Shooter Jennings and Joe Rogan dissect Scientology’s rituals, including L. Ron Hubbard’s locked Excalibur vault and tithing demands, while critiquing its anti-psychiatry stance and questioning Tom Cruise’s unshakable optimism. Jennings’ skepticism of voting—highlighted by OJ Simpson media frenzy amid Osama bin Laden’s ignored threats—aligns with Rogan’s view of corporate-controlled politics, comparing it to a runaway train. They debate conspiracy theories, like the moon landing’s authenticity, citing Clinton’s doubts and NASA’s fake petrified wood "gift" to the Dutch PM in 1969, later debunked in 1988. Rogan warns of government surveillance, from NSA hacking to CIA spying on the Senate, while Jennings shares his DMT fascination and concerns about societal control through debt and media manipulation, like MSNBC’s prank call fallout and legacy outlets’ decline amid social media chaos. Ultimately, the conversation reveals systemic distrust in institutions—whether religious, political, or scientific—fueled by secrecy, profit, and the struggle to separate fact from fiction. [Automatically generated summary]
This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Onnit.com.
That's O-N-N-I-T. Onnit is a human optimization website.
What that means is that we sell you Or we sell.
It might not be to you.
You might just be a dude listening going, next.
But we sell shit that makes your body work better, shit that makes your mind work better, strength and conditioning equipment, supplements that improve cognitive function, supplements that can improve your endurance and strength.
All the different various aspects of these things are explained at Onnit.com far better than I'm going to be able to do in a simple commercial.
But our goal is just to provide you with all the different shit that we use.
All the different things that I use as far as strength and conditioning equipment, like kettlebells, things that can improve athletic performance, steel maces and steel clubs.
All these different things are all, again, explained far better at Onnit.com.
If you're a person who doesn't exercise and you've never tried anything like this before, I cannot stress enough to take it lightly.
Start slow.
Hire a trainer if you can afford one.
You don't need to do every workout with a trainer.
Just have somebody show you the correct motions, the correct way, the correct form to do various physical exercises so that you don't hurt yourself.
Because the whole goal of exercise, obviously, is to improve the way your body works.
And if you break it along the way, that shit ain't improving nothing.
That said, we sell a wide variety of weights of kettlebells.
We sell packages from beginner kettlebell packages, which have three different weight sizes, 20 kilograms, 16 kilograms, and 12 kilograms, which are, what is 20?
Was that 35 pounds?
No, 50 pounds?
2.2.
46 pounds?
Yeah.
I don't know why we're doing kilograms.
This is something because they were created in Russia.
What kettlebells are is an ancient Russian method of lifting weights.
It's like a cannonball with a handle on it and using momentum and swinging these things.
The goal of the kettlebell is to strengthen the entire body as one individual unit.
Like a lot of times when you see people lifting weights, they do things like if you go to the standard gym setup, A lot of times people are doing what you call isolation exercises, like curls or things along those lines, tricep extensions that are really just working one body muscle group.
And the idea behind something like kettlebells is to work the entire body as one individual thing.
So it strengthens the body all as one unit and also enhances athletic performance because of that.
Because if you just develop strong biceps, like you're only working your bicep, you're not working your legs and your back at the same time, You're kind of doing yourself a disservice because you're going to create an imbalance.
It's not natural to just have really strong biceps for no reason.
It looks sexy.
unidentified
You want to have some fucking guns for the beach, kid?
There's a wide variety of things, including workout DVDs.
I can't stress this one enough.
I talk about it all the time, but it's just because it's so good.
The Extreme Kettlebell Cardio Workout DVD by a man named Keith Weber.
Keith will be here in October.
We're working out the dates right now.
I'm very psyched to sit down and talk to him.
He's a good dude and he has a great workout regimen that you can follow.
Also, besides strength and conditioning equipment, we have massive amounts of supplements, healthy foods, including the Hemp Force Protein Bar.
Hemp Force Protein Bar, which contains the finest quality hemp protein.
Very delicious.
Very low in fats.
It's got healthy fats, minerals, fiber, protein, all pressed into a shape that's perfect to just stuff in your pocket or your bag and get the fuck out of there and have healthy protein and have something that fills your stomach up but doesn't make you feel like an asshole for doing it.
Onnit.com.
O-N-N-I-T. Use the code word ROGAN and save yourself 10% off.
We're also brought to you by a new sponsor, and it's called MeUndies.
Why did they decide to call their company MeUndies?
I don't know, man.
I don't know.
But the idea behind it is they have the finest underwear that you can buy, and they will deliver it to you, order it online, and have it sent to you.
I personally do not like going to a store and shopping.
And for the U.S. and Canada, shipping is absolutely free.
So MeUndies.com forward slash Rogan.
Save 20% off your first order.
We're also brought to you by Audible.com, last and not least, because Audible is awesome.
I'm a huge fan of audio podcasts, and I'm also a huge fan of audio books.
I'm a huge fan of taking time that would ordinarily be wasted time and actually making it very enjoyable, and that's what a book on tape can do for you.
Audible has over 150,000 titles, fantastic books that you can choose from, including Burt Kreischer, our pal Burt Kreischer's The Life of the Party.
Bert did a fantastic job on the audiobook version of it, and it actually sells better than the book book version, which is really rare.
But if you're a fan of Bert Kreischer, it totally makes sense because he's such an entertaining guy and he's a fun guy to listen to.
So if you go to audible.com forward slash Joe, you will get one free audiobook and 30 free days of Audible service.
Audible is the leading provider of audio entertainment on the internet, and I can't stress enough how much I like that company.
They've been around for a long time, and I've been a fan for a long time.
They have so many different titles to choose from, and you literally can never run out of excellent books to listen to, and it makes a commute so much more interesting.
And again, if you go to audible.com forward slash Joe, you will get a free audio book, and I recommend my friend Bert Kreischer's book, The Life of the Party.
So go there, get a free book, audioaudible.com forward slash Joe.
All right, Shooter Jenny's is here.
unidentified
Why fuck around?
Play the music and let's start the show.
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
For wackiness, but by the end of it, you're like, hmm.
That's what's fucked up about it.
It's like the concept of what...
Because I guess Dianetics, like...
I'm kind of obsessed with Scientology because it's so fucking retarded in one way, in one sense to me, but in the other sense, because it's so serious and all the craziness you hear about.
This book, it was like the foreshadowing for Scientology, and that he tried to get it published, and three or four people that read it committed suicide, so he locked it in a vault, and there's a copy of it, and no one ever knows where that is, but that was where Scientology was born from.
So I'm so fascinated by it.
So Dianetics was his new book that he wrote.
He's like, wait, I've got it figured out.
It's more like this.
So Dianetics was kind of like the way of introducing what was in the Excalibur book to the mass population.
It was about the mob mentality and breaking that apart.
So that no matter what, everyone is really always alone, no matter if they're in a group.
But when they're in a group, they act a certain way that's different.
So there's a guy being hung.
There's a scene in it where there's a guy being hung and then there's the mob that wants him hung.
And it goes and analyzes the people in the mob and analyzes the executioner and analyzes the guy who's getting hung.
I don't know.
I'm very fascinated with that kind of...
And that's why the whole Scientology thing to me is so fascinating because I'm like, how do these people, they pay money to join this fucking club?
It's like, you know, it's real like AA and all that stuff in the sense that it's like, you know, your new friends and your old friends and they assign people to you and then eventually you kind of weed out all those other people.
But the whole concept of it is taking, the whole concept of Dianetics is taking, like when you're a little kid and a dog bites you and then for the rest of your life you're scared of dogs, like the whole concept behind Dianetics is that they can take the memory, what they call a reactive memory, which is like the dog thing, And they can turn it into a regular memory so that you won't get rid of all of those kind of little things that fucked you up through life.
That's what the concept of clear is.
So that when those things become...
you're not reactive anymore.
So if you hate your dad...
And then for that reason, you react a certain way to people your whole life.
You can get that out of there so you'll never act uncalm, you know what I mean?
And I'm supposed to not like this guy because he did diss my best friend and manager, which is not cool.
But besides that, previous to that, before it got sticky, there's a guy on Twitter named Not Tom Cruise.
Do you know this guy?
Dude, he's hilarious.
He just talks about how he's blowing rails with Britney Spears all day long and driving down.
He's just talking about being coked out of his face and how he's like Scientology rules and he's looking for bitches and hanging out with Travolta and doing rails and shit.
I think there's a reason why they've come up with a lot of these drugs, and some people have benefited tremendously.
There's people that just have natural chemical imbalances in their brain.
And the idea that someone who doesn't know how your brain works can say, you know, oh, you don't need it because I don't need it, or you don't need it because Mike doesn't need it, Tom Cruise doesn't need it, so, you know, John, fuck over here, he doesn't need it either.
That's crazy.
some people benefit from them tremendously and sometimes they can use you can use those things as a bridge like you got really tough times in your life you can use the psychiatric drugs as a bridge and then get to a healthy place and then wean yourself off like get your life in order I've read stuff about people doing that too I don't necessarily think they're all bad but I think that agree I don't think There's a lot of people that don't take care of themselves and then just they get depressed and just take a pill and then now they're better.
Well, maybe not.
Maybe you would have been better off if you started eating better and maybe stopped drinking as much and doing a little bit of exercise every now and then and probably you'd feel better.
When you see a guy like Tom Cruise, who is undeniably wacky, but also undeniably successful, the guy is always positive, like he does these interviews, he's got a lot of great energy, and it's like, man, there's a benefit to that.
There's definitely something to that, especially when you get a guy who's in that much, I mean, that much power and has had that much success, you know, and has that much influence, like...
I mean, I know that they treat him like he's the L. Ron Hubbard Jr. or something, so I'm sure he's loving that side of it, but the reality is that For him to have stuck by it, there's got to be something too.
Like I said, the audiobook of Dianetics, as funny as that is, it is so fascinating because it explains why he's always in a fucking good mood all the time.
He's like, I'm really good at this clear thing.
He's really figured it out and he's really happy all the time.
Or, you know, he might just shut the door when the day is done and fucking wail and scream and fucking fish all over the ground flopping around like a fucking animal.
When he did the auditing, though, I'm sure because they're trying to convince someone to come back that they're not going to start delving into real personal shit, but I'm sure like, what do you do?
I don't remember because it was very unremarkable.
I remember I was baked, which is part of the problem.
Which is why I was willing to do it in the first place, because otherwise I would have probably just hovered and watched other people do it.
But, you know, it was dumb questions, like dumb questions about your childhood, are you happy with your career, are you happy in your relationship, and they just get a reading on you, allegedly, from this non-scientific measuring instrument.
I see we could spend the whole thing talking about this because it's one of those things where there's a bunch of people in on a joke, and you're just wanting someone to say, okay, we're just fucking with you.
Like, I'm reading about this, after you brought up Excalibur, what you were talking about, and I pulled up that website that mocked Scientology, Xenu.net.
I grabbed that off WikiLeaks and was, like, looking at that.
The Operating Thetans manual, like, level three, which is apparently where, I guess, Tom Cruise is, like, four or five or six or something, but he was three a couple years.
I haven't been keeping up with his level, what rank he's at, but I know he's ranked up, because they've given him...
They made up some new award for him.
Did you ever see that video that leaked?
Yes.
Where he's using all this stuff?
That was like, they made up this thing they'd never had before.
It was like Guardian of the Galaxy Award, you know?
And they gave it to him, and he was like...
He's like saying all that shit that made no sense and using all their words and stuff, you know, and that leaked to the internet and people putting music to it and shit.
But there's like a whole thing where Jim Carrey's character...
Is in an insane asylum over that chick, the Mary Samsonite, as they call her from the first one.
And then it turns out he was joking for 20 years.
And yet Lloyd, he's like, Lloyd, you mean to tell me that you've been faking for 20 years all for a gag?
And he's like, yep.
It would be amazing if he did that.
That's the only way a good politician would work.
The only way that you could have a president in this country that was actually going to care about the people is they'd have to lie their way from the beginning to the moment they get in office and they didn't have to flip.
Because it's like, what is the fucking difference?
First of all, people who are like...
I may be going against a lot of people's opinions of this, but people who are so gung-ho on these certain politicians and lobbying for this person, and they're so excited that Obama's going to fucking change everything.
I mean, yeah, it's awesome.
Our first black president, that's awesome.
But otherwise, like...
It's the same fucking game.
Same shit over and over.
So I look at people who are really gung-ho about one guy.
I'm like, are you fucking crazy?
You're buying this?
Nobody's bought anything for so long.
Bill Clinton goes on Arsenio Hall.
Have you watched that 90s thing that has been on National Geographic recently?
No.
There's a series called The 90s and it's like six hours, the whole thing.
And I sat and watched it one day.
And it's awesome, but it really reminds you how much shit you weren't paying attention to in the 90s and how rigged it all was.
Like, everything.
Like, Osama Bin Laden was on, like...
They did an interview with him in like 98 or 96. When was OJ? 94?
If it was OJ, I don't remember if it was OJ or Monica Lewinsky, but one of those things was going on at the moment.
And 400,000 people watched this interview with Osama Bin Laden.
He's like...
He says on the interview, he's like, we're going to fuck you and you're going to watch it on TV and you're going to be crying when it happens.
And like 400 people watched it and nobody cared.
And like at the exact moment they were airing it is when like Monica Lewinsky or OJ was like in the prime and everyone's like looking over here while like this guy over here.
And Osama's just as fucking bullshitty as fucking the president's and everything.
Like, yeah, right.
Like, Osama did not fly that plane.
I mean, there are some people that did that shit, and there are people involved, and we will never know the truth about any of it.
So, I mean, no matter how hard we dig, you know what I mean?
So, it's like, to me, it all seems so silly when people get so riled up.
Like, they have to believe something.
It's like Satanism.
You have to believe in God to be a Satanist?
That seems so stupid to me.
Like, you have to be Christian...
If you want to be in this Church of Satan, you have to be a Christian first.
Because then you have to believe that whole thing to believe that there is a Satan to join the Church of Satan.
See, I mean, there's like the Crowley Church and there's like the LeVay Church, which is what you're kind of talking about, which is just essentially like...
But, like, the writings and the teachings and the things where they reference Satan as, you know, and all those kind of, like, rituals and shit are silly because it's like you've got to be in the frame of reference of Christianity and the Bible and all that.
To fix the system, you have to end banking, you have to end the Federal Reserve, you have to get the corporations out of control of the media and everything.
There's so many fucked up pieces of it that as it trickles down from the top to the bottom, it's just...
You know how when water...
Water goes through, when you see springs, like natural springs that come out, that water's going through all this rock and all this ground, and in doing so, it filters everything out, so the water comes out really pure and delicious to drink.
But it could start out really fucked up, and then it all gets...
Well, the opposite is true with politics.
You could have a great idea, and you could have someone who has great intentions, but by the time they get through the filter of, Corporations and special interest groups and lobbyists and this and that.
It's always going to do that because they want it to be that way.
To me, like you said, it's so fucked up and it really is.
It's really because of that...
That, you know, the 99%ers, 1%ers thing.
I mean, because you just have these, you just, the corporations have too much control, and they're, like, the net neutrality thing, they're trying to cut that out, and that's like, they're literally giving all the power to, like, these, you know, Viacom and shit like that.
Not only that, Viacom is a, any time you look at a corporation as an individual, which is what they keep trying to do, they're doing that as far as their Ability to donate to political campaigns.
They're doing it as far as their responsibilities.
They're trying to look at corporations as if these entities should be given rights like an individual, given rights like a human being.
But that's crazy, because in doing so, what you're also doing when you have a corporation is you dissolve the responsibility of each individual for the actions of the group.
If you're going to give corporations the responsibilities, or if you're going to give corporations the rights of an individual, you should also be able to charge every individual in the corporation as if they were guilty for anything that the corporation is in trouble for.
And if you did that, then it would change the actions entirely of the corporation.
Because right now, say if you're part of a corporation, this corporation likes to go to Guatemala, And build cell phones and in the meantime you fucking shoot rabbits and fucking poison the wells and you know who knows what kind of horrible anti-human shit they're doing in these third world countries and pollution and genocide and there's a group of people that doesn't want them to clear cut so they fucking gun these people down and you find out about it all later and Everyone involved in the corporation should be responsible for
it, and that's the only way you would ever stop any of that shit from going on.
If you looked at BP, perfect example, the oil spill in the Gulf, which just Fucked up so many people's lives.
I mean, there's so many people that don't have a voice.
You're not hearing from the fishermen.
You're not hearing from the people that had to clean that shit up.
You're not hearing from the people that lived in the towns close to the water that got really sick because of the dispersants.
There's so many individuals.
If everyone in BP was prosecuted as fully responsible for the actions of BP, I mean, man, shit could get crazy.
Like literally every single executive, every single work, everybody that's a part of a corporation, they got razors.
Well, it's subsidized.
That's what's even crazier.
Oil is subsidized.
The amount of fuckery that's involved when you get heavy-duty money involved in It's madness.
It's madness.
I don't know what the solution is, but...
Until you figure out a way to not have these big groups of people that have this diffusion of responsibility.
Because if you're, you know, Shooter Jennings is a part of BP, and BP does something fucked up, and you're like, man, that's fucked up.
I can't believe my company did that.
But, oh well, I got a raise.
I didn't do anything.
You can sleep tight knowing that you didn't do anything personally.
But you're a part of a machine that did something really good.
Yeah, but then there's people like you and I that drive cars and need gas, and you buy an iPhone, and how's it going to fucking get to the Apple Store?
Someone's got to put that bitch in a truck and just got to drive it over there.
There's no other way.
The whole system has just been set up without a whole lot of foresight.
It was set up to deal with...
What's available right now?
And no one sort of saw the future of how things are going to get ugly and where it could become problems.
How much carbon can you get into the air until it starts fucking with the weather.
It's just so much.
And then there's so much momentum also.
The thing about politics and the thing about the influence of corporations and special interest groups is that It's sort of been this way for so long that to come in now and try...
It's almost like there's a train running through your neighborhood.
And it's just a train.
We've got to stop this train.
Do you grab it?
Do you hold on to it?
What we need to do is put some stuff on the track.
Let's just run over that stuff.
Well, how the fuck do you stop the train?
Well, you've got to grab the back and put a lot of weight on it.
Is that going to work?
No.
Well, all the things that we're doing to try to...
To reform politics, like from an individual point of view, whether it's complaining about it online or writing blogs or doing this and that.
It's akin to trying to grab a hold of the back of the train and dig your heels in.
I don't mean like moving to the USA. I mean, in a metaphor, I mean, kind of like...
Like, don't you feel like...
I mean, I feel like the only...
Out of the people that I've kind of read and researched that are kind of like this anti-establishment shit, it seems to be...
That if they tell you, you know, you've got to do this now.
You've got to wear a blue shirt every day.
The only way to fight any of it is just by not doing it.
You know what I mean?
Like, just whatever.
But at this point in time, they've convinced this entire country and they've convinced the entire world that this is how things work and you have to go along with it.
Like jobs.
And, you know, they like the fact that everyone is freaking out about money all the time.
They...
They squeeze the middle and lower class out of that, you know, so that they're freaked out all the time, that both parents are having to work all the time, that the kids are in shitty daycares where the education is terrible, and it's like that's how they keep that in control, you know what I mean?
But most people just walk through life and accept that and just say that's the way it is.
And, you know, it's very few people that actually stand up and try and Figure something else out, but there's not really a solution, especially that someone like me could give anyone.
But at the same time, I can sit back and look at it and comment on it.
With the Black Ribbons record, that was my getting.
It was right when the economy fell in 2009, at the very beginning.
George Bush was missing and Obama was looking real glorious at the time but nobody was doing anything about the collapse of the economy and then the bank bailouts were happening and it was just like man this is insane it was like the scariest little point of time you know and and that's kind of where that album came out of and and for me it was really my comment on the whole thing and by having Stephen King be the DJ and do all that shit like Like what his character was really what the record was about and it was kind of like keeping hope and
you know small communities and family and you know those kind of like friendships and things like that that level is the only way that people like unions you know were started because it was like people were like I can't take this shit we can't take this shit anymore and Like that connection, that level, that's where you can grab the train and you can, you know, with enough people.
It's like that Occupy thing, man.
When I was in New York living at the time when the Occupy Wall Street thing happened and my daughter was going to a school in the financial district.
So like when I drop her off at school and me and my buddy would walk over to the To the Occupy Wall Street, just hang out in the middle of the whole thing, you know?
And it got a bad rap, and it had all these different things, but those motherfuckers were standing up to the man, and the man was, like, fucking shooting the beanbags at him and shit, and, you know, it was really crazy.
Like, they had books, and the cops were burning the books and shit.
It was like some scene out of, like, Nazi Germany when we walked over.
There was pouring rain, there were people in the trees.
Like, every 10 or 20 minutes, like, a whole bunch of cops with those fucking...
Guard things would run through the fucking place and knock some guy over.
I'm sitting in the middle of that thing, that encampment, the Occupy Wall Street thing with my friend Lincoln and we turn around, man, and this fucking cop comes running with that fucking shield and just slips because it's raining and he just eats shit and falls down, man.
And it's like three or four of these fucking hippies are like, hey, you okay, man?
You know, even though the rest of them are like, Fuck you, pig!
It was pretty funny, man.
This motherfucker just bit, ate shit running into that thing, and everybody was just laughing about it.
All that Occupy stuff, to me, it signals that this possibility, like, it wasn't entirely successful.
It sort of awakened people to the idea of protesting, you know, that you could protest on a mass scale to get a lot of attention, and that people are willing to get involved, because a lot of people did get involved.
I think an action like that, and I think they're calculated in that response, that when you have a million people, like a Shah, saying...
One of the dictators, I forget which one it was, that was ousted.
Egypt?
No.
I forget which one it was.
It was a long time ago, but it was because he had said that if there was more than three people that were together, that were protesting together as a group, they would be shot on sight.
I forget which dictator it was.
And within two days, three million people were in front of his castle calling for his head.
And it was like, oh shit.
When you have a million people in the streets that are calling for your head, the gig is up.
The numbers when you deal with the President and the Secret Service and then the government and the military, the actual numbers of those people that you would need to protect against a mob of five million Americans that have had enough And then come with rifles and guns and just storm the gates.
Everyone worries.
People say, well, what do you do for the Second Amendment?
If the shit hits the fan, if the shit hits the fan like that, and all of a sudden you've got three or four million people that are showing up on the White House lawn, and then they start storming en masse, and they literally call for the president's head and rip him apart on national television.
That's not outside the realm of possibility.
Given a few terrible decisions, a natural disaster, a nuclear bomb goes off somewhere in Chicago, The fucking shit hits the fan, and then next thing you know, there's a million people with guns.
I got out, like, this kind of dissent It's manifesting itself in this form right now where there's a bunch of people with fucking drum circles and they're saying enough is enough.
Well, it doesn't matter if it's the cloud, because they're going right into your goddamn email.
They're going into your hard drive.
They're hacking your hard drive, and they're going right in there, pulling out all your data, pulling all your credit card information, putting out all your contacts.
If you are a person that's involved in some controversial activity...
Everyone that you call, everyone that you talk to, they get monitored now.
If you start talking crazy shit about the government on this podcast, then you make a phone call.
If the NSA decides to monitor you, they're gonna monitor your buddies, they're gonna monitor people you fucking play pool with, they're gonna monitor a guy you go drinking with.
Everybody gets monitored and you all become suspects.
Yeah, it's like an online role-playing game with millions of players going around the world.
And they had NSA agents in there because they were saying that the terrorist groups were meeting in those games.
They would go in the game and they'd meet and they had to talk in there.
So they said that they had so many NSA agents in World of Warcraft that they had to assign other NSA agents to watch those NSA agents inside World of Warcraft.
I mean, can't you see these motherfuckers sitting there playing like a level 50 wizard?
I wonder how many times there have been undercover sting operations where an undercover drug dealer was selling drugs to an undercover DEA agent posing as a guy to buy drugs.
I mean, they were like, we had to say, hey, Snowden, come back here.
We promise we're not going to kill you.
Like, when America has to say that, you know what I mean?
It's like, fuck, we're fucked.
It's like Howard Stern says, man.
He's like, we're like the last...
We are like the...
People say we shouldn't police the world, but the reality is 90% of the world are murdering their own people or stoning women to death.
There's all these other countries.
There's not many countries that says, hey, fucking stop, right?
That is what we want from America.
It's what we hope for.
But when you look at it and you look at the NSA shit and all that, it's like, You know, it's just hard to get all hyped up and excited about it.
I mean, but our world changed so much, man.
I was talking to, I'm 35, and I was talking to a friend of mine about this, about how my generation, it was like, our world is so fucked compared to everybody else's because, I mean, it's probably just getting worse for the other kids, but you know, we saw...
When we were 14, Kurt Cobain blew his brains out.
So by that time, everybody's kind of hopeful.
And then when that happens, that's the first time that's ever happened.
It was so dark.
There were photographs floating around in my high school of it and shit.
And I remember kind of being like, man, this is dark, but it kind of like threw me.
I was really into Nine Inch Nails and Manson and shit like that.
And it like threw me into that world even more.
And, you know, everybody loved the dark, loved the dark.
And then fucking 9-11 happens when we're like 20, 21. And it's like, holy fuck.
Like everything changed after that point.
Like everyone is a lot darker.
Everyone is like realizes that yeah, you know that might just these massive assaults can happen here, you know, there was always kind of like dreamy.
It's you know, it's America thing.
It's like we always kind of even though there was a lot of corruption with like from Nixon to like the you know, the Kennedy assassination and shit, which was kind of the start of like, like.
Like televised or broadcast in certain ways, newspapers like death, mass death and weird crazy shit like that.
But you look at, there was always this kind of hopefulness and I think like after 9-11 and after kind of everything that's going on, people are really like disillusioned to it.
We don't have that same kind of feeling that was going on in the 80s and 90s.
You still go to New York and the cab driver guy who's, by the way, only driven for two weeks because he got here two weeks ago.
He'll still tell you.
Goddamn so happy to be in America, of course, because you're in New York City and it's beautiful and there is a beauty to that in what we offer the rest of the world and people that are in these fucking terrible countries and they escape and they come here and it's like that.
Yeah, in comparison to the Congo, we are awesome, but at the same time, we're like kids that I think the couple generations before us, it was like the parents stayed together, and it was like, great, we're the kids, the mom shot the dad and got away with it.
And we're like, alright.
You know what I mean?
Our vision of America is kind of like, yeah, we really kind of hate our parents.
You definitely don't want to watch the news and you definitely don't want to- Well, one of the reasons why things are so fucked as far as our perceptions is because we're getting more information about the real dealings of our government now than ever before.
Because of guys like Julian Assange and because of guys like Edward Snowden, one of the things that people don't like about it is like, well, you know, they're exposing American secrets, they're putting Americans at risk.
Well, maybe what Americans are doing is putting Americans at risk because what they're doing is exposing truth.
Yeah, but also avoid other possible scenarios that aren't as sexy.
There's a lot of incompetence involved in government.
Sometimes people, they misconstrue conspiracy.
They think of it as a conspiracy when it's really just a bunch of idiots that did a shitty job of protecting people and then the scramble afterwards.
And then people that have capitalized on the scramble and made money.
And then people look at the people who capitalized on the event and say, oh, well, this is clear evidence that there was a conspiracy and these people are the ones that profited off of it.
Maybe not.
Maybe there was a fucking horrible event, and some people look at horrible events as an opportunity to make money, and they did.
And they didn't have anything to do with it happening, but they did have something to do with profiting off of it.
You know, so there's a lot of like...
And people get involved in these conspiracy discussions, and unfortunately what happens is...
When you start labeling a bunch of shit conspiracies that aren't really conspiracies, you throw the whole thing into a tizzy.
Because now no one knows what the fuck to believe.
And if I find out that you're wrong about a bunch of ridiculous conspiracy assumptions, if you're wrong about those, what am I supposed to think about all the other shit that you're saying?
It helps anyone in government because it also shows that any time there's any sort of a cataclysmic disaster, any time there's any sort of an event like a 9-11...
There's so much scrambling and there's so much chaos afterwards that it's impossible to get a clear story on what exactly happened.
That's why Edward Snowden and people like that really terrify him.
Because they tried to, you know, they planted fake Snowden stories that were like, there was a UFO one that they were trying to plant them so he would look like a kook.
And they weren't real real.
It would be like an article in some European magazine saying that Snowden papers say that the government knew about UFOs and has had them for a long time and all this.
And Ciro's nightclub, you know, this was back in the 1930s, I guess, in the 1940s, like whenever it was, the early 20th century.
And that was a place where Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis would perform.
And the Comedy Store's original...
mob run nightclub and a lot of people were killed there there was a tunnel from the back of the Comedy Store main room the green room in the main room where you would go and take this tunnel up into a house that was up in the hills like they had it during the illegal bootlegging era wow yeah there was a lot of wacky shit that happened in that place and And because of that...
Like, I got abducted by aliens and my ass got probed and all this shit.
Like, I see these people and you're like, these poor people are so lonely and they got nothing going on and they either dream this shit up or they're taking Ambien walking around in their front yard to sleep and, you know, have this thing or whatever it is.
I just don't know.
It's like, I want to, man.
Me and my dad went to go see Fire in the Sky when I was a kid, when that movie came out, you know?
It was just touching into mainstream, all this, like, alien abduction shit, you know?
Yeah, because they had this lady who's supposed to be the real lady and they have her interviews with Mila Jovovich acting out the scenes, but it was all fake.
They set up this whole thing.
Blair Witch was the first to do this kind of shit.
Eventually, it's all coming down as fake, I would think.
The real problem is when you deal with the people that are involved in the quote-unquote UFO community.
I've interviewed a ton of those for that television show, and I sat down.
The show, each episode was only an hour long, but in that hour-long episode, I had several hour-plus-long conversations with a lot of different people that were involved in these things.
And one thing that you get out of them is that these motherfuckers only have one option.
That option in their head is that UFOs are real, even if they haven't seen shit themselves.
And what they're not taking into account is how many people are liars.
I've told this story before.
I was in the woods once, and I thought I saw a wolf.
I thought it was a wolf for about four seconds at the most.
It was a squirrel.
I saw a squirrel.
I was like, is that a wolf?
Is that a wolf?
Squirrel.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
It was literally like that.
I thought it was a wolf.
It was a squirrel.
And it was the woods.
And I'm sane.
And I'm also...
I constantly check myself.
I'm very objective like that.
I'm always like, what are you doing, dummy?
I'm always saying that to myself to make sure that...
But some people don't ever say, what are you doing, dummy?
But they're in the house and ringing the doorbell and letting me know they're in the house.
And I'm not like a scaredy cat.
I'm always the guy that goes downstairs to check it out.
I've got no problem with that.
I've got no problem walking downstairs.
There may be somebody down there.
But in this moment, I was like...
I'm alone, and the doorbell's ringing on the inside of the house, and this fucking sucks, and I'm hammered, so I'm like, getting the knife out, you know?
But again, same kind of thing.
I think I'll see something.
I think I'll hear something.
And my mind goes to these places.
But at the end of the day, I know it's ridiculous.
Unless it's a home invasion of tweakers.
That's the only thing I'm worried about.
Tweaker home invasion, which was rampant here when I first moved into town in the flatlands.
But I remember reading that one of the experts that they were interviewing was talking about your lack of ability to make critical decisions and that it goes out the window.
It's one of the first symptoms of meth use.
As people start doing, like rational people start doing really irrational things and don't seem to understand the consequences of it.
It's like they can't...
They don't see...
You know, you see several steps ahead.
Like, you say, like, well, you know, if I go outside and light that car on fire, well, if it explodes, and then what if the tree catches on fire, and then the building catches on fire, fuck, man, I could start a big fire.
Meth heads don't think that.
All they think is, I'm gonna light that fucking car on fire!
There have been times and places where someone has had that shit.
I mean, I'm not, like, fucking doing blow all day long or anything, but there have been times I've done shows and shit, and they're just moving around and be like, hey, man, you want to party?
And some guy, you, like, think the guy's going to chop up some blow or something, right?
And then it'll be like, it's meth.
But, I mean, it's funny to call it meth because it's crank or speed.
Like, when I first moved here, I was partying a bunch, and there was this guy that had, like, this yellow dog speed.
It was, like, yellowish...
It wasn't, and it's the same kind of effect.
Like, one line of it will keep you up for like 10 hours.
Like, with coke, you want to do more every hour or every, you know, 30 minutes.
And with meth, like, you do a line and you're like, boo!
Like, for fucking, you can stay up for like 10 hours, you know, if you want to.
And then those guys, like, that's why meth, like, you don't need as much of it.
And they'll just do some or they'll smoke it and do that.
And, you know.
It's like, that's what it is.
It's like really, really powerful Coke.
So, like, I can't stay up all night on Coke, and I have stayed up all night one time on meth.
Just one line of it, of just being up, and you just like play the guitar, and you're like singing, and you're just so into singing, you know?
But in the Southeast, where we play a lot, it's so big down there.
My buddies that live in Kentucky and stuff, it's everywhere, and their buddies all do it.
Sometimes they'll do it occasionally, and then one of the guys will start doing it too much.
There's tons of sad stories, guys with kids and shit that are just doing it and staying up for eight or nine days, and the kids have no idea, and they're fucking just wired.
Yeah, that started in the South where they were like real fast.
But I mean, you know, I mean, there's probably been times I may have done it like where I thought I was doing something else and then I'm like, oh, that's definitely crank.
You know what I mean?
But it's like my brothers and sisters and cousins, I mean, they probably hate me for saying this, but I mean...
Where they come from, that's common.
It's common that people have done crank or do it.
It's not weird.
It's definitely not addictive.
I mean, if you're the type of person who's never done cocaine and you do cocaine and all of a sudden you're like, fuck, I gotta do more cocaine all the fucking time.
I know certain people that are into coke like that, but I can never do that.
If I have done coke, I can't do it for another couple days.
I'm not the guy who stays up all night and does the whole bag.
I'll do a bump or something like that.
It's been a long time since I've done it, but if I did do it, I would just do small amounts of it, you know, here or there.
But there are people that if you have that personality where you're going to be the guy who locks himself in a hotel room for three days and does blow and doesn't show up for your job and all that shit just because you got a bag of blow at a party, you know, then you're going to have a problem with crank.
But I think it's the same kind of thing, though.
It's just hardcore, man.
It's not my style.
Certain people prefer Crank to Coke.
Some people prefer Adderall and do all that.
None of it excites me that much, but anything that lasts a really long time...
I can't do it.
I got kids and shit.
You know what I mean?
If I'm in a party, weed is right down my alley.
I love weed.
I can fucking do it in the studio.
I do it at night after my kids sleep to go to bed.
It's never going to fuck you up so much you can't snap out of it and fucking make a good decision.
There's times you can be like, man, I shouldn't have fucking ate that old pizza.
But it's not like I went and robbed my mom's house and I woke up two days later in a ditch and I'm like, Fuck, I probably shouldn't have done that crank.
After you've been up an entire day, you start seeing stuff.
I've done that without drugs.
I've stayed up days on it.
And you just start getting delirious.
And, like, when you're using something that's fueling your heart rate and keeping you...
Your brain is still acting as if you are not on the drugs and you've been up for five days and you're seeing shit, but yet you're just wired from that shit.
That's what...
Like, they do the home invasion thing.
Like, there was a...
I used to live on...
I've lived all over this town, but Santa Monica and Gardner.
And there was a house there that notoriously had been...
Like, tweakers, like, kicked the door down and came in and were just fucking, like, tied the whole family up and shit and robbed them with their money.
Because that's all they want, is they want money to buy more crank.
Yeah, there's fake pot, too, that they sell as, like, something like that.
And I tried smoking that one time.
Super bad for you.
And it was terrible.
It was, like, just gave me a headache instantly, you know?
You could have smoked a cookie and probably...
It done less damage.
I have to say, I'm a foodie too in all this, and while we're on this, I don't know why I popped in my head, but there was a tweet you sent out that I saved the photograph and I look at it.
When you had like seven eggs, and it was clearly a little butter in the pan too, and I cooked too, and I was looking at this fucking thing, and I was like, God...
I could eat that all day and all night, but the fact that you have that photograph, the seven eggs, I have it in my phone right now.
And Johnny had a bunch of fish that he'd already caught.
And he had them rigged somewhere so he was going to try and make it where my dad would actually think he caught something because he could never go through it.
We weren't real outdoorsy people.
Let's just say it that way.
I watched way more horror movies with my dad.
He used to wake me up in the middle of the night and say, there's a scary movie on TV. And I'd go downstairs.
I was like six or seven.
I'd go downstairs.
Proceed to, like, get petrified by some horrible movie that a six-year-old shouldn't watch.
Yeah, well, I mean, naturally, I guess, you know, because of the era and the, like, you know, if you go back a little bit, I mean, not very far from my dad's generation, him growing up and all the...
All of the Grand Ole Opry and all that.
I mean, all those guys were into that.
They all lived in the woods.
Nashville, and let's not even say Nashville, even all of the Southeast was far, far more undeveloped.
So back then, it was really country folks.
Country music, they would roll their windows up when they'd listen to it because it was frowned upon.
It was like a poor people's music.
So a lot of the people in the South and stuff, it's inevitably tied into that, of course.
But I mean...
It's funny because now, if they're critical of...
I don't represent myself pretending to be anything I'm not, but if someone was ever critical of the fact that I live in LA and I'm not a country boy and I play country style music, it's like, do you guys really think that Jason Aldean and these new country guys that are so big, you really think those guys' daily existence is...
Tailgate parties and hunting and things like that.
You guys are fucking retarded because they're shopping for shoes on Melrose.
This shirt is based on Terrence McKenna's stoned ape theory, that lower hominids ate mushrooms, and then they had this ideal of nuclear power and spirituality.
It's an interesting idea that his brother, Dennis McKenna, who's still alive, is a fascinating guy himself, actually substantiated with science in a way that's way better than I ever could.
If you want to listen to the first podcast that I did with Dennis McKenna, he explains the actual effect that psilocybin has on the mind and why it would facilitate the construction of language.
What McKenna's theory was that what happened to lower primates is that somewhere around a million plus years ago when Over a period of two million years, the size of the human brain doubled.
And that's like a very substantial event in biology.
And they really have no idea what caused human beings to become so much more intelligent than they were previous.
And his theory is that this is at the same time that the...
These tropical rainforests receded into grasslands.
Climate change forced these tropical rainforests to become grasslands.
And these monkeys climbed down off trees and started experimenting with various food sources, different things.
And one of the things they do is they start flipping over cow patties.
And they find bugs and worms and shit to eat underneath them.
But there was also things growing on the cow patties.
Yeah, and there's a bunch of different reasons why, besides the facilitation of language, which is the very specific reaction that psilocybin has on the human mind, and why Dennis McKenna described it very well.
I can't really repeat what he said.
I'm not smart enough.
I don't remember it either.
What McKenna also said was that psilocybin in low doses increases visual acuity.
It sharpens edges.
It makes you be able to see things better.
It makes you hornier, so it would make you see better and make you hornier.
If you see better, you'd probably be more aware of things.
You'd probably be a better hunter.
If you're hornier, you'd fuck more.
So the mushroom-eating monkeys would have a biological advantage over the non-mushroom-eating monkeys.
Well, you do know if a bunch of monkeys are walking around and one of them eats mushrooms, and all of a sudden he's like, you know they're going to be like, dudes, you guys got to try this shit.
Out of all the things that make sense as far as looking at the effects that a substance has on the body, what would cause massive consumption of the substance over a long period of time, like 2 million years?
What would cause direct changes to the human body?
What would cause direct changes to the actual function of the mind?
Psilocybin is like number one.
It's so common.
It's everywhere.
It grows out of cow shit.
It's totally edible.
You're hungry.
You can eat it.
You eat it, you trip balls.
You trip balls, you think about things, you develop language, you develop...
Well, apparently he did a bunch of DMT when he was doing the record and was just like, yeah, that song itself talks about DMT and psilocybin and stuff in it.
Yeah, what's the deal with the aliens with DMT? Well, there's something that happens when you take DMT where you pass through, visually or spiritually, whether it's real or...
And when you're in some new space, what's weird about DMT... Is this all in your head with your eyes shut?
Yes, your eyes are shut.
But if you open your eyes, you're going to see some crazy shit, too.
You'll see some crazy shit, though, that's also...
You're better off keeping your eyes closed, though, because then you'll get sort of a full representation of what's going on and what you're seeing.
When your eyes are open, your eyes are taking in the physical world, like what you're seeing in front of you, and you're trying to combine the two of them, and it's very baffling and confusing.
So it's better to just shut your eyes.
Silent darkness.
Close your eyes, take it, and then just close your eyes and lay back and you go on the craziest trip.
It's impossible for anything to be stronger.
It's impossible for anything to be a more potent hallucination because it seems more real than reality itself.
Like, once you do DMT, the weirdest thing about it is, coming back, like, regular reality is so dry and dull.
It's like, that's more real.
Like, it's more, you feel it, you also feel, if this makes any sense, you feel the experience in your essence.
He got federal permission, the DEA's permission, to do these research studies on dimethyltryptamine intravenously in patients.
He did it at the University of New Mexico, and they did several of these, and then he wrote a book on it called DMT, the spirit molecule, where...
These people had these incredible, incredible experiences while on this intravenous dimethyltryptamine, and repeatable experiences that would go to these, and very, very, very much mirrored the alien abduction experiences that people would talk about, like being taken aboard alien spacecrafts and being brought to alien places and alien lands, like very, very similar.
Yeah, so he started connecting dimethyltryptamine and endogenous dumps of dimethyltryptamine to alien abduction experiences, and that's what he thinks that's all about.
He thinks all of these people that have these, like, I woke up in the middle of the night, I was on a spaceship, your brain just dumped a bunch of DMT in, and somehow or another you got caught in the middle of this world of being awake.
And dreaming.
So your body, when you're dreaming, is essentially producing something that's causing you to hallucinate.
The speculation is that that's DMT as well.
They haven't totally proven that yet, but they're pretty sure.
They've already proven that DMT is produced by the pineal gland.
That was a long time.
That was speculation.
But they've proven that in live rats.
That live rats actually produce DMT in that gland.
Because grass has it in it, a lot of different, thousands of different plants have it in it.
So because of that, your body produces chemicals that mitigate that.
One of them is called monoamine oxidase.
And monoamine oxidase is produced in your gut.
So when the Amazon shamans figure out how to give people DMT with a...
Say in modern...
Like today, in the United States, in the modern chemical world, there's scientists that have figured out how to synthesize pure DMT. So they take it from plants or, you know, from various chemicals and they synthesize pure DMT. You smoke it.
It goes right in your bloodstream.
It's pure DMT. But you can't do that in the Amazon.
So what they figured out how to do is make an orally active version of it.
So what it is is they combine the leaves of one plant.
With the roots of another, and one of them being Haramine, which is a natural MAO inhibitor.
So it's a monoamine oxidase inhibitor that they mix in.
So it's like a DMT trip, but it's not quite as intense.
It's a slow-release, longer version that's very hallucinogenic and very spiritual in a lot of ways, but I've only done the big one.
The big one is the smoking DMT is you get shot through a cannon to the center of the fucking universe.
The way I describe it is you're communicating with complex geometric patterns that are made out of love and understanding.
Sacred geometry and fractals and all those different...
When you look at just the nature of the universe itself, just the nature of cellular life, subatomic particles, atoms becoming individuals, individuals being a part of a group of individuals that live on a planet, the planet being a part of the galaxy, the galaxy being a part of the universe, on and on and on and on and on.
It seems like there's a fractal geometric nature to life itself.
The Fibonacci sequence that describes the way sunflower seeds are developed, the way a nautilus shell looks, the way so many different plants grow.
There's all this weird sort of fractal mathematical nature to the world itself.
There's so many things that I'm so fascinated with that...
I feel like when you unlock those kind of things in your mind and you're into that stuff...
There's a great book called Gateway to the Gods that I read.
I don't know how I ran across this book, but it's about this guy.
It's about a lot of psychogeometry.
It really deals with the, in the Bible, like the Watchers and the Nephilim and the concept that angels were actually like interdimensional travel.
And it touches a little bit on the DMT-ish kind of thing.
And it touches on some of that kind of travel, mind travel.
But I'm very fascinated by it, man.
I just, you know, I think if your mind is open to it and you do do something like DMT, it probably enhances your, if you're like you being so knowledgeable on so much of this probably has enhanced your trip when you do it because you're, Probably.
Are you able to focus on what you're looking at or whatever you're seeing in your mind?
The fractal nature of the universe embodied in imagery, which also had meaning and love connected to it.
So when you're seeing it, you weren't just seeing something beautiful, but you were feeling it.
And it was like, almost like it was running through your soul, like it was cleansing you as you saw it.
Like everything that I saw made me, every time I saw it, every new thing made me love people more, made me love life more, made me more appreciative, made me want to hug more.
And then I thought that was over, and they would go, look at this!
I've had negative experiences in that DMT has sort of exposed that I was maybe a little out of control in my life, like maybe too stressed out or maybe taking too much time.
Devoted too much time to work and bullshit-related things.
It really didn't matter.
The negative aspect was after it was over, I was like, hey, I need to just fucking chill out.
I need to just smell the daisies.
I need to just enjoy this experience.
Wow.
15 minutes, huh?
I've never had a negative experience in that while I was in it.
Well, you can with DMT. I don't know about reptiles.
I've never seen a reptile wall on it, but I've seen things that are somehow or another consciousness or appear to be conscious or are representations of your own consciousness in some sort of a much pure, much greater form.
But you know who else wasn't a church-going person?
The problem with any sort of power structure, any top-down power structure, is that people want to contain...
Once they have power, they want to retain that power.
They want to contain the people, contain the ideologies of the people that are involved in that group.
And then...
You know, to have an open-minded, completely open situation where you have a group but there's no structure to it and everyone's just loving and able to do whatever they want.
There's no one person that's the leader.
No, that's not what we do.
Human beings, everything sort of falls into that weird alpha male monkey category where there's one person that talks and everyone else listens.
And that's what you find in churches.
That's what you find at political rallies.
That's what you find when the president gives a speech on television.
There's the one, and then there's the listeners.
And it's not a dialogue.
It's one person talks, and everyone comes in and sits down.
Open up to page 324. We're going to read from the gospel.
But there's just one person that's doing this.
It's one person that's guiding this whole thing.
And that's sort of...
Contrary to the very nature of a cooperative and open group of humans, a community.
And that's also the best way to control people, to ensure that this one person disseminates the rules, this one person gets to talk, and this one person keeps everybody under control.
We could get into that forever because I've, you know, just conceptually, the way that the control is, you know, doled out, it's pretty...
I mean, it's pretty easy.
It's pretty mathematical.
One plus one equals two.
Like, you just...
Like I was saying, keep everybody poor, keep everybody uneducated, and then convince them that if they don't do what we want them to do, they're going to burn in hell.
Those guys, they have a great record called The People's Key, but the opening...
The opening thing is this guy.
I don't even know who it is.
He's talking about exactly what we're talking about and how they control the masses and stuff.
Man, that's a great speech in the beginning of this thing.
But, you know, it's like keeping the mom and dad separate because they both have to work.
You make it so hard for a normal, lower-income family to even be together so that you can disseminate information to each one of them exactly like you want to, and they don't have a lot of time together.
You know, that's a big part of it.
And it's so insane.
It just is insane.
And it's just like the wages and the way they control that and the people who make the money.
It's like the banking thing.
This is why the Bitcoin thing is so brilliant.
I mean, you know, you talked to Andreas, who's like the man, but...
This is what's weird about it, because the Bitcoin itself is the protocol, so it's like, that's what's brilliant.
The foundation was created as something that was supposed to kind of drive the development of it, but it's become a corporation, essentially.
You know, it's got to add a lot of negative, but the people who are in charge of it now are even more, more so people are like, they're kind of crooks and shady and, but there's really no need for it.
There's no need.
There's not like there's a Bitcoin company that people work for, you know, the thing is it's like more like a virus that was set into the world.
And then just like the internet was, you know, there's not like the, they're an internet company that there's president of the internet who can decide like, That's the beautiful thing about the internet, isn't it?
It is amazing.
But that's why they're trying to do this net neutrality thing.
It's such a big issue because they're trying to...
Right now, Time Warner Cable can already...
If they don't like the Joe Rogan show, they can slow down when people go to your site.
They can slow it down on purpose.
Right.
That's shitty enough already, but with the net neutrality thing they're trying to get rid of, then Time Warner can say, hey, Google, your shit's going to be real slow unless you pay us money.
And so then they're going to start extorting money to go back into their own pocket to actually alter what sites and even blocking sites.
And when Time Warner owns...
All the internet...
I mean, there's a giant portion of the internet.
I don't know what the actual numbers are, but it's over 50% of the service provider.
And the service provider can then charge companies and decide what people can see.
Then that's like...
The internet is, the purpose of it is you're getting fucked big time, you know what I mean?
I mean, like in fucking Egypt, and they cut the internet, you know, and shit like that.
That's what, we're like three steps away from happening, and that's the internet.
The internet is decentralized.
There is no one in charge of it, and they know that.
And the reality is, if Time Warner becomes that big of a deal, somebody will come out there and run their own wires and fucking set up their own fucking statewide Wi-Fi, and it'll be fine.
Yeah.
It's just tough, man.
But you know that, like, did you ever get into a discussion about Bitcoin about how you can...
If I send you money, you can attach a message to it, or you can actually, like, attach a deed, or I could write a song, and it would be in the blockchain, copyrighted.
But you can actually embed a message in the transaction, and that the first transaction ever done by the guy who made it had the, like, either Washington Post or, like, Wall Street Journal, the headline was, like...
The government approves second bailout for banks.
Like, that was encoded in the first transmission, because it was like they're saying, like, enough.
Like, this shit is so fucked.
The banking, the Federal Reserve, the government, everything.
See, like the mining thing, man, it's like some people think of it and they're like, oh, it's like people who want to just like make free money, which is not the way it works.
It's like what it actually is, and this is the nerd part of me, like I also run a full node of Bitcoin at home, which means like I'm part of the network of transactions that happen.
It's kind of complicated, but at the same time, like the technology behind the whole transaction confirming process, which is the aka the mining, is what is so fascinating to me.
And I like, I mean, I'll go on the internet and on IRC and hang out and talk to the developers and shit because I'm just, I think that someone is.
Someone has to and is going to use this technology in the way that Bitcoin is and make, finally, a decentralized entertainment distribution platform.
Because eventually, iTunes takes 30%.
They've been good to me in different moments, but here's the reality.
You make something that costs nothing to duplicate because it's digital, and they're taking 30% of it, plus a company like TuneCore, Like, jabs you and robs you to even get your shit on iTunes if you're just a new band, you know, who's like, how do I get my shit on iTunes?
Somebody's gonna collect some money for them to just email your song over to iTunes in the correct format, and then iTunes takes 30%.
If you got rid of that and you got it where I was like, say I gave you a David Bowie song.
If there was a way to just have a proof of ownership and have a transaction fee like there is in Bitcoin, where I just gave you an album that would somehow pay David Bowie.
When you get it.
There doesn't need to be the iTunes, the store you go to, to get it.
It's like, really, if I'm sending you a song via email, there should be a way to build a decentralized distribution platform like that.
There are people that charge, that are services, that are people that were at one point worked for the Grammy organization and they have the email addresses of all the people that they know that vote.
So there are people that will charge you like five grand to bombard these people with emails all year so that by the time they see the voting sheet, they're like, oh, that fucking person, I'll vote for that.
Like, there's things like that, but...
Besides that, dude, it's like the Grammys are a self-contained operation of the old media.
It's like Clive Davis and all those people, and they're all like...
A random band from nowhere who nobody's ever heard of is never going to win a Grammy unless they've got money behind them.
Do you know what I mean?
So the whole show...
The billboards are fake and all that shit.
All that shit's not real.
It's not like...
It's not like the 50s where Muddy Waters puts out something and it goes straight to the top of the charts and all of a sudden race music becomes this big thing.
It's not that way anymore.
It's all corporate, controlled by the 1%.
It's controlled by the biocoms of the world who are putting it on the television, who are deciding who's going to win.
Like Arcade Fire wins a fucking Grammy because they think that...
That, like, you know, everyone feels like it's been too pop-oriented.
So let's give one to Arcade Fire this year.
And it's like, as much as I want to believe that there are, like, the fans are in any way involved in these kind of processes, they're totally not.
It's just all the marketing.
There's fucking five people calling all the radio station programming for the year.
You know, people buying their way to the top of, buying Grammys and buying their way to the top of Billboard.
It's like, if rich people are the only people that have the ability to buy their way in the top, why would Muddy Waters even care?
Like, you know, Clive Davis is going to make a record and he's going to give it to the...
When they go to their Bohemian Grove little party that they do or whatever, they're going to fucking...
He's going to say, hey...
I'm going to send you the new, you know, Kanye record or whatever.
I'm going to send you the new Alicia Keys record.
And these radio stations are going to fucking, you know, they're going to get, you know, they're not getting payola, but they're fucking getting free trips to Disneyland for their whole family and like five other people, you know, to fucking play like this record that so-and-so's invested in.
To me, it's all kind of a joke.
And that's probably why I'm not a rich man is because I fucking, I spout off about this shit all the time on my radio show too.
The XXX thing was something where I was trying to actually...
It's kind of defunct in a way now.
I mean, I still play all those bands, but there's this whole underground country, underground roots, blues thing that was happening, and it was getting boxed into this Americana shit.
Americana and country and everything.
There was this real big gap in the middle, and there was all these bands that were falling in the gap.
So I started a website with that, and it was kind of just a play on AAA radio.
And I was like...
I don't know.
I got more heat over it.
I mean, it helped a lot of artists, and I know it did because I'm friends with them.
And it definitely...
I've now started producing a lot of other people and started working in the studio with them more as opposed to promoting them, which has been really good.
But it was just a way of trying to promote all these really great bands that really just weren't getting any chance.
But I still play all those bands on my radio show.
But it's called Electric Rodeo.
I've been doing it like nine years now, which is kind of insane.
But I... I don't do it like this.
I do it on the fly.
I was looking at this and I'm like, man, since I've been doing my show for nine years, I would actually have something to show for it.
I mean, I do know like one time I said the thing about...
About the billboard, and I had evidence of this, and I'm not going to say what artist it was, because I'm not in the business of doing that, but there was this big-name artist who had this new record coming out, and his sponsor company bought 300,000 copies of it first week, so they would make sure that it went number one.
And I said that on the radio, and my boss says, and he's told me I've gotten a lot of calls.
They call him, and they say, he's saying this shit, and it's irresponsible because it's not true.
And I'm like, yes, it is true.
I know it's true.
I've seen the paper that said it was true.
But I think they get pissed that I say that.
But a lot of people don't like me.
They blackballed me a long time ago anyway, because I've always been that way, man.
I'm to my disadvantage in a lot of ways, but like, If someone's a phony, I hate that more than anything in the world, man.
There have been times in my life when I was a phony growing up, with girls and things.
We try to get into that, but as you get older and as I've gotten older, there's so much insincerity, especially in the music business, that I have such a disdain for it.
The way that the writers work, what's happened to country music is directly related to what we're talking about in corporate America.
It's the same kind of shit.
It's just gotten to where these corporations are in so much power and they have so much money that it's really hard for the little man to beat it.
I see people who pretend to be for the little man But yet they're playing this fucking ball game over here and talking out of both sides of their mouth and it just kills me.
So I'll say it.
I'll happily say it all day long.
But yeah, I definitely think that there are groups.
I just found out about a group in Nashville, but there are groups much like the Bilderberg group where they're in music and in movies and things.
I mean, I know everybody knows they kind of have that kind of thing, but But there are actual groups where they orchestrate kind of who they're going to lend their support to.
I mean, they never played me on the radio.
It's not like they're going to have a meeting and they say, we're going to purposely keep Shooter out.
It's not like that.
Not that paranoid.
But I do know that they have meetings about...
We're the studio heads and the local community and the Congress and city planners and developers and certain record labels, mostly independent.
The independents have kind of chokeholded out the corporate ones a little bit in a weird way, especially in Nashville.
And the songwriters and the radio people, and they have these retreats that they go on together.
It's like, duh.
Like, of course they're all scratching each other's backs.
Of course, like, the little guy, they have to pay, like, 15 grand to join this group to go on these retreats, you know, and keep paying.
It's like, like, it's fascinating to me, you know, like, when people are like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
That doesn't happen.
It's like, if you think that doesn't happen, then you are dumb, because...
Of course these people want to keep their job.
They want to keep the money they're making.
So they'll do anything it takes to keep that position.
Yeah, it's unfortunate, right, that people that are in that sort of a position, they're making a shitload of money, don't realize, like, man, this is kind of bad for the art form itself to do this.
Like, the very art form that we need that we're selling.
It's like the point of the movie a little bit is that, I mean, it's implied in that, especially when at the very end of the movie, Edward James Olmos' character, like, he's been leaving his origami all over the place, but he leaves the unicorn.
But see, in the original one, I just watched the theatrical one for the first time.
The minute it was available on DVD, I don't know about VHS, but the minute the DVDs came out, the director's cut saturated the market.
So on Voodoo, I was trying to figure out a way when I was...
Traveling on the road in a car to venue to venue.
I was trying to figure out a way to...
I don't have enough space on my fucking iPhone because the fucking iCloud and the pictures and all this shit and it's always full and I don't want to throw it against the fucking wall.
But the Voodoo app lets me watch movies.
So I was like, oh, I'm going to watch Blade Runner.
And then I pulled it up and it was that version, which I had never seen.
But then there was a final cut that was made about...
Seven or eight years ago that came out.
And that one has the deleted unicorn scene in it.
And what that is is that I guess that Harrison Ford's character has some kind of like there's a unicorn scene.
In his past, in his memory, he has a memory of a unicorn.
There's a scene in the movie, in the final cut, where he shoots that chick that had the snake around her neck.
When he shoots her, there's a shot of this unicorn because it like reminded him of this thing.
And it's kind of like connecting the dots that he has this weird memory of a unicorn in the woods.
And at the very end of the film, Edward James almost makes a unicorn.
He walks out the front door of his house and there's a unicorn out of origami sitting there.
And that's like Edward James almost saying, hey, you know, you're actually one too.
So that was kind of the implied.
But the whole thing is like, you know, if she's one, if he's one, you know, anyone could be one.
And that was the kind of, you know, am I a robot?
Are we all robots?
Like, you know, that's kind of the ultimate story.
But in the book, they run away together and she ends up dying and it's like a love story and it ends up not mattering if he is one or not because, you know, Well, in the real world that we live in right now, that seems like much more likely a possibility than it ever did when Blade Runner came out.
Like back then, like the idea of a robot that looks exactly like a person, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, might as well be traveling to the moon, might as well be fucking, you know, Battlestar Galactica or something.
When you see the artificial bodies that they're able to create now, like these robot faces that move and articulate just like a human face, like really similar.
They thought he was really there and he never told them.
So they thought he really came to their fucking shit town where there was nothing to do.
Like you know the little village and it was like this guy and like he said right now like I could go over there and they can have like a hologram thing set up in Japan and I could like literally walk in front of the cameras and I'd be in Japan and I'd be talking to motherfuckers and totally like help me Obi-Wan save me Obi-Wan or like the fucking Sith Lord guy appearing like talking about it but it doesn't even look like that he said that when it's in a normal room it looks like you can't tell the difference From a hologram.
I will report to you on this after I go to it, after I go see this demonstration.
Do you remember when they had that on television for CNN when they were covering the news and Wolf Blitzer would stand in the CNN hologram, the holodeck?
Yeah, they're saying a demonstration they gave that guy who was presenting an award and he was standing in the room and this whole family walked in the room and he was standing there and he talked to them and they were talking to him back and everything and then he just bust into flames and they were all freaked out because they thought he was real.
They were a band in the early 2000s, late 90s, but they had clone bands.
They wore masks.
They wore these hoods.
So they had five clone bands, and they'd send them out on the road, and you would never know if it was the real band or not because they always had the hoods on and shit, but they would have five different bands they would just send out touring.
Well, when you're doing those things, those remotes, you have an earpiece in, and a lot of times it's hard to understand what the fuck anybody's saying, and there's a bit of a delay between them saying it and you hearing it.
But the guy sitting over there watching the fucking broadcast, or supposedly watching the broadcast when it goes down, and editing on the fly and all that, that guy should have been like...
Well, you know, we live in strange times where anybody can get information out.
Yeah.
But especially with these legacy media places like that, like news, like we're getting someone who's live on the scene and like, that's like, those are targets for people fucking with people.
We're also in weird times when it comes to those things being relevant at all, because at a certain point in time, they're realizing that more people are paying attention to online sources than they are.
I will say, like, if I'm cruising the channels and I'm home and, like, the 5, 6 o'clock news is on, I'll turn it on because locally to LA, like, if there's anything going on, I'll kind of be interested in that.
But otherwise, like, who watches the news on, like, Channel 2?
Yeah, and even then, you still have to process stuff.
There's so much bullshit.
It's so difficult to figure out what's right and what's wrong.
And then when you have disinformation thrown into the mix, I mean...
It's been proven that government organizations will, when something bad goes down, they'll throw a bunch of wacky shit into the news as well to sort of counterbalance.
There's a lot of people out there that believe that a lot of the conspiracy theorists that say the most ridiculous shit, that they're being hired to say ridiculous shit because it Makes all conspiracies sound silly.
I believe that there are misinformation agents all over the place.
Manly P. Hall was one.
Manly P. Hall, famous writer, wrote a lot of books about a lot of conspiracy type things, and he was a straight-up disinformation agent for the Masons.
Yeah, but he's, man, that story, that dude is very fascinating because he is the real life, like, dude.
I mean, in my Black Ribbon's record, the Stephen King character gets killed and everything in the end.
I mean, he's the real life character of that.
Like, this guy was out there, and his radio show was awesome, and he was just, like, telling you, like, the first person talking about the Bilderberg group, the first person talking about all these people, and just laying it out there no matter what, who it pissed off, and...
Eventually it pissed off enough people to get him killed, but he's very fascinating.
In the hour of the time, I wanted to take the first episode of it and print it on a 12-inch vinyl, because it's just long enough.
I wanted to put music under it and make a record on a record label, and I was trying to get the family to let me do that.
They were interested, but then they kind of disappeared on me.
But, I mean, see, to me, William Cooper, I mean, obviously, he was hitting on some pretty harsh things if he was killed by the United States government.
He's very collected, he's very smart, very educated.
It'd be one thing if he was full of shit, but he's not.
If you listen to his show, he was very wise to things, and he was saying a lot of shit that would piss a lot of people off, and I know for a fact a lot of it is true.
If you go to Rational Wiki, he believed that UFO people were controlling the world, that UFO technology had been used in Vietnam.
He became one of the stars in the UFO lecture circuit, writing books that alleged that space aliens were part of the New World Order.
He later believed that he had been tricked into believing in aliens, and it was all part of an Illuminati plot, including the JFK assassination and the fake moon landings.
There's a theory that the US government wanted, the technology that he developed during Dr. Strangelove and he used in 2001 for the monkeys and the backgrounds and the way he shot that stuff.
And they said they would give him unlimited access to NASA and everything for 2001 and fund every film forever.
And so supposedly he was hinting at a lot of it in 2001 and in Eyes Wide Shut, especially in Eyes Wide Shut, that he was hinting to what he'd done Well, there's documentaries that show all the secret symbolism that he put into The Shining.
That movie's terrible because, see, I had studied all that shit, man, and it's so true.
There's such cool shit in it.
And that movie was like, they were interviewing the craziest people on the planet Earth with no frame of reference to what they were talking about.
And when you watch that movie, it's like...
It sounds like they're crazy.
It sounds like everything about the movie is bullshit because these people who are talking are clearly insane.
But the people who actually did the research before those kooks are the people that it was kind of fascinating about.
He wrote in his quote, he wrote about when he was young and he had seen the moon landing.
He goes, this is, I forget what page it is.
It just says, just a month before Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had left their colleague Michael Collins aboard Starship Columbia and walked on the moon, beating by five months President Kennedy's goal of putting a man on the moon before the end of beating by five months President Kennedy's goal of putting a man on The old carpenter asked me if I believed that it happened.
I said, sure.
I saw it on television.
He disagreed.
He said that he didn't believe it for a minute and that them television fellers, in quote, could make things look real that weren't.
Back then, I thought he was a crank.
During my eight years in Washington, I saw some things on TV that made me wonder if he wasn't ahead of his time.
That's fucking crazy.
That's crazy that a president of the United States would say...
I saw some things on television during my time in Washington that make me wonder if he wasn't ahead of his time, specifically talking about a guy claiming that the moon landings were fake.
You know, you're out there in space, you're not protected by the environment, you're not protected by the atmosphere, so there's no protection from, like, micrometeors, asteroidal impacts, like, all the different things.
Like, when you see shooting stars, those are fucking rocks that were in space that made their way down to Earth, but they get eaten up in the atmosphere, and they burn out.
I think that we're going to know, and I'll tell you when we're going to know, is these independent contractors are trying to get to the moon, Google being one of them.
When someone else besides the government goes to the moon, I don't mean the Russian government at the same time.
Like, if someone independent goes to the moon and it looks way different than it did when they did it in the 60s, you know?
And it's like, oh, like, really, don't float when we walk here.
You know what I mean?
Like, then we'll know.
You know, there's a lot of fucking things about that.
There's, you know, on that one website with the Kubrick thing, they, like, do this contrast thing where it kind of compares the 2001 monkey scenes to the...
And this Reality Sandwich article shows the use of this front screen projection method and how it mimics, I think that's what it's called, How it mimics what the shots looked like from the moon landings.
The real issue with the moon landings is how few...
If you stop and think about between 1969 and 1972, that that's when all these took place, and that no one has been more than 400 miles above the Earth's surface since then.
Not only that, how about when Neil Armstrong, there's a 20th anniversary of the moon landing for NASA, and he gives a speech, or 25th anniversary I think it was, yeah, that's what it was, and he gives this speech at the White House, and his words were, there are great ideas, undiscovered breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truth's protective layers.
That's the quote that he gives.
He's speaking to America's honor students, like all the high school students that get the best grades in science and math and all these different things, and they're all there listening to this guy who's the first man on the moon talk, and this is the thing he says.
There are great ideas, undiscovered breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truth-protective layers.
What the fuck does that mean?
Between him and Clinton, it's almost like if the moon landings were real, they're clearly fucking with everybody.
They're just begging for people to read into it.
But if it wasn't real, it's almost poetic how they're dropping these truths.
Yeah, that was how, with Kubrick, they said that in a lot of the films, he was dropping the guilt of the fact that he lied, that he did this thing, and that he was trying to admit it in a lot of the films.
It is pretty crazy that the last time people went was 1972. Yeah, and we haven't even come fucking close since then.
Not only have we not come close, we've never gone further than 400 miles.
That's the thing about every single space shuttle mission, every space station mission, everything is inside of 400 miles from the Earth's surface, except the Apollo missions.
There was a moon rock that was given to the Dutch Prime Minister by the Apollo 11 astronauts.
And once they examined it, like many, many years later, they were doing it for, I believe it was for an insurance investigation, and it was actually just petrified wood.
Really?
Yeah, it was attached to a plaque that said it was there from Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin taking this from the moon.
I don't know if the actual rock was handed to them by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, but it was supposedly a rock that was given to the Dutch Prime Minister from the Apollo 11 astronauts in 1969 and it was fake.
Okay, it says, The Rock was given to William Dries, a former Dutch leader, during a global tour by Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin, following their moon mission.
But if they weren't in the know, then even further.
Look, dude.
If you and I walked on the moon together, and it was just the two of us, and we came back and we're the only two humans that walked on the fucking moon, first of all, wouldn't you think that we would look around and be like, man, look at this shit.
I mean, you don't think we would be like, la la la, whatever, it's the moon, there's another place.
So, by the time you get to this, somebody hands you a fucking piece of wood, this petrified wood, and tells you, hey, this is from your moon trip.
First of all, neither one of you picked it up and brought it back, because you know that.
Second of all, wouldn't you think we would know that it's not, especially if Our whole life was meant to get to this point.
And somebody hands you this rock that you're supposed to give to someone that is a moon rock.
Well, they definitely got moon rocks that came from Asteroidal Impacts.
And that was actually one of the big points of contention because Werner von Braun, who was a Nazi, a straight up Nazi, ladies and gentlemen, that's a real moon rock?
Werner Von Braun was in Antarctica in 1969 before the actual, or 67?
One of those.
Before the actual moon landings took place, collecting asteroids.
They had gone to Antarctica because Antarctica is one of the places where they could be assured that a lot of the asteroids that had landed there, for whatever reason they knew, were from the moon themselves.
I'm happy to throw my phone aside because I run my own business.
I run the record label that we do with my manager.
And like...
Like, I was packing, like, Sunday night, me and my wife were literally packing all the pre-orders of, like, our vinyl that we did in boxes and shipping them and shit.
And we've set up a warehouse and we've done all this shit.
So, like, I'm stressed out all the fucking time.
And I'm in the studio all the time.
And I've got my kids all the time.
So, like, when I get my kids, I, like, love throwing my phone aside.
But I would be real bummed if I didn't have, like...
Didn't have no...
If I wasn't able to get on the internet.
Because, like, part of my favorite...
My non-stress time is...
There's a game called Combat Arms.
It's like a free first-person shooter game online only that me and my manager and buddies, we go in there and play and kill each other and do that kind of stuff.
Yeah, if you go through something in public and everything is subject to other people's criticisms and evaluations, with or without any information whatsoever, and then you watch it all play out, you're like, what?
Oh yeah, and just to fuck with you, to see if they can get a rise out of you, just to get you to react, just so that they know that, you know, Shooter Jennings is a real person on the other end of that.
Yeah, that's why I like to keep it where they think I'm not real.
Just kidding.
Like, I don't react.
No, you know, it's funny, like, Ricky Rackman is a buddy of mine, and he was telling me that, he's like, it's funny that people write you nice shit all day long and you never replied to it, but like, one guy says something shitty to you.
Actually, this is kind of when I backed off of Twitter.
I tweeted something about John Mayer being a giant douche because I thought that he all of a sudden was all Hollywood and he was all played out of Hollywood and then all of a sudden he buys this place in Montana and he got a poncho and starts growing his hair out and wearing a cowboy hat and doing all that shit.
I was like, give me a fucking break.
But he's still hanging out at the fucking Chateau in Vermont, but he's putting this image forward.
And I was like, phony.
More than phony shit.
So I just called him out on it.
And TMZ put it...
I remember it was Halloween of 2012. I'll never forget it.
Because TMZ fucking puts that shit everywhere.
And all of a sudden I'm getting calls from my brother and my family.
They're seeing it on the Yahoo page.
TMZ says this thing about how I called him a king douche and all that.
And dude, all of a sudden I had...
I'm looking at my Twitter and it says I've got...
Like, lots of mentions.
And the number just keep going up.
And it was like 15,000 15-year-olds telling me what a piece of shit I was.
And I was like, nobody.
And I was doing this shit for attention.
I mean, I've never seen...
So I just started retweeting all of them.
Just constantly retweeting all these people telling me what a piece of shit I was, you know?
The same type of girls that go on ratting them out and saying these crazy things about them, those are also the same type of girls that would be annoying if you were John Mayer and you were dating that girl, right?
And I really didn't like his version of Free Fall On, which was all these 12-year-old kids think John Mayer wrote this song.
And so I already had issues, and I'm sure that there are people that have the same kind of issues with me, but it is kind of a well-known fact that John Mayer is a douchebag.
I mean, I can guarantee that it's kind of not news to say.
Before I was a comedian, I worked as a security guard at Great Woods.
Great Woods is this place in Mansfield, Massachusetts that has these concerts.
And the Neil Young show was the last one I ever worked.
I was like, this is too fucking crazy.
I was like, I gotta get out.
Because I thought I was gonna get killed.
Somebody was gonna get killed.
Yeah, it was madness.
Because the way Great Woods works is...
There's a covered area, and then there's a back area that's like a lawn.
And all the security people were assigned to, you know, stop people from bringing in booze, like they'd bring in bottles of wine and stuff like that, bottles of whiskey, and also to keep order, like when shit would go haywire.
Well, the lawn, the thing about the lawn was there was no assigned seating.
So everybody just sat wherever they wanted to on the lawn.
Well, people just started fires.
And during the Neil Young concert, they had to shut the concert down because the lawn was on fire.
Oh, man.
And then fights broke out, and I had a security jacket on, and I covered my security jacket, or I turned it inside out.
I don't remember what I did, but I was like, fuck this job.
I zipped it up, and I'm like, I'm a normal person now, and I got the fuck out of there.
I don't even know if I got paid for the last day of work.
I don't know if I punched out.
I don't remember shit, but I remember saying to myself, I was probably 19 at the time.
It was a long time ago.
But I remember saying, this is the last day I work as a security guard.
And it was the Neil Young Show.
Because it was just so crazy.
There was fights breaking out, and fucking bottles were flying, and fire, and it was like, this is, what was I getting paid, like 10 bucks an hour or something stupid back then?