fucking copies and what are you gonna do now you're gonna put a fucking look at him look at he had hair across his face remember that shit he grew a soul patch

like what the fuck was going on there it's his it's his filtered interpret i think he was going for like a a ryan adams sort thing. I think he just straight went crazy. I think that was... Or he went fucking nuts. That's a very distinct possibility. He blew a rod right there. He's redlining his engine. Look at those eyes, man.

That was blowing a rod in the engine. And then from then on, he kind of disappeared. You never hear about Garth Brooks anymore. Oh, he just came back. Well, he's gonna... I mean, he'll still still do well he's got a lot of fucking hits but it's been a long time where garth brooks is in the public consciousness but meanwhile in the 1990s or whatever it was 80 i guess 90s like early 90s when did he when was he just gigantic like early 90s he just kind of came out of nowhere gigantic knocked it Cam Thai. Just knocked it right out.

Really, I think a lot of the stuff going on today is an absolute direct byproduct. We're still getting the ripples of all that. Because at some point, country music turned into a really shitty Van Halen concert. You know what I mean? Not David Lee Roth? No. Sammy Hagar. Yeah, Van Hagar.

I knew what you were going to mean. Come on, man. That's fascinating. His first tour of religion. roth no sammy hagar yeah yeah van hagar i knew what you were gonna make come on man that's it you know it's fascinating first tour of religion yeah dude i think that the original van halen with david lee ross are the greatest bands of all time but without a doubt running with the devil to this day it's like if i'm on the treadmill and i throw on running with the devil i'll crank that bitch up an extra couple miles an hour fuck it you know it's just one of those songs man but they did just as well with sammy hangar they really did would it might have done better they got more soccer moms yeah what happened commercially i think it took them even more it made them more accessible what the fuck is that i don't know how does that was my

first concert ever my dad took took me to see van halen in the fifth grade really yeah fucking eddie van halen for you know i'm up for a fifth grader that's that's amazing man in the fifth grade yeah i think mine was the ninth grade i went to see jay giles band j Guile's band was huge back then. Angels of Centerfold. Love Stinks. They were giant, man. They had a lot of deep cuts. Yeah. Giant in my high school.

Giant. In 1981 or whatever the hell it was. Where are you from? Newton. Well, that's where I went to high school. I was born in New Jersey.

I grew up kind of all over the country. Lived in San Francisco from age 7 to 11. Lived in Florida from 11 to 13. Boston from 13 to probably 23, 24. And then New York for a couple years. And California.

So I'm a Californian now. I'm more Californian than anything I've ever been in my life. But this place is a mess. It's a fucking mess it's not the worst place though it's just it's too many people if you could whittle california if you could whittle los angeles down to like one-tenth of its size as far as like population wise so just see you know you ever go to seattle i bet it was the shit in the 40s and 50s, man. I mean, it was just, it was the absolute shit. It's just a matter of, like, inconvenience and overpopulation.

Like, Seattle has, like, very few people. That town kicked my ass. Did it? Oh, yeah. What was it, the rain? Among other things, yeah. The rain did get you there. The rain is, I think, is a direct contributor to a lot of the other problems people acquire while they live in Seattle.

But the rain keeps people from moving there, too. There's a good thing about that goddamn rain. But it's beautiful. It really is. So beautiful. Especially the summers. I mean, it's really hard to beat Seattle in the summertime. It's just that other nine months of the most dismal.

I mean, I remember, like, hanging my towel up to dry after taking a shower, and you'd come in there two days later, be like fucking lichen growing on it's just a petri dish you know yeah so much precipitation that you just people are jacked up on coffee or heroin all the time but i have friends that live in seattle that were fucking defended to the death like right now the voodoo chicken is raising his fist in anger you wait till i get a hold of you he fucking moved there from indiana my friend voodoo chicken uh that's what his official stage name is and when he did that man like he liked it way better than indiana and i'm like that's good that's good but if you ever lived in los angeles have you ever lived where it just doesn't fucking rain like we're babies we're used to just soaking in that sun every day every day we don't have 320 have a bad day. 320 days a year? How about 370?

Really? We have extra days here. Extra Sundays? It doesn't fucking rain. It's a total drought. I mean, we're stealing water from the Colorado River or some shit. I don't know how we keep everything hydrated. Until some super genius guy figures out how to suck water out of the ocean,

you want to get some oceanfront property about 700 yards in because everybody's worried about the sea level rising. All you have to do is figure out how to desalinate ocean water. We'll drink that shit. We'll use that shit in our toilets. We'll just start extra golf courses with that fucking ocean. That ocean won't be nothing. Don't worry about that thing rising.

Oh, you're worried about there being too much water? Oh, don't sweat it. We got that. It doesn't rain, and we're abusive when we find a resource. If we could actually tap into the ocean, beachfront people would be fucking pissed. Because the beach would be like a couple hundred yards away in a few years. A mile and a half to the shoreline. We'd suck that bitch dry.

It may come to that. It might. It really might. It may very well. i don't know you know man i've only every time i come to california it's all it's always like in and out yeah quick tourist stop we were here we did conan and played at the troubadour a month or two back and we were here for about four days and that's the most time i've ever spent consecutively in la so but i've never been able to really get the lay of the land.

I know I like Redondo. Yeah, Redondo's nice. Very chill, bohemian kind of feel. That's where Tommy Bunz lives. Tom Segura lives in Redondo. He fucking loves it. It's very chill. Like any of those beach communities are very chill.

LA's great. It's great. I talk shit about it sometimes, but it's just the amount of people. I just don't think people value things that they have in too much abundance and i think there's an issue with people when you get over a certain population i think we just naturally get a little more callous or you just don't give a fuck about each other like if you go to like a really small town and you go to the store people say hi to each other because there's not that many fucking people right there's only a few thousand people in the town i mean yeah they're gonna get some small-minded gossipy bullshit too but i don't necessarily think that has to be the

case in a small town but i think the benefit of being on a smaller population is people are just like a little less intruded upon by sensory input. Everybody's a little less on edge. Yeah. California is just, there's 20 million people plus Mexicans in the city. I say plus Mexicans. Plus Mexicans. With respect.

Because, I mean, people that have come over here from Mexico, which I think you should just be able to come over. I don't believe in, I think it's ridiculous that people who want to work, they should be forced to stay in this shitty patch of dirt because they just got a bad roll of the dice and they were born there. I think we're just scared. The good spots like here, we're scared it's going to bounce out somehow and they're going to come over and fuck it up. We just got to figure out a way to not have it fuck it up. Just got to figure out a way to not have crime and poverty and all the different issues that we've just completely ignored in poor communities not have that affect everybody's like level of happiness that's living in these big groups but then just to imprison someone in a shit country because they were fucked and they were born there just seems kind of crazy and inhumane to me just seems weird you know it's pretty eurocentric but i think you know the illegals first of all just you know? It's pretty Eurocentric. But I think, you know, the illegals, first of all, just, you know, they're here.

They're Americans. Yeah. We're all immigrants, you fucks. But if you counted them, I don't think they've ever really counted them. I don't know how many that is. So I say 20 million plus Mexicans because that's what it is. It's like the greater L.A. area, which is a huge area, like goes all the way down and wide and you know it's it's such so spread out and sprawled something around 20 million people which is just incredible that's

just a nutty number i lived in tokyo for a while whoa i was younger and what were you doing there i was in the military i got stationed over there wow and it's like you know an island roughly the size of california with the population of the united states you know so but it was weird something you said earlier about people being crowded i just went back last year and visited some friends of mine that helped me with a video project and i noticed it even more so now that i'm older but i mean even on a crowded subway train where you're just jammed in like sardines or walking down the street, they're so aware of self-aware and just their surroundings.

You could be crammed in this train, literally nut to butt, but yet nobody's touching anybody. There's just really this awareness um and and consideration and mutual respect that i think you don't really encounter in a lot of big cities here it's just this get the fuck out of my way you know what i mean yeah i found it incredibly polite i've only went i went to tokyo once i was like everybody's so polite here friendly it's amazing you know that place is 20 times the size of new york city you could pass out in the darkest alley with a hundred dollar bill sticking out of each year and nobody's gonna fuck with you but there's a bunch of african dudes that are moving in there from africa

like straight from africa these hustler guys as well as the rapungi and some of the nightlife districts yeah yeah you're walking down the street and they're trying to drag you into some massage joint and there's like there's just a look about them like, oh. Some sinister shit, man. A wolf got into the chicken coop. Well, it does have, there is a very dark underbelly side to Tokyo for sure. But it's hard for guys like you and me to really go find that. Well, I've had Ensign Inoue on the podcast several times.

He's an MMA fighter who was originally from Hawaii but lives in Japan now. And he's Japanese and he's friends with all these. He fought for Pride, which was the biggest MMA organization in the world at one point. They were in Japan. K2? No, no, that's K1. You're thinking of like kickboxing. That's a big event too.

They had some MMA events as well. But Pride had these enormous shows where they would do like 90,000 seat arenas. You're thinking of kickboxing. That's a big event, too. They had some MMA events as well. But Pride had these enormous shows where they would do 90,000-seat arenas. It was just gigantic. And Ensign was one of their big stars over there, and he's down with the Yakuza. So he had all these crazy Yakuza stories. I hung out with a couple of Yakuza guys once. One of them was a bookie, and the other one, I guess he was just like a...

You're sitting in bars, and you'll be drunk you know and they all they all if they once they especially they learn you're american or if you speak english that you know they all want to talk to you and just figure out what you're about and these guys you know they were drunk we just ended up kicking it for a couple hours then i kind of put it together and realized what they did wow and uh they they they asked me and a friend of mine that was with me if we wanted to go to another club and this guy had like this badass baby blue 67 corvette um really in japan they were just young guys like flashing out you know they just wanted to impress us wow um it was weird because i could tell you to really give a fuck about being friends with us they just

wanted to like show us what they were all about and they were young probably really lower level guys um and there's a lot of that but it's it's very it's very they're in one specific part of the city mostly shinjuku or all the pachinko parlors and organized gambling takes place and the red light um and they they make it very obvious who they are you know what i mean wow and it's an accepted part of the culture more and more so they've become less corrupt uh the government just kind of realized we can try to fight this or we can work with them they do a lot of things for the communities that they're in strangely enough you know to kind of keep order but then at the same time you hear stories about some guy might owe a little too much money, and they just literally go and beat him the fuck to death in a train station with baseball bats or whatever in front of people,

and they don't do shit about it. Whoa. There's a club owner in Roppongi that got murdered a couple years ago, and I don't think anything came of that. It's just like... Just that's what happens. That's what happens. Whoa. They have MMA fights between uh gang members they have like yakuza mma fights

yeah what the fuck jesus christ that's a that's a crazy warrior society well they they're so kind those they adhere to budo i mean they that's their whole trip is is maintaining samurai culture and they that they despise all the westernization that happened post-world war ii and yeah it's all about codes and honor and you know the budo way yeah ensign in ua his nickname is yamato damashi which is warrior spirit and this samurai spirit that everything has to be done with yamato damashi like when he would go into a fight he would write notes to all his friends and his family because he thought he would die yeah and write a goodbye note all that big horror and shit you're just ready to go to war you know that guy was in his fights were so fucking exciting because of that because like he

literally never worried about his own safety he would just go in there and just try to test himself and just swing you ever did you ever you ever read any of uh moriayu shiba or the guy that founded aikido and no no sense yeah he was more of a philosopher really than a than a martial artist well he was absolutely a martial artist but uh a lot of his writings i always found more interesting so you know more so than the actual art well that was really a strange part of samurai culture i'm not not i shouldn't say strange but unexpected when i started investigating it or reading about it rather was that they were required to be balanced and it was encouraged to be a very balanced person balanced like in your discipline balanced in your artistic expression balanced in your understanding of emotions

and fears it was very different than what we think of as like a warrior we think of like stone cold murderer conan the barbarian motherfucker just i think it was just at its essence pure absolute budd absolute Buddhism like they just live completely in that moment all the time whatever they do they they're so intensely focused and you know in anything whether it's trimming a flower or you know it's there's a very certain element to that culture that I've never seen anywhere else in the world yeah i wonder how that happens i'd like to talk to someone who's an expert in japanese culture to explain

how one society does fit into this very unusual pattern i wonder how much of it had to do with sword fighting well you know that's what i think you should be talking about you know because there's no you can't second guess when a fucking sword fight yeah like in every most you know these samurai movies that's all bullshit because a lot of these things were one stroke you know you had to choose that first stroke and then yeah cut a man in half so there's a and then with with any kind of society like that ito or kendo whatever there's a lot of mutual respect, I would imagine. You know, because, I mean, back in the day,

if, like, a peasant or somebody going to the fucking market, taking their fruit to sell, if they passed a samurai on the street and they didn't bow accordingly or just basically say good morning, they'd cut their fucking head off, man. Like, right there. Like, no questions.

So, you know, imagine if, like, walking down the street on Santa Monica was like that today. I mean, people's behavior would be very different towards one another. Yeah. I don't think it's good to be cutting people's heads off. No, I'm not saying that. But I do think, I know what you're saying. I do think that when people are scared of other people in that way, or when they respect that the other person has that ability to do that to them they're carrying a fucking sword like that well-armed society is a

polite society argument i don't necessarily think that's the way to go but i do think there is an element of people that need to know they get punched in their fucking face like there's a bunch of people that say rude shit to people and they say it only because they think they can because they're protected by society and because of that they're oftentimes less respectful than someone who would be like a physically dominant person in the conversation like i've seen martial artists have conversations with people where you know they're way way way more um kind or way more considerate in the way they've voiced their concerns or opinions about something versus people that have never been in a fight in their life that will get in people's face and scream and yell and you motherfucker and it's like you're only doing that because this guy's not going to punch you right you know you're

having this conversation because you're out in public and you know this guy's not going to punch you. You're having this conversation because you're out in public, and you know this guy's not just going to pick you up and drop you on your head. But if he wanted to, he could. He shouldn't talk to people like that. There aren't any repercussions for being an asshole. Yes, exactly. The repercussions are only verbal. And they feel like if they keep it on that ground, they can bully the bully even.

They can go after them if they keep it on that ground like they can bully the bully even they can go after them if they keep it completely verbal if they know the guy's not going to do anything you big fucking stupid piece of shit you know they can say and they know he's not gonna smash your head like a zit as long as you're protected by society you can get away with being pretty shitty to some people so i don't think it's good to chop people in half with swords but i do think it might have something to do with the reason why they're considerate you know it's weird how cultures develop in these unusual ways when they're just separated like the japan is an island you know they're separated from other people so they they've developed it. I mean, there's similarities to other Eastern cultures and their approach to things, but they're different.

They have their own thing going on. I think every place has its own thing going on. I was in D.C., I guess, back in April, and I was trying to catch a train to go to a show. I can't remember if it was New York or Boston, and I was at the Amtrak station in D.C. And then something happened where there was a downed power line. Like way up north it had taken out a lot of routes.

And they basically canceled or delayed all the trains going out of the station. And when they put the announcement up, it just, the place fucking erupted. it just, the place fucking erupted. I mean, I've never witnessed such a self-important display of human behavior in all my life as in Washington, D.C. that day at the Amtrak station.

Like, there's this line of suited, briefcased, you know, guys, they all just got right in the Amtrak employee's faces one at a time, like, trying to explain to them how much more important their life was than everyone else's who had just been inconvenienced sitting in this place. Right.

And, I mean, it was like I had to retreat into myself. I was just so surrounded by it. And I saw a pregnant lady get fucking bumped out of the way. Whoa. Some dude. I mean, it was just disgusting, of the way. Whoa. Some dude. This is disgusting, man. Wow.

I don't know. You would never see that in Japan. Right. People would just deal. I don't know if you'd ever see that in England. I mean, who's to say? Is that just the uber successful, hyper-focused, shithead thing that we have that other countries just don't have? Like, they have the discipline, but they don't have this marauding focus thing that a lot of, like, American businessmen sort of embody. This idea, you know, it's Wall Street, fucking Gordon Gekko, greed is good.

You know, that kind of shit. I would say, you know, Wall Street and D.C. places like this tend to cultivate a bit more intense version of that. I was just there Saturday night. I had a great fucking time. Yeah, it's a great party town. But, yeah, I don't know what happened. I just couldn't believe what I was seeing. It seems like a weird place.

It really did. It's a weird place. I mean, that's the Death Star. It's right there i mean all the world's wars are all like kind of sort of organized in this weird geometrical building there you know so this is a thing it's there that there's the penthouse which is just outside of there and then there's the white house which is this weird fucking building in a park where the commander-in-chief of the number one conquering army the world has ever known, that's where he sleeps.

And everybody passes by the castle, some sort of strange formation, a big circle you drive around. Everybody points at it. It's a weird place to be. You read the history of the layout of the city and why it was laid out. What is it? Do you remember it? It's got all sorts of weird... It's not Masonic, is it? just read like the the history of the layout of the city and why it was laid out yeah what is the do you remember it it's got all sorts of weird it's not masonic is it yes yeah yeah some weird masonic implications and it's all very specific in its geometry this may not be true but i think i read somewhere that they part of it like why the streets are all one way and why it's so

fucking confusing to drive around dc is that um in case it was ever invaded, they wanted to make it difficult for whoever was coming to get from the shore into the capital. That makes sense. That totally makes sense. I mean, why would you like to have it like so you could do an easy driveway and just fucking get on the highway and go really fast? Yeah, you want to make it like super complicated. What is that street? Lombard Street in san francisco that's what they should do

have that shit set up it's a cool city too yeah well it's it's got a lot of weird history to it it's like if you stop and think about it yeah there's a website on the uh sacred geometry and symbols of washington dc oh and it sort of explains sacred geometry the whole thing like what it mimics and the different all the different dimensions it's freaky stuff man it's freaky because you know that these guys they really were like into ancient cultures they really were into these weird groups that they would form i mean there's that skull and bone that's not fake yeah that's that's real that's weird that's real i mean they really are a part of all this stuff were they in the pine cones i don't know if they were into

pine cones i know that's that was a big thing in a lot of ancient catholic art right oh there's giant pine cones outside the vatican yeah yeah the pine cone supposedly represents the pineal gland which is the seed of the soul in ancient egypt and which is where now they've actually proven that dmt is made it's pretty speculative until real recently at least in rodents right yes which i mean it's a mammal yeah rick strassman um and that group that he's involved with the cottonwood research foundation they put it together and just getting in a live rodent being able to prove that this third eye in the middle of your head actually is producing psychedelic chemicals pretty fucking crazy the people that knew that they designed the white

house design all that shit oh yeah so sort of probably they're probably copying people who knew it probably didn't even know why they had buckets of that shit do you think they had DMT back when they were building like the White House it was here but was it do you know they didn't even find out about I was synthesized that's a good question I think ayahuasca was discovered by western civilization in the 1850s okay and i think it was uh i think they figured out what was in it when they were isolating the alkaloids in it and they they originally wanted to call it telepathy the alkaloid they isolated but then they found out that it was already isolated as the the compound harming and that's in that's in the

plant that is connected to ayahuasca that has the mao inhibitor right so this is like this is all like the early 1900s 18 late 800 1800s early how did they figure that shit how do they know what plants to boil together in order to deactivate and how they know for thousands yeah how'd they know yeah how'd they figure it out? It's not an easy process. I mean, how many species of plants can there be in the Amazon? You know what I mean? How did they found the right two? Well, what's fucked up is that, oh, there's hundreds of thousands of different plants.

They found not just the right two, but they found out how to do it in this weird way where you have to mash up the vines. Pulp it out. And you add in the leaves and you boil it down and it's it's a very involved process that takes hours to make true ayahuasca but nobody knows how they did it they say that the plants told them how to do it which is just as good an explanation as anything i'll accept that if you're high on mushrooms plants will tell you some shit i've had conversations with traffic simple signals you know i mean yeah imagine if everything really was alive we just couldn't tune into it you know i mean if your your table really was alive and your tables really had consciousness

it just just sits there its consciousness is very different than ours it's not and it's not important for it to move it just is where it is if you chop it up it doesn't freak it out but it has some sort of a feel to it that's interesting i mean obviously it's not provable no but that rupert sheldrake guy who was on before, Rupert who was on a couple weeks ago, he thinks that everything has a memory. He thinks that objects contain a memory. And that's why people don't want to live in a house where someone's been killed. Like you walk in, you have a weird feeling. I would say one of the more common side effects of high-dose psilocybin is that inanimate objects tend to develop personalities or you kind of perceive them as

much more characterized than normally yeah it's all condensed matter you know so who fuck knows man like right yeah well who who does that's that's another part of the whole what is what is a thing what is an object that really fucks with your head? When you start thinking about the fact that most atoms, it's mostly space. There's all this stuff in there where it's undefined. There's a lot of nothing. And it's all just sort of somehow or another cohesive. It becomes a table. It's like energy condensed to a very slow vibration, right?

Yeah. That's the Higgs line. Yeah. Yeah. Here's Tom with the weather. All of it sounds bizarre. Just the idea that atoms, we're trying to figure out what subatomic particles are

and there's these particles inside atoms. Like, we don't know what the fuck is going on with all those things. Like, what are all those things? Have you followed this hydrogen collider thing? Which one? The Higgs boson. Yes.

It's just fat. I mean, I don't know. That's the kind of stuff I was tripping out on when the record got written. I mean, just like, you know, I don't know. I don't pretend to understand it. I'm definitely a hobbyist, but I'm fascinated by string theory and the concept of independent, freestanding, dimensional realms of energy that all kind of hold one another together. in that they've taken this theoretical particle and made it the subject of this gigantic science project that involves hundreds of different fucking countries like i think it's like a

hundred different countries over a 10 000 different scientists something like that the photo gallery of the actual facility it's one of the most insane things i've ever seen like that's the amount of time and years it took them to build this thing is just it's incredible i don't even want to know what the price tag looked like it's billions billions of dollars and it's all to collide particles so that they can produce yeah this higgs boson product that's amazing point of origin well they also found that quark gluon plasma i think it is which is like supposedly the heaviest matter that they've ever discovered let me pull that up it's some insane amount of weight these things have that that's something

that was figured out yeah quark one plasma weight it's just insanely dense the densest matter created ever um that they they figured this out that it is actually a real thing when they were doing some of the experiments. The exotic material is more than 100,000 times hotter than the inside of the sun and is denser than a neutron star. Wrap your fucking head around that. It acts like a perfect liquid. Can we see it? I think they can, but very briefly. You know, it's like you're seeing it almost in a perfect liquid can we see it i think they can but very brief you know it's like

you're seeing it almost in a calculation dark yeah by triggering hundreds i mean i think it's so heavy that if you had a piece of it like like that you could look at like a marble it would probably sink through the center of the universe i mean just go right to your fucking right through the i mean i don't know alien spit it would probably go to the center of the planet and just hang out there yeah alien spit burned through the fucking core yeah that's insane yeah it's supposed to be unbelievably heavy like more like i could give you the numbers if i could find it but i think it's one of those things where you can't even you can't even imagine it doesn't make any sense and that's something that they figured out is actually real i mean if there's if there's they're looking for the point of origin right like they're looking for

the god particle or whatever whatever calls the big bang or you know what there's a there's this jay swift priest pierre taylor de chardin he wrote a lot of really weird controversial things but um i think he actually got blackballed by the Vatican in the early 20th century. But he wrote this book, The Phenomenon of Man, where he talks about the omega point. No. The origin, like the first point of all complex consciousness, or the source of the universe that emanated everything that we know and that ever has been into existence.

And he was basically trying to establish a symbiotic relationship between science and religion and evolution and spirituality, which wasn't a very popular opinion in the Vatican in the 1920s. He had this theory that it all emanated from this one point, or the omega point, and that eventually consciousness will reach a state of complexity that's so advanced that it will no longer require a physical vessel or a human body or anything to inhabit itself.

And then it will keep evolving until it returns back to the highest state of complexity, which can only be the same place it came from, because whatever started it had to be the source of this true divine whatever. So once it goes back, you know, but basically, you know, the reality as we perceive it, and this is according to a lot of modern quantum physics, it's just this manifestation that we sort of project out to convince ourself that we're not actually consciousness experiencing itself if that makes sense like you know we're not little special flowers and individuals we're

all literally the same people are pulling their car over the side of the road right now jumping out and running into the woods yeah they don't know you just scared the shit out of people it's all gonna well it if the universe is 14 point whatever billion years old like they say i didn't i it's not i didn't it's not my idea no it's a great idea what i'm saying is what why wouldn't it be you know who knows what it might be fucking 100 billion times older than that like might not have might not have any age. It might just be a constant cycle of that happening, down to a compressed tiny spot smaller than the head of a pin, the entire universe,

and then boom, big bang, over and over and over again. It might just happen. It might just compress. I mean, just over the course of who knows how many billions of years and just continually do that. If it happened once,

like, why would we think that it's only like it's a one-time sale well they don't sell sell sell the big bang is headed your way well it's just this one little big bang it's just pockets of infinity stacked upon each other you know listen to this shit i found i found out what the weight of this stuff is this is gonna fuck your head up one cubic centimeter of this quark gluon plasma weighs 40 billion tons what it's pretty dense what the fuck how much is that what is 40 billion tons times 2 000 fuck i don't well it's times a ton is 2 000 pounds right a billion times 2 000 so

what is that what is a skyscraper weigh 40 billion tons i mean does it what the fuck weighs 40 billion tons i don't know what i don't even think do you think a skyscraper weighs 40 billion tons that's insane and that's a cubic centimeter so if you like threw that at somebody they're not catching it. You'd be wrecking house, man. Just go right through your hand. Boom. Right through the center of the earth.

A fucking cubic centimeter. They'll figure out how to weaponize it if they found it. And a centimeter is tiny. We don't use those little bitchy ass little units of measurement in my America. But that's a little tiny fucking thing. It's about that big, right? It's tiny.

Cubic centimeter, 40 billion tons. If there was a Big Bang, why wouldn't we think that there could be an infinite number of Big Bangs? An infinite number of expansions and contractions and maybe what we are currently, what we like to think of as the highest state of life available what we are is just this is what exists when you have this state

of the universe and there's a type of consciousness that exists when the universe becomes no longer physical and that might be what you're experiencing when you smoke dmt you might be experiencing these other forms of reality that are there you just don't tune into them while you're in this state. You can access them through these chemical doorways while you're sleeping, while you're meditating. When you reach these different tunes of mind that people have been exercising and having these disciplined practices to try to reach these frequencies. They've been doing it forever. They're not doing it because they were well i know i'm starving to death but i want to try to figure out a way to reach some shit that's not even real yeah no they were they were doing it

because they had had success in it in some way or another just changing the channel really possibly you know possibly i've never i've never uh weird my experience is very limited with i've only encountered it twice and i've never had i guess what you call a breakthrough what have you had when you've done it uh it was like well the first time i don't i didn't know what i was doing and it the bubbling it was just weird everything just some weird associations that kind of freaked me out and i thought like there's no way this could be healthy but then the second time i got like this extreme i don't know how to describe it other than say it was an intense downward shift in gravity what felt like gravity or you know that crest at the top of the first hill on a roller coaster where everything just kind of i felt

like something was like pushing me down um and then, you know, I'd read so much and researched so much. Most of my understanding came from reading and how that tied together with other experiences that I've had or how that related to things that I've always been fascinated with or subscribed to maybe on a personal notion. But it felt like something putting you almost in a trance you know but i was still very much aware i was i you know i don't think i got a very strong dose we were you taking regular dmt or five meo dmt then in and then yeah and you so you didn't have any visuals oh i did no i had some visuals but it was i wouldn't say that it was uh it was probably as intense as the strongest psilocybin trip i've ever had but but I was still very much, I never lost cognitive

thought. I was aware. I was in my body. I could open my eyes. I was still, I knew I was in the room. Right, right, right. I saw almost like these Easter Island head sort of things, sort of just kind of coming out of the void with chasers.

And it felt like something, it was like the cusp of something and it just it was kind of over and there was a the room definitely looked there was a weird energy like everything had this crystalline sort of melty effect but i mean it wasn't overwhelming certainly not anything like what what they've described like some of the research volunteers talked about the volunteers are doing it slightly differently because they were doing yeah the intravenous supposed to be a motherfucker actually i was i got to visit with dr strassman about five days ago yeah um he answered a lot of questions and went more into detail but yeah they were like massive doses man yeah and four like four in a road before 80 to 120 milligram doses all in one morning back to back.

Yeah. They're hitting hard. Just. Yeah, there's no resisting it at that point. Yeah, my knowledge is from a purely amateur academia. And incorporating that into certain other things. How it may or may not resemble elements of tibetan buddhism and what people describe like these like the bardos and independent realms of energy and

where your soul is faced with these entities that test you in ways and how you react to those determine how you might transmigrate right or reincarnate into another life and i didn't even know about it until a year ago man i was sitting, I was visiting a buddy of mine that was in town. And it was just really strange because I've listened to your podcast off and on for a while. And I used to listen to a lot of Terrence lectures. And for whatever reason, it just never, I never heard about it. Or maybe it passed in front of me when I was younger and I didn't know what it was. And just said no because it's related.

It's like a PCP or something. Get that shit away. But yeah, I was sitting at a friend of mine's related. It's like a PCP or something. Get that shit away. But yeah, I was sitting at a friend of mine's house, and his father, I can't remember if his father had already passed or if he was just, he'd gotten very ill with terminal cancer, and he was pretty distraught about it. And we were just hanging out, and he was kind of telling me everything he'd been dealing with.

And, you know, I didn't know what to really say or to comfort him, you know, because he's obviously, you know, you find out your dad's dying right fucks you up oh yeah and you know I just was like well you know man there some people think that there's no such thing as death and you know you live to die and we die so we can really live and you know like the Buddhists think that there's this other realm you go to it's just the most pure bliss and like this ocean of love and you and you feel that joy and euphoria and either go on to nirvana or you go back into another life depending on how you live this one and he's like man that sounds a lot like

dmt i was like what the fuck is dmt and uh he's like really man you come on stars you've all people you know i was like i'd like, I didn't have a clue. And he played an excerpt right there on the porch from one of your podcasts where you kind of go on this rant about it. I'm like, all right, I need to dig in here because I'm seeing a lot of similarities and symbiotic touchstones. And I went home, and man, I probably spent the next three months just reading everything I could find and scouring forums and then going back and reading metaphysical publications and a lot of theology and bouncing this shit around.

And then I found out my wife was going to have a child. And it just was like my last great existentialistic dilemma. You know what I mean? So I was like, I'm going to write a record about all this shit and record it like it was in outer space and then Dave and I just kind of wanted to tackle it from a standpoint

in terms of the mix. I wanted it to sound like a lot of my favorite records did that I used to listen to when I was high out of my fucking mind on Mushrooms

or Dextromethorphan or anything else, you know? And you can do all that with tape, I think. Like we were talking about vinyl earlier, it's settled.

So when you put the headphones on, you want it to kind of just figure it around your head. And you can do that with tape better than you can digitally? A lot of people will say no, but I think the end result is a much better texture, for lack of a better term. You know what I mean? mean right I don't know it's hard to it's hard to explain but the digital manipulation with computers that you what you can do with music now it's pretty incredible but it's easy so easy to overdo it right and then you lose that human quality of the actual sound of the instrument so you want everything i think to a certain degree has to be understated isn't there like there's something really cool about hearing the pick moving across the guitar when you know that that's what you're hearing yeah it gives you

this certain strange connection and then instead if that was like cleaned up and this perfect sound this perfect synthesized i mean it's still a cool thing. But it's missing out on whatever makes, whatever that unique feeling that you get from someone's art is. You know, when you see someone like David Cho was here the other day and he had some paintings. And just seeing his paintings and knowing him. He's amazing. Yeah, and it's like you're getting his unique art it's very uniquely his and that's what's missing with all this pro tool shit right well you get perspective

yeah and i mean with any real art i think you just kind of it's somebody you know that's what you do you observe and you assimilate and then you put out your perception of this thing and hopefully a way that everybody can relate to, you know, you're kind of putting the unspeakable into a visual, you know what I mean? If that makes sense. Sort of.

And what do you, what do you think about people that make like electronic music, like that kind of shit? You know what, man, I love a lot of that shit. I think, I think anything,

any good music is soul music and you can put soul in anything. Like somebody really put a lot of time into sequencing all that shit i think i think anything any good music is soul music and you can put soul into anything like somebody really put a lot of time into sequencing all that shit out there's a lot of crap just like anything else you know just like anything else um but i i dare anybody to go stand in front of a skrillex concert and tell me that that's not bad the fuck ass right yeah so exactly yeah i can i can listen and appreciate anything as long as it's done from a and you can tell when it's not i mean it's like there's not a good thing about today we were talking earlier about how if you had a record deal in the 1970s you had to be a bad motherfucker you had to be you had to be but isn't it better that it's more accessible today well you'll get more

quantity and you'll get a lot of shitheads but you're also the quality will slip through too do you think no i don't i don't think it's a good thing at all because now people have to sift through a lot of mediocre bullshit to find the real stuff but they found you so if someone finds you you could get spread pretty quick now. Yeah, but at some point it became this thing where everybody wants to be in a band at some point. Right. Excuse me, a lot of people now, hey, coffee man, bulletproof. It feels to me like there's an element of it where a lot of people think that playing music for a living is a right. It's just something you can decide to go do.

Right. You know what I mean? Like, oh, I'm going to put a Kickstarter campaign up because we need a new van to tour in, so give me some money so I can go tour and play music. Fuck you, man. Right. You know, get out there and earn it.

Right. Because even though, I mean, I got a wife that I love and a four-month-old son that I've seen exactly like 12 days of his life. And I spend all the time in a van with three or four stinky other dudes going out and playing to a bunch of drunk strangers. And it's still the greatest fucking job on planet, you know. And if it never went anywhere beyond where it is right now for me, I feel like I've just basically clawed my way to the beginning, as it were. me i feel like i've just basically clawed my way to the beginning as it were um and if we're playing clubs to three or five hundred people i mean i can i can make a living at some point doing that and it's i'm not compromising in any way i don't have to wake up and like report to anybody

i'm not sitting in fucking meetings for a week about what my haircut should look like and i just feel like there's a lot of people like you see and you used to see back in club dates and you just you can tell like the blatant blinding narcissism that permeates this industry where people literally almost come to fucking fist fights over who's going to play what set spot at this rinky

dink club that nobody gives a shit about just because they think there's going to be somebody there that's going to recognize my genius and that's going to change everything. And I think you get a lot of entitlement because of that. And that's, to me, probably the worst aspect of working

in the music business is entitled musicians. Yeah, well, everybody comes at it from a different place and everybody i'm talking about sort of all aspects of show business and everybody handles their own needs in a different way like some people go in less needy some people are just completely obsessed with the idea of success and it's just like permeates every cell of their body it's the end goal as opposed to the actual art yeah yeah you can hear that shit pretty easy.

But that's why people go crazy when that shit slips through though, right? When that stuff works? Well, it's always worked. I mean, it's not a new concept. Pop music's been around since the very first days of the music business. That's what it was all about. But there's good pop music too, right? Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah. That's what's weird about it, right? It's all just... A good song is a good song yeah i don't know it's a you can go crazy thinking about it so i try not to so is it necessary that you live in nashville no it's not at all i thought it would be and it wasn't in the beginning it was because you have to be playing in those clubs which are some of the most thankless

clubs in the entire nation like you can't make money playing in Nashville. It's where you go to find people that can help you. Really? I've been very fortunate in that regard where I was found by maybe the handful of actually trustworthy folks in town. My manager never took a dollar from me for the first three years. He was just kind of like a friend that gave me solid advice and told me what not to do because he'd watch guys like me get chewed up and spit out for 20 years.

He was almost retired, basically. He just said, I'll help you, and if it turns into a gig, I want the gig. I was like, all right, man, you got a deal. Just kind of put this wall up between a lot of that shit that happens to a lot of people and they you know get taken advantage of and you end up bitter as a result and your creativity suffers right um so i just decided well if i just don't have anything to do with any of that then that can't ever happen so now four years later you know i have a great booking

agent i have a manager and and these people that kind of help facilitate us getting out and playing shows on the road. I mean, I could start a tour from anywhere. So my wife and I talked about that. And I was like, why do we even still live here? Because we don't go out, you know. Yeah. It's like the Hollywood thing too, right? There's a lot of people that are comics and are on the road all the time.

And they still live here. But you can practice here. Do you need a place to practice or can you you could practice in a studio right what do you mean rehearsals yeah but you don't we never rehearse you never rehearse yeah we got a very small compact band we we've been doing this in the beginning we rehearsed every day for like six months to get the chemistry there but now the shows are basically every show is different it's very dynamic and um we like to keep it lean because of that it's the freedom you can kind of just go here there right and everything's just sort of an extension of my acoustic guitar so you kind of just we never write set lists really yeah just kind of feel the audience feel the room and try to just maintain a focus on dynamics.

So when you create new songs, do you write them together? Do you write them yourself and then bring it to them? Yeah, I always write them myself. Typically, I don't like to play songs I haven't recorded. So I get in the studio and formulate it and then get it down and committed. And then they kind of tend to come to life all on their own over the course of a year and a half. You end up at the end of a tour,

that song sounds nothing like the one you put down on tape. Why is that? You get bored, so you push things and go to different places and try to just keep it exciting and take risks, and it makes you a better musician. Obviously, eight months later, from the time you recorded that song if you've been playing every night for two hours if you haven't become a better musician by that time then you're doing this for the wrong reasons so now when you go in to make your next record ideally you, you've trained harder. Right, right.

So you will change, like, the rhythm? Will you add lines to songs? Only when I forget the other ones. Does that happen? All the time. Yeah, man. All the time. But nobody can really understand what the hell I'm saying anyway, so I just my way slur through it and they don't they're none the wiser

would you ever consider doing like a residency somewhere like a vegas type thing where people always came to you but when you think that you always have to tour that's the kind of thing you do when your career's over is that what it is just getting started i know but i always wondered like man the trap we were talking when you got here you're beat because of traveling and i'm beat because of traveling i was just and i was only traveling for two days you know just to fly back and forth from philly to dc la to philly philly to dc dc to la do that in two days and just like if you could just stay put if they could all come to you i did um you know i mean or as part of the gig like the travel and the stuff that sucks and being away from your family that's that's well that's where you you know musicians play music and that's where you become a musician on your rule 10,000s and all

that but it's so truthfully for me man it's really bittersweet everything that's happening right now because i've been like i said for off and on for a lot of different reasons that i've put it down over the years but i've been doing this a long time and at a very thankless capacity so it's all just been very passion driven and then now you know I've got a newborn son and everything's happening and I'm just slammed so much that I'm exhausted a lot of times. And it's really weird because I'm out here and all this stuff we've worked so hard for has finally happened. But a lot of days I just really want to be at home. Right. That's the catch-22, right?

Yeah, that's the catch-22. That's what I get for starting at 34. That's what you get for being successful, too. Now you're busy. If you weren't, you'd wish you were busy. I'd be sitting on the couch wishing I had a gig. Yeah. It's damned if you do, damned if you don't.

You're way better off with this damned. Yes, I agree. Damned if you do is way better than damned if you don't. I just miss my family a lot. Of course. Can you take them on the road with you? Ideally, the goal right but you know that certain other thing i got to take care of the band i got to take care of you know a lot of there's a lot of you don't really make money touring no it's just how you build awareness wow what a pain in the ass so if you

don't make money touring how do you make money money? That's a good question, Joe Rogan. Because album sales are a real issue now, right? It's so funny because people back home that I haven't talked to since I was in high school, and all of a sudden you start getting texts from unknown numbers and shit, and people you haven't talked to, and they're like, man, you fucking made it, man. It's like, I'm just blowing it up. They think because you get some press in 10 or 12 media outlets that you're just raking in the dough, and that's just not the reality.

Making records is fucking expensive. Packaging records is expensive. Especially, I wanted to put out vinyl. That barely pays for itself. Yeah, we never got into how much the first one cost. We sort of started it, but we never. The first one, because of some of the guys we used on the session. Like The pig?

The pig and the guy named Robbie Turner. He used to play steel for Whalen and other guys. Wow. He used to play steel for Whalen. Man. Gotta drink whiskey. Yeah. Well, there was this dream come true scenario where this investor came into the picture

and was going to help out and blah blah blah and then at the last minute it all you know went away due to negotiations so then i got stuck with the bill on this record that i thought i was going to have help making and it was all all of a sudden done about 27 grand that i didn't have wow so spent that year on the road playing and then trying to pay that debt off. And then about a year later, once we're coming back off tour, we're about five grand in the black. And I just spent all this time on the road with this, with this young band had put together working out all these songs and just decide, all right, well, let's just go make the, make a record.

And it has to be quick because we don't have the cash, you know? So I paid the guys in the cash, you know. Right. So I paid the guys in the band a thousand bucks and then the other thousand went towards paying the engineers and my buddy Dave, the producer, just kind of did it for free on spec to help out. Wow. And so I think the whole thing cost about forty-five hundred bucks and it was just very, very inexpensive to make an album.

And now this record that sort of started, I guess, what we'll call the beginning of a career, if I had taken that in and tried to shop it to anybody, any major label or Music Row entity or even a lot of indie labels and had laid that down, one, it's a country record and two i'm talking about reptile aliens and fucking turtles and shit man you know exactly as well as i do how that would have gone yeah you know what's the turtle thing what's that's a that's a a jocular expression i got from a stephen hawking book um it's it's a it's like an old

comedic reference to the infinite regress problem in cosmology, which, you know, basically all the shit we were talking about earlier. And there's a story, I guess there was some professor at Oxford or somewhere giving a speech explaining how the universe works and everything else. And some little lady stood up and said, you know, that's really clever. I know you think you're smart, but you're wrong. And he's like, oh, yeah, well, what's the truth? And she's like, well, the Earth sits on the back

of this giant cosmic turtle, and it carries it through space. And he said, well, what's carrying the turtle? And she said, oh, that's very clever, but it's another turtle. And he's like, well, what's under that? She's like, you might as well, you're wasting your time your time as turtles all the way down and so hawking referenced this in brief history of time and it's weird because you can look back um hindu cosmology and a lot of uh some native american tribes they

all held these like earthly turtles in high reverence and the symbology of it all. And you find that story in different cultures throughout, you know, space, but thousands of years, but it was this weird, weird reference to this cosmic turtle. And I know that the Indians or the Hindus thought there were these four elephants standing on the back of the turtle and the earth was a flat disc

resting on its back. And it just cruised through space. There's a lot of artwork you can find associated with this. And I just thought that it was really the the record at its core is about love you know being like this one universal truth you get a lot of people look to religion a lot of people look to drugs i'm not saying you can't get really spiritual experiences from all those things but i think love at the end of the day is the one thing that really i've ever found forced me to want to wake up and really try to be a better human being every day you know so that was the main point of the album and the turtles thing was just kind of it's it's

a way of saying if you get into an argument with somebody and you realize it's just pointless and you're going back and forth it's turtles all the way down because like nobody really knows shit you know and we're all just trying to not kill each other so i don't know i decided it would make a good country song what that's a fascinating uh theory on her part i mean what did she mean look at that there's a picture of the earth with turtles below it who did that jamie no idea hollingsworth steven what a bizarre idea there's some really really cool visual what a bizarre idea i mean why why turtles what was well what was she trying to say turtles are the oldest known living species on the planet they Are they really? They predate crocodiles and other reptile species. And the 13 symmetrical, the design of the shells, a lot of ancient Indian tribes thought that that was in connection

with the 13 lunar cycles. Whoa. It's just an ancient creature. They live a long time. They're very independent, self-sufficient. They carry their homes on their back. So they thought it was really wise, old. Plus the pineal gland, if you cut that shit open, there's a little third eyeball sitting in there.

Some of them even have a translucent layer to the top of their skull where the pineal gland sits. I used to have turtles for pets. Really? Had to get rid of them. My wife got pregnant. Salmonella? Well, they're just dangerous. They're dirty, stinky little fuckers.

They will give off some fucking serious poop disease. They're very messy. And I would feed them goldfish. They're not really meant for domestication, but they're sure cool. I had piranhas at one point in time, allegedly, since they're illegal. Say allegedly. And watching piranhas eat is not nearly as cool as watching turtles eat turtles are a motherfucker dude really fucking cool they grab goldfish and just bite them in

half just grab them with their paws it's like watching dinosaurs eat and they swim after the goldfish they're fucking predatory man like i always thought of turtles as being like this sort of slow moving thing that really didn't fuck with anybody. No, no. Hungry turtles in a fish tank and some goldfish. And you just have an orgy of slaughter. I mean, they're wild to watch. Imagine back when they were like turtles the size of fucking school buses.

Yeah. Is that how big they were at one point? I guess. I mean, everything else was huge. I mean. Yeah, I've never had that adequately explained to me, why everything was so fucking big. And why the species that lasted diminished through evolution.

Like, crocodiles used to be like 70, 80-foot crocodiles, you know? Yeah, it was a different species of crocodile, but yeah. The ones that are out now, though, they've been around for hundreds of millions of years. So that means the ones around now survived the thing that hit the Yucatan, which is like, what? Okay. Sharks did too, right? Sharks have been around in this state for more than 100 million years.

Yeah. I don't get it. It's amazing that those things are around, though. We get a chance to look at an animal that would have walked freely amongst the dinosaurs. When you see a crocodile you're essentially seeing a prehistoric beast yeah crazy prehistoric thing covered in armor waddles around takes gazelles out just looking for shit to kill oh disgusting fucking monsters they make a hell of a pair of shoes, though. Get yourself a couple of nice croc shoes. Ooh, polish them bitches up nice.

Gators. Yeah. Alligators are, I mean, at one point in time, they were really extinct or on the verge of extinction. They were really endangered. That's when I lived in Florida. We used to feed them. We used to throw marshmallows into this place called Lake Alice, and they would come up and snatch up the marshmallows. And I never would have thought that they would get so plentiful that they would start hunting them but now they

turn they're trying to kill as many alligators as they can they just can't keep up with them i took one of those fan boat tours down in new orleans one time oh did you go out with like some dude with three teeth jumps on the lily pond and starts smacking these alligators in the head and shit and but at the end of it he had this little baby alligator in a cooler on the boat just just torturing the shit out of this poor animal you know and uh they pass it around there's like 14 people on this pontoon out touring the swamp and everybody gets a chance to hold this little baby alligator so you imagine the thing's probably scared shitless all these weird hormones and and so i'm the fucking very last person to get this

thing dude i swear to god as soon as they my wife hands it to me it just pissed all over me and because you're holding by the tail and just this this fire hydrant of of urine just misting out all over me man i'm just like this was not meant to happen no it was meant to happen you're the chosen one right it. It was holding its pee. It's like, I'm going to get to Sturgill and I'm going to anoint him. I'm going to anoint him. Yeah.

I'm going to let him know he's the chosen one. It trusted you because you were probably the only one that wouldn't smash its skull open if it pissed all over him.

I mean, it was nothing to do. I just kind of had to hold it and let him finish. Was its mouth taped up? Yeah, he had like a big rubber band on it. Yeah, we had an alligator on Fear Factor once. It had uh mouth taped up yeah he had like a big rubber band on it yeah we had an alligator on fear factor once had a mouth taped up too fuck that man yeah this guy

he jumps out on this little grass pond and you just see like eight of them in succession come out of nowhere and start swimming towards and they all jump up you know he understands the behaviorism the sight line but i'm just this guy this massive scar on his bald head and literally three teeth in his head he's like now but didn't don't damn you know and then i'm like i'm gonna watch this guy die well how'd they get the scar did an alligator i don't know how'd you not ask i man i did i wanted to engage as little as possible to be honest uh i would have had to ask i think yeah i would have had to ask guy I think. Yeah, I would have had to ask. Guy fucks with alligators and he's got an alligator-sized bite on his head?

Well, I was afraid he might have been like a veteran. He almost had like a giant scar that went from the back of his neck over his skull. Oh. So I didn't want to. Right. Where'd you get the scar, man? Yeah. How'd that happen?

Lost to all my friends. Yeah. You want to go on scar, man? Yeah. How'd that happen? Lost to all my friends. Yeah. So we'll go on a boat ride. Yeah. I only have shaky memories of it, but every night in the middle of the night, I hear the guns. I hear the explosions. That's fucked up. Yeah.

Have you ever watched that show, Small People? Where they make a living just killing alligators? I know what you're talking about. They have hundreds of alligator tags. They'll get like a hundred tags. And they can kill a hundred alligators in a season. That's how many fucking alligators you're talking about they have hundreds of alligator tags they'll get like a hundred tags and they have to they can kill 100 alligators in a season that's how many fucking alligators there are they're just selling the skins what are they doing yeah yeah they sell the skins and the meat too the meat is delicious apparently it's the highest amount of protein it's got more protein per ounce of uh of alligator meat than i think like any other i've tried it a

couple times it's really chewy i think it's how you how you prepare it i would like to try it fresh i've only tried it deep fried like in batter it was you know it was forgettable but apparently if you get a fresh alligator and someone's a good chef and they understand how to cook it they can it's really delicious but it's one of those things like a lot of wild game um gets real tricky because there's no fat i think alligator is probably very similar you ever eat rattlesnake yeah i've had rattlesnake before yeah it's weird it gets acquired too i like those yeah flashed it in some butter yeah oh did you cook it yourself no my uncle cooked it oh wow yeah he's one of those pilgrim

motherfuckers that just that's a chewy chewy meat too but a really distinct flavor you know the wild game tends to be very uh difficult to cook right if you cook it too much you fuck it up you know you have to like really be careful i bet alligator is probably similar in that way i tasted uh i worked with a guy in the yard poor he's a big hunter and he would you know bow hunt and uh he moved up to wyoming because he could get like four or six more tags a year than he could in utah and he'd drive that hour and a half every day even like wow through the winter blizzards to come to this job just so he could the kid was just eat up with it man but he apparently he set i think the longest distance shot in Wyoming at 23,

and then he'd hunt moose and elk and everything else with a bow. But he would cut in. He'd bring in these venison, like, fillet cutlet medallions of elk meat, and we had a grill down at the switch shack and he'd cook that shit. It was the best fucking thing I've ever tasted in my life. Elk is delicious. I used to go back to eating ground beef after tasting that, you know. Yeah, elk is so good for you, man. You just taste it in the meat that it's good for you like whoa apparently

moose is like that too i never ate moose before but it's supposed to be unbelievably good like you eat it and just go my god i'm sort of in awe of those people that want to get 40 feet from a moose with a bow and arrow. That's pretty fucking hardcore. 40 yards. 40 feet is fucking pushing it. I mean, you better hit it right. I mean, I'm sure it's happened.

I'm sure someone's been 40 feet, but you know how close 40 feet is? I don't have any idea, yeah. 40 feet is where the bathroom is. That's the pisser, yeah. You could do it. I mean, it could happen. But goddamn. The fact that the

moose hasn't run away or charged you or you have to call them in you have to pretend you're pussy oh sup trying to get some over here and then he comes comes waddling through all 1500 pounds of like a bull oh it's a giant animal i've seen them in in real life right i mean like they're there i wouldn't say they're mean they're defensive and aggressive like a mother and her calf you don't ever want to run into that i was with a mother and her calf on an island we uh took a boat out to an island and me and ari and uh this guy matt was a guide up in alaska took a salmon fishing valley river jars we pulled up onto this uh island and there was a moose a mama moose there with her calf and we were no more than 30 yards away from her it was real touch and go like i was

looking at this moose and she was looking at us like oh for real like you motherfuckers are just gonna pull up onto this island i'm on the island with my baby it wasn't a big island either but his dad uh owns the island and he has like a resort like a camp set up like for fishermen and hunters on this island and so there's like these cabins and shit there and generators and stuff and the moose is just hanging out there just keeping a good eye on us but it's such a big fucking animal it's a horse a horse-sized animal and they're just thinking about should i stomp this motherfucker they just want to make sure you don't make any weird movements nothing crazy nothing predatory but we saw several moose while we were there they're enormous big big animals it's intense man there was this uh island out in utah the state

park antelope island it was a buffalo reserve but there were all these hiking trails and shit you could go out there with these buffaloes could would and sometimes could be roaming freely and a friend of mine we'd gone out there to hike this peak and we're coming back down and you can look down we see like five or six hundred yards down on the trailers these two buffalo just standing so you know we think well fuck we'll just keep going by the time we get down there they'll be gone you can see the herd off in the distance and uh we come around the bend this clear this big rock and there they're standing and i didn't know man i grew up you know around a lot of farms and cows and shit and you just walk right through and get out of the way i have no idea i don't know anything about buffalo and uh my buddy he's just like

immediately scared shitless brook ran and got up on this rock just kind of not knowing what to do and i i'm like i don't know what i was thinking. And I just kept walking, and I get literally 10 feet away from this thing. And he's standing sideways, broad across the trail. And all of a sudden, he just stops eating grass and turns and looks at me. And I realize his head is the size of a fucking Volkswagen Beetle. And I'm just like, all right, this was not great. How close were you? Oh, like 10, 15 feet.

Oh, my God. Easy. And then it dawned on me how incredibly stupid i was oh my god and then i'm like this thing probably runs 40 miles an hour like what am i gonna do and i took i didn't know what else to do so i took one more step towards it and it just like kicked up and kind of ran off but the fucking ground shook and i was just like oh man i mean that would have been the end of so bad no good songs yeah no good times brooks just down on the rock like you know laughing could have gotten watching trample death holy shit yeah there's a wild herd of uh buffalo in

mexico we're supposed to go hunting there sometime this winter for uh that show meat eater we're gonna go buffalo hunting where in mexico um actually with the guy the producer of the show meat eater um i don't know somewhere in mexico there's a giant wild herd of buffalo they brought there in like the 1950s most bison today like when you know you buy bison steaks most of its farm raised is very little wild buffalo left in this country a lot big percentage of it is owned. It's property. People have these big giant game preserves, and they have buffalo on them that you can hunt.

And they have buffalo in these livestock places where you buy farm-raised buffalo. That's what buffalo has come down to. Ted Turner's or... Yeah, he's got a bunch of places that sell it, right? No. Isn't it just called Ted's or something like that? I think so. It's got a big Buffalo logo.

Apparently, there's a guy that I'm going to have on the podcast that Steve Rinella recommended to me that can explain in great detail what actually happened to the buffalo, but that there's a lot of misconceptions about why the buffalo population was so high and he says there's a direct correlation between smallpox that when this the french and the spaniards when they brought over smallpox or whoever brought it i guess it was the french it wiped out like 90 of the native american population and during that time the buffalo population just exploded flourished so

when we came along and started slaughtering these uh buffalo in mass when i say we white people obviously wasn't human it was a long time ago but those big piles of buffalo bones of the guilt yeah we do white guilt strong they the reason why those guys were able to find these animals in such giant numbers was because the native americans had experienced this massive loss of casualty i mean massive 90 casualty rate because of smallpox because they were apparently at least in this guy's book he's going to come on the podcast soon we're working out the dates um they were on the verge of uh extra i guess extirpation is what they call it when it's local extinction.

Because the Native Americans had figured out horseback riding. And once they figured out horseback riding over the course of a couple hundred years, whatever it was, they had almost completely abandoned agriculture. And they were just chasing down the bison and killing them like fucking crazy. Evolved hunters. Yeah. So the idea was that they were on the verge of killing off the Buffalo even before those crazy assholes came in and did it later on hundred years later it's just the smallpox got him and then just what

would have been a very well even if we hadn't showed up they would have continued procreating have been more Indians and you know probably right Native Americans Native Americans it is kind of crazy we still call them indians one fuck up you know christopher columbus 600 years dumbass reciprocated down to me sitting here on your podcast and i just perpetuated it yeah 500 plus years ago he thought he was in india good enough chris good enough for chris good enough for me them fucking indians look what i did yeah they were there were some brutal bastards man like running around cracking babies heads on rocks and shit and just you know serial killers basically well the accounts of the missionaries that talked about what columbus's people did they're they're horrific

and we never heard that shit when they had columbus day i don't know why still celebrate that idiot yeah it's very strange Very strange we celebrate that guy. Seems like there's a bunch of people we missed. You know, how come there's no Gandhi Day? We celebrate Columbus. We don't celebrate Gandhi Day. You know? I mean, I would settle for a Jimmy Carter Day.

Yeah, right? Over a Christopher Columbus Day. Carter's a good man. He deserves a day. Jimmy Carter should have a day. I agree with you. And still to this day, he's a very good man. He deserves a day. Jimmy Carter should have a day. I agree with you. And still to this day, he's a very good man. Very moral and ethical and just very different than what you perceive to be a guy who would be the president of the United States.

Hunter Thompson wrote a really great piece about Carter. I can't remember which book it was in. But he just kind of summed that he was probably like the last real great politician he witnessed some speech somewhere i can't remember now the details that just it's like he felt for the first time like he actually heard a politician be a human being and he's really tall from his heart and i think it left a pretty heavy impression with him but i keep wondering if that's possible again if somewhere in the future because of the transparency that we're experiencing now with the social media with the internet with the access to

information that we have today i wonder if like eventually the bullshit artists will all be exposed to the point where they won't they won't be viable anymore it's not a viable business model right the accountability of the corporations that are financing these politicians but i wonder i wonder if there's going to come a point in time when we start to see an emergence of people that are talking in a real sense like like you're talking about real music well there's got to be real politicians too that aren't hacks you know there's a bunch of shitty pop singing politicians that get pretty far but we recognize them we know they're bullshit artists we hear speeches these canned fucking hooey rah-rah sarah palin style speeches and we

go that's a pop star that's a shitty one at that there's got to be some real leader out there you know i'm saying that someone who's not following a mold but speaking from the heart someone who truly doesn't give a fuck. They must exist. And if they don't, it's possible they're gonna. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 72. Yep. That's the book? Yeah.

It's a great fucking book. Yeah. I read part of it. Shark Hunt was a good one. Yeah, his documentary explains the creation of all this stuff. How he became an embedded reporter was so fascinating. That he was one guy out of all these guys that had nothing to lose because he knew he'd never do this again so he just was fucking going bonkers on pt barnard them all man yeah he talked football and got his way into nixon's car yeah isn't that crazy sitting with nixon to ride to

the airport hunter thompson talking football they sure, you're only going to talk football now. None of this Vietnam stuff. And they just talked football. That would be bizarre as fuck. Be sitting there with Nixon. With, I mean, just the biggest hidden agenda ever, you know. Yeah. Just snowballing the president of the fucking United States knowing you're going to rip his asshole wide apart in a book.

Yeah, right? Complete and total character studies well he was one of the most incredibly bizarre former presidents he's a very odd guy do you see that book that was written out that they believe he was gay and then his uh this guy that he's with all the time was his boyfriend said the same thing about lincoln though did they yeah but didn't like sleep with men to stay warm his bodyguard except for his bodyguard service agent they shared a bit and it's now it's speculated they had a relationship due to some some journal memoirs they found or he can justify just about anything who cares you know we should we could do we could do well with a gay president you know maybe even better could be you know

there'd be some empathy there maybe maybe not you know julius caesar was gay you know i'm saying alexander the great was gay a lot of fucking gay warriors that's people like to sleep on gay people fuck you up too i wouldn't i wouldn't fight a gay dude whoop your ass man mean as shit. Nixon's darkest secrets. New biography. Digs up rumors. Richard Nixon's gay affair with mafia banker.

Whoa. That's the guy. Yep, they're gay. I'm just going to say yes. I'm looking at the two of them together for sure. Who knows? Maybe Nixon didn't like to fuck anybody but America. It was one of those things.

He didn't have a gender sexual. He was nation sexual. Just wanted to fuck America. It's like a kin doll. He just didn't have any. Yeah. It was nothing. Just evil thoughts.

Well, he was a different breed back then. A different breed of politician. And post, I mean, he's coming along post Kennedyedy's assassination and bizarre dark time in america that was well that's that's when they kind of locked it all down that's when the all the schedule one list started popping up everything kind of yeah that again that's a valley you know i mean there was a great hill the great hill was like the 1960s and then the 70s came along that was the big valley yeah and that's where disco came from that's what happened nobody had acid nobody had mushrooms it's just cocaine man just dancing fueling all that bad judgment just like it's like 80s country bad judgment but so good fucking music you know if it wasn't for

disco you wouldn't have cool and the Gang, right? And that's where it came from. That's all dancing music. Fucking Bee Gees, man. Yeah, there you go, dude. They had some good jams. Seriously good jams. They do, right?

People don't want to admit that. More than a woman? Come on. It's a good goddamn song. Jamie's going to disagree. I was singing it. It's a shame. Those guys are gone.

Yeah, there was some... I mean, even the Stones stuck their foot in the disco water. Yeah, for sure. There was some funk to a lot of their songs that didn't exist in the earlier music they were creating. Product of the times, man. Yeah. What's today's time? I mean, when you see this new door opening up for you you know when you see like all of a sudden your your career like you said you've clawed your way to the beginning you're obviously there's some shit going on man i mean i told you my friend justin told me about you right when i like he

goes man he goes there's this dude sturgill simpson and as soon as he said that i go i too i've been listening to nothing but him for two fucking weeks and we were laughing and joking around there's something going on man when my friend justin finds out about shit i always pay attention because he's got fantastic taste in music but i had already found out like there's there's something going on you've you've hit this sort of frequency where people are checking out your shit it could be over tomorrow man yeah but it's not gonna be let's be's be honest. This shit's going to ride. Just hang in there, fella. Well, I've got a very clear plan.

Do you? No matter what, I'm going to adhere to it. You want to tell us the plan? Or is it secret shit? It's not really a secret. No, I'm going to make a total of five records and then be done. Why? I feel like, well, there's a certain methodology to the entire thing but uh i don't know i think a lot i don't know what else i would have to say beyond

that um and each one successfully kind of incorporate other elements of music that i love and get more progressively opened up and so you've got this mapped up like in a formal way roughly yeah do you have it written down somewhere in various forms voice memos and notes and things but yeah i mean the idea just just the layout and then the sonic execution um but then beyond that a lot a lot of artists keep recording in order to maintain some sense of relevancy or you know or just because well it's been a year's time to make a record i just don't ever want to find myself in that position where i'm um i don't know i think i would keep i'd rather keep it more concise and focused right and just try to know that i absolutely did my best

every time and then i think after five albums i don't know i'll probably i already feel somewhat limited on terms of songwriting and how much freedom there is to really get out what you want to say so i might try something else at some point like just writing outright like writing a book or yeah so just looking at as another form of expression but I think it's a weird that you like think that you're gonna run dry like what makes you think you're gonna want I'm gonna one dry it's not it's not an issue of running dry just certain things that I want to say or you know make a statement with and use the opportunity to hopefully make it other than something just about me.

Try to promote a bigger message, I guess. And at some point, you just end up repeating yourself. That's fascinating. I hope that's wrong. I hope you just keep banging them out and having a good time. But you're the only one who knows what's going on in your head. You're the only one who's ever going to know your vision right so the real job is just keeping myself out of a situation where i have to compromise that that's fascinating though that you've done that

that you have this idea of these stages that you're going to put out so you're only going to put out three more albums or five more three more that's it yeah but you've been doing music for how many years now my whole life but i mean professionally for two albums well professionally really just like the last two years i've put my first record out in 2013 okay so two years for two albums so it's almost an album a year so you've only got three more years to go and then what are you gonna do i have no idea oh come on man just keep making music pontoon in the jungle or something i don't know do you plan on doing that like expanding your horizons in some sort of great and unforeseen way i mean by not doing this when i was younger i was

out doing a lot of other things that kind of culminated into whoever the hell i think i'm trying to be today right so incorporating those experiences and a lot of those stories and people i've known and characters i've met and then maybe even embellishing upon that in a somewhat autobiographical sense but still telling these stories in a way that other people say yeah i feel that way too you know you don't want to just say hey this is what the world looks like it's just this is what it looks like to me and hopefully other people can can resonate with them but it's an interesting there's a line you have to really kind of straddle between commercial commercial viability and making art is this a rigid idea that you have or do you think

that it's possible that you can get to that three albums from now and then go you know what i'm enjoying the fucking shit out of this i'm not gonna stop i'm just gonna figure out a new concept i'm gonna go i'm gonna go chris gaines i'll put on no i'm just kidding is that his name chris kane chris kane's the garth brooks character maybe that's what he was doing well i mean outside of that i think i've already well i say that just because i have those albums pretty clearly in in my head and i do what they'll sound like and what they'll be about and you know someday you're dead everybody that ever knew you was dead and it's like you were never here

but that little thing I don't know what else I would really have to say about my version of the human experience past a certain point unless I go turn it off and do another 30 or 40 years of living and then make 5 more albums any real artist

their best work is always in their pinnacle peak and then make five more albums any real artist their best work is always in their in their pinnacle peak and then right before they die and then you get this this ocean of mediocrity of just kind of fumbling through existence there it's it's a very repeated element that's an interesting perspective because you really think that when a guy puts out an album, or there's parallels to authors, to a lot of different art forms. You spent your entire life thinking, and then you express yourself, like the culmination of this life in your first few pieces of work. Well, there's a really interesting thing. I think my buddy Jason Isbell put up there, didn't retweet it talks about you it takes 20 years to write your first record you get a year to write your second record and uh really doesn't matter what you do because music's the devil's work and you're fucked anyway

but um but yeah it's like you know you squeeze all this i had i had a good 30 years of of fucking up and mistakes and lessons and and you know a lot of personal you know development and certain experiences that i had that led me to kind of recognize and look at things that caused me to live that way and then to come out of the other side of that like really supported and understood by someone that met me at my absolute worst and then helped me to get right here it's just like i have all this clarity now and i don't you know i think the only way to ever really grab that feet i mean i probably could have made some great records in my 20s i was so fucked up you know i'll never know but so i'm just trying to like reference those feelings as i remember them the best I can.

Right. And people think, oh, I made this record. This guy's just sitting around fucking smoking DMT and he's on drugs. There were no drugs involved making this record. I really don't even smoke dope that much anymore, especially with the son. Certainly not when I'm at home. Usually on the road and it's only then anymore to cure boredom.

So it's just really weird to find myself. but I still had to tell that part of my life through story. When you were in your 20s, you were partying a lot? I wouldn't even say partying. It was always more exploratory for me. I never had an addictive personality, but I never, I don't know, I just read a lot of the wrong books way too young and had this weird romantic vision that everything was encapsulated under the umbrella of experience and i wanted to

experience everything and some things you just shouldn't experience and like what uh i mean whatever man i mean whatever's in front of me um whatever I could find, I just never always just wanted to know, you know. Say when I got out of the Navy, living in Seattle, those were some darker days, you know. Well, you were saying that earlier about Seattle not just being the weather but what the weather does to people. Yeah. At some point I just became very disenchanted, disillusioned with the military. So I got out and stuck around there for like a year.

So there's that disenchantment and disillusionment and then there's living in Seattle where you're dealing with the dreariness at the same time. you know, I was excited. This, this young relationship and I was going to all these parties and meeting people and, and exposed to things I probably never would have been otherwise and just kind of, you know, took it at face value for experience and jumped in. And then there was a lot of, you know, there's a lot of hard narcotics in that area. And I realized that those weren't very well for me and like heroin, heroin, know methamphetamine every anything you're looking for really good whatever you can grab it or forward and i couldn't i wasn't 21 i couldn't go out and drink so there's all these other methods of escapism that i kind of fell into and i got really bad off for a while and actually as a result ended up missing my grandfather's

funeral because i knew if i came home like my family would come my dad used to be an undercover narcotics officer so he you know there was some weird a lot of shame there after that you know what I mean right so I eventually ended up back in Kentucky and got away from that and then it was just really just I don't know I mean I never really was a very ambitious guy just sort of drifted and existed a lot. And I don't know. If something, it was more of exploratory just because I knew there was something else beyond whatever this is. Maybe that's what I was trying to find. Now, how did you get involved with Rick Strassman? How did you find out about him and how did you meet him?

Well, like I said, my buddy played when we were talking on the porch last year, and then he played your little excerpt. I went home that night and just kind of started scouring the Internet on the subject and a lot of things related to it. And I found Dr. Strassman's book, downloaded it, and read it probably three times, and it just absolutely blew my mind, all the correlating aspects of this converse of that conversation and i think what might have ultimately led him to it or what he was looking for in terms of its relation to i don't you should have him on someday oh he's gonna be on so is he okay yeah he's gonna be

on soon to promote the new book what date jamie the 12th i think 12th yeah we had a great conversation in his kitchen about five days ago. I mean, he was very gracious enough to invite me out. He's a very, very nice guy. Oh, extremely. I mean, he's a cool dude. He's so sweet, though. He probably would never think that himself, but he's like in so many ways.

I'm really glad I went, and it answered a lot of questions, and even questions I didn't even know I had. But it was interesting to find out why he approached it and what he got. He probably knows more than anybody else on the subject at this point. But he's like a musician that has been touring a record for a year. He's so tired of talking about it. This was all 25 years ago. Right.

He's moved on. People are still finding out about it, though. Yeah, people like me. It's still fairly obscure. Although for his day-to-day existence, it's sort of overwhelmed his day-to-day existence for the past 20-plus years. Right. But for a lot of folks, they're just starting to read his work. And emails every day.

Yeah. So, yeah, once I finished the record and had it mixed and mastered, I sort of like looking back through all everything that sort of led to this happening and i knew i went into it before we put the album and i really did think okay well this is going to be the end of my career you know um people are going to think this guy's nuts or what the hell and but you know but the work that that dr strassman did i guess the bravery it took on his part to open that conversation back up in a field especially in the in the professional medical world was so stigmatized yeah um i can't imagine like the balls that must have taken yeah after spending years of your life following this this profession and all the school he underwent and so i wrote him an email and i got the i got

his contact off cotton when i just wrote him basically say hey thank you, thank you. I shared the record with him through a file. I was just like, I just wanted to thank you for your work and the inspiration that I got from the book and along with some other things. And he wrote back and it sort of, you know, email buddies sort of thing. And then I was going out to Phoenix, and so I just stopped by and had a cup of coffee. Just like anybody else, you know. Yeah know yeah yeah he's just a regular guy but he's a he's got some really fascinating stories of his explorations

in this realm uh not just physically but just dealing with the red tape that was required to do a real fda study two years of yeah democratic nightmare man yeah to do one of the first psychedelic uh studies that you know uh have a real scholar involved in testing people on some serious schedule one hallucinogens that the army research labs of it they were they were aware of that shit in the 60s absolutely they had um that's how mckenna found out about it terence mckenna got a hold of dmt through a friend who is a chemist at the army research lab and apparently this guy had they had like a barrel of it yeah oh yeah which if you know about the effective dose of dmt it's about like a pinky nail is a lot like if you had a pinky nail sized piece of dmt or pile you might as well have a football

stadium of weed you're going you're getting blasted i mean you're going to the center of the fucking universe with a pinky size so imagine these guys had barrels or stuff and um mckenna's story i found out about mckenna because of hicks hicks mentioned mckenna on one of his bits what terence he would talk talk about taping mushrooms under the chair of everybody in the room like he he would like say something and then he would drag them into this i've taped mushrooms under all your chairs reach down it's what terence mckenna would call a heroic dose five dried grams you know and um i was like who's this mckenna guy and so i started looking into mckenna and reading uh some of the things that i could find about him online and then listening to some

audio recordings but he was uh he was already dead by the time i had found out about him unfortunately but his um you know his discovery of dmt and the way he described it in one of his audio recordings was just one of the most amazing things i've ever heard because this is a guy who had already done like lsd and morning glory seeds and he had experienced psilocybin and he thought he had really traveled he thought he kind of knew what was available and i really did i mean they did a lot of traveling i guess but uh man like the aboga and i like i said dmt i don't really have any experience to speak of firsthand, so I try not to talk about it.

Mm-hmm. We've got to change that. We've got to hook that up. Hey, man. Allegedly. Well, you know, Dr. Strassman said that, and I'm inclined to agree, although at this point, like, after, I should have a fucking PhD in this shit. I've read about it, and I don't even know what the firsthand aspect is. But he said, at this point in my life, now that all these things are formulating

and my career is budding and I have a newborn son, that there's a high potential it could make for a pretty unsettling experience because it's all this stuff that's finally happening in my life that's so positive. Like the idea of thinking you're dying and having to let go of that could make for an unsettling. You'll be fine. Yeah? Yeah. be make for an unsettling you'll be fine yeah okay yeah i believe you yeah it'll be fine i mean i've had some some i wouldn't say heroic i'd say foolish dosage um you know the first time you ever you ever buy mushrooms nobody's

there to tell you hey well this is how much it takes you know right i think i bought like a quarter and just ate the whole bag man's and that was my first i mean what is that seven it's like seven or eight grams whoa how was that that was a great time man you know i never i never got the freak outs except well that's good you have a good soul you have lsd the few times i tried lsd though i didn't really enjoy it because it all every time it seemed like on the tail end of the trip there's there's this it takes this turn and there's almost this almost a sinister underlying energy about it i don't know that i've never experienced with psilocybin um yeah psilocybin is very giggly yeah you know a lot of people say it's like it's the starting gate for psychedelics and i add to that i say go eat 12 or 15 grams and tell me that you're yeah the starting gate is only if you have a small it's

overwhelming it's completely overwhelmed and also very very visionary like you see i remember um just seeing stanhope and i did mushrooms the day the war started the day the iraq war started we the first one or the first one not not uh in the 80s you know the the one after 9-11 gotcha and um we were blitzed as they were announcing on television the war was starting and i'll never forget stand up was like oh my god they've got a kickoff they're like war coverage begins at five he's like the war has a kickoff and we just fell to the ground we're howling laughing and this the walls around us were all made of like these honeycomb geometric patterns like everything was basically gone i was trying to still have conversations with him but he was just this sea of patterns you know that like blurrily represented what his physical form was but it was

all just like really tiny flower of loves you know that little flower of life thing it was like so i mean that was his entire body was made out of those as was all the walls around us and i mean it's more like it's almost identical to dimethyltryptamine the molecular footprint right so it's pretty close take a high dose for fox for a loxi and and dimethyltryptamine, the molecular footprint, right? It's pretty close. Take a high dose. 4-FOX4-ALOXY and dimethyltryptamine is how it's been explained. I think what happens is... Extra oxygen... We're obviously not chemists, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah, we are not fucking studying the periodic table.

If you read Strassman's accounts of it, where they talk about how it's synthesized in the body, it's very similar. It's got a lot of the same elements as real natural human neurotransmitters. So it's very easily accepted into the mind. The blood-brain barrier accepts it. It craves it, apparently. Well, yeah, I mean, dimethyltryptamine, for sure.

We know that. We know that it's created in the liver. It's created in the lungs. It's not just created in the pineal glands. It's created in other parts of your body. They also know that it's in, like, who knows how many fucking plants, like a shitload of plants. It's just out there.

It's all over the place. You know, I think it's cool that guys like him are out there. So important. I know I've had some unbelievably profound introspective like healing experiences especially for mushrooms on the high doses yeah i mean it's it really forces you to to look at a lot of things maybe you don't want to or you're unable to and just kind of pulls apart the defense mechanism you know yeah destroying the, the one thing that allows people to push forward in spite of or because of everything that they've learned their whole life, the built-up defense mechanisms, the built-up definitions of yourself. And then you're pushing forward with all this stuff attached to you like it's like an armor.

But really, you find out that that's really the shit that's kind of holding your perspective back and if you release all that armor and just look around and release this idea of you and then just experience it's a very different world you're living in that that different world is rarely tapped into in regular life but that different world resets your entire perspective of your existence and if that's not good for you what the fuck is everybody doing meditating why is everybody going to church why is everybody you know going to workshops and trying they were trying to get better everyone's trying to get better i've never seen a single thing in life that has the same effects that psychedelic drugs do and yet they're illegal i mean it's one

of the weirdest aspects of our time that these things have these unbelievably profound effects but they're illegal whereas there's you know x number of sanctioned drugs that don't have these effects that are deadly make an asshole bleed everything else i'll sell that shit all day well i mean they're trying to crack down now on the prescriptions on pain pain medication prescriptions because there are so many people that are addicted to them and they've realized look we've made a nation of junkies it's i mean i'll tell you the part of the country you're from man i mean that that is fucking that is prescription drug central right hillbilly heroin man it's unbelievable it's right just right i mean i the town that i'm originally from uh it's called jackson it's like right in

middle southeast kentucky like heart appalachia and i remember as a small child it was very much it was a wonderful community there was small business main street was thriving everybody knew everybody um and then but all the major industry was based on coal which slowly evolved from strip mining or from deep mining i'm sorry into strip mining once they figured out they could get the coal with less bodies and uh so that just kind of leveled the topography but then even when that industry sort of dried up and they moved on well the coal pulled out and then walmart and OxyContin moved in. And it, I mean, within a matter of years, it just completely changed the entire face of the region.

Wow. And now it's just, you know, people say poor. You don't even know what fucking poor is, man, you know. And there's a, it's sad because there's just, it's, there's a, there's a, it's sad because there's no, there's not even the idea of like the, the possibility of opportunity coming to that region. You know, nothing,

no industry is going to come in there and like start building car manufacturing plants. Cause then they have to train the shit out of there. It's just not logistically very sound for any type of industry other than growing dope and making meth you know uh like unless they really push the hemp legislation through and they can put a lot of money and food on people's tables down there but that would be incredible and weirdly enough in kentucky they're they're really finally pushing toward i never thought i'd say this but there's a guy named mitch guy named Mitch McConnell who for once did something I agree with.

And he's really trying to get that. Kentucky was at one time the nation's leading hemp manufacturing point. The hemp museums and a little town called Versailles. They're doing a lot of interesting things in Kentucky. Kentucky reintroduced elk. Yeah, that's true. And they have giant successful herds of elk. I mean, they're hunting them now. They've reintroduced them. They've done a giant successful herds of elk i mean they're hunting

them now they've reintroduced them they've done it over a period of a few decades they used to have elk all across the country it was illegal for a long time to hunt elk in kentucky and then they and i guess they're getting the population to kind of grow back out well there was none there were none yeah so they the rocky mountain elk foundation brought elk in and they they they sort of seeded the area and now it's become very successful and now they have hunts hmm there used to be a lot of elk yes I care that back in the Daniel Boone days Davy Crockett days you know the shit out of hunting the shit out of them yeah yeah it's but it's interesting

the Kentucky's on the ball with hemp as well. Right. Well, the tobacco industry took a big hit, and that really hurt the state economy. They have to do something. I hope hemp doesn't. I hope really that's what becomes the next savior. Because farmer, and it will change the consciousness too. You know how that's going to go. I want to do pot and all the petroleum industries,

and everybody will start throwing more money at making it not happen that's why that's why it was elite elite you know i wonder if they're going to be yeah that is why it was made illegal in the first place but i wonder if they're going to be able to do that because i i feel like they even they don't have enough resources to stop that kind of truth forever right it's already kind of and what you're seeing with with what's going on in colorado is even war Warren Buffett's companies are getting in on it. Warren Buffett has a company that leases giant warehouses specifically to weed growers. They have commercials where they're showing how they have these tiered systems where there's like second floor and first floor. You could fit in more weed plants than a single floor warehouse.

This is Warren motherfucking buffett and his company is involved in actively pursuing marijuana growers to lease their warehouses to grow marijuana because it's legal there so it becomes a part of yeah is it going to be big corporations that are profiting on it? Maybe. But guess what? It's not hard to grow. Right. You know, it's not hard. I mean, this is not creating Oxycontins in some sort of fucking laboratory where you have to wear a spacesuit. You know, you're talking about a plant that grows like that.

You don't even have to do anything to it. Just stick it in the ground and come back in a month. You get some shit growing there. It's super easy. I mean, it is a hardy... It's kind of hard to fuck up, really. It's hard to fuck up. I mean, you could do it better.

You could make the kind of weed that these botanist motherfuckers in California and Colorado and Washington State are making. What happens when it does eventually, you know, like everything else, at some point it is going to go mainstream and then they're going to

commodify the hell out of it and commercialize it and everywhere you go it's going to look like a then they're going to commodify the hell out of it and commercialize it and everywhere you go is going to look like a 14 year old's bedroom and this is warren buffett's company look at this cube what is this called cubic design scroll so we could see it so we could see the name of the company cubic designs so this is like see how you get these tiered systems that is entirely for fucking growing weed. Wow. We're going to go tour a big grow-off in Washington State when we play. I love it. I love it.

I think it's amazing. I think the corporations are going to get in on it, but I don't think they're going to be able to control it. I just think something like weed is too easy to grow. They're definitely going to make a lot of money. They could definitely get exclusive deals with certain providers and stores. Maybe they can make it difficult to have a license to own a store where you could sell a shitload of it. But if it's legal, people are going to grow it. They're going to grow their own.

They're going to grow neighborhood growing weed operations. And if they do allow small businesses to grow it i think the laws it's stated today is that you have to grow the marijuana and then sell it you can't buy like you couldn't grow it and then sell it to me and then i buy it and sell it okay i couldn't i couldn't do that i would have to grow my own and sell my own so you have to be a grower as well as a dealer which is fine i mean that's a small group of people could cultivate a large amount of marijuana and make a shitload of money. That's good. I saw this really not-too-long episode of Vice where they were looking at the industry.

I guess they're not allowed to use banks in Colorado. They're showing these basically blackwater guys escorting the payouts every day and shit. I was just like, holy, you don't even consider that aspect. How much money they probably took out of the cartel's hands the first few years. Oh, yeah. Fuck yeah. It'll be interesting to see what this all really turns into. I wonder if people have been threatened.

Because it won't all be positive. Well, it's too much money, know well it's too much money right too much money yeah it is it's a curious thing because it's extremely profitable and it's current and people are aware of the profitability of it people are aware of the not only that they're aware that traffic uh incidents of pulling people over for duis is at an all-time low murder is dropped everything's dropped violent crime dropped i mean you're showing a huge increase in the amount of money that's being generated as far as like for state revenue more than 100 million dollars in taxes this year and then you're showing these drops in crime drops in duis drops in murder like there's nothing you could say other

than let's let's try this somewhere else any state that's struggling any state that doesn't have some sort of a massive resource pool like a natural oil or gas or something like that that's relying on if they are in need of an industry boy that's a fucking pretty easy one it's right there for you. Dive on in, bitches. You can make some money. Three months from now, just going to make you some more money all over again.

I wonder what's going to happen. I wonder how many states are going to adopt it this next upcoming election. I would imagine it's going to be another couple, at least. I would like to see five or six more just jump in and start just wildly... You know what would be the shit? If Texas jumped in utah's talking about it are they really you know because the mormons figured out well if we can make a fuck

ton of money off this too so i mean if utah is talking about it then i can't i mean i think the south will still be the last part of the country where it ever materializes there's a lot of fucking stoners in utah man there's a lot of stoners in Utah. I was in Utah. I did Salt Lake City. I did... Salt Lake City's a really liberal town, weirdly enough. It's weird. The... I think they all kind of moved out to the outskirts,

so now you've got this little hotbed of rebellion right there in the middle of it all, you know? Wise Guys Comedy Club. That place is the shit. And it's right in Salt Lake. And all my friends who work there they all come back go dude have you been to salt lake it's the best kept secret in the united states oh it's fucking banging it's a they're nice people too man that is a nice

town and a lot of weed there's a lot of weed going around utah if they grow it too they're going to start seeing massive amounts of profit and they're going to start seeing massive amounts of profit and they're going to see a shift in consciousness that's the big thing the shift in consciousness it might take a few more years to recognize that and the effects of that but people are just going to be nicer it's just going to happen you can't you can't smoke a ton of weed and keep the entire population with the same anger level it It's going to change. It'll change the way people interact with each other, and that will, in turn, change the entire culture. It's the genies out of the bottle.

You don't really see fights breaking out in coffee shops in Amsterdam. It's not... It's very rare. Very rare. Yeah. But, oddly enough, a lot of jiu-jitsu guys like to smoke weed. Really? And then go do jiu-jitsu.

Bruce was a big pothead, wasn't he? Yeah, he used to eat hash. Yeah. Yeah. I i thought that that killed him i remember when i was a teenager is that bullshit they said his brain swelled from the hash what yeah he apparently had a head injury and uh yeah i think he also had some sort of a reaction to the drugs he was taking for it i should probably google. I think you're right. I think Linda gave him something for his... Yeah. Anyway.

Yeah, he used to get stoned as hell and work out all day, right? Yeah, he loved hash, apparently. Apparently, he was really into it, man. But if you've ever eaten hash, you would kind of get it. The eating of marijuana is one of the least respected but most ass kicking of all the psychedelic experiences i prefer edibles yeah man the shit that they're throwing around today there's this dude called los hermanos the gumi is that the that the name of them the gumi brothers yeah these motherfuckers my friend ari had this comedy central taping and these guys

showed up with these gummy bears and then i go i'm looking at the gummy bear it's a bear i go how much should i eat the guy goes no more than the head i'm like well why are you making it so big why what do you mean no more than the head what happens if i eat more than the head he's like don't do it why you made it you made it. Joey Diaz eats the whole fucking thing. Oh, man. He's a hero. He's a hero. He's a man amongst men.

We were out here months ago for this, played with Greg Allman down at the Annenberg Center. And some guy came, or somebody gave us these little, man, they were tiny. They were like these little, tiny little cupcake with like a peace sign on the top of it. No bigger than a nickel and it just absolutely destroyed me it wasn't i had to i had to like somehow find my way back to my hotel room just to lay down and just that was there was nothing fun about it i was completely non-functional. It was a Saturday night at 8 p.m. when I was just done. Yeah, they're saying that Bruce Lee's brain had been swollen when they checked his autopsy.

They said there was no visible external injury. However, according to autopsy reports, his brain had swollen considerably from 1,400 to 1,575 grams, which is a 13% increase, which big he was only 32 the only substance found during his autopsy was equagesic i don't know what that is um i'll google it okay the only substance okay the doctor said in an interview that he he died from an allergic reaction to the muscle relaxant and equagistic whatever it is which described as a common ingredient in painkillers doctors announced knee lee's death officially it was ruled death by misadventure huh wow that's interesting but i guarantee he had some head injuries because he was sparring you know if you're if you're doing the kind of shit that he was doing he was experimenting a lot with various

martial arts and had a most likely he got hit i mean that's just a part of the game and if he was doing really experimental wild stuff like i know he mean, he's involved in a lot of different sort of assimilating a lot of different martial arts styles. I'm sure Don and Osato got a shot or two in there somewhere. You know what I mean? Come on. Yeah, all of them. There's some recent video, recently released video of him sparring at some karate tournament thing.

And he has his headgear on and his full body armor on and him and his dude are going at it so if he was involved in stuff like that he's most likely he's getting hit in the head it's just the way it is he worked with a lot of boxers i know he worked with gene labelle he did some judo with gene and it's just the nature of martial arts especially when you're involved in striking sports so who knows who knows what it was that caused his head to bleed. But it wasn't eating hash. No.

That's a shame. Have you gotten a hold of some of the LA edibles while you're here? This trip, no. I don't know. Yes, you have. You just don't know it yet. Man, the last experience

kind of put me off, dude. I'm not kidding. Don't be scared, homie. All three of us ate that fucking cupcake and all three of us were done fucking cupcake and all three of us were done i mean they don't they got to put a dosage loss on that shit they do now they put dosage numbers on it was not cool man i mean it was just not not night my night was over well they

have this um they have these things called chiba chews and some of them i think will go up to 250 milligrams which is just insane an effective dose is like 20 or 30. That's insane. Like 20 is not bad for like a mellow, easygoing, body high. 30, you're pushing the boundaries of paranoia. 40, 50, you're in a cold sweat. 250. Joey Diaz ate two of them.

There's a chocolate bar at a place I go to. It's 40 doses. Game over. 40 doses in one chocolate bar. And a chocolate bar to place they go to it's 40 doses game over 40 doses in one chocolate bar small bar too what the fuck man how big is small small like a not a big bar you know where it's like five pieces right like a little like how many inches wide size snicker size 40 doses 40 people why i mean imagine if you ate it by yourself though two hits and it's like because you want to see buddha. There's only one way to see him.

You've got to see Buddha. You've got to close your eyes, shut the lights out, and watch the dance. Yeah, I don't know. At some point, I realized, I almost felt like I was getting anxiety from smoking it. And definitely the carcinogen, and as a singer now, I've really got to be cautious about it. So I just kind of quit smoking. And then the edibles, you're're right it's an entirely different feeling it's more of an anti-anxiety almost like an overall body high whereas if you try to go out on stage i can't i can't smoke and

perform because like you get so internalized i feel like i can't connect with the crowd at all right um so i just learned a long time ago not not to do that. But with the edibles, man, it almost just opens you up. And it's much more expressive, I think. Do you know about the conversion in your body? I have no idea. Like the 11-hydroxy metabolite? People who have heard this on the podcast, please bear with me. I know you've heard this.

When you eat marijuana, it produces something called 11-hydroxy metabolite. It passes through your liver. And apparently it's four to five times more psychoactive than thc oh absolutely that's why it's such an intensely different experience it's because it's a totally different drug when you eat it yeah well in this in the sensory depth tank sensory deprivation tank it's very psychedelic when you eat it because you you just you're in that experience which is so bizarre as it is yeah you don't even really need drugs and those things do you no you don't need anything what's that like you have one yeah yeah yeah you want to do it how long you here for i fly out tomorrow at noon

see what we could do you should try it though at some point in your life for sure i don't know if they have one in nashville but they But they're popping up All over the country They had one in D.C. When I was in D.C. People from the show in Philly They have one in Philly Like they're showing up All over the country

People are starting to open up These tank centers This is another thing That didn't Didn't exist In I mean Most cities

It was really hard to find one If you have your own You gotta maintain the pH levels Mine has a full filtrate I have a commercial level one Float Nashville Float Nashville cities it was really hard to find one if you have your own you got to maintain the ph levels and mine has a full filtrate i have a commercial level one float nashville float nashville bam son you're in i work on buying a car first you don't i mean it's not expensive i mean you don't have to have one right you go and uh rent one out just go and uh you know set an appointment you should definitely try it it's one of the most profound feelings of relaxation you'll ever feel in your life.

It's like a complete and total disassociation experience. You lose feeling of your body, right? Yeah, you don't think you're there anymore. You think your mind has been released from your body and your mind's flying through space, completely untethered from the body. You don't feel the water. The only time I've ever experienced that, even on,

I never had any type of complete disassociation experiences, even on really high dosages of psilocybin. The one time I ever, I think what I would classify as the most psychedelic experience I've ever had was from a drug that's not even normally associated with the psychedelic family, which is dextromethorphan.

What is that? DXM. It's a lot of kids like pound bottles of robitussin to get but i mean by the time you consume enough dxm that's in the robitussin you're doing so much horrible shit to your body um but i only i only encountered it one time we were at this festival in charlotte north carolina a friend of mine had somehow gotten a hold of this pure medical grade dextromethorphan we had a digital scale jail caps weighing it out and it's about 400 milligrams it's just the most amazing completely inexplicable experience i've ever had wow um my buddy brian he's like you know sturgell you you need to hear music on this he's

like it's as good as it fucking gets so first off the weirdest part of the whole experience is we're what we're out in this koa campground in north carolina they're just surrounded by hippies and there's night you know tanks going off and shit and like that ain't my thing but tanks yeah nitrous tanks they'll look for these hippie festivals how you thought you meant like... No. No, no, no. I don't understand. Hippies have tanks? We had to make it back down to the parking lot where his truck was parked through this trail. You couldn't see shit, man. It was like the most complete flutter vision ever.

And I'm just stumbling, not walking in the trees. And Brian was like, oh, man, just close your eyes. I'm like, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? Close my eyes? He's like, just close your eyes, trust me. And I closed my eyes, and I swear as I'm sitting here, it was all of a sudden like I could see the trail plain as day directly in front of me,

and almost like the entire canopy had this moon lamp just turned on and flooded it with light, and everything was so clear. And we walked all the way back down to his truck. With your eyes closed? With our eyes closed. What? I swear to you man i'll never to this day i'm not even you know it was it was insane and we got you only do it

once one time i don't know i've never even met anybody that's even heard of it or knew where to find it since but uh brian used to get tons of this shit and he just lay with his headphones on for like eight hours in his living room and listen to music. You're completely. Is it illegal? Oh, well, I mean, to possess it in that kind of quantity. You have to have permits and things like that. But we got to the truck, and he had a Toyota Tacoma, you know, with the bucket seats. And a really nice stereo, like this booming-ass stereo. And we just put in like Band of Gypsies or something.

And I laid that bucket seat back man and closed my eyes and within a matter of second half a minute or a minute i i wasn't in that truck anymore i wasn't in this bucket seat i felt like you never floated down a river on an inner tube yeah it's the same feeling except seven or two i was laying in this little like my own little personal cloud just kind of like and as just as i'm sitting here talking to you i was in this cloud cruising through this golden sienna, purple sunrise sky. Just like the most booming, blissful euphoria I've ever felt listening to Jimi Hendrix. And this lasted like six hours, man. You're just like cruising through the sky.

Wow. I've never had that from any of, you know, what people commonly associate as hallucinogens. That stuff sounds intense. Yeah, I talked to Dr. Strassman about it. He said there's never really been any studies. There's not a lot known. You're a guinea pig. Sturgill Simpson, human guinea pig.

No, well, this was all years and years ago, man. I don't know that I'm... You should do a trip report on Arrowhead. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, the forum. I know what you're talking about. Yeah.

Yeah, if you... Well, that's one of the most important resources Arrowhead is for people understanding what they're getting into. Because there's a lot of really educated, very well thought out reviews of the various compounds and different different effects they have like i said i don't i didn't know anything about it until then i've never seen it since but i do remember uh the guy saying that the difference in three or four or two hundred milligrams is you know a thousand times stronger trip so you know nobody's ever really documented the ladder so

a thousand times stronger trip four or five hundred milligrams you know you can wow is there any negative uh downside um the only thing i remember is i might have had like a slight allergic reaction because i remember feeling like i had sun poisoning and i was like really scratching my back kind of tripping out on this for a second this is on the early onset and the guys were like what are you doing i was like man i think i got too much sun scratching my back, kind of tripping out on this for a second. This was on the early onset, and the guys were like, what are you doing? I was like, man, I think I got too much sun today. My back's really itching. And Chad was like, no, it's not. You're fine.

And as soon as he said that, the whole sensation went away. But there was nothing negative about the experience. And when it's over, the comedown? It just goes away. You head back to baseline. It just kind of wears off. Wow. That's so weird. negative about the experience and when it's over the come down it's just like just goes away back to baseline just kind of wears off wow yeah that's so weird you you always wonder like if there was it was easy for people to do research on psychedelics and there it was respected and it was something that people pursued as opposed to being like you know if you do research on

on certain things you could be thought of as a pariah. It could fuck with you. You know, you could be ostracized. People could say, oh, this guy just wants to get high. He's just trying to get people high. He's just doing experimental drugs. He's not doing serious research. Or they think there's some hidden agenda or zealotry behind it, right?

Yeah, it could be. There's a massive hospital in Lexington, Kentucky that was called the Narcotics Farm. And it was a criminal institution for drug. William Burroughs was there for a while. Wow. They did a lot of highly barbaric experimental addiction treatments there back in the 40s and 50s. And just unspeakable things like dropping people's genitals in ice water or something like that.s and just unspeakable things like you know like dropping people's genitals and ice water or something like that's not unspeakable right i can think of like

kind of ridiculous approaches to dealing with with heroin and methadone right addiction and i know they did some psychedelic studies i'm sure back there but you know it's the hospital still stands there and it's just the most ominous creepy creepy building. Methadone is a weird one, isn't it? Oh, that's horrible shit, man. They use it to get people off heroin, but yet it's worse for you than heroin. The withdrawals are way worse, yeah. It just makes them well, too, right? It doesn't get them high.

Is that the deal? Whatever the genetical attachment. attachment that you're you know your heroin is like one of those drugs that actually modifies your body's you know biochemistry in a way that you become physically dependent on it so they're kind of facilitating that whatever it is that causes the sickness when you withdraw but the shit it's like it's way worse for you and it doesn't get you high nobody talks about like really good methadone music you know like yeah right people did heroin and made some fucking incredible music nobody did methadone made some awesome shit there was these guys that used to come to the pool hall that used

to hang out in white plains and uh they were called the methadonians that's what we would call them they were dudes that came over from the methadone clinic and they'd come over and play pool and they were just zombified just dead in the eyes yeah what's his deal he's one of those methadonians these poor guys come over from the methadone clinic what do you guys do around here when you got to take a massively intensely painful piss oh you got to do it right now go run go take a piss all right we're done anyway. You run, and I'll tell everybody how to get to your website. Sturgill Simpson as he takes his little girl's bladder to the bathroom. Not everyone can deal with bulletproof coffee and all that stuff. Water.

Just sitting there. Just weighs. I have that. Weighs on you. You have it? I know. I said you'll have that sometimes. Not you. Yeah, occasionally. Weighs on, you have it? I know, I said you'll have that sometimes. Not you.

Yeah, occasionally. You in a third person sense. But I get it occasionally too, man. It definitely does happen. Sturgill's website, his Twitter is Sturgill Simpson. And if you go to it, it's actually that image, the image of the earth, s sands the turtles underneath it. Similar image.

But Sturgill's... The CDs that I have, like I said, I'm a big fucking fan. He's got several songs that I'm really into that I'm listening to right now on iTunes. But the CDs... Let me find them on my playlist here. Meta Modern Sounds and Country.

That's the name of one. That's the latest one. That's the one that's the most psychedelic. And then the other one is High Top Mountain, which is fucking fantastic. I really, really dig it. They're very different. But both of them are equally unique and kick ass. I love all of it.

I'm sure he's got a website too. Must be like SturgillSimpson.com, right? Check this out. His website? No, well, sort of. Colorado health officials want to ban almost all recreational edibles haha pussies came out two hours ago

really yeah on HuffPo wow SturgillSimpson.com is his website that's ridiculous we're just reading something on Huffington Post

that the health officials in Colorado want to ban all edibles cause kids are getting into them and shit they're just nerfing

the world that's all they're doing they're just nerfing the world. That's all they're doing. They're just nerfing the world. There was a really sensationalist piece about this on some national news program the other night because children were... Halloween. ...getting a hold of them and having overdoses.

There's no... It's really scary. So you're going to outlaw Clorox, too? Yeah. Because your kids get under the fucking sink? You're a bad parent? Clorox is way worse, first of all, because the kids that are having the overdose on pot they're not dying well they might freak out but they're not gonna die it doesn't it's not toxic right just doesn't you know anything

that can fuck your kids up just don't let them get to it you know yeah don't let your kid play with hammers no shouldn't fucking go to home depot and shut it down stupid take away spoons yeah the idea that adults a a grown adult, should not be able to buy an edible that has a clearly marked label. All these experiences that we're talking about, like you ate this little thing that was the size of a nickel, you got fucked up, you learn. You learn.

You're here. Everyone's fine. It's like the lowest worry version of overdose ever, because the overdose is just, ah! Well, when I say say overdose it's still i mean all it means is i'm gonna go lay in bed and have a really good time instead of walking around and having a really good time but there's no ill effects no ill effects your body doesn't break your mind doesn't melt you're gonna be fine at the end of the day you might just get a really

great night's sleep yeah i'm not really recommending you give it to your kids but if your kids get a hold of it just stay with them. Stay in the room with them. Everybody's going to be okay. They link two deaths to them. I don't know. One, somebody ate one and fell off of a hotel. Another guy, it says, Richard Kirk may have been on pain meds in a pot edible when he killed his wife.

Well, pain meds. I guarantee you I'd go with that. The pot edible was probably wrestling with the pain beds as he was grabbing hold of the trigger fuck all that man you can't blame a guy falling off a roof on pot what are you doing on the roof stupid pot didn't tell you to get up on that roof why'd you fall off that roof you know he probably just fell off that roof no matter what he was on you can't fuck around on roofs dummy especially when you're blitzed that's a silly idea no matter what he was on. You can't fuck around on roofs, dummy. Especially when you're blitzed.

That's a silly idea. Who knows what he was doing? But to blame that on pot is fucking stupid. Instead of blaming that on pot, how about you think about how many fucking people don't jump off the roof when they're on pot? It's like a lot more. It also says that the cookie he ate didn't give him the recommended immediate effect that he wanted, so then he ate six times the recommended dose. Silly bitch. You can die from cigarettes standing

in the fucking corner, you know? Rest in peace, silly bitch. People make mistakes, man. You can't blame the substance. I mean, it's like, what are we going to do? Are we going to outlaw cars because people get in accidents? Are we going to outlaw knives because people stab people? The idea that adults can't make their own decisions has been the folly of man since civilization was created.

We have to figure out what decisions are the right ones, educate each other, and then move forward from there. But to tell someone that they can't handle it because Jim over here jumped off the fucking roof. Everybody, all those positive experiences that he had eating pot, we're going to flush those down the toilet because we lost Jim, okay? Jim is a wild man. Jim is fucking crazy. Yeah, Jim used to work a tightrope, and he used to do fucking backflips off the garage, but whatever.

We loved him, and he's gone, so no more pot for everybody. Like, what are you talking about? I mean, are we going to outlaw guns every time someone commits suicide? What are we going to do? What kind of a goofy world are we going to create? Because if you just make everything illegal, everything that kills you is going to be illegal.

You're going to have nothing. You're going to have no electricity. There'll be no water because people could fucking drown. There'll be no food because sometimes food goes bad and people die of food poisoning. There'll be no water because people could fucking drown there'll be no food because sometimes food goes bad and people die of food poisoning there'll be everything you're gonna take away everything you you literally if you want to take away things that kill people you literally have to remove life itself no more dogs because dogs bite people no more spiders because spiders can poison you we're gonna have to poison all the spiders because they could poison people

but we can't have spider poison because that kills babies if they get added under the sink so we'll have no life there will be no life it's just preposterous and the idea that colorado is gonna step in and legislate that what we need to do is get all those fucking people high where is that coming from some dummies yeah some what's what's the issue like i didn't they're worried about people freaking out on edibles. That's all it is. Is it so strong? Yeah, but so what?

Don't eat as much. Lower the dose. You know what's really strong? Alcohol. It's everywhere. Go to a fucking store, drink a bottle of Jack Daniels, you're dead. You're dead in three hours. Or whatever it takes.

Maybe you've got a better tolerance than me. But if you eat a fucking, you know, you drink a gallon jug of Jack Daniels, most likely you're a goner. It's really, yeah, there's some truth there. I used to, I don't really drink at all anymore. I think most of that is probably related to my job. Because you spend night after night looking out at rooms full of people that are very drunk. Right. And it gives you a certain i don't know and plus looking

back on my life all the dumbest shit i ever did alcohol was pretty much directly related all of it the worst decisions i ever made it wasn't because i was on hard drugs you know go figure no it's it's the number one sanctioned drug i mean it's what everybody does to have a good time after work let's go have a drink. I'm not opposed to having a drink. I like having a drink. I really do. I like drinking.

I don't drink too much. I don't get fucked up. But I've been fucked up and I've had a great time. Yeah, it's bad for you. But so is a lot of cheeseburgers and bath bombs. There's really nothing worse than a drunk. Very few things. Very few things worse than an obnoxious drunk.

Yeah, especially a violent obnoxious drunk and obnoxious drunk yeah especially a violent obnoxious drunk it's the worst the worst is you ever been on a date with a girl and you're sober and she's drunk that's disastrous really drunk girls are the worst really drunk guys that's the worst they're the worst i think really drunk guys are the worst because they're more violent than the really drunk girls you know those are it's sad at the shows they're the they're the only ones that ever want to talk to me like the other guys in the bandander young and they get hit on by the girls the girls never want to talk to sturgeon man it's always like the really big like large drunk guy and they they all like give me the bear hug and i get i get i get the whaling thing and then they're just like hugging me and

i'm i'm levitating off the ground they're giving me like this thing like fucking man you're the shit dude yeah like one song man damn dude uh and those are the only people i want to talk to me like they're really huge like wildebeest drunk really redneck guys that's my curse yeah they're fun to talk to they're fucking great i have a good time talking a lot of those dudes i do i think this is a certain romance and fun involved in alcohol consumption that I embrace. It's not the end-all, be-all, but it's not bad. There's some fun to alcohol. It's an irresponsible, oftentimes reckless, stupid, impulsive feeling and state of mind. But with the right people, that shit works.

It's bad for your health that's the number one issue that shouldn't smoke pot fuck yeah everything hits people differently yeah i know a lot of people that shouldn't drink though a lot more people that shouldn't drink than shouldn't do anything else right i know friends that i have friends that smoke pop i can't drink they're alcoholics but they'll still smoke pot so they don't drink yeah well well it's not even so but they can they can smoke pot and they're fine but if they drink they're off the rails the gene just yeah that weird a lot of irishmen a lot of that that weird gene gene it just it just hits them like a truck they can't do it they can't regulate it takes over whoa whoa i mean we were we were in were in Ireland a couple weeks ago.

You talk about some fucking great people, though, man. Oh, yeah. Just, if all the places in Great Britain or Europe that we've played, it feels the most like the States. Because they're just like, you know, and a lot of the British and the Scottish audiences are so intensely attentive and appreciative that it's almost disconcertingly quiet.

When you get to Ireland, it's like, fuck! Yeah! You're like, yep, okay, done this before. They like American country music? They fucking love it, man. Wow, that's awesome. Scottish and the Irish especially. It all came from there.

Really? Yeah, all country, bluegrass, anything. It's all just a derivative of Scotch-Iish folk music that came over with with the settlers we just kind of know she drank whiskey and sit on a porch for a hundred years and it just got faster and faster no she had back traditional Irish music and a lot of Scottish fiddle tunes like the mandolin is tuned in D like just like a bagpipe because when the pipes got outlawed, they started playing a lot of those songs on stringed instruments.

Wow. Why did the pipes get outlawed? For being annoying? No, for basically it was their British equivalent of the law against inciting a riot. Whoa. Like somebody pulled out some fucking bagpipes back in the day like some shit was going to go down, man. Wow. They made a law fucking bagpipes back in the day. Like some shit was going to go down, man. Wow.

They made a law against bagpipes. Yeah, they outlawed them for a long time. That's hilarious. How long? I don't know. Like years? Yeah. Jamie will find out.

Wow. That's insane. All of that tradition kind of came over. And that's where a lot of country music, the melodies and the themes and the elements, they're very similar. Is that why like that lord of the dance shit like when they were dancing a little bit like line dancing yeah well isn't it that's a little questionable i don't know we'll go i don't know what michael what the fuck was his name the lord of the dance flat flatly that was short-lived people like yeah let's go, let's go Irish dancing. No, let's not.

No. I did it for a little while. I think he still, I actually, I think I saw a fucking billboard for it when I was over there. There's a few suckers left in town. Man. Most people got hip to that and went, wait, wait, wait, wait. What the fuck are we watching? What is that dude doing up there, man? That was weird.

Yeah. But yeah, it's all interconnected. That's amazing. I didn't that's amazing i really really do really i mean i've man especially up in glasgow and dublin i we feel like we've almost been adopted at this point really they just they're so appreciative how often you play over there i've been over five or six times this year no shit yeah actually we haven't really started our u.s tour on the the album. The album came back in May, but I've spent the majority of the year in Europe. Wow. Why is that? It's just, it's important.

It was always important to me, like, to go over there and play for those people. Why? I don't know. Just free travel, really, man. And plus, you get to fucking play music every night and see Europe. Right. I think, honestly, well, here be such it's a little it has the potential to be a little bit more flash in the pan base over here people get bored quicker

but uh i've just had a lot of friends that are musicians that said if you make the effort and you go over and and they see you they see you taking the trouble and time to come over like they're loyal they're just fans for life i'll probably still be touring over there long after any career i have here's dried up really yeah that's amazing what about is that england as well or just i'm not so much i mean there's a market but it it appears to be sincerely and genuinely appreciated in in the celtic areas dublin and belfast and glasgow and edinburgh and uh you know these these these are really very musical cities at their core but they just you know anything poetry related or you know storytelling they just really love it how upset were they that youtube put their songs on every iphone were they bummed out? I don't know.

Was Dublin pissed? They've gone soft. I go out of my way to stay as much the fuck out of their business as possible when I'm there. Right. You know, just show up and do my job. Because it's always, you know. Do you know the story about YouTube putting their

YouTube put their new album on every iPhone? The other day I'm in my, and my phone starts playing random. And all of a sudden, I got some YouTube song. Oops, I'm sorry. Bono apologizes for YouTube album being automatically added to Apple iTunes library. Now that you say that, man, I was backstage yesterday syncing my phone up to a new laptop. I got on the road, and I was getting all the cloud shit, and I looked down, and there's a fucking U2 album on there.

Exactly. Okay. I was wondering, why is shit, and I looked down, and there's a fucking U2 album on the music. Exactly. Okay. I was wondering, why is this here? Yeah, why is that there? I don't want that. I don't want that. I'm in my car the other day, and I have my car plugged in. I got the thing that plugs into the stereo system.

It's playing random. I just do that sometimes. So they monopolized iTunes, basically. Well, they figured out a way to launch their album on iTunes. But the problem is, a lot of people that buy an iPhone aren't U2 fans. That's a fucking very presumptuous thing. And you're dealing with billions of these fucking things being sold. So how many of them have U2 songs on them?

All of them! I mean, how many are they selling? I mean, they might sell 100 million iPhones, right? That's all with a U2 album on it. That's stupid. That's not how many U2 would sell. U2's a very popular band. I'm sure a lot of people would be super happy to get U2's song for free with a new iPhone.

But a lot of people wouldn't. They just sold them with them. They pushed them onto their existing phones. Yes. I had a 5S. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. Just showed up.

Oh, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you update The operating system It wasn't Not even that No Just showed up

What Just through iTunes No Yeah just showed up That's dirty Oh that's even dirtier Like you already purchased it And you just didn't download it yet

Oh my god That's actually disgusting Yeah That's a disaster That's why he said sorry Why did he let that go I read the other day Where he also

said that uh he's been wearing those fucking glasses for 20 years because he's got glaucoma yeah do you buy that you look a little incredulous yep the jury's out jury's out i wonder yeah he's probably got called on it you know people like hey man why is it just now coming up though i mean people have been wondering what the i mean remember he had like the fly these big the big black ones back in the day everybody just let that shit slide like nobody was like hey man what the fuck i wonder if he smokes weed because if you uh have glaucoma you're allowed to it reduces interocular pressure it's one of the legit reasons to get a medical marijuana prescription my

grandfather has really bad glaucoma now and i but he's never i would never i don't even know how i would approach that conversation to give him weed oh yeah he's such an old school like just a hillbilly you know right just never never you know i don't even know how i would convince him that this actually will make you feel better just sit him down you know um sit him down yeah get him drunk first he's pretty pretty stoic guy man well then just sit him down maybe i just don't tell him just give him the brownies and then i freak out and have a heart attack and die well that would be very bad yes yeah sit him down all right i'll sit him down you're a grown man now. He might listen to you.

I get time off to go home and actually see him. I might do that sometimes. Listen, man. We're out of time. We just ran through three hours. Really? Yep. Holy shit.

Crazy, right? That's nuts. Time flies. It all just slips away. Tell people your website, SturgillSimpson.com, your two albums. Your website, SturgillSimpson.com. Your two albums, you can get them on iTunes, and I listed them off while you were taking a leak.

If anybody's interested, you got to, I mean, my favorite songs, there's a bunch of them. You Can Have the Crown, I fucking love that. Off your first one, that's a great fucking, why are you laughing? Oh, man. It's nothing. What? It's that song everybody's got that song they wish they never wrote that's your song that's my song dude that song's great uh yeah i fucking love that it was a lot of fun and i had i wrote it in about 20

minutes like 7 30 in the morning and we ended up recording it that day we just happened to go into a studio actually waylon's old studio in nashville hillbilly central we got the opportunity to record in there and dave was like what do you got that's new and i'd written that song and another song literally that morning before i knew we were going to be in there and i was like well and i played it for him and the rest of the guys of course they're just laughing their ass off right they're like we got to cut that so we cut it and then at the end of the day i heard the playback and i'm like cut that so we cut it and then at the end of the day i heard the playback and i'm like i'm gonna be singing that fucking thing when i'm 60 years old that's gonna be that's gonna be the one and sure as shit man every show every fucking show uh it never fails there's that one guy

and in between every song king turd motherfucker you know just like playing a turd you know there's any like he follows us it has to be the same guy I don't know well when you start off with song saying I've been spending all my money on weed and pills yeah that's that's that's how it launches you got you got to get both albums folks they're both very different which I thought was really fascinating too before I got to meet you and understand what it's from what caused it and then the other one meta modern

sounds and country music I love that too man dude you're the shit thank you very much thanks for being you thanks for being on here and please reconsider your five album thing it's the internet man the internet knows all it's fucking scary.

All right, you dirty bitches. We'll see you soon. This week, a lot of podcasts, including that lady, Sue, from Life Below Zero. I'm very excited

to talk to her. Cameron Haynes is here on Friday, too. Awesome. you