TrueLife - The Brotherhood of Eternal Love: Orange Sunshine from Afghanistan to California

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/https://brotherhoodhashish.website/index.html    Step back in time as I recount the adventures of a young man, barely in his twenties, traveling through countries that are no longer accessible to westerners and one country, Yugoslavia, which is no longer there. Follow me to Afghanistan, a faraway fairy tale land of enchantment and hashish. The Arab nations were at peace, modernization was coming, and they welcomed us with open arms. It was a time of change, and I truly believed the world could become a better place through the use of Psychedelics.    The first chapters of Brotherhood Hashish are memoirs from my childhood and teenage years. They tell of my unusual life, and the circumstances that influenced me to become the person I am.  At the heart of the book are memoirs from my life as Ronnie Bevan. These stories follow a period during which I aspire to be an engineer, discover LSD, embrace the hippie movement, smuggle hashish, become a fugitive, escape to the Caribbean, and after returning to California spend ten years avoiding arrest. The last chapters are memoirs from my life after the adventures of Ronnie Bevan end. During this period, I met thousands upon thousands of people, and never revealed my secret past to anyone, until now. One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Of journeying together. Yeah. Yeah. Many, many lifetimes. Literally journeyed together.

We've already got. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. That's all right. That's all right. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. I hope everybody is having a beautiful day. I have an incredible story to tell you. For anybody who has found themselves in the embrace of a warm psychedelic hug,

I have some people that may have made that possible for you. For anyone who has felt the chicken skin on a come-up, on a realization that was about to change your life, I have some people that have influenced not only me, but the psychedelic scene, And it's, there's a story called, here's the name, there's the look at the book for people that are watching. It's called Brotherhood Hashish. It's the story of Ronnie Bevan and his lovely wife, Wendy. But the book possibly could have been called the story of Ronnie Jensen, James McDonald, or Roy Day, for that matter,

because there's so many different characters. But in the end, it's, it's an incredible story that talks about the world we live in today, the psychedelic world we live in today. There's some great quotes that I want to read from some people that talk about the book. And this one is from Tim Scully. It says, I highly recommend Brotherhood Hashish. Tim Scully, chemist, author, creator of Orange Sunshine. Ron's book is a testament to the spirit, adventure, and spirituality that the Brotherhood of Eternal Love represents, Nicholas Schu. A cinematic odyssey to the psychedelic underworld, Chris Simenek.

Thank you, Ronnie, for a true story with deep spiritual meaning, Michael Randall, and of course, a true story. story about the innocence and humble beginnings of what it was really all about and why we did what we did. Carol Griggs Randall. Ronnie, Wendy, thank you so much for being here today. How are you guys today? Good. I am so excited to have you. You know, I met you through Mark Rose. We should send a shout out to Mark Rose. He's probably watching this right now. Mark, thanks for getting us in contact. It's such an amazing story. You know, as a young man, I grew up in Southern California, and I began to have a spiritual experience, probably around 18 or 19.

And I remember the first time that I went to a laser show and ate some mushrooms. And I got this warm feeling of just this knowing or something like that. But when I got your book, it was really amazing just to see how it all started. So I guess it seems to me when I picked up the book, Ronnie and Wendy, you had an interesting childhood where you went from the Middle East and dreaming of raising pigeons to Laguna Beach and surfing. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the beginning of the book. Well, I was part, because there's so many different chapters there. My life was changing so fast.

My aliases were changing. True. Maybe, so you find yourself in a, I think maybe one of the reasons why you're such a good communicator is that you grew up learning sign language. That was probably a foundation for getting to read people in a way. which made your life a little bit easier. Like how, your father was signed, used sign language, right?

Yeah, my father and both of my grandparents and my great, no, both of my grandparents and my father were mute, the three of them. And so that must have been an interesting way to, looking back at it, like you knew that probably wasn't normal. But when you use sign language, you really get good at looking at people's facial features. You really get good at reading people

because you have to look at their eyes, you look at their hands, and you understand communication in a way that someone who doesn't sign, you know, doesn't understand. Do you think that's kind of accurate? Yeah. Yeah. I think that the reason I bring that up is because as we get into this book and we begin learning about some of the escapades that happened,

you were really good at reading people, whether it was, you know, talking to Johnny Griggs or Dennis or seeing your beautiful wife for the first time, you were able to really read people's ideas and understand kind of what they meant. And I think that led to your spiritual path little. But I ever thought about that for a minute? Like it's pretty impressive. No, no.

That makes sense. We haven't done a lot of looking back. And when you look back and you see what we did and many, many other, you know, things in our life, it's kind of amazing. It's hard for us even to understand. But we were busy. You know, if you get up every day and you go after it, you know, that's what happens. In your life, you've accomplished quite a bit. Yeah.

So one part about this book that I wasn't really didn't know I was going to get is it's like a geography lesson. And it kind of goes back in time where you were in Laguna Beach in Southern California when Nottsbury Farm was free before there was a wall around it, you know, when Disneyland was different. How has it been to see that place change from the time you were there? You probably got to surf beaches when there was no crowds there. That's kind of amazing. You all got, yeah. When we first started surfing, we were at some of the first ones. So we didn't ever have a problem.

You know, we were still careful not to go like to Malibu or somewhere where these quirky surfers were. And at that time, a big group of well-known surfers were coming up. You know what I mean? They were establishing themselves. But true, the beaches were pretty empty. And we could go surfing pretty much wherever we wanted. Because we were early.

You know, we were at the start. And it just happened to be that way. We just happened to tune into things at their beginning. And that just has been our life. Yeah. It was a really unique time, especially for California, to see that culture emerge right there and to be part of it. And that's probably one of the reasons why you were so influential in doing what you did. You know, it's when we move from the beginning,

of your story and we start getting into one of my favorite chapters was chapter six a year of LSD discovery and it's like from the blue liquid of the Sandoz in Long Beach to the Tequita's Canyon and Palm Springs. Maybe you could talk a little bit about

getting blue liquid from Sandoz. Like Sandoz was like the first places where Albert Hoffman synthesized it and then it came like what was your first experience with it with the Sandoz LSD? Well the thing is we didn't know where it came from. Okay.

I actually got a vial for my brother. And there weren't a lot of those vials. I think there was only one egg crate full of them. And Michael Holland said had come to Southern California from Sandals and brought him with them. And that was the first and the last blue liquid that we ever saw. It was like one batch. But it was so pure and so strong. And I do want to mention that as far as having the spiritual experience goes,

the pure the LSD is the easier. You know, you're not fighting whatever. It just allows everything to open up and you open up. And it seems easily accessible, where some acids that aren't so pure is that you kind of have to work with them all. Yeah, it seems like the further it goes down the line, the more it gets stepped on. And then you start getting these weird sort of, you know, twitchiness,

or you start grinding your teeth. Ethan. And you know, that's not the LSD. And when people tell us some stories, we tell them, you know, you either, you know, there's a lot of people. I took Sunshine and then they had this, all these weird things. And I said that wasn't sunshine because that wouldn't happen. Right. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. It's not like we didn't have our experiences with some off brands at time. And so we were familiar with that. So we took LSD, like right away I was totally intrigued with it. So we took it once a week on the weekends for, I really don't know the time frame. But we did a lot of different things like go to Disneyland and, you know, walk out in nature and do things. We hadn't experienced the religious side of it, the metaphysical side. That was something that had to come.

So, you know, we were experimenting. I don't remember the time frame, though, for it was four weeks, six weeks or something before, where you read that one where I was standing and the clear lake came upon me. That was something that just happened in evolution, let's say, or succession of our experiences. And that point, everything changed.

And that's the experience that you were talking about that a lot of people do have. Yeah. It's an interesting relationship because I think it starts that way for a lot of people. In the beginning, it's almost like a marriage because it's like you start off in this courting phase where like you have a little bit of LSD and you get familiar with it. And there is this there is this playfulness about it. But soon after, there's this beautiful love that comes about it. And that's sort of that spiritual experience.

And in the book you talked about the first time using with the blue liquid. And then you start talking about going out into nature. I want to read the quote because I thought it was transformative. It was something that people said. So I imagine you in the Tequita's Canyon and Palm Springs and you're out and you find this beautiful area. And the quote is, then one afternoon something different happened. Several hours into our session, I was standing in the stream and everything around me turned into light. I saw how all things manifest from one source.

It was like I'd waited my whole life for that moment as endless amounts of knowledge. knowledge poured through my mind. Like that's such an amazing quote because I think so many people have had a similar experience. Yeah. Is a spiritual experience. Maybe can you take us back to that moment, maybe describe it a little bit? Well, there's a lot to describe. You know, we had learned to take RELD.

And sometimes we had hiked, you know, the second deal is give you energy. Right. They're a really good thing, especially like mescaline or, you know, mushrooms. They give you energy to do things. You actually can hike if you can isolate yourself. Like we used to hike through the crater. And no one would, and Haleakala, they wouldn't see anyone the whole day. So you could take some psychedelic, be still for a couple hours.

And then at that point, you could physically exert yourself. And so at that time, we were going up to Tauquitz, and we were actually climbing up the stream and climbing up the rocks and getting to the streams in the back. And that was our experience. was having the day of exploring in nature on LSD. And after that hit me in the stream, after that, there was no more exploring, there was no more hiking,

there was no more nothing. When we took our LSD, we lay down. And we were down for a good five hours before we got back up. And in that time was when we had the LSD experience. and that is the experience that we were able to show to hundreds, thousands of people, our group, the brotherhood. Yeah. I remember hearing the story in the book,

you talk about going to Black's Beach with Johnny Griggs and laying down after he had met with Timothy Leary and brought back these papers and stuff like that. Maybe you could introduce the people to Johnny Griggs. And, you know, you spoke eloquently about him and talking about he's one of the most enlightened people you'd ever met. And I thought, wouldn't be proper unless we kind of brought him up and you could kind of talk about him a little bit. Well, he was or whatever, he is the most enlightened person I ever met. There's no doubt about that.

And we've met all the high lamas. We've met a lot of people, Timothy Larry, you know, so many people. But no one was like Johnny. I don't know what the deal was, but he was a very advanced soul. And he wasn't with this very long, but you'll find, I think I said in the book, that a lot of prophets and advanced spiritual. people don't they don't live long they're here they have a message and they're over but no one was like him he was the most charismatic person i ever knew he was his energy was so active and he recognized

everything right away for him it was easy he you know took acid a couple of times and bam there it was and once you merge with that light and that consciousness and that oneness you really can't go back to playing around with psychedelics like i said you could take small doses of mushrooms or things like that and have physical experiences like walking through a forest or public creek or whatever. But if you take a strong dose of LSD, we never had a choice but to lay down. And when everybody went when everybody went out with this, they also laid down and we took them away. We were able to show them that experience that we had experienced by ourselves. Yeah.

that, you know, there's something that happens when you lose the ability to speak or even communicate and you just because all you can do is lay down and just kind of become of it. You know, it's interesting to me this, this experience, you know, when you talk about Johnny Griggs or you talk about having a spiritual experience, on some level, it makes everyone around you afraid. Like, they're afraid of you because you've had this experience that they can kind of see in you. You know, it seems to me psychedelics are the one drug that makes everybody around you trip out. It's kind of weird, right? Well, we are all connected mentally, and there is a lot of that, what do you call it?

There's a lot going on in the ether between us that people don't think about. Like mine, like if you sit in a room and someone has a thought and then three other people have that same thought, those things happen, and they happen because we're connected. And if you can get that connectivity raw enough, you can see through it, and you can see, for instance, you can see the energy in your brothers and sisters. You know, when you look at them, you don't see Georgia anymore. You see God. And that is inside all of us.

Yeah, it's really well said. And maybe that is what scares people is when you can see through them, you know, and you can understand that they are you in some way. You recognize the fear and yourself that's in them. And like, it can be, you know, what we describe. is love can be very frightening for people who've never been loved before maybe that's part of it yeah um you know the the ego has no place in the psychedelic experience and the ego is the individuality that we all carry with us so sometimes when that gets threatened uh and people don't have tools to go

somewhere else or they're not with some guy that can you know get in between their and care of it for them, then they can have a bad experience. But I want you to know that out of the thousands of people that we took out on these experiences, and sometimes there'd be 20 or 30 people with this, maybe three established members from their brotherhood only, but they would all, they would all see that whole picture. And we never lost anyone. We never had anyone jump off a cliff or go home crazy or do anything like that. Everyone, and that was one reason we went in nature because you're isolated.

can't leave. You're in a house in Laguna Beach in the middle of the night. People can get up and go get in a car and go crazy. But being so far out in nature like we did every Sunday, we would hike into wherever we went, the forest, the desert, whatever. It isolated people enough so that when things came up, we could deal with them. And before we left that evening, everyone was back to the person they started out that morning. Yeah, I always say the worst thing that can happen to you on ALS and D experiences, you come back the same. That is really good. It's true.

Yeah. You know, I got, when I was reading the book, I had this question because you talk about bringing people out into nature and everybody having an experience that help them maybe understand a little bit better who they are. And then something changes, whether it's in the community or whether it's the propaganda that begins coming out, like time. magazine and these different magazines start putting out different propaganda pieces that talk about how it should be banned instead of controlled, you know. And then you even had a doctor from UCLA come out and try to write like a hit piece on you guys.

How much of the bat. Yeah, he wrote a hit piece on you guys, right? Yeah. And he was proposing to be our friend and was going to see, at that time, LSD was legal and there was a lot of controversy everywhere about what should be done. about it. The government just wanted to make it illegal. You had a lot of people with money that had had the experience and were willing to fight it. You know what I mean? They were willing to spend the money for advertising whenever they could do to try to keep it how it was. But that didn't work. They ended up making an illegal anyway. But yeah, there's quite a few articles in there.

And the other thing I just wanted to say that one of the big turning points was Art Linkletter's daughter when she jumped out of the building. Who knows what she was on? They took that and ran with it. They could go, oh, hey, LSD. And that really, you know, affected people because of the popularity of Art Linkletter. And so, you know, there was kind of a time when everything was open and people were experimenting. and it was an accepted thing of being a way to have a religious experience or whatever. And then it was a time of people standing up against it and wanting to outlaw.

And over time, of course, as you know, they ended up outlawed. Yeah, I know, like I'm just speculating here. But what was that? Was that the government and authority being afraid of people beginning to feel for themselves? Was it because the boundaries were disilluding? Was it a power thing? What do you think was the power behind it? I think it was a thing because anyone who turned on would realize that we're all one.

That makes it impossible for you to go to war. Well, we stopped that war in Vietnam. That was my goal. I was an activist. But when I first took acid, I realized immediately. this is it. This is what's going to work. And it was a thing. Also, you didn't have time to have meditate for 30 years to be enlightened. This had to happen now. We had to change people's minds and turn them towards the light and the love now and to stop these wars and to change. And it worked.

We did it. It'll never be the same. I was talking to Carol and I said, well, hey, you know, we opened the doors. And she said, open the door. And she said, open the door. doors, that whole building's gone. So yeah, that's what it took at that time to stop the war and to help everybody. And the other thing people don't realize is we were going on sessions with a lot of bets that had just come back from Vietnam that were terribly traumatized. And we also, which is another thing that's totally swept under the rug, so many kids were getting electric shock treatments.

If you were a hippie, the protocol was to get you in and get you electric shock treatments immediately. So there was a lot of kids that were really messed up that, you know, we cared for and found that that really helped both the vets and those kids. And then there was just everybody else. So we were just all one with everybody. I don't, nobody ever felt they were better or higher or you don't, that's not, you know, LSD is very humbling experience. So you're not going to come out of it at egotomane. So. Yeah, that's really well said. Yeah, I often wondered, you know, when I read some of the books or you listen to some lectures or you hear the accounts of what happened in that time, it does seem like there was a, an authority or a sort of power structure in place that was getting really nervous about everybody trying to disagree with them. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I do see that as.

like a, do you think it's like a high tide or is it more like a tsunami? If we just think about what happened at that time and then we see what's happening now, is it like a tide that comes in? Is it like this spiritual tide or is this just like a tsunami that's coming all the way in and taking everybody over? Probably depends on how high of a dose you take. That's such a good answer. So, you know, if we take, if I, if I can ground myself and get us back to the book, I have so many questions, I'm so thankful you're here.

My mind kind of races sometimes. So let me, let me put us back on track over here for a minute. I, you know, there's another quote that I wrote down to. It says the physical realm was manifesting from the vibration of the sound. That sounds like a pretty deep internal realization on a pretty high dose of acid right there. Do you remember saying that quote? Well, yeah, of course. And that's because that's all there is. There isn't anything beyond that. And the way it works is this physical world we living in is all manifestations of the energy and different vibrations.

That's what things are. They're manifestation of energy and different vibrations. And if you, I want to throw in. now right now something real quick though that we even had opposition once we started having these experiences from hindoos and Tibetans and you know people that are really asked to find exactly what we were looking for but they found it through meditation and whatever their practices happen to be but they weren't happy with us because here all of a sudden we're saying look at we can get right to where you guys spend your whole lifetime meditating in a cave we can have that

experienced by taking a pill. And you can imagine that didn't go over good, you know, with their doctrines and what they believe in all their hard work, you know, to sit there like that. But the truth of it is, everything breaks down to the sound of Ome. And you won't find a Hindu prayer, Tibetan prayer, any Eastern prayer that doesn't start with the word Ome. Every prayer starts with oh and that's because that is the basic vibrational source that everything manifests from and if you can get inside deep enough that home can start coming apart you can see those vibrations slow down or the noise instead of om becomes very vacuous and it kind of starts disappearing and once that disappearing the light manifests and there you are in the middle of all of it is that is that a

that you guys would do while on acid? Would you meditate using OM or? Well, you know the truth of it is, it was a ride. And once you took a high dose like that, it was all you could do to hang on. Yeah. It wasn't like you could, you know, enforce any of your things. You were actually nailed to the ground. If you tried to get up from land down, you couldn't get up.

And that energy. And that's kind of what it kept all the other people from being distracted and get up and trying to cling to their ego or something was because you really couldn't. And that's why we took the high doses in the beginning, too. So you didn't have a choice. And I kind of compare it to, now that I've had kids, it's like going into labor. There's no turning back.

Well, there is a point. When you take the acid, all of a sudden you go, uh-oh. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. You do. And your ego recognizes it. And your only choices to let the ego go. You're going to be in a bad place.

It's been nice knowing you. Yeah. We've had that every single time you take it, your ego goes, go. Yeah. What's going to happen here? And you really don't know. You don't have your spirituality. You have your toolbox that you've accumulated spiritual things to get you back.

You have the psychedelic prayer book. You've read the psychedelic experience book. I mean, you are prepared. You still don't know what is going to ripen in your karma on that experience to, I mean, you're not going to flip out or anything, but you're going to learn. You don't know what you're going to learn. And also, I've always said by doing a lot of accidental overdosing and stuff that it doesn't matter how much you take.

you're only going to get as far as your karma is allowing you to get to see at that point. Right. So if you would take 25 doses, it doesn't mean you're going to get enlightened. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's not the thing. The thing is basically where you are in your karma and how you're relating to those energies once that you leave this well. Yeah.

Sometimes I liken it to the like an environment. It's like you go to this place. And once you begin to understand the environment, you can begin to focus on the objects in that environment. But in the beginning, you're just like your death by astonishment. You know what I mean? You're just like, oh, ha, ha, you know, but after a while, you go, okay, okay, me focus. What is this over here?

You know? Yeah, we've had ego deaths in a lot of different ways. And some were a little more strenuous and hanging on where there's other times that you just all of a sudden you're there and you take your five doses or whatever you're taken and you're sitting there and all of a sudden you're there you're in the light you didn't see a transition it just happened so it was always refreshing and new but we never had the fear that you know we always were optimistic and looking to learn more yeah yeah i think that that that fear set in, especially for some, the fear sets in the moment you come in contact, whether you,

whether you accidentally get some on your hand or whether you take a big dose and all of a sudden you feel that come up, that come up feels a lot like panic. If you take a, you know, if you're not familiar with what's about to happen to you, people can panic right there. And if they don't have someone with them to be like, look, relax, it's going to be all right. We're going to go through this little phase. Then we're going to kind of ease into this thing. But, you know, And another point I read in the book is that you guys capped everything at like 333 milligrams, which is like three times a dose that someone would take in a modern day. And you took five of those.

Yeah, that was the protocol. You don't know, but that's why there's no fooling around and you don't have people getting scared except for like a nanose. There's no time. Yeah, there's no time to be scared at that dose. And then roll one and it's great. So, yeah, that's, wow. That is such a transformative dose to take. Yes.

I'm glad we talked about that because that explains the idea of being pinned down to the ground, not being able to move. Like, that is right. That's right. Oh, man. And there's no real communication at that point. They're not able to really talk at that point in time, are you? No, no. There's no talking.

There is communication through the interview. But there isn't any talking. And we had that prayer book, you know, that was the guide. And we used it every time after we got it. But we had had a lot of experiences without it. So we knew the path. We knew what it was talking about. We knew all those different levels.

But a lot of times, those prayers are all, they cover a certain aspect of your psychedelic journey. And what can happen is at a point where you get where you're kind of, of struggling a little bit. You're starting to move around and you're not getting it. You can read one of those prayers and they'll take you right back to the emptiness. And they work. They really do work. They save people's lives. Yeah. If someone else is having a problem, you know, I mean, there's ways you're supposed to use the psychedelic prayer book and, you know, we did that a lot too. But sometimes you'd just be so high. And if someone else would be, you know, all of a sudden they are struggling,

I would just let the book open. And wherever it opened to, I would read that prayer. And it was the, I figured that would be the, and the words would just come off the page and actually read themselves. So it wasn't. And then everything would be fine. There was never a problem. Yeah.

Was that book based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead? No, that wasn't the one. Actually, Lerian Alpert and those guys wrote the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which at that time to me was quite confusing. You know, there's a lot of jargon. There's a lot of experiences. And they didn't really take it from top to bottom. I think it's a great book for somebody that intellectual

that wants to get into maybe take an LSD and understanding the process. But the prayer book was different. The prayer book was short and sweet. I mean, you know, you're out there and all of a sudden you're struggling and you read this prayer and you just fall back into the unity again and move move on with your experience and it's it's all right there it's very basic um but it is the most wonderful book to

have on an allisty experience as far as a guidebook goes and um you would see if you were at a certain place and you'd see what it does to you it's kind of amazing how to just kind of send you on your way Yeah, those guys were brilliant to figure that out. And a lot of the prayers were like the Tao Te Ching, where it's just in a nutshell, this is what you need, and then it works. So it was good. It was always good. Yeah.

You know, just on a timeline note, was what was happening when the Brotherhood was being formed in California, was at the same time Millbrook was happening on the East Coast, Were those similar timelines? Milbrook was a little ahead of us. They had been doing a lot of, you know, Timothy was involved with the college and Albert and Watson, not Watson, anyway, the people that wrote the book, they were doing all kinds of experiences, experiments and stuff.

And all those people in Milbrook were not the same as the Brotherhood. Right. Milk had 40 bedrooms in it, whatever. There was always people there, Alan Ginsberg and the, you know, Colonious Monk, you know, whatever. And they were taking LSD. Like they said, there was always someone in the house on LSD. And they would use it like to create music or poetry or things that happened.

The Brotherhood was pretty unique in the fact that our whole thing was going out in nature with groups of people and laying down and leaving the ego behind. experience in the metaphysical. And that was one of the things that drew me to the Brotherhood because I'd lived, I was in San Francisco and then I got turned on to the Brotherhood because I went there to, I got some hash. But one time when I was in Michigan, my hash. His hash.

And as soon as I walked in the door and smelled it, I was like, oh my gosh, because we had been doing Moroccan. And I said, oh, what is that? And then there was a big hookah and we set it up and we did it. And I made the deal with the guy who brought it to turn me on to the place where he got it. And that's what took me to Laguna. So my first few trips there were basically to score. And then afterwards, I realized they were on my same path of how to take LSP set and setting, go out in nature.

Because in San Francisco is wonderful. My family was beautiful there. We had a place in Tahoe. we could go experience so we were in nature there but the brotherhood took everything to a step above and you know beyond and yeah beyond and uh and that's and when i was welcomed in with open arms because they you know we could just tell we were on this exact same page and i was a good worker to be part of uh spreading the joy In the book, you know that the book has mine and Wendy's whole love story in there too.

Yeah. How we met everything. But in the book, it says that we first met in the canyon when I was over between the finale. But now that we just talked about it, I believe that when you got that that slab of Primo, that's actually when she first met. Yeah. Yeah. From Afghanistan.

Can you believe it? She went looking for the guy with the hash and married. it. Yeah. That's the best way to keep it handy. Yeah. It almost reminds me of Alexander Shulgin's a chemical romance, you know, because you get the hash and all of a sudden you're drawn to the person that brought it there. It's like, it's just like a big deep love story that mingles through the book. And the book is like a, not only is it a love story, not is it a story about American spirit, not only in a story about brotherhood and LSD and geography, but it's a story about exploration, you know? And you know, you know,

what in the beginning when the, when the, um, the first hash she's from Afghanistan chapter comes into view, I got a whole new love for the Volkswagen bus pop top. You know, I, you know,

I didn't know that they had all these little in, those little spots that you could do and in, and buying things in Germany and, you know, maybe we should move there. Like so the first hash from Afghanistan, maybe we could start there. Okay.

So also let me, I just want to throw one more. Please. Please. The book, what it's really about, but we don't, we don't cap on it too much because some people don't think it's the greatest thing. But I was the only member of the Brotherhood that never got arrested. I was able to do everything I did. And you'll see them there. It's not because I was super careful or I was better than anybody or anything like that. There's time and time again where they could have bussed me.

Just for instance, that night I drove into Laguna from the shrine on a to-teratorium and got pulled over and had a pocket full of joints. Yeah. And maybe normally, I mean, I was a full-on hippie, full on, you know, beard, hair, all the whole banana. And we was in Laguna, but the policeman end up just letting me go. But that's, and that's just a small incident, but that is one chance where if you would have looked in my pockets, I would have went to jail and it would have been arrested, which never happened. It's kind of like a Jedi thing.

I think it just needed so much love that when they were there with us and we loved them so much and had so much empathy and compassion for them that I think a lot of times that I think they walked away sometimes and went, wait, what happened? And another thing is to compare me to the movie The Fugitive. You can have series of all the different times when I could have been caught. They had me, but somehow I got out. We had close calls where we just like riding a wave. We managed to stay on the wave or stay in the tube.

And we never really looked at it, you know, until we looked back. Never. We never thought about it. Then when you look back, you go, oh, my God, you know, look at how everything came out. Yeah, like when I was reading through it, I'm like, this is ridiculous. You're going to smuggle hash into Afghanistan? You're going to bring it into India and a tape. Like, you know, that's the opposite.

You're supposed to take it out of it and I bring it in there. Yeah. And then in Columbia, too, like getting pulled over. Like, there was so many instances in the book where I was like, oh, he's going down right here. There's no way. You didn't. You did what? Those are the things I'm talking about when they have me.

All they have to do is one little move. And, you know, somehow I was able to walk away from it. And I love the, maybe it's growing up in Southern California. Maybe it's being an exor. Maybe it's because my parents were, my dad was military. But I love the, on some level, there's always the pushback against authority, whether it's being pulled into customs and tapping your boot on the table. Like, yeah, there's nothing in here.

You know what I mean? It was always like, it was always pushback. Like, yeah, I got nothing. You got nothing on me. You know what I mean? It's so brazen and so bold, and I found it really beautiful and welcoming, you know, and I love that part of it.

It's awesome to me. Well, speaking of that, you know, everybody knows the game musical chairs, but you played a game called musical instruments where stuff is hanging out of them and, you know, when the first one came back, maybe you can tell that story a little bit. Oh, okay.

Let me tell another story real quick, a short one. It was a perfect example. escaping the authority. Yeah, of course. Of course. This is a, it's just a story in the middle of all of it. So you kind of need some makeup. But the truth of it is, when I, when I was wanted after the wanted poster came out,

I was wanted for 12 years, by the way. And I didn't have any ID. When I came back from Puerto Rico, I really didn't have any ID. And we had an incident where I had to go get some ID. And that's another, that's a big, nice story about us getting away and escaping. But this one in particular, you had my brand new driver's license and I'm out in Sebastopol, you know, in Stumbull County, and I'm driving out to Bodega Bay to see Wendy.

And what? This is a good story. Okay, it's a good story. So all of a sudden, there's no one on that road. I was up in Rio, you know, it was midnight. There wasn't a car on the road. And I'm driving along and I've got a beer. I'm drinking a beer and I got a couple of joints in my pocket.

And I look up and there's the red lights that police are pulling me over. And I'm going, well, what, you know, what's the deal? So they, they pull over and they pulled me over to have me get out of the car. And so I put my beer on the floor and I took my joints and I put them in a Kleenex box that was sitting right there on another seat. I put them underneath, you know, in the middle of the thing. And so they searched the car and they talked to me a little bit. And I was kind of hymn and on about what I was doing. And I said, but I'm really, I'm going to visit my girlfriend out in Bada, Bay.

And they searched the car some more. And there was two of them. One guy stood in the back with me while the other one serves the car. And then they came back to the back and they called in somewhere and they talked for a minute and they came back over and they said, okay, they said, we'll tell you what's going on. Right around, right up the street, someone was just robbed of some jewelry. And you were the only car on the road. You know, so we pulled you over. And they said, it's okay, you know, you can go now. And so they let me go and I walk back to the car.

and behind at the end, you know, the back end of the car. And I start to get in the car and the guy says, hey, he says, by the way, he said that Kleenex boxes are a very good place to hide your joint. And I went, oh, my God. I thought, you know, these guys could take me in right now if they wanted. So I got in the car and the joints were on the dashboard. They left them on the dashboard for me. And I looked down and my beer was still sitting on the floor.

So I drove away. Well, there's an instance where I could have gone down really easy. Yeah. And, but it's a great story that they let me go and they let me keep my joint. I think a lot of it also really has to do with, like, everybody asked me, were you, weren't you scared doing all that stuff? Weren't you scared running international borders and things? And I said, no, never, because I never felt like I was doing anything wrong.

I was on a mission of God to turn everybody on to God. And, you know, that's what I say. My favorite thing is when going through customs made a lot of trips from here to Canada. And they'd say, do you have anything you're not supposed to have? Favorite line. Nope, everything I have, I am supposed to have. And just drive right through. It was never a problem.

Of course, I always looked good. I always, you know, we weren't foolish when we went to do things, you know. Like a lot of times guys like, you know, oh, we love hippie chicks, no makeup. and all that kind of stuff. Well, I'd get fixed up to go out. I'd come out of the bathroom. Everybody just... So the first hash from Afghanistan.

Yeah. So my little brother, 18 years old and Travis Ashbeth, Dave, we had some people that were smuggling Nepalese, David Hall and Johnny Daw, that were members of our group. And they had did one thing where they'd take golf clubs and cut them off short and made a space in the bottom of their golf bags. and they had done a couple of different things bringing Naples' fingers over. So Ricky and Travis at that time were they were going to get a car in Europe and they were going to drive it to Nepal and put hash in it and send it back home.

Well, on their drive, they picked up some hitchhikers, and the hitchhikers told them, if you're going for a hash, you don't want to go to Nepal, you want to go to Afghanistan. And at that point, none of them had ever even heard of Afghanistan. Right? So they went ahead. They gave the guys the hippies their ride and they got to Afghanistan. And that's kind of their story, how they found that connection. But it was quite a story. And it's a real nice story. And I'm hoping that it'll come out someday. But that's not my story. So what they proceeded to do was they had enough money. They were going to try to bring

back 20 pounds, but they had enough money to buy 76 pounds. And they bought. And they bought, bottom all. And then they thought, well, how are we going to get them back? Not this old rickety car. So the connection had an idea. They had all these Afghani instruments. And they took the drums apart. You've probably seen the metal drums with the leather lacing at the top or wooden ones from, you know, they're pretty common from Indian Afghanistan. They had some of those. And then they have some tablets, which are the musical, like the tar things. And they had filled the necks of those up with hash. And anyway, somehow they got that 76 pounds into it.

And they shipped it to Germany. And then they came home. And they called me to pick them up at the airport. So I drove up to the L.A. airport and picked them up. And when they came down the escalator, my brother had a NASDA coat. And he handed it to me. I almost dropped it on the floor because it had a couple of kilos of hashishet. So I drove them home.

and on the back to laguna i was living in uh in pomona at the time and on the way they said well look at we've got a shipment coming i you know hashish and we mailed it to you and i thought why did you mail it to me why didn't you mail it to yourself what do you know well the truth of it is and i'll tell you now they were two chicken shit they were afraid to go pick it up so so anyway so okay morning comes which was monday i guess I picked him up like on a Friday. We had to wait through the weekend. And I had a Mustang at the time.

And I rented a trailer, you know, a hitch, a ball, not a ball hitch, but one that clamped on, a clamp on. You clamped on the bumper at that time. And I took all the papers. I drove up to the shipping places all around the airport. They're all on the outside of the airport. And I found the place I was supposed to go. And I went in there and gave them the papers. And they looked at all the papers.

I was standing there and they said, well, come in the back room. So I went in the back room and they had a couple of wooden crates sitting on the floor and they gave me a crowbar and they said, we'll open them up. So I said, okay, so they opened up the crates and right away, they started talking, but that's because they had sent animal furs along with the ship. And the furs were on top. They could see them. So right away, the one, there was two customs officers. So right away, the one tells me, you know, I don't know if these are legal to import. You know, we're going to have to make some phone call. So they said, take everything out of the boxes and put it on the floor and separate the, you know, the, the, um, first from the rest of the ship.

So I visited myself doing that and we waited and we waited longer. And in the meantime, the stuff was on the floor. They were taking care of the rest of their business. And we started talking. And, you know, it was the same thing sports, you know, who. what do you do? What do you like? You know, just common conversation that people have. And eventually it came back that the first were completely illegal and that we had to leave them there. So they just said, we'll leave that pile alone.

And then they started looking through the stuff. So I'm standing there. We've been talking for two hours. And they start going through the things and they see the necks are broken on the string. instruments. They said, oh, too bad that these, you know, broke and everything, you know, kind of a bummer. But they broke in a way that the hash concealed inside of them. You couldn't see it. You know, like the neck was sitting there filled with hash and the bottom was too, but nothing

was exposed. So everything seemed pretty, you know, like it was okay. And then one of the guys picked up one of the wooden tablas and it was heavy. You know, it had 10 pounds of hash in it And he goes, God, he said, this must be solid wood. And the other customs officer picked up a metal one. And it was equally as heavy. And he looked at the customs guy. And he said, yeah. And he said, I suppose this one's solid metal.

And I'm just standing there. And they look at each other. And they look back and they said, okay, you can go. And at that point, they actually helped me load all of the instruments in those wooden boxes and helped me carry him out to my U-Haul. And I drove home, of course, looking over my shoulder, but no one was following. Everything was fine. And that was the very first shipment of Afghani Hashis into America that anyone knows about.

Man, I think that foreshadows, too. Like, the ability to remain calm. I think that speaks to volumes what Wendy was saying that, look, I wasn't doing anything. wrong. What I'm doing is right. It seems like people tend to freak out on those moments because they get nervous. They think I'm doing this thing wrong. They start sweating. But what was it? Like how are you able to keep your cool in that moment? Well, you know, I told you about our familiarity with the home. Yes. And you get in there. You can get at it anytime you want. And I think probably I was just concentrating on, you know, the vibration that everything's perfect and that, you know, everything's

moving along like it should and it's okay. And I really think that was my defense against being scared or, you know, wondering or anything like that. I kind of just kept a calm about me that was centered in the home. And, you know, I think they liked me. I think the fact that I was pretty straight looking and I, we had become friends over the two hours that I was in there with them. And as far as I know,

they might even have suspected something was in there. but decided I was such a nice guy that they would just let it go. I'll never know that. But, you know, I kind of have a feeling that that's kind of the way it went. Yeah, maybe. And if I just stay in that moment for a minute, you know, I think being able to face fears, whether it's instruments with Hashishianam or speaking to an authority figure, the technique you use to get through the fear can be applied to our lives.

Like, it's a skill that everybody can use, and it probably is very beneficial when you find yourself in a situation where your heart rate is racing. Maybe you're a little nervous. Maybe you're scared. If you just center yourself, you can bring everything back in order and get through that process. Like, that's a really cool skill. I'm glad you shared that. I think it's very beneficial to do that. As you're talking about it, I began thinking about it.

Another thing that may have happened is those guys may have had a lot of respect for you. Like, hey, here's this guy that just got back from Afghanistan. They probably never heard of it either. And they're like, right? They're probably pretty amazed by it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. They were a couple of nice guys and it sure worked for me.

But it's, you know, you wonder, how did I run into those cops out there on the road that gave me my joints back? You know, why didn't I run there to some jive-ass cop that was just going to make a bus no matter what? Because at that time, two joints would put you in the slammer. There's no doubt about it. I think also we related to people of authority. as human beings. Yeah. They have families.

They feel this way. And it was kind of a little opportunity to change their mind just by, you know, being in their presence and respecting them. And to be perfectly honest, I think hippies are the most patriotic people in America. They only wanted the best for everybody in America. So I always felt very patriotic and very, very, very. respectful and I always would tell people too they're like oh cops or whatever I said oh really if somebody was breaking in your house who would you call yeah you would expect that cop to come put their

life on the line for you and yet you're being disrespectful so you have to just understand where they're coming from too and we did have two of the people that had created the poster come to one of our showings and they're real old now and we were guys that were after us yeah That's awesome. Yeah. We're friends now. Yeah, we're friends now. And it was really nice to meet them and have bygone.

They said, you know what? It's all over. That's in the past. They said, you guys won. Yeah. And now we're just enjoying our older life. But they enjoyed the movie. They watched the movie.

It sat there in the front row. And it was really fun meeting them and their families. And now, after it's all over and, you know, we were the bad guy. They were the good guy. But who knows who really was the good guy. Now we're all just humans again, thank goodness. So. Yeah.

Yeah, as you talk about that and we talk about the the joints in the pocket or, you know, just the beginning part of meeting those guys and the custom agents, it does speak volumes. And I love the way you said that. Like, we're all just people. And maybe if we all just treated each other with a little bit more respect, we'd all get a pass every now and then, you know, and if we could just get past this idea that I am this thing, I am a cop, I am a smuggler, I am. If we just get past this I am and just see each other as, hey, we're both trying to get through this thing here together.

Let's work together. That's a cool part of it. I had gotten pulled over one time driving into Bakersfield. When you get off the freeway, it's a down ram. And so consequently, when you pull on to the Bakers, it's a speed trap. And I had, my trunk was packed. And I got pulled over. And I thought, oh, no. Well, I had just seen this video of this policeman getting hit by a car by standing on the driver's side of a car he had pulled over. So this guy comes, you know, the policeman comes up right to my door and he's like, how did you know you? And I said, hey, go over on the other side of the car. Get out of the street. You know, you shouldn't be out in the street like that. That's dangerous. He's like, what? He wasn't ready for me to tell him what to do. And so consequently, I think I took a mother role with him. And he was. And he was. And he.

went around to the other side and I opened the window and he's shining his flashlight in there and I was listening to Mozart and, you know, dressed nice and everything. And he just said, you know, well, you were speeding and he was going to give me a ticket. And I'm like, oh, man, I've never had a ticket. Never once. I said, go look up my driving record. I said, this would be so devastating for me to get a ticket. And somehow, he's like, okay, ma'am, well, I'm really sorry I bothered you. Yeah. I said, you're just doing your job. You know, thanks for doing. your job. Love you. Just so you know, for the people that have read the book or know our history or, you know,

whatever things about us, or me anyway, that Wendy had a life of her own before we got together. And she had driven a Volkswagen to Afghanistan and loaded it and brought it back. She had taken 10 grams of LSD over to Timothy Leary when he was in Algeria. And they wouldn't know. What's his name? Whoever was in charge there, I forget. He wouldn't let have it. So she had to take it back to Amsterdam and they sat there in Amsterdam while they sold it all. And she smuggled hashback from Morocco and has done various other things. As it was. Yeah, she went to Woodstock. And this was all before we got to them. So she does have a history of Rome that doesn't show in the book. But we're trying to get her book written.

So you see, she had quite an adventurous life before me. We were just just led to another, led to another led to another. You know, I'd get to Detroit to do something and I'd have to wait. Somebody tell me, hey, we need something to go to Ontario. You go to Ontario. Hey, can you take this to Montreal? And then I end up back in Detroit and get back to San Francisco. Those were her mule days. Yeah. But I was delighted to do it. I was happy to do it. Anything I could do, I never cared. A lot of times I never ever, you know, profited. Our family profited. Everything was always to the family. You never kept money for yourself. and and that was I think that was that was good so and the other thing I was going to say is my family

in San Francisco was so beautiful we take lots of acid we had the house in Tahoe where we could go be in nature but it still when I there were a well-known family too we knew about them yeah yeah from Laguna Beach we knew about them yeah in the lab but anyway when I came to to Lagoon I really liked everybody and then I had an opportunity right away to go to ranch because I had heard about the ranch and that it was you know a safe haven to go turn on so you could be safe because that was an issue and uh I've I thought wow what a beautiful people to to have done something so generous for so many people and I went to the ranch and of course I had my homemade long tap as stew dress on and my hair tie braids and so I you know that's the way

I looked but I walk in and first thing Carol says and she was a with Barbara who passed away now, but she was our best friend too. And they both said, oh, my God, you should live here. I hadn't even walked past over the threshold. So that was really fun. And then we got to know each other really well after that. And of course, I said, well, I'm kind of busy. I've got to get back to San Francisco and back to Detroit and back to Canada.

So because I figured that until I had children, I wanted to do everything I could to turn on as many people as I could. And that was my mission to change people's minds. But that's what I loved about the Brotherhood and what initially brought me to them, is that we were on exactly the same level. And when you lived at the ranch, you were pretty much on 24-7 duty when you were in the working part to have be awake. If anybody came down the gravel road that had come to the ranch and turned on,

even unbeknownst to you down at the waterfall or one of the other many beautiful places you could be safe there. They'd come and your job was to bring them in. We always had a pot of soup on the stove always for unexpected guests and you'd get them to the shower. You'd make sure they were cared for. They were fed and you put another log on the fire and make up the, bring out the sleeping bags for them to sleep in the living room. And everybody, was always welcome. And a lot of times you didn't even know these people, but you could tell they had turned on that day. So, you know, and they were, that was just, it was so important to the brotherhood, which was my same mindset, the whole experience, not just taking acid, but reentering.

Your reentry is so important to your final result of what you got out of that session. You want to keep your mind open. You want to remember everything you learn. And in order to do that, you can't get right back into things quickly. You need to take a little time to re-enter. The process of re-entering is a process of rejecting thoughts coming into your mind. And you stay that off as long as you can. But they liken it to a wheel rolling along a string. Eventually, it's going to run out of energy and it's going to fall off.

And that is going to happen to you. But your thing isn't, it's really, it creates, kind of negative effects if you rush back into your ego and rush back into all those things that you were doing and don't experience that withdrawing from the oneness and learning everything you can at that point. And staving off the ego seemed to put you in a better place when you finally the drug wears off and you're back into your body. The sacrament. Sorry. Yeah.

You know, it reminds me of the windy. the way you described the hospitality you provided people seems a lot like the hospitality that was afforded to both of you when you would go to Iran or Afghanistan or the way people would take care of you. It's pretty interesting how that works. It's really nice, yeah. Yeah. The people were wonderful. Yeah. You know, I know it was a bad time political with the Shah and the CIA and doing all that. But I don't know. I don't want to get into politics. Sometimes you need a strong arm to hold down certain groups people.

Yeah. And it won't manifest unless you get that strong arm. But we were too young, 21 years old. Yeah. And world politics or what's going on. We were in their land, you know, just because the guy had five wives and you'll never going to see any of them because they're completely covered up. It's done our business.

Yeah. You're over there, scoring has each. Well, I mean. You know what I mean? And it wasn't a political thing. And we never found it important for us to even, question it. Yeah. Well, I was, really. Right. I was so innocent when I went to Afghanistan,

when Haitula came. It was our connection. Yeah, when he came into town and he saw me and he's like, oh my God, you can't stay here in town. You need to come to the compound. So we got to go to his compound, which was very rare. And then we called it, I think Ron wrote it in his book, Stand in Lineistan. Yeah. We were holding another vehicle. Then you just ran it. And most people, waited in town or they went to Kabul or something, you know, they could do something else while they were fading. But we were lucky enough to be there. So I got, I was running back and forth

between the women and that, then standing on a big stool to smoke the big hookah with all the pressers. And, and, and I didn't have, I didn't think I was, that that was inappropriate at all. And, and going back in with, I never really thought about why the women never came out of their really nice area. They had this really beautiful area. And I would go back and, and I would go back in. in there and you know i've cooked with people all over the world none of them spoke of word of english but you know potatoes a potato a carrot's a carrot show me how you want to cut i'll cut it so uh and i was embroidering and uh crocheting and they really like that so luckily i got to be friends with the women and we went shopping one day and uh that was the first time i had seen them in their full garb

and i was like oh my god i couldn't tell who was who and then we go only their feet showed yeah and so we go to town and they give me two paper bags and one of them has a couple because we didn't speak the same language at all none of them spoke a word of english i didn't speak a word of rcy i guess whatever they speak and uh they give me these two paper bags and one's got a couple garbanzo beans in it one's got a couple grains of rice to show me what what i should get so you know that's my job go in and fill these bags up and then we'll it so we'll meet you back so then that all finished and i went back to the van and i took turned around to look into town to, well, all the women looked exactly the same. I'm like,

oh, oh, where's my girlfriend? And so I thought, oh, gosh, now I'm going to have to just be a scene because I was totally in, not at all covered. And you had a scarf. Well, Hightola had given me a really beautiful, colorful scarf over my hair, but I didn't know what was from over my hair. I was tying it around my leg and around my neck. Beautiful. So anyway, I was a really, I was over there and I thought what I'm like hey and then next thing I know these five dark figures emerge from the crowd and those were my girlfriends and once we got in the back of the van we shut all the curtains and they could take their thing off and we would talk and it was so funny because they would talk to me in their language I would talk to them in my language even though we didn't

know each other was saying we'd laugh and yeah they were wonderful and I had no idea those were all his wives. I thought one of them was his wife and she had her sisters living there. And there was a sisters. And then I find out they're all his wives and all his kids. So anyway, it's interesting. Very interesting. Especially for a young woman who's 21 years old and coming from the West.

Like, you know, what an education it is to have a lived experience there. It's pretty beautiful, really. Yeah, it is. It was a good time. It was a good time. And we pulled into Iran and we had to drive all the way through Iran, which is a huge country in the desert. There wasn't roads or signs or anything either. You were really just driving in the desert.

And we saw this guy hitchhiking right when we first pulled in and we're all, oh, my God. You know, it's like there's nothing behind us. There's nothing on either side. Where's this guy going? So we picked him up. What turns out he's going right to Iran? Meshad right on the border of Afghanistan. So now this guy's going to be with us for days.

So I did all the cooking and everything in the car. I had brought Army foot lockers full of food. And so he slept underneath our van and we slept in it because there was only room for two. It was a double cab. So it's a small sleeping area. And we fed him breakfast, lunch and dinner. And then we drove him and we dropped him off at his house. His family whipped out.

They were so happy. They could not believe that we would be gracious enough to take them in and feed them and take care of them and drop them off. They forced us to stay there, not forced us, but they were like, you have to. And we didn't want to be disrespectful. But they wanted us to stay there. They wanted to give us tours of the town and the underground. And it was pretty amazing. They played instruments and we all danced.

And it was really, really fun. So that was it was. The people everywhere were so nice. Everywhere. Yeah. Through Turkey and Iran and Afghanistan. You were kind of an anomaly. You know, it's amazing.

Yeah. You know, how fun it was. And another thing was, we were safe. Yeah. We could sleep out in the desert under our van, under our van, in our van, and never have to worry about, you know, getting robbed or anything like that. And the people that you ran into always wanted you to come to their house and visit.

I mean, they were, you know. Had tea. You drank so much tea. Whatever. They were just really, really nice. Yeah. Even the guys that they had these little, they were in Afghanistan, they had tolls on the road. And this guy would stand there as in like this foam booth building with a bar across the road.

And you stopped, you paid them whatever, 25 Africanians are something. But they all had hashish pipes and hash in their little cubicle. And they'd always invite you in. they smoke the hash and have tea. And these were just the guards. But that's the way it was. It was like that everywhere. And everybody, you know, in Kabul, all the shop owners, they all want to have tea.

Have tea, have tea, and talk. And, you know, they're curious about you and what was going on. And, you know, I can't remember any happening that wasn't the people were so inviting, you know, to come to their house and feed you. and, you know, it just interchanged from your world to theirs. And that's the way it was. It was, you know, there wasn't any, you know, it wasn't any threat. You weren't ever felt threat. Oh, you always felt safe.

It's fascinating. Fascinating to think that, you know, we're always told to be afraid. We're always told about fear. We're always kind of conditioned to, like, be questioning these other people. But when you hear stories about people traveling to distant places and how warm and welcoming the people are. And it seems interesting that sort of relationship comes from LSD too. Like you, you know, when you're turned on or when you have an experience, you begin to see a lot of love out there. And sometimes maybe that's something that LSD and traveling do similar is that they show you the truth.

Like, you don't, and one of the truths they show you is you don't really need to be afraid. Fear is the one that kind of causes a lot of problems. problems out there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is constricting. It is. And it's your muscles, it's your mind. Yeah. And I, yeah, I have to say nowadays, I don't, uh, you know, I would feel fine walking through Detroit, walking through wherever. And now it, it really is different now. I hitchhiked from Detroit to San Francisco and back twice. Wow. And, um, well, because the plane fare, we could get two kilos of weed for what one plane fare cost. So we figured we could get six more kilos of weed rather than do the,

and so that was fine with us. And it was adventurous. But no, I wouldn't recommend that to anyone now because it's just different. Back in that day, the truck drive, people were more friendly. The truck drivers were all good old boys. And now you don't really know. And there's just so much more turmoil. and so many people are more disturbed that I wouldn't recommend anyone to just stick their thumb out and go hitchhike anywhere.

It would be too scary to get in a stranger's car. But I still pick up hitchhikers. He doesn't really like me to, but being a hitchhiker, I know how nice it is to get a ride. Yeah. You know, you talk about in Afghanistan, there was a time when, like, obviously there's some sort of moral or cultural. codes that when they're broken, people get upset. And you talk a little bit about your brother being offered some hashish and then he offers a better bit of hashish back.

Why is that a bad code to break? Is that disrespectful to do that? Is that, well, one thing is there were some pieces of hashish that, you know, ash didn't come in large quantities. They didn't have warehouses full of press patties. It was always pressed to,

order. Okay. That's why we had to wait. Right. You know, people would come in with different orders and they would have to press it up while the people waited. So,

um, so what the deal was, the hash came in usually little muslin bags, you know, a couple of kilos at a time. And you realize this is the pollen from hundreds and hundreds of plants. Right. So no matter how much hash they had growing,

they still only managed to have. 10 kilos of the same kind. Well, there were a few times where there was something really special. And we knew what it was. I mean, we brought back what we called Primo, and it was basically the same kind of quality. And that's what everybody loves when they, old-timers talk about the house.

It's the Primo they're talking about. It's their hand-pressed patties. And it was a quality that was, you know, it was great. but it wasn't the special special quality. And you could never get any amounts of that kind of hash. You might get an ounce or a piece like that. Well, my brother, you little pompous, he threw that piece down to the guy saying,

well, I want this. But we knew that he can't get that. Oh, I see. The guy really wanted to kill him. Wow. A guy after he got his down, he said, that guy wanted to kill you. And, you know, we were lucky to get out of that alley and back on the street.

And Ron wasn't even supposed to be with them. Yeah, I was right. That's one of their many accidentally meetings from all over the world. And he just went with them to just go with them. Yeah, it was there. Yeah, so he could have got sucked into something. That was pretty bad. But that's why that happened that way that, you know, those special pieces, there was a, they were few and far between.

and you could never get even a kilo. And they perceived it as being disrespectful. Right. You know. Yeah. Like how did what do you get? Who are you to bring this to my house? I get it.

Yeah. Yeah. This is what I've got. Yeah. Yeah. Not throw me down a piece of hash and say, well, this is what I want. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. That makes, that's, I put some color behind it there. Yeah. that would scare the bejesus out of me. I can't imagine like just being in Afghanistan and then running into my sister. Hey, what are you doing here? He's running to your brother there?

I ran to my brother all over the world. It's weird how it happened. But I did. Several, several times in other foreign countries, Jamaica, this little island, Karakou in Afghanistan. You know, I'd just be on the street walking down the street and I'd see them across the streets.

on the corner. He gets around to. And we never knew what each other was doing. People, the different guys that smuggled, it wasn't common knowledge what we were doing. Need to no basis. Yeah, yeah. He would just all of a sudden be in Laguna and then we disappeared for six months. And that's just the way it was. So I never knew what he was doing anymore than he knew what I was doing. So it was real strange to run into him in the far corners of the world, just I ask. Karma. Yeah.

One of a, I had to set the book down a while I was reading one, a bunch of times. For people listening right now, I just want to make sure that we talk about the actual title of this book. People can see it. Brotherhood hashish, the story of Ronnie Bevan.

And you're going to, it's amazing. You'll put it down, you'll pick it up, you'll highlight it. But there was this one scene that really mesmerized me, like a lot of them did. This is where you decided to put the camper on the Black Sea.

and then you talk about going to the upper deck and going to this all, you know, hardwood room and sitting down and eating dinners with the captain of the ship. I was curious, like, what was that like? What kind of stories did you talk to about the captain of that ship while on that vessel? Like, that just seems like a fascinating time. Well, it was, and it was a wonderful trip.

I'll never forget it. It was three days. And there was only like four cabins up with the captain's cabin on the top floor. It was this small floor. And I don't really know what we talked about. But, you know, we met him. He was always in uniform and everything.

And he served us this wonderful food. And it was just part of our deal from having that first class cabin. Yeah. And, you know, that was just an amazing vacation kind of in the middle of everything. You know, I had heard the boat went from Istanbul to Travzon, which cut off a big chunk out of a turkey. A quarter, as you said. And, yeah. And so we went down and got the tickets.

and we had no idea about the experience, but it just turned out to be, you know, wonderful. It was, what can you say? That you'll never forget it. It was something real special in our life. Yeah, it's, I just imagine a young man that is, you know, turning on the world's going to Afghanistan to get some hash heesh and you're sitting in this first class boat ride on some,

I don't know, it just seems so magical to me. And I think, you know, shortly after that story, you're talking about you and a friend being on some treacherous mountain pass in the middle of the night where the code of the truck drivers is to run with your headlights off, but you can't see anything. So here you are trying to figure out where you are, and all of a sudden, someone's brighting you, you brighting you, you bright him back a little bit, and next thing you know, cops following you. Like that sounds like just running from the cops on a Volkswagen bus on a mountain pass. Are you kidding?

I don't know what I was thinking. I really don't. But as soon as I, as soon as it started, I didn't have a choice at that point. Once I started running, you know, at that point it was just cops and robbers. It was them trying to catch me. And it was the middle of the night. And a little scary. You're in the middle of nowhere.

There's no towns, no cities, no people. And so you wonder, well, if that cop pulls us over exactly what would happen. So my basic thing was just outrun them, which I did. It's fascinating to me. You know, I had a Volkswagen bus. I remember going up the grapevine doing like 25 miles an hour because it's as fast as I could go up there. So I'm just imagining you in this VW bus,

you know, but like it's so crazy, man. It's so crazy. What are amazing. And your friends sleeping the whole time. Yeah, he slept the whole time. It was probably a couple of hours. It was beautiful, though, when dawn broke, I couldn't see their lights anymore behind me. And we were up this giant, this slope down to the Caspian Sea.

So we were really far away from it, but because of the slope of the mountains and where we were up on high, you could see way down into it. You could see the Caspian Sea. And that was really one of the most beautiful mornings in my life when I think about it. You have those certain times when everything just seemed so perfect. And that was one of those times. It was really, really nice. Yeah.

And is that the same time that you begin to, was that the same story where you saw Mount Errorat come into view? That sounds like a pretty beautiful time as well. No. That was a different time. That's when we were in Mercedes. And, yeah, and that was nasty going over that mountain. When you could tell you about it, they had to travel at St.

Mount, and they got caught in that snowstorm, and they took them to a resort, a ski resort, and kept them in while the blizzard passed. Yeah, we had chains on our tires, but as we were trying to get up the hill, and it was so snowy, our Volkswagen just started sliding backwards, and it was a huge cliff. and I remember jumping out of the car and the person I was with was like, oh, well, thanks a lot. And I said, well, there's no point both of us going over. You should have jumped out too and just let the car pull. But that's a nasty, fast.

It's very high. And then you ride that ridge for quite a while before you start coming back down. And at that time, when we went up and then storm hit us, the road was disappearing. It was just all becoming snow. You're out there on this dirt road anyway. And without traffic to show you where it was going.

We realized we were kind of reaching a danger point there. Somehow we got through it. I wrote about the people at the bottom, that one slope that went down and up, and you could see down into it. But there are people standing down there, where they came from, God over knows. Yeah, people came to help us to push our car back onto the road.

And they were down there to help the cars and the trucks get through this area that had became so wet you couldn't, your tires wouldn't grab it for them. And like I said, where they came from, who even knows, there wasn't any villages around there. Yeah, it was really weird when people showed up. They were there just to help the people and the trucks to get them through, you know, so they could, otherwise they'd just be stuck out. And, you know, it was cold. It was really cold.

And the resort was the ski resort, it was like going from being in heaven where you'd just come from hail. because you're forced to death, fall over the edge of the cliff, nothing, no one, you can't even see your hand in front of your faces. So I was raised in Michigan, so I was used to snow. And that was a whole different level of snow.

Amazing. It does. It's so fascinating to me. Like the whole geography lesson and getting to see some of the landmarks, both of you've traveled, to, I think it was, I'll probably pronounce it wrong, but Mashad, and you were talking about what it was like to imagine, you know, Genghis Khan or, you know, Mark Anthony or, you know,

the Greek soldiers coming through. Like, you guys are traveling through spots that were, you know, developed in 818, you know, the imam rinsa shrine and like just seeing these landmarks that are older than our country, that had to be psychedelic in its own way. Well, of course it is, and we never see anything like that. Yeah. You know, so when you get to these countries that have thousands and thousand years of history, you know, I remember that one time getting out of the car and realizing that this was a past that all those people, Jinghers Kong, Alexander the Great, all those people had traversed at one time and just imagining the history that that one spot holds.

You can feel it emanating. You could feel the ancientness of it and the things that had happened. Now, in retrospect, I wish I would have had a metal detector. We never thought about anything like that. So in some of those trips, you were able to have some blue Levi's running through those areas and getting to experience that part of the world under the morning sunshine. Yeah, we had, we took LSD occasionally on those trips. You know, it wasn't every week.

Right. But there were at our times when we stopped, you know, we couldn't take it and drive. Right, right. In the day driving. So we'd have to stop. And then we had quite a few experiences. All of us did that went over there that, you know, smuggled and experienced the country. You know, had experiences while we were there.

Was one of those times under like the 100 foot Buddha? Yeah. but we didn't take any psychobiles but we did see it before they blew the face off of it. It was really quite beautiful. And you'll have to say too that those Muslims

were just destroyers and they're still that way today. And in the India for instance, a lot of the Muslim shrines and they still exist and why do they exist? The Taj Mahal, all those places, the Blue Mosque.

It's because the Muslims were the that destroyed everything. Alexander the Great and the Hindus people either they destroyed. So the Muslims would go through, they'd tear down a Hindu temple and they'd rebuild a mosque right on the spot. And there's a lot of that reclamation going on today in India

where they found these Hindu temples. They find the ruins of them behind the mosque. And now they're trying to restore them. But that's why you're going to find that was the Muslims would go and they would destroy everything. They would level everything. Where the other, the Hindus and Alexandria and all those people, they just left everything. Of the Muslim temples like the Taj Mahal, blah, blah, blah, they're still there.

And that's why? Because nobody everybody else isn't like that where they just destroy everything. And why they had to shoot the faces off those Buddhist daughters? really knows. And why the world didn't heritage or something step in. We don't know. But anyway, sad. Yeah.

You know, it's interesting. Sitting here in Oahu and then getting to read parts of the book where you had the Maui group, you know, and for someone who smoked tons of weed in my life and even in California, getting to hear names like Maui, Wawi, and stuff like that, to get to understand where it came from, to get to understand about the pilgrimage from Laguna to Maui and some of the brotherhood that moved over there after the ranch kind of turned into a different aspect.

After Johnny died. After Johnny died. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. That seemed like a pretty big turning point, right? Well, it was. And I got to say, it was maybe the happiest time of my life.

I mean, we were unrestricted. You never saw a policeman, ever. And even there was a trail that went down into the crater. I lived in Kula. I was actually the highest one on the Aliaquacra crater out of our group. And I could get up there pretty quick, maybe in the hour. And they had one trail that went down into the crater and then came back out. Well, they've closed it.

It's not there anymore. But that was a great back door because most people went up to sliding sands. It went in that way and came out through the backside over the falls. and but we were just we could do anything we wanted you know we'd we'd drive around the island we wanted to have some fun we'd just drive around the island never saw a place there just weren't in the outfit they kind of hung out in Lahaina they had a little group and you know if there was trouble that'd come out sure but in general they it wasn't like it is now um there was wasn't that many cars on the road and you know you didn't have to pay to get into the holiakla there was

was no gates. I could get up in the morning. I could just drive up and drive right to the top and watch the sunrise. You know, it was different. It was really different in those days. And I've seen photos and I read about it and I've looked on, you know, the satellite maps and seeing what they've done there. And it's crazy that, you know, I haven't been there in such a long time, 30 years or whatever it's been that you can imagine. But to me still, it's to have what we had, turn into that, you know, it's two different worlds. It's not the same world. Well, anywhere.

Yeah. Yeah, that's true of anywhere, but shocking for Mal. Yeah. I often think how much of a millionaire you would be if you would have bought those acres of land on the peninsula. Oh, yeah. There's a few missed opportunities there. But it all happened for a reason, right? Like, it's, do you feel like, yeah, go ahead.

Maybe if we would have bought. when they rounded it every going up, they would have found us. Yeah, of course. I escaped that. Yeah. You know, you just have to say, well, whatever happened was good for you because you came out unscathed and everything you did. That was pretty amazing. Yeah, super amazing.

You know, it's, I found that living in Hawaii has kind of changed my relationship to nature. And it's, it's so interesting that, you know, your experience with psychedelics or LSD, turned you on, I guess, and made you see the world in a different way. What, you know, then what, when you come to Hawaii and you start living this life out here, and it's, it's kind of past the smuggling days a little bit.

Like you kind of have turned away from that a little bit, but what was it, do you think that that chapter of your life kind of shaped who you are today, like just being out here in Hawaii? Oh, I don't know. It certainly was a wonderful, experience. There's a big piece of the puzzle. And those were a couple years of my life that were really a couple of the better years. I don't think you ever forget the Hawaiian experience.

Yeah. When you go there, even if it's just a visit or whatever, you know, especially if you turn on there. And it's just, there's just something really special about it. And you're really blessed to be able to actually live there. Yeah. You guys saw Jimmy Hendricks in Maui at a free concert six weeks before he died. Like, what was that like? Oh, that was great, you know. You know, that group was there filming that movie, Rainbow Bridge,

that ended up not so great. Our friends made that. Yeah, it was our friends that were making that. Nice. Yeah, I know. It was pretty cool. You know, Jimmy played up on the crater. They wanted to film him playing.

That was a big part of their movie, their budget and everything. And probably what got them through it, because they hadn't come into running out of money a couple of times. And, you know, they were able to gather more money because Hendricks came to play. Yeah. But, you know, it was awesome. It was, you know, it wasn't a lot different than a lot of other concerts because you have to realize that when the whole hippie movement began, there were love-ins. And there were free concerts in the, you know. parks on Sundays.

And we would go see bands, you know, justice in the airplane, whatever, all the San Francisco bands. And there was no security. They would just set up in a park somewhere. And you were right there, you know, near the stage, near everybody else. It was all just brotherhood and

everybody loving everybody. There was never a fight or anything that, you know, went astray. And this happened quite often. So we were used to being close to these famous bands. Well, they'd come right down in the audience when they were on their break and stuff. Nobody ever, you know, gathered around them or bothered them.

They were always happy to talk to them. Hey, man, great, you know, I play guitar too or whatever. You know what I mean? It's just like they mingled and it never was a worry, you know. So the Hendricks experience was a wonderful thing that happened. And it was in a beautiful place on the side of that. You couldn't see any houses that you can see anything of just the rolling hills. of the crater down below, maybe 3,000 feet.

And it was great to have that experience with, you know, there was hundreds of people there that, you know, everyone was invited. So it was great to see Jimmy Hendricks, but it wasn't any closer or more personal to us than it had been in the love in California. Yeah. Because there was so much.

There was so many great bands. You went to see them all the time. you mingled with them. You kind of, you know, you could talk to them. It was never, I lived in San Francisco and I used to soap clothing and make leather goods and I'd sell them on H Street. And a lot of times I wouldn't even get to the store where I was supposed to sell them all before they were already all sold because people would see all these bags over my shoulder. And they're like, oh my God, you know, I got to have one of those. So I just basically deal them off before I even got there.

But a lot of times it was band members. And or they'd say, oh, wow, you do this. Well, we're making this vest for Hendricks. Can you help, you know, us like that white vest he wore. The fringe was so heavy, it wouldn't stay. It kept falling. And so we'd had to put drapery weights in the front of it to keep it from so it was set right. So it's just stuff like that.

That was really fun and beating, all that kind of stuff. It was a great time. Yeah, what? It sounds amazing. When I think of getting to be in Hawaii and serve, you know, you have a quote in your book that says it feels awesome to, it feels awesome to or smoking hash in Afghanistan is a lot like eating sushi in Japan. I just thought to myself like, that's such a beautiful quote. Like, yeah, like that's the mecca. That's where it is, right?

That's, yeah. That's true. Yeah. Was it, so when you, what was it like to be? If I just take it back to Afghanistan for a minute, you know, there's a story in there too where you talk about making the, you get the, you get the crystals and then you make the oil out of that. What's the real difference between that oil and the hash? Like, what's that, what's the real difference there? I mean, obviously the consistency.

Well, it's a strength. Okay. And what it is is I don't know why it's stronger. Maybe it just is condensed or something. You have to use a medium to make the oil too. The hash is just pure. Yeah, yeah.

You use like alcohol to get the THC out of the crystals. And so that I think condenses it more than, more than make just a hash concentrate. I never really liked that oil, though. I have to tell you. The hash, why? When you have the hash,

it's such a pure product. You have the growing plant. You get the crystals off of it. You press up the patties and you smoke it. And that's just... Right, a natural, you know, thing that's been done for thousands and thousands of years. Oh, yeah. You feel so ancient.

You know, they figured it out. And it does... Smoke in the hash. gives you a different experience than any of the byproducts or marijuana or anything else. It kind of takes you and puts you in this place. Yeah. And if you let it, it will do it. And that's why you like smoking it in the morning first thing, because there's nothing like starting out your day from the right place.

The place where you see it all as one or you feel it all as one. And you realize that, you know, this is what you are. This is what everything is. and from there you can go on and make your day, do what you're going to do. I always say when this was my experience with the hash, hashish, is when you smoke it, it really, it starts in your heart. It just opens up your heart and then it moves up and opens up your mind and then it moves up. And I just use this as a metaphor, whatever, but it's like a lotus blossoming and another one

blossoming out of that. And I've always said, I don't think you ever come down from smoking hash. I think you just pick up where you left off because it doesn't ever, it makes that time be here now. And then when you move on to the next time you smoke it, you just pick up, pick up where you left off. That's just my own personal. I have nothing to base that on, except my own personal experiences. That's what's happened to me every single time. So I have a pretty good. But you know, only the Afghani hash does that too. Yeah. The other hashes from other countries, they don't have that.

And we don't know exactly why, but, you know, it's thousands of years old, their tradition. But another thing is, too, that the Afghan people in Afghanistan, they were Sufis. They really weren't Muslims. And the Sufi religions do different things. to have you have that experience. And, you know, I'm sure you heard of the twirling derbishes and, you know, that people that they have different methods. This group would smoke ash and then they would just start twirling until they fell down on the floor.

And then they would have that religious experience. So they had different ways. And one of them was smoking the hash. That was one way they could get to this state in their mind where they could have. experience something beyond this level. And they had it down to, you know, thousands of years. Right. The Afghani hash was pure. You know, there was gum Arabic and some of the hash from other countries. There was opium and some of the Naples. And in India, they put cow poop and everything. So it's just, you know, that's just part of the ingredient. I mean, a lot of times it's ash,

but still, you know, there's something added at it. And the Pakistan didn't press it up. they would press it into blocks. And it's not the same. Something happens in that kneading process. It's the twisting. Yeah, the twisting and something happens to it in that process that changes the product where it, when you smoke it, it produces that certain effect. And, you know, I mean, I'll get a lot of negativity from this from all the new modern people

and everything. But all those oils and those superhashes and all those things, you have to use equipment to smoke. You have to use burners and bubbled up and five levels of screens and stuff like that. A lot of paraphernalia. It doesn't do it to you. More, stronger isn't better. Yeah. And I know a lot of people like to smoke with the rush and the taste and all that.

But that is really a perversion on their original hash east. It's not hashish. No, not at all. It's something else. And that's what's real popular today. And mainly because the process of pressing the hash has been lost, there are very few people that know how to do it, me being one of them. I'm kind of famous for it.

Yeah. But something happens. We don't know what it is. Something happens in the process, you know, like pulling taffy, you know, how you keep pulling it and then you end up with the same thing with the hash. You keep pressing it, heating it up, pressing it up, pressing it up, heating up present more and eventually you come out with something that's quite different than anything else and that's the hash we brought back we call it primo and uh it got its own name premo but that's what

it's called and um and it's just different that you know and these people that i'm not against them with their super stricts and everything but i tried it before and yeah we've a friend of ours yeah almost made me pass out and give me a buzz but yeah it's it's not the same those um what they call them, concentrate aren't really cashed or something else. There's something else. Kind of like that oil Eastern, which was really kind of too strong. Yeah. It didn't really have its place.

You know, it's a novelty and people love it. And some people, hey, you fucked up or what? That's not our goal. That wasn't our goal. Yeah. That's what you see today. And like I said, I probably get people, the young people go. Well, you know, you didn't know what he's fucking talking about.

Yeah. Well, we finally had a friend of ours who makes it, and we knew he was making it out of good stuff, but we still had refused, you know, the offer to smoke some with him. And he had to get, like he said, all the screens and the, I don't know. And we finally, one day, he was just bugging us and bugging us. And he said, you know, you really, you can't knock it. We said, we're not knocking it. Enjoy yourself.

You know, we just don't want to partake. And he finally, he talked us into it. We said, all right. We'll try it because we knew it was he made it and it was from his stuff. So we tried it and we both were like, oh my God, it left the worst taste in your mouth. It gave you this rush, which I guess is the thing. I'm not sure. And we had to like go outside and we were kind of dizzy and we had to go eat to just, you know,

get everything straightened back out. And even then we're like, oh, we're never doing that again. Well, through the years we've had different people, oh, hey, I made this. You've got to cry it. It's always the same. You know, it's never going to be what Primo is. It's never going to have the history and what do you want to call it, time proven, you know, that you're going to get from the hand-pressed half can. It's the love.

It's the love. No one, it's so good. We've, you know, well, we've got to do. an experience. We were involved in, you know, making hash and selling it during the days when, since 97, which it was legal but not legal. And we were involved with several dispensaries. We kind of had it going. They were buying a hash from us quite often. And they wanted to start having seminars and, you know, have on a Saturday, have a thing where we would come in and talk about the hash and people could smoke it. And we were just getting into things like that. And then

that's when they made it legal. And then those people, they just, you know, walked away from us. We couldn't deal with them anymore because we didn't have the license. Yeah, we didn't have the millions of dollars to get the license and didn't want to, we didn't want to get involved with, well, the man. So it's kind of, you know, it's kind of been pushed aside or lost or whatever. But I still think there's a good place in the market for that. And, you know, it's a basic price because you're not taking all these concentrates it,

where they have a lot of money of marijuana in the concentration. So they're expensive. No, you can pay $90 for a gram or something or a half a gram. And it is kind of ridiculous. Well, we were selling our grams. They had them for sell for $10. Wow. And they would tell us, we had several dispensers we were dealing with.

But they would say, they say, well, you know, buys your ass. Or he said, who's that? They said, the old guys. What it is. These young guys, they don't know what it is. And so they were really pushing us to come in and educate the public. But that's when it changed. And we were just locked out. They closed their doors and it was kind of over for us.

Right. Our first book signing for Brotherhood Hashish, we had rented a big place, a music place. But it was a really nice place with the kitchen and everything. And had a lot of couches and everything sitting around. And we had set up two little areas with two little water. pipes and you could smoke as much hash as you wanted. We've done that at several of our private talks. Private places.

Yeah, where we do give lectures and things like that. And we always have a pre-hash. You can smoke as much as you want. But the thing is, it gets you so high. Right. That's an easy thing to do. Totally. Take one hit.

In fact, I can only remember at this one party, this one girl came back for second. And I took some big tokes again and she says, I have a high toll. But she was going on, everybody else. Everybody's time good. It didn't take much to the malchish to, you know, put the amount that would last for several hours. So it's easy to say smoke as much as you want because it's not that much to get really. I always say it's the best bang for your buck. Yeah.

And we're still kind of wishing that we could educate the world on the hand-pressed Afghani and what it does and everything. But we just haven't had that opportunity. We've had our fuelers out and, you know, we've got some people that have license and stuff, but they're just not interested in really going there. You know, they don't feel they have a need for it. And so we're still kind of, you know, hoping that someone would come along that wants to promote it. Somebody with some licenses where, you know, we could get in there and make a bunch of it and actually put it on the market.

Yeah, because for us to get a license to make it and sell it, it would be millions of dollars. for us. We don't have that. And you're under the scrutiny of, you know, cameras in your house. And it's just so ridiculous that we're just like, yeah, okay, we'll pass. Yeah. But I think it might come around eventually. Well, I don't see, I think without a doubt, without 100% without a doubt, it's coming back around.

And I think you bring up an incredible point that, you know, anybody can go out and get blasted on some shatter. some sort of new analog. Anybody can do that, but you're losing the magic. When you lose the story, you lose the transformation. Like the story, like the same reason

that the brotherhood was the, had the power of enlightenment is they had a story. They had a vision and they had something that they were trying to do to make the world better.

A little bit of shatter from some Fortune 500 company doesn't care about your transformation. They care about making money. And that shows in the product because the product, you know, whether it's, whether it's orange sunshines, even though orange sunshines can be blue Levi's, I didn't know that. Thank you for sharing that with me. You know, or it's this, it's the hash that's made in a certain way.

Like there's reasons and intention. More importantly, there's intention behind things that cause transformation in people. And I think that's coming back around. When we get off here, I'll tell you about some things that I think may be beneficial for that. But, you know, it's fascinating to me because I do think that we have lost our way. You know, and just rereading the book, I mean, coming back and reading the book, Brotherhood, Hashish, it brings back the ideas of what the Brotherhood was trying to do.

And I see the psychedelic renaissance beginning to play another wave. We're beginning the next track is getting ready to play. We're flipping the tape back over and putting inside two over here. But what the people are currently missing is the backstory. They need to talk to the people that kind of were in the first wave that understood the love, that understood the message and understood the shared sacrifice. And I think that that's what you guys provide. I think that the book is a, I think that this first book, because it seems to me like Wendy's

probably got five books in her. And I think Ronnie's probably got another four in him. And I think of these stories, you know what I mean? I think it's the stories that help people understand not only where they came from and what's important, but what the future looks like. And we start thinking about the ruins in Turkey. We started thinking about the road trips that were made, the pilgrimages that were made to Afghanistan. I started thinking about, you know, the mythology of it. Like I think back to the Greek myths of the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Greeks telling stories and, you know, the different sorts of

rites of passage that happen. And I think that's happening now. And I know I'm kind of rambling right there. But I agree totally. Okay. It's usually coming back around and then one thing I tell everybody that they can't do the drug war again. Right. It's over. That's it. That's all there is to it. They already admitted we want. You're seeing advances in a lot of it is in psychology and things like that because why?

Because doctors and scientists and stuff, they have credibility. for instance, we are of such value. I mean, if you really want to know about the psychedelic experience, who knows better than us? Who's taken LSD a hundred times, gone out and laid down in nature over and over and had these transcendental experiences, but we're the ones.

But no one's going to talk to us because we don't have a PhD, and they're just not interested. And you find that all over, and the PhDs on one hand, because they're able to make this happen because of their credibility, they can rent a place in Jamaica, and they can bring people in that have, you know, mental problems. I'm just, you know, not big ones, but whatever, anxieties and things.

And they can give them doses of mushrooms or whatever they happen to have and guide them through an experience that should make their life change and be better. But the problem is that these doctors, they don't have the experience. They don't know how to. They don't really know what's in there and how it all works. So they're there, you know, blind leading the blind. And they're actually causing, you know, they're opening it up where you see more and more of these retreats. You see them in Belize and Jamaica and Holland and they're all over.

But there's still, we don't feel they're being led properly for a spiritual. of understanding. They're mainly dealing with people that have some small mental problem, if you want to call it that, that they're addressing and they're hoping to become a better person through the experiences. But just for instance, we saw one in Jamaica. We watched these group of people go down there, and it was like six of them. And they took these people, they had them there for a few days, go to the beach, loosen them up. You know, in nature, they're in a different environment, so they're not familiar, you know, because well, one thing, if you're in a familiar environment, like if you take LSD in your house,

there's so many things that can be distracted. But if you go out into Palm Springs in the desert, there's nothing there to distract you. So you're wide open for your consciousness to expand and experience what's inside of you. But these people that we watched their thing, there was like five or six of them, and they each had a guide. And they were all laid out on these tables inside one room. And then the guides were kept talking to them. They can and touching him. Yeah, it's okay.

Are you okay now? We're like, oh, my God. Get away from him. And what's going on is that you really, the guide is there when you don't realize this guy. You know, the guide's there understanding what you're going through. There is no guide. Just let it all happen. It's only time the guide would ever come out to get involved in your experience.

would be if it wasn't going right. Yeah, if you started getting up and confused, then they can bring you back. But as far, you've got to go within. And if somebody's touching you and talking to you, you're not going within. They are distracting you from what could be the best thing that ever happened to you. But what's coming from this is general acceptance. Right. You know, now you've got ayahuasca groups around the country that are legal.

You still have the peyote Indians are still legal what they're paying. you know in Arizona and a lot of the mushroom psilocybin yeah that a lot of them have access to that now the doctors and scientists and whatever experiments they can get it so it's opening up and what I see coming of it is eventually it'll get to a point for some people realize hey well there's something more here than just therapy. You know, there's actually something here that can give people the religious experience. And I think at that point, you're going to see some of these places either expanding or changing or more places, you know, coming up, or you could actually go there because you want to see more of the metaphysical realms and what's inside of you. You're not going there

for therapy. So it's all moving forward, like you said, and I see it coming. It's just going to take a little while longer before it's accepted. But you're seeing a lot of people talking about the psychedelic experience and religion and what it's done to them and what it's done to other people. And it's becoming more known and more popular. So I think, you know, it won't be long before people break through and they actually have a place where you can come and have, you know, the psychedelic experience for, your religious advancement rather than, you know, for therapy.

Yeah. And platforms like yours are essential to get this message back out of going within. So you're doing a really great thing to just let people be educated by some people that know. And because we're dying off. Carol and I were just talking the other day about our projects and stuff, and we were joking that we really have a deadline. Deadline. That's what we're having to like, okay, we're not going to finish that. So we're going to let that go.

Let's try to get something done here. So it's great that you've provided a platform to educate people on what it really was about. And it still is about that. So it's important. Yeah, first off, thank you. I mean, I'm, I feel like I'm getting to sit at the feet of the masters and learn. You know, I've, it's, it's, and, and those stories need to be shared. You know, you're right. Like, there is, we're all facing different generations have different roles, they say. And it seems to me that your guy's role has gone from, from, from people who have done it to becoming the teachers now, you know, and, writing these books. That's why it's important when you should be knocking these books out. And Ronnie, you should have more books coming out because these are the teachings that people

are going to read. This is, this is the psychedelic prayers of the next generation. You know what I mean? When people can read that, they're going to have the similar experience that you had when you got those papers from Johnny. Like, it's the evolvement of. And like, I think that that's one of your guys' roles is like, look, now it's time to pass on that information. that the dream can continue. And I do think you're right when it comes to the idea of these centers being being operated in a way. In some ways,

a lot of these places in Costa Rica and whatnot are like the McDonald's of transformation. You go there, get your ayahuasca and a big mac and a ducked pepper and you're out of there. You know, it's not really about seeing the, you know, seeing all things manifest from one source. You know,

it's not that experience in the same way. Yeah, I do love the idea of people that have had the experience of turning on other people being pinned down after five doses of 333 milligrams. That's a whole other experience, you know, than being set up in the Hyatt in a third world country and then going down and having some crazy breakfast. And there's horror stories of people getting raped down there and, you know, people not having the purest form of intention. and just when you make it about the money, you take away the spirituality out of it. And I see a lot of that happening. And I do think a lot of other people are seeing what you guys see.

And that's why I know that your guys role going forward is going to be probably bigger than you imagine. How could it not be? If history is the best predictor of future behavior and you look at your guys' history, how could this next phase not even be bigger? Oh, boy. Okay. We're ready. I know you guys are.

It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, to even sit down here and listen to it.

Yeah, I, I, I, I, on some levels, I think that the same way, time magazine and all these magazines tried to interfere with what the brotherhood was doing so too is the medical industry trying to interfere with, what the spiritual nature is this time. And what I mean by that is that the,

the, the, the magazines and the, the, the system tried to clamp down on the psychedelic movement. And it seems to me in today's world, they're, they're almost weaponizing fragility. Like, oh, you guys got these mental problems. You got to have this. Like, they're saying you can only use it this way. But that's not the right way. You know what I mean?

Does that kind of make sense? Yeah, yeah. That's what we're seeing. Yeah. We see that. But we're hoping that that will evolve into something bigger and better for, you know, for man's consciousness. You know, that out of that.

somewhere, somewhere along the line, they're going to give this guy a high dose of psilocybin, and all of a sudden he's going to turn into light and the whole room's going to turn in line. He's going to come back and say, God, dang, you know what I just saw. And at that point, there may be some pursuance of that experience by other people. That's what we keep thinking is going to happen, accident by accident. Yeah, they're fooling around right now, but it's just a matter of time. Yeah. It's like a Trojan horse, right?

Like, we're bringing in medicine. They just freeze everybody. Rise. That's so funny. Yeah. We're hoping. And when the younger generation, like we're around a lot of the younger kids and they're all like, yeah, we want to do it.

How'd you do it? We want to do what you did. I don't think you can ever do what we did because it's a different time. You can't, you know, like for sure, were willing to sacrifice everything. We gave up, you know, moved out to places with no electricity and, you know, no plastic, no makeup, no nothing. And we were ready, willing, and able to just jump into that. But the difference between that now is that we were getting a house, you know, for $95 a month. That same exact house rents for $2,500 a month. That puts it completely out of someone's

range to be able to even if you're still just working as a waitress or a maid or whatever you're working at the bank you could function back then easily and go out on the weekends and then turn it into a full time because you realize that you were needed but that that's what they it's really hard for the younger generation I always just tell them well you can start just by quit using plastic heard your house of all your plastic don't use plastic bags ever really need some guidance Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

To come up for these younger kids. You know, there's so many of them that dressing like hippies, going to Grateful Dead concerts, you know what I mean, doing all those things. But it's not the same as us. I think that they might be in a little shock if they realize that, well, when we were, looked like you and what we were doing in the world, we weren't served in restaurants. Yeah. You know, we couldn't go to Natsbury Farm. We couldn't go home.

You couldn't go home. Even to a funeral, you couldn't go. You know what I mean? There was so much against us and what we were doing, but we believed so strongly in what we were doing that it was right that we were able to put up with all these things. Yeah. Not having long hair. You know, when we first started out, no one had long hair.

Now, everybody has long. Right. So we've destroyed that house that they were. trying to protect themselves in. But yeah, the kids, it's really hard for them now to try to do anything. And the other thing that people don't realize, now I'm just saying we, I don't mean everybody because everybody is an individual. And of course, you know, I don't know why everybody expects, you know, like, oh, yeah,

well, I knew a hippie and he got drunk. Oh, well, that's it then. Yeah. You know, they don't realize, though, that we did not drink alcohol. We did not smoke cigarettes. We ate a pure diet. You know, we tried to shun any preservatives or, and we were very organic and made our own clothes and, you know, stuck to the cotton and got away from the polyester and all that kind of stuff,

all natural. And if you, we were willing to do that and go there and, you know, yeah, we made mistakes and stuff. For one thing, we were children. And we were just trying to figure it out. from a point that we never had. There were no health food stores. You know, there were diabetic stores.

That was the closest thing you could get to a health food store. If you wanted to buy a book about nutrition, you know, good luck or find a diet that was vegetarian. You want to teach a yoga class in the church. You're not going to do that here. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's a yoga class. Yeah.

No, I had to tell the lady when she was refusing me to rent the room in the church. community room and she said we have a religion we don't do that here i said it's not a religion i said really it's just stretching and and exercising and i said it's a lot of breathing i said actually you by just breathing are doing yoga and there was such a silence i think she was holding her breath she'd rather die but a lot of the things that are established now are rooted in us like the helpful. We had maybe the first one in our Mr. Cars. And

you know, like the same thing with the yoga and all that. And then you know, we were searching too. A lot of these yogis would come over from India or religious teachers and stuff and they would gather follow it, you know. But

for some reason, you take those guys out of India out of the mountains and put them on the streets here. You know, the distraction changes to much. And there were big problems with the gurus taken advantage of the groups. And that gave the whole thing a bad taste. And that once again, when you have so many people and then you just focus on one little thing, you know, like for instance, at Woodstock, 500,000 people. And everybody's like, oh, yeah, everybody was so loaded. I'm like, do you know how much weed it would take to just

give each person one joint? Like the trains. Yeah. So it's like there really wasn't that. I mean, everything, the weed and the acid, everything was gone in like the first hour. So we had the rest of the three days. But that kind of was the peak that showed how people can be together and get along. Yeah. You know, there were no bad incidents at all.

And it just, that's just the way it was. You know, you'd never see a fight or people yell at each other or, you know, drunk and being funny because they didn't do that. You didn't do that. So you didn't have that element. You were really, everybody was making a conscious, constant effort to be the person they really knew they could be. The productive, helpful, loving, giving person that you would want people to remember you as. And everybody made that effort. Everybody had the same opportunity to become enlightened.

You know, what they did with it was their own karma also. And when Johnny died and the indictments came out and, you know, that was just a really hard time. And there were some people that resorted back to drinking and then all of a sudden Coke came on the scene. I remember one of my friends, you know, because I was so against it. And they're like, oh, well, it's the new LSD. And I'm like, when was the last time you took LSD? Yeah. As it is not.

And I don't need to try it to see that it's wrong. You know, the other thing, too, was people's houses were always open. You could go anywhere and spend the night in someone's house. I mean, if you're like hitchhike into Michigan or something, you know, maybe in the afternoon some hippies would come by and pick you up and they'd take you home. Yeah, that happened. It happened. And all of our friends, you know, that lived anywhere, you could go there anytime. You wanted to go spend the night or you had a friend in Hawaii. You just show up. You don't have to make arrangements to say, I'm coming and visiting for a week. you just show up and they, you know, our houses were always open.

It was never a problem. It was never a problem. And, you know, a lot different than today. And, you know, I know it's more organized today and everything. But I was just saying the love and that was extended to everybody and the camaraderie. And just the general consciousness at that time was supportive and helpful and love. Yeah. And we didn't have our parents.

parents. We didn't have anything to fall back on because we had already burned that bridge. And that was that was kind of scary. It's really the first time in history that a whole generation of parents turned on a whole generation of their own children, which is a little bit shocking when you look back on it. Because there were kids that we would have to take into the communes that had gotten these electric shock treatments. And, you know, because they thought they dabble. in being a hippie and they're, bam, they're in there. And then we've got to deal with it because their parents won't take them back, even after they destroyed them. So it was a lot to deal with for children. Luckily, we had a lot to give. And it's amazing how much human beings have to give once they open that floodgate.

It's a never-ending thing. It's a bottomless well of love that is available in every human being. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of the hash. You know, when your system is running on elements that are pure, you tend to live a more pure lifestyle. It's interesting to think about that from if you have pure LSD or if you have pure hash, what you manifest after that particular trip seems to be a little bit more pure, whether it's trying to live a more pure form of life.

And then you look at some of these analog drugs like meth or, you know, some of these opiates that are happening today. And you look at the way society is running. You could argue that a society functions the way it's drugs do. And if you have pure drugs, whether it's, you know, LSD, caffeine, chocolate, like Coca, not the cocaine, but like Coca, you know, all these different drugs that are pure that come from the earth. If we're running on that system, life seems to be a lot better. Oh, yeah. Right?

And when you talk about being in Woodstock and being around this large group of people that were just trying to become the best versions of themselves, that seems like good advice for the generation coming up. If they look at what you guys did and want to do it, maybe they can never go to Afghanistan and run hash, but they can try to live a pure lifestyle. Maybe it's the message of the brotherhood that they can carry on, right? Right. Oh, that's what we're hoping.

That's what we're hoping. Yeah. We are. We are. And there are some really great kids out there. Sure. Really talented artists. Really talented musicians.

And they're doing really well. They're like the little ember that's not going out. You know, it's just the eternal ember. And they're really making, they're making a difference. But then a lot of them live at home. You know, I think this generation of parents decided they didn't want their kids to all become hippies. So they're going to support them and really almost make them co-dependent in order to keep them from, drifting off, which is fine. You know, I'm fine. That's wonderful. You can go home to your brother's

wedding. We couldn't. Right. You know, you can go to your uncle's funeral. We couldn't. You know, your grandmother's funeral. We weren't welcome. You couldn't go. It was out of the question. And people don't realize how hardcore. Yeah, that tough love was just ignorant, you know. And the other thing about drugs, I always call LSD and mushrooms and, you know, peyote and stuff. That's sacrament. It's sacrament. And I say these are actually the only people I knew that didn't take drugs. So for being tagged drug addicts, we weren't at all.

We were very, very anti-drugs. And there was no poker heroin or anything. I never even saw that stuff. You know. No, I've never seen the heroin. Yeah. Yeah. So it's hard.

Yeah. It's, in some ways, it's, it's so necessary. What do you think is the, like, if you were going to distill the message of the brotherhood down, down, what would it be? Love everybody. Yeah. It's all about the love. Love is something that exists. Yeah.

It's a vibration. Yeah. And it does actually exist. Love, forgive, let go. Be here now, actually is the main thing. Let go of all your past. It's the past. Don't worry about the future.

If you draw all that energy that you spend, you know, victimizing yourself because of your past or being scared about your future, you can bring all that energy into this moment right now. It's endless. You've got it. You have tapped into the well and not worry about those things. Just be here now. So that be here now thing is still very relevant.

Yeah. Yeah. I once heard that depression is being trapped in the past and anxiety is being trapped in the future. There you go. Right. All you really have is this moment. And we are. I know for myself, I get caught in the trap sometimes of like, oh, I might not have enough in the future.

I got to do this thing, you know, but it's such a trap because you can't. control any of that right no and control any of it and what happens happens and um i mean you know i hate to use this for an example but we had the most wonderful relationship with our children and then all of a sudden they come and they say they're dead well that's over you know everything that was wonderful and great in your life is over so at that point you know what do you turn to and the only thing can do is be here now and accept what happened and move on. It's all your own. You know, and that's just kind of the way it is.

You know, they always say that you go along and then somehow something turns your mind to the religion. Something turns your mind to the energy and the pureness of it is there. And what that is, we don't really know. You know, it just comes along. But that's what I see a biggie right now is they really need some. centers of people aspiring to have some understanding about the metaphysical and what's really going on.

And that's kind of what's missing today. And you have your pockets. You'll have your teachers here and there. But there isn't a big mass movement towards that. And that's what I see. The main thing is something needs to turn these people's minds towards something that's beyond their mind. And there is massive groups of people out there ready for that.

know, they think, oh, you know, like we have this one young friend, 22 years old, and we were talking to him. He said, what does it matter? He said, they're going to just blow the earth up anyway. And that really was his thing as a 22-year-old was he didn't have a lot of motivation to move forward in anything, anything trying to live his life and do the best he can. But his bottom line is that the powers of the be here is going to blow everything up and nothing's going to be here anyway. And you see that, you know, emerged everywhere. and everywhere things are bad. And that's not just our country.

That's a lot of different places. But somehow, some movement has to come along again, like LSD, to turn massive amounts of people towards the inside, towards their real consciousness and really have a desire to learn about what's really going on here other than us living in this illusion or just dotty-doddy-dose. You know, we're going on in our day and that's, then you die. And, you know, what's come of that? What have you made from your life?

What advancement have you done for the world and for your own spirituality? Great point. You know, I think it's happening. You know, I see people turning away from the machine. I see people walking away from, you know, jobs where their promised security in order to become the best version of themselves. And this is where I think it gets back to different generations. I don't really believe in coincidences. And I think the fact that your story,

the reason your story is coming out now is because kids in their 20s do need to see that it's possible. They do need to see that you can create something out of nothing. If you're willing to believe in yourself, and if you're willing to have the courage to stand up for what you think is right, then you can't become a better, you can become the best version of yourself. And when you do that, that's your gift to the word.

right like look I did it I became the best version of myself I'm not comparing myself to them or them but it's me you know it's I think that's what your guy's story does it's a it's an individual person you have to do it well well as a weird turn turn on the world one person at a time so you you know what may come about now you know that when Buddha was alive and Jesus was alive that there wasn't no writing there was no language nothing was written down all these stories about Buddha said and Jesus said it happened. The people wrote it 100 years later, how they have any idea what Buddha said. Because you have for dinner last Thursday. What could be very common is in 100 years from now, somebody's going to pick this story up and they're going to make a religion out of the brotherhood and the people involved. Is that funny?

I wanted to, one thing I think is interesting. It's just a side note. But there's always, you know, I'm always into the be here now and to pull all that energy and into the present moment. And the present moment is called present because it's a gift. It's a present. And it's a gift for you to cherish each moment. And I just love that, that it's called the present.

Yeah. And you're right about, you know, trying to set up the future or, you know, dwelling on the past and everything. Yeah. You know, that stuff's all useless now. The only thing that's of use is this very moment, what you're doing and how you're interacting with the world. And you find if you center yourself on that point, rather than what's going to happen tomorrow or what happened yesterday,

that your life gets better. You know, it gets revealing. You start seeing more because you're not so, your mind isn't so far off in the future, busy with those. thoughts are from maybe bad experiences or something that happened in the past. And it just gives you the opportunity to open up. And you have no control over any of it anyway. What happens to you tomorrow? And that's kind of what I was bringing up with our boys, was life was going along just great. And all of a sudden, one day it's over. And that happens to a lot of people in a lot of different

ways. And, you know, so the only thing you really can do is try to to be present in this moment and as things come up, deal with them. Do the best you can. After that, let it go. Be as loving and giving and, you know, give that homeless sound person, your leftovers or, you know, whatever you can do to help anybody at any time is. Yeah, and even little things make a difference. And it also make a difference in yourself. If you go out of your way to do something kind towards someone,

it actually changes you. It changes your demeanor. It changes the world and made it a better world. And that's really where our focus should be is on helping others because that's where your happiness comes. Right. That's what I was going to say that from the studying Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism for all these years, a few things we've learned is, well, a lot of things.

But what was I going to say? Oh, God, I lost my thought. Letting Buddhism and helping others. Oh, yeah. Okay, right. Oh, thank you so much. So they have a saying that thinking of yourself brings suffering and thinking of others brings happiness. And that's so true.

And they have a real thing of rejoicing in other people's success. So if they play a game and you're so happy for the person that won, you don't think, oh, man, you know, I'm fiercely competitive. but I'm all so very happy when we play dominoes and stuff. And I always say it's an opportunity to practice, you know, good sportsmanship and being rejoicing in someone else's thing. And when we were in the village where our son was reborn, he's a little Tibetan refugee village in way north India. And they had a little pool hall there, a little snooker table or snooker table.

So, of course, we come in and we're like, hey, let's have a contest, you know. And then we got prizes for every single person got either pair of socks, t-shirt, something, food. And then the winner got a pool queue from here we took. And so that was a really big deal. We thought they didn't need to think to them. But the contest went from morning all the way through the night. And finally the-nine o'clock till past midnight. Yeah, nine in the morning till past midnight.

And I left our house and went, you know, they can't. and told me, hey, they're coming up to the end, you know, because I wanted to see it. And so I went in and watched the two last players. They were all Tibetan play. And I'll never forget the moment because I couldn't tell who won. They were both so happy for each other. It was like that in all the games, too. Yeah, it was like that in all the...

We filmed it. Yeah, we filmed it. And watching the film, you can't tell who won. You can't ever tell. They were both so happy to have been able to play the game and the winner was the winner. Yeah, and they were so rejoiced in that. And what a lesson. Yeah.

Okay. I still got some work to do. Yeah. So there's little things you can do in your daily life that actually will change your life and make you a better person and actually you reap the benefits from it also. You know, that it just mindset, you know, when, you know, when, you know, when, you know, when, Something bad happens. Some car jumps out in front of you or something instead of getting upset with it, you know, you just kind of let it go.

And when you come across someone that maybe needs advice or help or even physical help, if you're able to reach out to them, it changes you as a person. And it really does. Those things, they change your mind. You know, they make you peaceful. You know, and these things radiate and people see them in you. And then it spreads. And that's the only way back is through kindness and helping.

There is no other way. Yeah, that's really well said it. Sometimes I think of myself as a pattern or my life as a pattern. And you can really understand the frequency of that pattern if you use LSD or you use some of these transformative sacraments in a way that can help you see yourself in a new pattern. And that pattern can become contagious, right? because if you have a pattern of kindness, all of a sudden that what you put out radiates back to you. And you can see it sometimes.

You can see it in your life when you change the way you interact with people. If you're, I've spent a big part of my life being an asshole sometimes. When I look back, I have to laugh, you know, and I'm like, what a dummy I was.

I was bringing it all on myself, just doing what I was doing. You know, but sometimes I think you have to go through that in order to see that pattern. Yeah, right. You have to work it out. We're working out. we're working out so much in this lifetime and especially if you've chosen a conscious life,

you're then all of a sudden now it's just a huge burden of responsibility to continue on this path of, you know, not to be kind and loving and everything. And that's, you have to work it in your life where that's natural. That's where your mind goes. That's where things are. And you start by one thing. Yeah. one thing to help someone, you'll see it and then you realize it and you go from there.

And everyone can see like, you know, the guys on the phone at the stop sign and you're honking out of you know, what the fuck? What do you know, what are you doing? And you then, you know, you can tell from right there that that's not good. Well, we always, good for you. We always feel sorry for them because now they have created karma with all those people that they made weight. And my thing with karma is, of course, we come in with all our karma.

And the kind of bummer is you never know when it's going to ripen. So it can just whineside you at any moment. But like with our boys or whatever. And my thing is, you know, realize it's your karma. Realize it's your own fault. It's your karma. If you were involved in it, that is your karma. How you deal with that is going to directly affect your karma in the next month.

moment. So be careful. Work out your karma. Don't create more. If you want to really unpack and get out of this life, it's the cleanest laid as you can possibly have. And with, you know, for sure, we've had millions and millions of years of accumulating our karma. And now we all of sudden realize we got to work it out. But that people hate that, you know, well, it's your karma. You know, no, why me? You can never say, lucky. You're lucky. you. And I used to tell the kids at that, no matter how bad things got, it's always good because you worked that karma. And I have to say when they died, I was down there standing, you know, looking at the whatever window details, but realizing, you know, how's this working out for you? You know, this is

what you preached your whole life. And now it's just like slammed you so hard. And I had to realize said, okay, we all had that karma to have that happen to all of us. It happened to them and it happened to us. And now we have to go forward and do the best we can to accept that and know that we all had that karma to work out. And now that is worked out. And what are we going to do now? Well, my plan was to go find them and help them and love them some more. So we did that. That's what we did. Yeah, that next 20 years. And thank God, it all worked out so beautifully. And they're so happy. There is the Mother's Day, Father's Day, birthday,

or when they need to talk to us or whatever, it's, it's, they call us. And it's, it's heartwarming. Yeah, it's wrestling with the why me. You can wrestle with that one forever. Yeah. Because it's an illusion to be shattered. The best thing is just to accept whatever's happened and then move on.

You know, deal with what you can with what you've got. and move on, you know, the getting stuck anywhere isn't a, isn't a good thing. But the, you know, the why me thing is a total misunderstanding. The YU is because that's what you're like this. That's what you've created in the past. And now it's ripened and you're experiencing it. But you don't want to experience it again. Yeah.

So the best thing to do is let it go, forgive everyone, and find that kindness in yourself and manifest it, you know, maybe. Make an effort, you know, do something for somebody. Doesn't matter who, relative, whatever, do something kind, that consciously that you do to help them in their life. And you will actually change. You change and become a better person. Yeah. You know, it's whenever you're struck by a tragedy that no one should go through, it's a moment where you have an opportunity.

to not let that happen again. It's really hard, though, because you're so overwhelmed with emotion and you fall into the trap of, why me or, you know, there's no God. You know,

you just fall into all these traps that, but what those traps do is they trap you in the same pattern. And if you get trapped, you're going to repeat it again. You're going to repeat it again. So it seems to me like the biggest tragedies, I know this is hard to think about. And when,

it took me a long time, I lost my son to, years to come to the idea that this thing that happened to me, this worst tragedy in my life, became one of the greatest learning experiences. And I'm fortunate to have had that happen to me because I was able to find a way to make it help me become whole. And I never would have become whole had I not had that tragedy. And I mean, I get goosebumps thinking and talking about it, but I share it because I want anyone who's ever in a situation where they feel overwhelmed. whether it's a parent dying, a child dying, a sibling dying, or whether it's losing your house or getting a divorce,

whatever the tragedy is in your life, take a moment to be thankful that it happened to you. I know that sounds crazy, but if you just take a moment to feel that, something will grow inside of you, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's wise. Wise words.

Did you use, it seems like, and this is another point where we can talk about maybe LSD or even hash-heesh, these particular sacraments allow you to take a break from the tragedy and see it from a different perspective. Did you find that to be the case? Yes. Yeah, well, you went with our thing also was you don't, you have to think about the person who died. And, you know, there's already so much, they've found that when you die, you know, be careful what you say around that dead person. They can still hear you. And so you want to, you want to be careful with that. And then you want to just, you know, like the Tibetans read them through the bardos.

There are special prayers. And there's prayers that tell you, oh, nobly born, you know, whoever they are, you've died. Because so often, like the movie Ghost, that was the greatest movie about what really happens. He got shot and died, but he was still chasing after the guy who stole his wife's purse. And then he came back and he was like, wait, what? what's going on. And that's like really what happens. So you have to be so, have so much empathy for the person that died because they're in the same state you're in, only they've crossed over to the other side. So and that's why, you know, they can materialize in front of you or you can feel their

their hand on you or you can hear their voice or hear their breath. And you can't. You really are doing those things. It's, you know, people like to cut and dry. Oh, what's a word everybody says you have to do after somebody dies you have to you know process it or whatever and get over it you're not ever going to get over it there is no processing and uh you know it's so easy easy to say i guess but if you're really going through it then you get a whole new perspective on it and now you can say i know how you feel because you do know how you feel if it doesn't really happen to you as a human being you can't generate that kind of kind of level of empathy for another person in that type of a trauma and be really able to help

where now you can. And that's sad. And it's the other thing, the Buddha has a story, this lady lost her baby. She brought him to the Buddha because he can bring him back to life. And he said, okay, I'll do that. But you have to take these mustard seed and go to every house. And if you find someone who has not experienced death in their family, come back to me and I'll bring your kid back to life. They couldn't. Every family had experienced a tragedy like that. So that made her realize it wasn't just all about her, that this is what happens. And then you have to go back into the karma of that was their karma and your karma. And a lot of times I think that's a Christian, when children die as infants, that was just like, that was their role. That was what they were

supposed to do. That was your karma with them. They were going to come and give you the biggest gift and teach you the biggest lesson of impermanence. And then you have to realize that and you have to go with that and you have to do the best you can. And that will change the path you're on. You will meditate more, you will, pray more and become a better person because of that experience. And that's what you have to take from those kind of things. And you don't want to also miss when they come to visit you. You're so grief-stricken. You can't.

Like when we were looking for our boy in India, we went there the one time for six weeks and we went to orphanages and schools and monasteries and everything. we didn't find him, didn't find him. And then we came back and we told that one llama and he said, well, let's see, you know. And he told us, well, he was there. You didn't see him because you're so obscured in your own thing. And we didn't even think we were. We thought we were really, you know, there.

Well, so that was illusion. Yeah, illusion shattering. And then he did give us this hundred syllable chant that we had to do. And he said it's just like looking in the mirror. There's nothing wrong with. mirror, you can't see your reflection because the mirror is dirty. You got to clean the mirror. And then you can see your reflection again.

So this 100-syllable mantra, I had to do 100,000 times. And I swear when I pulled that last bead over, we found them. So you just have to keep yours free. You're going to find that story real interesting. Yeah. It's crazy. I already do. It's crazy how it evolved from one thing to another to another.

Yeah, that was a, that still is a ride. Yeah. No, I was just saying like it brings, as we're talking about cycles of life, you know, it brings back the idea that we were speaking about earlier about the 22 year old kid who is saying things like, what's that matter? We're all going to die. We're going to blip the planet anyway.

Right. And at some level, like, that brings me a lot of joy because he's already being molded to understand. don't worry about the future. Like, that's a hard lesson. But he's like, I think that whole generation is being forced fed this. Oh, hey, oh, you're all going to die. You're all going to die.

But what better way to wake him up to say, hey, don't worry about the future. We're about right now. Yeah. But that's just something I caught from listening to your story. It just in some ways it's so poetic to me because we're talking about three generations from your guy's generation to mine to the next generation. And we're like this bridge. Here you guys are providing the story.

Here we are on the platform interpreting it. And then it can go right to that next generation to be like, oh, maybe this is the pattern here, you know? And it just, I don't know. It brings me a lot of joy to think about it. No, it's true. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah. Yeah.

Brought it in. Yeah. I, um, I'm going to have to have you guys back. Like, I feel like we've only covered. Well, we've covered so much. Like, I think that, like, I've only covered to hear in the book so far. I'm only on, look, let me. talk about this. Airplane

scam from Karachi. You know what I mean? Oh, God. My buddy that I sent over there, he just died a week ago. Oh. And when we went to his, you know, gathering and stuff. And his wife, that was the wife at that

time was there. He had had a few wives during their life, but there's one he had a couple of daughters with, and she was actually the young girl. She was only 16 when she got with him. So she wanted to talk about it. So we talked about everything. But she was the one that I actually gave the money to to send over there to get them out. But so, but what do you want to know about? You want to know

the story? Yes, please. Okay. So this one friend of ours that were still in contact with, actually, Wendy went to Holland with him and Morocco, and he was with her when they sold all that LSD. So she has history with this guy, you know, from before. But his dad was an airline pilot and he figured out, how that you could get into those panels be on the airplanes with the little key you can get in the bathroom and the way it went was the airplanes came from

the east and they would make their normal stops Tokyo Thailand blah blah all the way and then Hawaii Oahu was their last stop because it was actually the entry point to

America so when you got to Hawaii you had to clear customs, even if your plane was going on to LA and that's where you were going. So they took everything off the plane. You went through customs and they put everything back on the plane. You re-border and they took you on. Well, what made it happen was it was always the same plane. The one plane went from Karachi through Delhi and Thailand and Japan and all those places. Stopped in Honolulu and then went on to L.A. Well, you could, at that point, there was no

check on anything. You could board a plane with any amount of luggage, with whatever. There was no check. There was no security check. And what you would do is you'd get a, you'd buy hash and Karachi and you'd 20 pounds and you'd get on the plane. And then somewhere before Hawaii, you would go to the bathroom and you would undo this panel. You'd put your 20 pounds behind the panel, lock it back up. You'd get off, go through custom. and then on your way to L.A., you'd go back in the bathroom with your luggage, take the hash out and put in your luggage.

And when you got to L.A., you could just walk away. So that was the scam. Real easy. Great scam. Great scam. And I had the connection in Hawaii, I mean, in Karachi, and I knew I'd been there a few times before. I knew the hotel and blah, blah, blah.

So I got these two guys, and I told them, look, here's what you do. And I told them everything. You go to this hotel, you talk to no one. Then sometimes, you know, the next day, you walk to this place where in town, and that's the connection. And you'll be able to buy 20 pounds from them.

And I said, and you buy that, you go back to your hotel room. You still don't talk to anyone, and you don't leave the hotel. And then when the day comes three days later to get on the flight, you just take your hash and I gave them the tool and told them how to do it. Well, the story goes. And never talk to the cab driver. got in the car, they got in the taxi, and the taxi man said, oh, you know what do you want? I have hashish.

And they said, oh, yeah, we want hashish. So the guy said, I can deliver it to you. So they went to the hotel. The guy brought him the 20 pounds. They paid them. And they told him, I'll take you to the airport. So he came back in the morning and got him and took him in the airport. And as soon as they stepped out of the taxi, they were arrested.

And that's because the taxi driver was in cahoots with the police and everyone else. house and they had not done what I told them, and they were sitting ducks. At that point, they were in jail. But they were jail in Pakistan. The jails were so bad they actually had them in a hotel room because they didn't take these young kids and put them in jail. And I sent the money over, and sure enough, a couple days later, they showed up in L.A., of course, without the hash or thing.

But it was strictly because they went over there and it was just stupid. Yeah. I have to tell you, though, what else happened was one time a guy was. was doing the scam and they changed planes in Honolulu. Yeah, they changed airplane. Well, his hash was in this airplane somewhere else. When he got to California, you couldn't get there was no hash there. But this one guy, his dad was an airline pilot and he was able to chase down that airplane.

He was able to find out through his dad's connections where that airplane was. and he actually flew to France or somewhere. They found out where the plane was, got on that plane and took the hash off. No way. That's crazy. So, isn't that funny? Yeah. That's a good thing.

That's a pretty cool. That's a great. That's a story for the two kids. Yeah. Yeah. They should have done when I told them. Yeah. You got to be careful who you do stuff with.

You got to be careful when you're smuggling hash out of Afghanistan. Yeah. Well, a lot of times people would turn on. You know, if you were going to go do something big with somebody, you turn on with them and make sure everything was copacetic, that they were going to be able to handle whatever. And you had to be, you know, man, when I did things, I was who I was, whatever my name was, that's who you were. Your suitcase was packed with, you know, Nortstrom's nighty and clothes and you wore stockings and, you know, whoever you were being personifying at the time. And that's who you were from beginning to end. And when we were doing our thing, we ran into some other people in Iran in the bathroom.

I walk in the bathroom and I see this girl crying, but I can't see who she is. It's just a girl for what I think. And she's over there crying and crying. I just felt so bad. And I'm like, well, maybe I could just get her a glass of water or something, you know. And I say, you know, are you okay? She turns around. She's my girlfriend from Laguna.

Whoa. I know. So I'm like, oh, my God. And she had had a falling out with the person she was traveling with. And it was just this nightmare and everything. And I'm like, oh, my God. So we spent quite a while crying and, I mean, her crying and me comforting her and giving her whatever advice to just get, you know, finish the scam, get home, get your money and go. And, but I told her.

I said when we go out in the restaurant, I don't know you. Do not come to our table and you go tell your friend, if he hasn't already seen the person I'm with, don't talk to us. We'll party our heads off when we get back to Laguna. But as of right now, this is who I am. And that's who you are. And we don't know each other. So that's what we did. Discipline.

Yeah. Yeah, that's how you do it. You don't, you can't do it any other way. You draw attention to yourself. You don't give $100 tips and, you know, be ridiculous or you're going to draw attention to yourself. So you don't, you're just, you know, I was just on vacation with my supposed it husband. So that's how you, that's how you do it. And if you can't do it that way and you want to party or you want to go do something else,

that's where all the trouble comes from. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You, you mix too much. too much pleasure with business, you know, it gets in the way. I'm wondering, like, Wendy, Ronnie was saying that, you know, something along the lines of 10 grams of LSD, you know, like, and I'm sure Ronnie, you've dealt with large quantities, too.

It's, you know, in the not too distant past, I've had an incident where I was taking some Eflat and putting it into an alcohol solution. And just a little bit got on my hand. And I'll tell you what, I felt it. You know what I mean? I felt it. Like you got to be really careful when you deal with different forms and transporting it apart. Did you guys ever, like what's the method for that?

Like, you know, it seems like it's, even though it's such a small quantity, like the crystals of that, it seems like it's pretty potent can be kind of dangerous. Oh, what do you mean? Like, how, like, did you ever have to transport? Like, if you take the crystals and then like you lay it on the paper, was that ever something that never happened in process? That would be something that happened like, I don't know, later down the line or something like that.

If you were tabbing up sunshine into tabs, you sit there for eight hours making all these tabs and this assembly line thing and, you know, your nostrils are all orange and your hands are all orange and you don't realize it, but you've gotten really high. A little out of time. A little out of time. And everybody's in there. You know, there's like 10 of you, five on one side of the table, five on the other. and you're all doing the same thing, making these tabs on these little cardboard things

or wooden things. And I remember when we did that for all day long, and we were ready to go back down to the house. And it was in this big, long barn thing that we turned into a tabbing room. But we opened the two doors, and there was this vista that was so beautiful. And we were all just like, wow. Because we, none of us were. realized. We never thought about wearing gloves.

Yeah, we never got about it. It would actually get it in your sense or underneath your fingernails. You know, you can do them this and eventually drives it in there. But like she said, it comes on a little at a time and you don't realize after six, eight hours, how high you are. Yeah. And, you know, until something happens like they open the doors or something. Yeah. You know, you just go out with the doors.

But yeah, that was really common. Like I said, I don't know why we never. thought about where it was. It just didn't seem like that was part of it. Yeah. I was, when I grew up, I was very anti-any-any-kind of drugs because I was an asthmatic and I had allergies. So if there was a day that I could breathe and not have to take anything, I was in heaven. And I was a gymnast and a ballerina and a swimmer and, you know, very active physically. And I had my one boyfriend and he was older than I was and he had this great Mustang and he was a really great gentleman. But one day he says, well, let's let's, I want to take you out to this place.

And it was kind of a makeout place. So I was all, I don't know, I want to go there, you know. So we went and I said, okay. And we went. And then we were there and he's all open up the glove box. So I opened up the glove box. And he had, he was in that service. He had just come back from San Francisco.

And he had actual buds, not all crumbled up shake. but it was buds. And he said, do you know what that is? And I said, well, yeah, I'm not stupid. It's marijuana. And he said, well, you want to smoke some? And I said, no way. I said, I'm fine.

I am so high. You know, I thought I was just a day with just being able to be me was just so delightful to me. And so he rolls up and joins. He's a well, I'm going to smoke. And I already have, knock yourself out. It's fine. I'm not judging, nothing.

So he's smoking. He says, come on, come on, try it. And I said, it won't do anything to me. I'm already as high as you can get. I'm so happy. And so finally I gave in. And he said, it's good for asthma. So which some people say, I don't know.

That's debatable. But anyway, so I started smoking with him. And that was the first time I had ever smoked. And so we smoked like three joints. And he was just wasted. And he's like looking at me. And he's all, oh, my God. I can't believe it that this isn't affecting you.

And I said, I think. feel really good. You know, I don't know how much better I can feel. And he said, well, let's, let's get out and take a walk. And, you know, Mustangs have these giant doors. And I opened up the door and we were in the middle of the forest. That's where this path was. And, oh, my God, the smell of the pine trees and the earth and the mushrooms that were growing on the ground and the, you know, the night air and the stars. I was just like, oh, my God, this is. so beautiful. You're right. And he's like, oh, thank God. And we just sat on the hood of his car looking at the stars. And he knew all about astronomy. So that was really fun. And we had a great

time. And he took me home. And then I wanted to smoke marijuana after that. I was a really good thing. So anyway, that's just funny. Yeah. No way. It speaks volumes of the power of cannabis and just the way in which it can change our state of mind. You know, it's amazing how those stories stay with us forever. And those are transformative stories, you know, and it's not only a relationship, it's your relationship with the earth in a way. It's a relationship with cannabis.

It's fascinating to think about. Yeah. LSD is a gateway drug. Yeah. I took LSD before I smoked marijuana. Did you? What is your take on the two of them together. I know that when I was younger, I would, I would always smoke a little bit towards the

end of it. And that would kind of bring about another sort of wave. What, what you're, that's good. But the marijuana isn't pure like the hash. Yeah. It's a lot of physical there. So in one state, it opens, you know, whatever you want to say, closes your mind, whatever opens you to the metaphysical side of things. But you also get a little druggie out of it. And it kind of brings you down a a little bit. But if you have the cichita, it's not like that. You just go back out. And there is a lot of difference there. But I think it's good. But either way. Yeah. Most people, you know, whatever, it, it takes that moment in time and shuts your mind down to what is thinking and then opens it up to the metaphysical realm. So, you know, it's a great thing. Irwana is a great thing for every

It's very therapeutic. I think it's a great medicine. It is medicine. You know what else? Ashish, really, I mean, you know, we've tried doing this

or thinking about it incorporated. But what it really helps you with is meditation. It helps you with yoga. It helps you with different physical activities where you kind of want to reach a certain state of mental stability while you're, you know,

doing whatever else. And it really does help out. You know, that, you know, if you take the time to smoke a little hash before you do yoga, your mind will already clear out. And that'll give you, you know, the opportunity to concentrate on, you know, whatever you're concentrating on when you do yoga. And in meditation, you really, I mean, you can't think enough about it because it closes your mind down to the speediness of it, you know, that this, think of that, and it kind of

puts it on one track where you can focus. Palms all those crazy monkeys. So there's, um, the hash is it can be used for a lot of different things. Um, that aren't being used today. I know they have these marijuana yoga classes, but the marijuana is the same thing. You smoke it in an hour or so you're going to get a little drag out of it. You know, it's going to be physically. dragging. So it isn't exactly the best thing for doing yoga or something like that. If it's all you got,

well, that's great. Yeah. It's better than nothing. You're seeing that these days. You know, there's a lot of places, especially out here in California, where they have these clubs and you join the club and you can go there and smoke any time you want, and then they have all these activities, you know, where you can join the marijuana yoga class and things like that. And they're perfectly, legal, you know, because it's a, it's a private thing. It's not public. As long as you're not public, you can smoke, you can do whatever you want. That's why we were able to do that in our book signings. We will make an invitation only, and it was a private affair. So we could do anything we wanted in there. We weren't against the law. Really fun. Yeah. Everybody had a good time.

Everybody had a good time. The other thing with the hashish is it, It can also, you know, calm those monkeys, but I have a tendency. I'm a super multitasker. He calls me the Energizer Bunny. And so, but sometimes I have a problem with that because I'm going in so many different directions. I feel like I saw this thing on people, tweakers or whatever they're called, where they start doing one thing in one room. And then I realize I'm running from room to room. And I'm like, oh, I'll do this now.

And I'm like, oh, my God, this is not good. And I'll take a couple puffs of ash. and then all of a sudden everything is doable, everything's fine, and I get so much done that it's absolutely amazing. So it is very medicinal to get your ducks in a row, so to speak. Yeah, it makes sense. And I think it speaks to the idea of heightened states of awareness. You know, sometimes people use different substances, but when you become aware in a height, in a height it was the first time I really

grasped this was when my friend told me you know what? If you're going to take the test if you're going to study high, you've got to take the test high because you're in you know what I mean? Like you're in that state of consciousness if you come out of that and try to do something, you're not on the same level. So if you want to if you're going to do something later, if you're going to study here,

you should also take the test here. You know, and it kind of speaks to the idea of becoming or building a relationship with whatever sacrament you're using. And it's, it's, it's interesting that I think a lot of things can be done, whether it's yoga, whether it's drafting, you know, whether it's whatever you're going to do. If you're going to study it normal, then you're going to perform it at a normal rate. But if you're going to

study it at a heightened state of awareness, then you can see it from a different angle. We only know the heightened state of awareness. Yeah. I hear you. I think I've smoked more joints and anybody on earth. I can attest to that. We haven't been without cash or marijuana for 40 years. And we smoke constantly and we only know the height state. We've never been to the monastery. We weren't high. We've never written one word in any of our books that we weren't high. It's just, that's our state of mind. Well, I did try when I was going to college and I was taking anatomy and physiology, I thought, okay, I better really straighten up here now and pay attention. And so I was just studying my, you know, books that are big as an encyclopedia and, you know, answering all the

questions and stuff. But I was really struggling. I was making these cassette tapes and listening to him on my way to school. And one of my classmates, he was just so kicked back and he was doing fine. And I said, yeah, what's your secret? He said, marijuana. He said, I go home, smoke a joint study. And so I thought, all right, I'm going to incorporate that into my routine. And it was so amazing that I could just have a little joint and be able to study, retain everything that I was reading. It was so fascinating. I was really, you really get into it, how everything's connected. And the other thing I was going to say was as far as edibles go. I had made some edibles when we were doing the things with the dispensaries. And it was a huge.

business it turned out. They bought tens of thousands of cookies, but I made them. The reason they were so popular is they were different. They weren't marijuana cookies. I made them out of the crystals. We got the hash crystals off of the weed and I used the crystals to make the cookies because myself personally, I hate edibles for myself personally. I hate being doped up.

I like expanding. I don't want to get dumbed down. And even if at night or whatever, I don't like the hangover from the marijuana, that, you know, the whole plant eating it is, I don't think it's a, it'll give you a good night's sleep, but it's then take you till noon or one o'clock to really wake up. And that's why I like the crystals was a very pure, because I thought, hmm, I bet that would work. And it did. And it was very popular. We called our cookies e-go-go. Yeah, because you're in-go.

Yeah, e-go-go. I can't use tens of thousands of our cookies. Now, if you would take two, you know, we had our tested, so we knew exactly what was in it and how much, you know, to take. So you take a quarter of a cookie and then, you know, whatever, you can take another quarter. There were 60 milligrams each. Each, yes.

That became too strong. for the law. So then it was like a quarter of a cookie. And that that was that was really good. Those were really popular. People really, really liked them. But if you eat my point was if you eat too much, people always said I should put a benign one in with the loaded one. Because they were so delicious. They were these oatmeal, toasty-Ody recipe from someone's grandma. Organic, everything. Everything organic. And because they'd always end up eating two or three. and then they'd get jacked up and get a really high and stay up on night. We never had a complaint because everybody would like wrote their best song.

But a lot of people called us and told us. Yeah. I didn't sleep with all that. Yeah. My one girlfriend, I ate the whole cookie. She called me and she said, hey, go, go, go, man.

And I said, well, you're such an over-medicator. Yeah. That was your problem. We suggested a quarter, which is still a thing like those. Yeah, but that would work for the medicine. They love those cookies. Yeah. It's funny.

You know what? I was talking to some friends in Oregon, and they were talking about after marijuana was legalized in Oregon, there was this boom, but it's driven down prices to like next to nothing they were telling me. And part of me thinks, like, maybe it doesn't want to be sold. Maybe the medicine or maybe the spiritual nature. maybe it doesn't want to be sold for a profit. Is that too far out there to think?

Is that what happened in California? No, everybody has to make a living. Right. And there's overhead, but the thing, we were never for legalization. How come? Well, once you bring corporate in, well, then what? Then it's all going to be a file of the money. You know, it's going to be over.

They're going to have investors and, you know, they're going to have, you know, stocks and they're, you know, how it is. Hey, we made 10,000 this week. Let's try to make 20,000 next week and all this. And then they have these, as far as the eye can see, greenhouses full of legal weed, but they're spraying at all. You cannot get organic and it's feminized seeds. GMO seeds sprayed with pesticides that now they've made, you know,

governments made, oh, okay. Okay, that's okay now because you can eat the tomato two days after we do that's on. That's nice. Can you smoke it? Mm. Because you concentrate it down. Yeah, they ruined the industry. Yeah, they ruined it.

Yeah. Any weeds you buy in a dispensary from one of the big distributors has been sprayed with poison. Wow. Wow. And it's a feminized seed. They're not going to take a chance, a losing a crop for their investors. I just read this morning this one distributor in California, they're bellying up. But what happened was they were fronting stuff to everyone.

So they had all these dispensaries that they would front to and the dispensaries owed them. So they had a, you know, they had a list of money that they were collecting along the way. Okay. Well, they were going out of business. But what it said was that the investors will be paid off first before they pay off the people that own. Front of them and stuff. And that's because these guys come. in with $100 million and start up a legal crop.

Like Wendy said, I've seen greenhouses in Santa Barbara as far as you can see. And it was a commercial outfit. They're all sprayed. So they've completely ruined the whole industry. Everyone we know that used to grow marijuana and sold it either legally or illegal, legally, they've stopped. You can't compete. Because there's no money in.

And the dispensaries are so you have to be licensed. You can't, you know. know, that's what put us right out of the market. You can't get in because you don't have those papers. So these big corporate entities have come in and why they're not in trouble because it's still federally illegal. I know. But somehow they can sell stock on the market.

I mean, the government can do just whatever they want, you know. There's like, you know, if you try to do that, you'd be in jail. Yep. Oh, they can come in with this, you know, and I'm not kidding, $100 million. We've seen some corporations. and things raise that much money to start these big startups. And they don't care because, you know, they're going to do a Ponzi thing or they're going to just gather more money after they get going.

Here we'll make an income of this and then we'll get more money from the investors. And, you know, all that stuff's hitting the bottom now because too many of them got in there. There's too much product. And they've lost a lot of the people buying it because of the prices. have gone, you know, where they don't, people would, were better off trying to buy it from your buddy or the guy down the street or something like that. Except that guy's not even grown it anymore because it was too much overhead for him to even try to keep up when there was nobody to sell it to. Everybody's scared to buy illegal weed like you don't.

Really, you know, it's really changed now. And it's really hard to get good organic marijuana for anyone. Yeah, from a true strain. Because whoever was, they were getting up from meat forest. growing it. Yeah. Yeah, they're all those feminized seeds. Yeah, all feminized seeds. So terrible. So sad. So corporate's ruined the whole industry. Yeah. It's really another industry. What's going to straighten it out on? We don't know. Do you think that that's like the similar path for like legalized mushrooms and psychedelics? That all depends, but that's a little harder thing to tap into because

you don't have the buyer base like they do marijuana. They already had 40. for similar people. Right. We established the whole market. So I don't think they'll do that with that. I think they'll see small groups by these resorts in these other countries and set up their own platform for whatever they want to do with psychedelics. They're using a lot of different ones. The ayahuasca.

Some of them may have a different program. You want to do ayahuasca? You want to do psilocybin? you know, and there's another one what, I don't know, rogain or what's the word I'm looking for? Ibogane. Ibogane, yeah. So

you can actually contact these people and have different experiences now on the different things. But it's not commercialized. It's still really small. You know, it's expensive. And some people are doing it and more power to them. Yeah.

And the more that do it, the more it opens up in these countries and places like Belize and Jamaica, they get used to life. licensing these things and they'll license more. And it'll become more and more popular. So I think it's a good thing. I think everything's moving forward, you know, the way it should.

And as far as mushrooms, mushrooms are, you know, marijuana, it does have a problem with pests or whatever. You have to be really careful. And so consequently, you know, we've had to abort crops because we're not going to ever spray. But people will do that. But with mushrooms, mushrooms are so sacred, you know, fantastic fungi and all, you know, I mean, it's so much more than meets the eye that that's the final product of this huge thing that's happening. And I think that would be, that would be harder to bastardize that particular industry

just because of the sacredness of the mushroom and the power of the mushroom from where it's just too, too strong. And it doesn't need it. It doesn't have, you know, white flies and height. Your nightmare. So yeah, I think that's a more sacred thing, but it's also a psychedelic

and the government is afraid of psychedelics. Terrified. Yeah. Yeah. You'll change your mind. Yeah, it really will. I love talking to you guys. This is really fun. We're coming up on three hours and it feels like we've been doing

24 minutes. I know. Oh, my gosh. We start charging after three hours. I know. I know. I know. I know.

I'm going to have to come back. I know we can talk about the new book coming out. And let's get together more often. This is really, really fun. And I think that we just kind of scratch the surface of it. Maybe it's because, you know, we're just kind of getting to know each other a little bit. But I really, really enjoyed it. I feel like I really learned a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. Let us know down the line. When we have time, we'll be glad to get back with you and talk about anything. Yeah. About microdosing, you know, we give lectures on a lot of things. Yeah, at college. History, you know, of psychedelics and, you know, whatever.

We're asked quite often to come and, you know, give lectures on this or that or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we could do a panel. Maybe we could bring some more people in and we could, maybe you could preach a little bit of the message of the brotherhood, sort of a, you know, a reembracing the spirit. spiritual nature of the pure process or something like that. But you should write that down. I should.

I'm really good at streaming consciousness. I should write stuff down more often. At least it's recorded, right? Yeah, that's a good point. There you go. It's a good point. And so I just want to point everybody. I want to show them the cover of the book here is what it looks like for those that

are watching. And then the link to the website will be down in the show notes in there. And I recommend everybody check it out. It's one of my favorite biographies now. And it's like a thrill ride. It's a biography. It's a geography lesson. It's a history lesson.

It's so much in there. And you guys did a great job at telling some of the stories. And I'm really, really thankful. And Mark Rose is chiming in. He's like, wow, I knew it would be good. I wanted to say one thing about the bookmarker in your book. I love it. Yeah.

I said it should have a picture. of all the cars and the world. And that's a little tiny thing. But what I see the map behind you, what I had done is I got a map. It was a shower curtain, but it's a map of the world. And then I,

those are all ordered lines. I am. Okay. Yeah. I am brighter. I don't know. Where are we? Move it right there.

Yes. Perfect. So, and these, These are all the cars that have a little... The nine vehicles that I sent to Afghanistan. It just runs things. And there's a little color code in front of each car. And then that's the color embroidery thread I used.

And it shows where each car was purchased. And then the journey that car went on to get back to California. So where it was purchased and where it was unloaded. And then the journey that it went, where it was dropped off in Europe. And I was making little pictures of the cars on the top. Yeah, and the little pictures of the car. We didn't mean to do that.

But when he was doing his, writing his book, he's like, well, and I said, well, let me see that. And so we brought one up and he printed it out and we cut it out. And I said, oh, this is so fun. And then he printed out all these. You've got that bookmark, right? Yeah, you've got this. I do. I do.

It's all at my desk over here. That's what that is. We've got it right here in full size. It's people's favorite thing, though. Yeah, they love it. Yeah, it's like a story within a story. Yeah, yeah, because we said we literally went around the world to bring you the best ash. I'm so glad you guys did.

Yeah, yeah, we are too. It was our, it was, you know, whatever, God's will. It's the gift that keeps on giving. It is. We have the movie. We're the only ones that have this movie, by the way. Brent Sunshine, is that showing us? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And you can get it on our website. And it's a DVD, which a lot of people don't even have DVDs. But that's the only way you can watch it now. It's not streaming anywhere. Amazon ran it for three years and they took it off. And we've got these little physical copies, but it's the only way you can see the movie.

But you can order that also online. And if you go to Ronnie Bevan on the internet, you get pages of stuff. So if you want to find anything, a book, one of our books of the movie or a link or anything or even fun stories, you just put my name in there. Yeah. And one of the reasons we came out, well, besides the statute of limitations that run out, one of the reasons we came out was because when we were all on the run and we left, we were gone. Nobody knew what we didn't even know where each other was. so then when we all started kind of coming back in and getting things taken care of we realized that all these people had said all this like horrible stuff not they didn't think

it was horrible they were saying they were brotherhood and this is what the brotherhood did and they did these despicable things that we would never do unethical things we would never do and so that's why we really came out yeah you know with gusto there's a lot of bad information. Yeah, a lot of bad information. That's totally not true. And it's such a shame because it distracts from what the Brotherhood really was, which was sole purpose to make your life better and to make the whole world better to heal the world.

It is what the Brotherhood's about. And we all still are. The ones that are still active are still actively, you know, like my little grandson said, God, Grandma, you're still doing this? I said, well, yeah, I'm still turning on the world. Yeah. What did I say? That's awesome.

What's good in the past is still good. So get back to us. We have a lot of time. Okay. You know, so whenever you think is good for you, let us know, we'll see if we can fit it in. And, of course, like I said, we're willing to talk about whatever. Now, you're going to take this video and cut it up?

Yeah, yeah. Make so? We streamed it live. What I'm going to do is I'll send, yeah, we streamed it live for like seven different platforms, two Facebook channels, Twitch, Twitter, YouTube, Trump, Rumble. Yeah. I thought you'd cut out any bad things. I don't think there was one bad thing in there. Ron swore one time.

He's human. We're all human, right? And I swear one time in the movie, too. Yeah. you watch that movie you're going to really enjoy it and especially now you've talked to us and you have some history it's going to be better yeah yeah i i'm a huge fan of the books because i i want to i love movies too but i want to read the words and then envision it in my own mind

before i see someone else's envision up you know what i mean i want to envision it yeah yeah we're putting it on on um we're putting it on audio right now also. Fantastic. Yeah, we're right in the middle of that. And then we're going to do from one life to the next on audio also. Is that I'm going to be on audible? Yeah, audible.

People want it. You know, everybody wants it to. So they can hear it. And it's a funny thing too. I've thrown out our, I do the reading myself. Perfect. And we've thrown out a couple of pieces to friends. And they've all been thrilled to death.

Some of them think, wow, it's a new story. And not a new story. You read it. But somehow when you hear it, it makes a difference than when you read it. And anyway, that's what we found out. But it's getting close. It's getting real close. And it'll be real enjoyable to be able to listen to me tell the story.

And also, it's going to open it up to Europe and places like that. You can't really get our book anywhere because we're not on Amazon. And the shipping. So the shipping is like $26. even though we've sold around the world quite a few of them but the audible you buy it and then you download it so anyone can buy it so that'll open up us to europe and asia and all those places we haven't been able to get to it's just going to be real fun it's getting close we're getting down to edit yeah it's like i said i i think that the the next transition is that you guys will be playing a

bigger role as teachers you know it's it's it's just a shift you know it's it's gone from yeah in afghanistan and now it's telling the story And in telling the story, you inspire other people to have lived experience. You know, and it's just, it's back to the hash. And there's a process beyond making something pure. And a story that is pure inspires other people to go and live a life worth living. So I'm excited for you guys' future. Oh, good.

Thank you. And it was so nice to get to know you. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Vice versa. I think we're going to be talking more often. Enjoy your day in paradise.

Yeah. All of them. I'll be here now. Yeah. Our goal. Well done. Bye. Okay.

Thank you so much. Have a good afternoon. I love you guys. Thank you for everything that you've done. And I will talk to you soon. Aloha. Okay. Thank you.