Dec. 27, 2016 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:08:08
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
|
Alright man. | |
| We're live. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| Thanks for having me, man. | ||
| Thanks for being here. | ||
| Yeah, this is cool. | ||
| This is cool. | ||
| Any friend of Duncan's, a friend of mine. | ||
| Likewise, likewise. | ||
| It's cool. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| Dude, okay, so I have to ask the opening question. | ||
| What the fuck is it like being the son of Timothy Leary? | ||
| The opening question, right? | ||
| It has to be the opening question. | ||
| It has to be. | ||
| Okay, that's cool. | ||
| Yeah, man, you know, and... | ||
| You know, the answer to the question kind of, it's changed a lot over the course of time, obviously, you know, because when I was younger, when I was a kid, you know, really up until my mid-20s, even my late 20s, I would say, like, I didn't know how to answer that question. | ||
| How could I? It's just all I knew. | ||
| It's just life. | ||
| You know, it's just my dad. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| How I grew up. | ||
| You know, he would take me to Little League. | ||
| He'd make sure I did my homework or didn't do my homework in my case, but whatever it was, you know what I mean? | ||
| It just was life. | ||
| I didn't have any objectivity to it. | ||
| I didn't have any distance from it. | ||
| I couldn't be removed from it. | ||
| You know, I didn't know, like, that it was perhaps really strange. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then, you know, he died in 96. You know, I was 22. And then kind of after that, then I sort of, you know, I got some distance from it. | ||
| Then I was like, oh, shit, you know. | ||
| Things are a little different at home. | ||
| You know, they were. | ||
| Well, your dad is probably like one of the most important, if not the most important people ever in terms of the psychedelic revolution. | ||
| He was. | ||
| I mean, yeah, my relationship with him and my relationship especially with his work was, yeah, I mean, of course the psychedelic part was a core pillar and I understood that's what made him famous. | ||
| But I considered him to be—he was a futurist, really. | ||
| During my formative years, the psychedelic thing was always there, but he was much more interested in technology and cyberculture and the progressive technology arts and things like that. | ||
| You know, in the 80s, he called the PC the LSD of the 80s. | ||
| So he was kind of really shifting. | ||
| And I kind of considered him somebody who just had, like, the innate ability to constantly reinvent himself. | ||
| And, of course, the psychedelics were, you know, were the core, I guess. | ||
| Probably is also probably a big part of how he could reinvent himself, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, that's... | ||
| That's true. | ||
| I mean, well, and considering, I mean, you can relate with this, I think, too. | ||
| And, you know, he didn't do his first psychedelic until he was 40. Oh, wow. | ||
| You were, what, 30 or something? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's a similar, like, you're well into your adult life and you're well formed. | ||
| You have an identity. | ||
| That's Jack Harrow's story, too. | ||
| Oh, is it? | ||
| Yeah, Jack Harrow was a Goldwater Republican, like, deep into his, I think he was getting divorced. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And met a young gal, and she turned him on to the weed, and all of a sudden he was like, hey, what the fuck have I been missing? | ||
| Yeah, he's still, to this day, he's still the strongest weed I've ever had. | ||
| Jack Harrow's train? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| He was a cool guy, man. | ||
| He was a cool guy. | ||
| He bummed me out when he left. | ||
| Yeah, and did good work. | ||
| So your dad probably would have had an amazing time with what's going on today in terms of virtual reality and the integration of cell phones into our life in an almost inescapable way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's funny, like the VR thing, Jamie and I were just talking about it before we rolled tape. | ||
| You know, we were doing VR like... | ||
| Yeah, you know, we were at the NASA Ames Research Center. | ||
| People were like Jaron Lanier and were like really, you know, Jaron Lanier was kind of the godfather of VR. And he was bringing kind of setups to our house in the early 90s. | ||
| And like really early, kind of almost 8-bit rudimentary VR. But it was there. | ||
| So what did that stuff look like? | ||
| It kind of looked like being inside of an Atari video game. | ||
| So real pixelated? | ||
| Pixelated, 8-bit, kind of clunky, block-like, but with full 3D dimensionality and stuff like that. | ||
| Did you ever see Duncan's Oculus, one of the first versions that he had, which was kind of like that, real pixelated? | ||
| Was it similar to that? | ||
| Very similar to that, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, Duncan and I, we went on this show together, this thing called Gunter's Universe, it's a VR chat show, and, you know, this was recent, and, you know, it's still, VR is still kind of in that, you know... | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| Like, does someone have a VR headset on in another location, and then you guys both enter the same room, so you're in the room together? | ||
| Yeah, well, Duncan and I actually, we're in the same room together. | ||
| Right, physically. | ||
| Physically, we happen to be, but yeah, and then all of these people with different headsets on, and then everybody has a different avatar. | ||
| And they're all in that room with you. | ||
| They're all in that room with us. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Very cool, very cool. | ||
| But like in that one, I think the servers crashed. | ||
| Too many people. | ||
| Oh, how many people can it support? | ||
| We had maybe like a thousand, I think. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| But yeah, like to get beyond that, you need some pretty, I mean, the avatars, you know, they're pretty involved. | ||
| They're pretty, you know, they made me into this Hare Krishna monk or some shit. | ||
| And Duncan was like this psychedelic clown. | ||
| It was pretty cool. | ||
| But yeah, you know, my dad loved VR. He'd love it. | ||
| It'd be really cool. | ||
| Yeah, I've always thought about him and McKenna. | ||
| McKenna obviously was a big futurist as well and completely fascinated by the possibilities and where technology was going. | ||
| I would have loved to see those guys today just take this all in and try to... | ||
| Yeah, amazing, right? | ||
| Like, Terrence was writing about the connection between psilocybin and virtual reality, right? | ||
| I mean, that's the subtext of not Food of the Gods, but of... | ||
| True hallucinations? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, it wasn't that one. | ||
| I'm forgetting which one's what it's called. | ||
| Mushrooms, virtual reality, and, you know, and he really saw the connection between... | ||
| And, you know, there's no accident that the Godfathers, the true visionaries of the Silicon Valley movement, were kind of remnants from the 60s. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, Steve Jobs. | ||
| Archaic Revival? | ||
| Is that it, Jamie? | ||
| Archaic Revival. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Terrence also had this idea that you would be able to recreate the DMT world in virtual reality and you'd be able to experience what people see when they're on DMT without actually taking the drug. | ||
| He believed that there was going to come a time when technology was so good. | ||
| And the images that you could create would be so elaborate that you literally could create the DMT images. | ||
| I kind of believe it. | ||
| I'm kind of leaning there right now myself, you know. | ||
| I mean, we kind of, again, Duncan, you know, we kind of had this crackpot idea of taking VR into the floatation tank, into the float tank, with this kind of in mind, that by disassociating the body and kind of getting rid of it, because, you know, what's the big DMT thing is it's the disassociative. | ||
| You just leave Joe. | ||
| You leave Zach and you become whatever. | ||
| So by taking the VR mask and a headset into the tank, maybe combining the two worlds, it could... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm still bullish on that. | ||
| I think it could work. | ||
| I think Terrence is right. | ||
| It sounds like it could be possible. | ||
| I know Crash from the Float Lab. | ||
| Crash has this setup where he has developed this screen that has the lowest amount of light that could be emitted to the point where you don't see the edges of the screen. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| So you literally, while you're in the tank, it's floating above your head. | ||
| It's suspended above your head. | ||
| And you see the image as if it's just the video, just floating in the sky. | ||
| And he believes that by separating your body from sensory input, like so you're not feeling your feet on the ground, you're not feeling the weight of the world and your shoulders, all that jazz, you're floating. | ||
| He thinks you could take in data better. | ||
| And so his idea was to show documentaries and You know, and instructionals and things along those lines and that you would learn quicker that way. | ||
| Yeah, interesting, right? | ||
| Because so much of your brain and the function of the cerebral cortex is to integrate the body. | ||
| This movement, standing upright, you know, and being muscular and moving around. | ||
| And if you get rid of that, right, your brain kind of opens up and can take more in. | ||
| Well, the way I always describe it to people that haven't used the tank, I was like, imagine if you were having a conversation, but next to you, people were screaming. | ||
| If it was an important conversation, you'd want to get away from those people screaming. | ||
| Because even though you think of it as a distraction, it's just input. | ||
| It's just data that you have to consider. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, you also have to consider your butt on this chair, the room, the dimensions that you're calculating as you're moving your head around, social cues, language, all these different things are all being calculated and they require resources. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, when you are in that tank, there's none of that. | ||
| And so your brain feels supercharged. | ||
| It feels like you have all these resources have been opened up to you. | ||
| Yeah, and I agree. | ||
| And I think, you know, all of those resources that you're speaking of, those are sort of the things that contribute to this idea of what we call the ego. | ||
| You know, and the same thing with psychedelics. | ||
| You know, they formulate the ego and our body and being separate. | ||
| Oh, my God, Joe, you're strong. | ||
| I mean, you know, it's all these kind of different things that create this image of who we think we are. | ||
| Psychedelics, the tank, meditation, whatever method you want to pick, it gets rid of that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And purely gets into, you know, Soland or something else. | ||
| Did you ever meet John Lilly? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Spent a long time with John. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did a lot of what? | |
| A lot of good research with John. | ||
| Research, air quotes. | ||
| Back in the day. | ||
| Yeah, that guy, man. | ||
| He's the, for people who don't know, we're talking about the guy who invented the sensory deprivation tank, and he was a pioneer in interspecies communication with dolphins. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fascinating, fascinating guy. | ||
| Fascinating guy. | ||
| You know, the last 20 years of his life, you know, the ketamine aspect was such a huge part of what he was doing. | ||
| Did he get too into it? | ||
| Ketamine seems to be an addictive substance. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look, I mean, I love John. | ||
| I did. | ||
| I thought he was great. | ||
| He was a good friend of my dad's, and I certainly wouldn't say anything too negative about him. | ||
| But yeah, one toke over the line, man. | ||
| Sweet Jesus. | ||
| Todd McCormick has a very funny story about him. | ||
| Do you know who Todd McCormick is? | ||
| I don't. | ||
| Todd's one of the first guys to get arrested in California for medical marijuana, where he was arrested in the late 90s or early 2000s. | ||
| And he was one of the first people to find out that when you are... | ||
| Legally growing marijuana in California because of the law, the medical law. | ||
| The federal government can still prosecute you, and when they prosecute you, you are in court. | ||
| You are not allowed to even bring up the term medical marijuana because that's not a real term federally. | ||
| So he had railroaded and went to jail. | ||
| But anyway, point being, He was at John Lilly's. | ||
| He actually still owns John Lilly's tank. | ||
| And he was with John Lilly and John Lilly invited him to get in the tank. | ||
| And so Todd's about to go in the tank and he says, do you want to do ketamine? | ||
| And he's like, I'm stepping into the tank. | ||
| And he's like, of course. | ||
| No, it's John Lilly. | ||
| So he hits him with a blast of intramuscular ketamine in his thigh and then Todd starts freaking out. | ||
| He's in the tank and he's freaking out. | ||
| So John gets in another tank next to him, blasts himself with ketamine and goes and visits him. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Yeah, they've found whatever same fucking dimension in the ketamine world. | ||
| And it worked? | ||
| Yes, it worked. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| I don't know, because I've never done ketamine. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Have you? | ||
| Yeah, I've done it in the tank, too. | ||
| Okay, what happens in there? | ||
| Well, it's been a while since I've done it in the tank, and I'm not so sure I'd do it again. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Calling to do it again. | ||
| I'm glad I did it. | ||
| God, man. | ||
| Well, you read that description of what Terrence writes about ketamine, that it's, I'm not sure I'm going to get it exactly right, but ketamine is sort of like you're going inside of an office building, but it's stark and there's nothing in the office building. | ||
| Yeah, it's vacant. | ||
| It's vacant, yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, Terence believed that when you were experiencing a heavy-duty mushroom trip, you're not just experiencing your trip, but you're experiencing all the different people that have ever done mushrooms together tripping. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Which is why a lot of people, when they take psilocybin particularly, they get a lot of Aztec and Mayan imagery. | ||
| That's the archaic rabbi. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| Are every single indigenous culture, you know, except for the Eskimos because they couldn't grow shit, but every single indigenous culture until very recently, secularists were a core part of their methodology, of their tribal rituals, you know. | ||
| Yeah, the Inuit's got You got fucked, huh? | ||
| There's nothing up there, dude. | ||
| You picked a bad spot. | ||
| You picked a bad spot, man. | ||
| Eating so much fish. | ||
| Ketamine in the tank, though, it's quite a journey. | ||
| The best way I could explain it is if you could see colors within blackness, if there were shades of black, if that makes any sense. | ||
| Like, because it's pitch black in the tank, and your head is pitch black, but somehow you're getting sacred geometry and sort of kind of visions and kind of downloads that are in the color black, if that makes any sense at all. | ||
| Yeah, thank God. | ||
| I mean, one of the great moments of my life, actually, was I took ketamine inside the tank, and... | ||
| This tank was right outside of my dad's sliding glass window, which went out into the lawn in his bedroom up here in the Hollywood Hills. | ||
| I went in and took a little ketamine. | ||
| Ram Dass was visiting that day, visiting my dad. | ||
| It was the last time they ever saw each other. | ||
| My dad died just like a month afterwards. | ||
| And I went inside the tank. | ||
| The two of them were visiting right outside of the tank hatch. | ||
| You know how the hatch comes out. | ||
| And they didn't know I was inside. | ||
| And I was lost in this K-hole. | ||
| Just completely fucked. | ||
| Just like, oh my god, what am I going to do? | ||
| And the only thing I knew how to do was like, you know... | ||
| Get the fuck out. | ||
| The K-hole, for people who don't know what we're talking about, is what people describe the ketamine experience when you're just really kind of stuck. | ||
| Yeah, and stuck in like, it's kind of like code red, like eject, hit the eject button, you know, so I popped open the hatch, got out, and... | ||
| You know, my dad and Ram Dass are sitting as close as you and I are right now. | ||
| And, you know, I'm self-referential enough to know, like, oh, wow, this is crazy, the two of them sitting here right now. | ||
| I mean, I wasn't stupid. | ||
| And you're naked and you're tripping on ketamine. | ||
| I'm naked, tripping on ketamine. | ||
| And everyone is just completely silent, staring at each other. | ||
| And Ram Dass just leans into me and goes, who are you now? | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| And it was kind of like a defining moment on my life journey. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It changed my life, man. | ||
| Who are you now? | ||
| Yeah, and it's kind of my mantra for life now. | ||
| But that was over 20 years ago now. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So did you feel like, was that the last time you did it in the tank? | ||
| Uh, no. | ||
| Oh, you're glutton for punishment. | ||
| Yeah, I did do it one other time after that, yeah. | ||
| So what is it particularly about the K-hole, like, when you go into what they call a K-hole? | ||
| Like, I've heard it described by people who are, like, recreational users. | ||
| I wouldn't call them psychonauts. | ||
| They're more like, you know, people go to raves and stuff. | ||
| It's dark, man. | ||
| It's dark. | ||
| I don't quite get it. | ||
| I don't get the ketamine in the public rave setting at all. | ||
| It doesn't make sense to me. | ||
| But John loved it. | ||
| Lily, right? | ||
| He did. | ||
| Loved it. | ||
| Ketamaniac. | ||
| But why was that his thing? | ||
| What was his raves about it? | ||
| I mean, he just... | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| I mean, well, to understand that relationship is also to understand John a little bit in the sense that, you know... | ||
| I mean, he was the guy who said, you know, my body is my laboratory. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, I mean, he was... | ||
| You know, at one point he gave himself a boob implant. | ||
| You know, I mean, he was way out there. | ||
| What did he use for the boob implant? | ||
| Like the ones that, standard ones that women get? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, like silicone or whatever. | ||
| Did he give himself one? | ||
| Only one? | ||
| No, he had two. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| So he was, you know, there was some darkness involved there. | ||
| Did he try to make them look like women's breasts? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If I recall, yeah. | ||
| See if we can find a picture of that. | ||
| Yeah, see if we can find... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did he lose a bet? | |
| Or is it just like... | ||
| No, I just... | ||
| Wanted to have breast implants. | ||
| I think it just was... | ||
| My body is my laboratory now. | ||
| It's sort of just the... | ||
| I mean, at that time, I mean, now what? | ||
| Being gender fluid is such a... | ||
| You know, we could talk about that. | ||
| Right, but I don't think that's really gender fluid. | ||
| One of the things about... | ||
| It's like, at the end of the day, everyone knows what the fuck that is. | ||
| There's this weird sort of suspension of disbelief where we're looking at these water bags that are surgically stuffed under your skin and we're just pretending these are sexual organs. | ||
| That are plump and ripe on the vine, but it's not. | ||
| It's one of the weirder things about being a tripper and deciding to do that. | ||
| It's like, wow, you're violating a lot of bizarre paradigms. | ||
| Yeah, but he was also kind of bending the paradigm and kind of bending the idea of you can be anything this time around. | ||
| If I want to be half-woman, I can be half-woman. | ||
| I can do that. | ||
| I'm a doctor, and we're living in this golden age of being able to Mm-hmm morph yourself into whatever the fuck you can imagine kind of thing Yeah, I wonder that was early too with a lot of those guys that trip so much it's like I think at least for practical purposes we would all like to think that you would like to have a Psychedelic experience and then come back down to earth and be able to you know make use of that in the real world like it can kind of benefit you in the real world and That's the idea, right? | ||
| That's sort of the idea. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I mean, why should we impart those standards on anybody? | ||
| I mean, you can do whatever you want. | ||
| But I think some guys, like Lily is probably a prime example that people use as a point of reference, went so far. | ||
| It's like, where's the baseline now? | ||
| Like, there's no baseline for him anymore. | ||
| He was just so out there. | ||
| He was. | ||
| He was, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I agree with you. | ||
| And also, I mean, not to use you as a great model, but you're a great poster child for psychedelics, as my dad was. | ||
| You were well into your adult life, and it changed your consciousness. | ||
| And you're able to apply it to your work, to what you do. | ||
| And it's become very fluid and very integrated. | ||
| You don't hide it. | ||
| You're public about it. | ||
| You found a way to... | ||
| Integrate it. | ||
| I mean, that's the idea of spiritual practice, isn't it? | ||
| It's about integration. | ||
| I think it's important to not hide it. | ||
| And I think there's much more fear of repercussions than actual repercussions. | ||
| You know, I think Terrence McKenna had a great saying. | ||
| He said, too many people are doing the man's work for the man. | ||
| They don't really care if you're out doing mushrooms. | ||
| What they're trying to do is they're trying to stop large-scale sales and distribution of Schedule I drugs. | ||
| They're not trying to stop some dude from doing mushrooms. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And look what we're seeing with microdosing right now in Silicon Valley. | ||
| I mean, more and more people are kind of coming out of the closet and, you know, supposedly what the names that are kind of attached to the rumor mill of who's doing microdosing in Silicon Valley. | ||
| It's huge. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's really, it's really insane. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think as marijuana is now legal in the state and it becomes legal in more and more states and hopefully one day it'll be released from the schedule one. | ||
| Which is just so crazy that the DEA decided to... | ||
| I mean, they got to the door this past summer. | ||
| They did. | ||
| And then they decided to pull away and just keep it at schedule one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| Which means there's no medical benefit, which is a lie. | ||
| Well, and that's especially fucked. | ||
| And I'm kind of down on Obama for that, as much as parts of Obama I really do admire. | ||
| But that, I think, was an epic failure. | ||
| And considering, you know, he just pardoned, what, 158 guys, most of them nonviolent drug offenders. | ||
| And the two are synonymous. | ||
| It's like, okay, you treated the symptom, man. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| I'm glad you released those guys from prison and good for you. | ||
| But treat the fucking disease, man. | ||
| And now, as we're stepping into this dark age, I mean, I'm calling it a dark age. | ||
| The Trump dark age? | ||
| The Trump dark age. | ||
| It's not good for these things. | ||
| Well, I don't know if it is or it isn't, but the problem is that when you know something, like if you and I know what's dangerous and what's not, like meth is dangerous. | ||
| Marijuana is not dangerous. | ||
| So when you look at all the facts and then you look at all the absolutely proven medical benefits and then you see that they're denying the existence of these, you go, okay, well, the people that are in control of locking people up and throw them in the jail, they're a bunch of liars because they're just ignoring the science. | ||
| They're ignoring the research and the research that's gone back to the 1970s. | ||
| That the Nixon administration paid for and then ignored. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And now I think the bar was even raised, right? | ||
| CBD has gotten thrown into that. | ||
| Really recently, which is just a really sneaky thing because CBD, much like hemp, has zero psychoactive properties. | ||
| It's not doing anything to alter your consciousness in terms of getting you high. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But it does amazing stuff for reducing inflammation for people that have arthritis. | ||
| It's like a lifesaver. | ||
| So, you know, the only thing I could kind of in this thread is kind of think about and talk about is, okay, well, what is, you know, what's the reason behind this? | ||
| I mean, if you kind of isolate big pharma and talk about that, and then, you know, I know the CBD industry, they're, you know, big pharma is the enemy, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But... | ||
| I also have to just kind of say that Big Pharma's main goal is to make money, to create products that make money. | ||
| It doesn't matter what the product is. | ||
| If they told you that plastic is going to alleviate cancer, they would make a plastic pill. | ||
| So who is the enemy within this that is making things like CBD and marijuana? | ||
| Is this just kind of left over from kind of baby boom paranoia, kind of narrow consciousness that we can't possibly allow these substances to fix us, to help us? | ||
| I mean, what is that? | ||
| Because there's tremendous profit potential. | ||
| So something is in alignment. | ||
| I want to know where that is. | ||
| The problem is that profit can't be controlled like Viagra. | ||
| It's hard to make Viagra. | ||
| If you and I wanted to go into the Viagra business, we would have to find out what the key ingredients are. | ||
| We'd have to set up a plant and manufacturing. | ||
| If we wanted to go into the CBD business, we'd just have to grow some weed. | ||
| It's not hard at all. | ||
| There's a big difference between extracting CBD or especially medical marijuana. | ||
| If you talk about just THC or cooking it down to a candy form or a pill form, it's not hard at all. | ||
| Right, but GlaxoSmithKline can put a billion dollars into making the best CBD pill and putting it on the store of every Rite Aid, the shelf of every Rite Aid, and kind of get the propaganda out there about what it can do. | ||
| Propaganda being a good thing, getting the marketing out there about all of its benefits. | ||
| So what is stopping that? | ||
| Well, they can't copyright it. | ||
| They can't control it. | ||
| It's not patentable. | ||
| It's nature. | ||
| It would be like trying to patent oranges. | ||
| You can't do it. | ||
| It's not going to work. | ||
| People are going to be able to grow oranges. | ||
| And when it comes to CBD oil, anyone in this room can grow some marijuana and extract the CBD from it. | ||
| It's not incredibly difficult. | ||
| It doesn't require massive resources like it would if you were going to make... | ||
| Certain types of Alzheimer's medication or Parkinson's medication that would be competing with the CBD oil. | ||
| Those are very difficult to get and if you can lock down the doctors and make sure that they only prescribe these pharmaceutical drugs that you guys can profit from and you're the only ones that can make it, then you've got that business locked. | ||
| There have been people that have done calculations about all of the different pharmaceutical drugs that would be useless or would be unnecessary, I should say, if marijuana was legal. | ||
| And it's pretty staggering. | ||
| It's a long list. | ||
| It's a huge list. | ||
| And the amount of profit that the people who make those pharmaceutical drugs would lose if marijuana became legal and people just started realizing like, hey, you know, there's and then the other benefits. | ||
| Like there's no drugs that are like pharmaceutical drugs that also open you up, make you a nicer person, make you more friendly and make me more contemplative of your existence, sort of give you a different perspective. | ||
| It's almost unattainable without those pharmaceutical. | ||
| It's not really right. | ||
| It's not that they don't have those additional benefits that the pot does. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| They don't, which is oftentimes why it's referred to as a war on consciousness. | ||
| Well, it is. | ||
| It's got to be. | ||
| I mean, that's absolutely what it is, because it's not about drugs, because there's so many drugs that are legal. | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| We cannot say there's a war on drugs when we can go buy a bottle of whiskey and a prescription for Oxycontin. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| In every restaurant, you could buy booze. | ||
| Pretty much every restaurant. | ||
| And, I mean, look what the OxyContin epidemic has done to America. | ||
| I mean, it's decimated. | ||
| It's created a whole generation of addicts all of a sudden, you know, and it's a dangerous drug. | ||
| So it's a war on consciousness. | ||
| Yeah, and it's really a war for profit, for controlling the ability to profit off of people altering their consciousness. | ||
| Because people have been, like you said, other than people that live in frozen places where nothing grows, they've been trying to alter their consciousness forever. | ||
| Okay, but do you believe, you know, I don't know what your conspiracy level kind of meter is, but do you believe that, like, with all of this said, that there is still kind of a secret kind of conspiracy government sanctioned funnel that allows the illegal drug market to still flourish in some way in order to keep certain, you know, Law enforcement and order. | ||
| Law enforcement and order. | ||
| You know, maybe skimming off the top, off of piles of cocaine that are coming from Bolivia, whatever the case may be. | ||
| I mean, I don't know what a case study is, but, you know, I mean, there's still so many coming in. | ||
| It's certainly something to be considered. | ||
| Are you aware of that CIA drug plane that crashed, the jet that had visited Guantanamo Bay a couple of times, and it crashed in Mexico with tons of cocaine on it? | ||
| You never seen that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I did. | |
| Jamie, see if you can pull that up. | ||
| CIA plane crashes in Mexico with tons of cocaine. | ||
| They overloaded their plane, and they had so much cocaine in it that they had to refuel. | ||
| And they tried to land in Mexico, and Mexico was like, fuck you. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| CIA jet crashes with four tons of cocaine on board. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| What year is this? | ||
| This is just last month, huh? | ||
| A couple months ago? | ||
| September. | ||
| September 16th. | ||
| Oh, I missed that one. | ||
| Well, this is a recent one, but it's happened a gang of times. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, here it is. | ||
| Eight years ago. | ||
| It's saying eight years ago. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It crashed in the middle of the jungle in Mexico's Yucatan, carrying four tons of cocaine. | ||
| The event and the aftermath changed forever. | ||
| An official narrative of the war on drugs has for years been pushing the notion that there is no significant American involvement in the global drug trade and no American drug lords. | ||
| Right, okay. | ||
| Well, you know the Barry Seale story? | ||
| Only a little bit. | ||
| Barry Seals, who used to fly drugs into Mena, Arkansas, from South America. | ||
| You'd go down to South America, fly drugs, and there's photos with him with all the CIA guys, and he'd be partying with Noriega down in Panama. | ||
| And this guy was just bringing coke into the United States. | ||
| And then when he was scheduled to testify, they assassinated him in his car on the way to court. | ||
| Oh, jeez. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| He had George Bush's number in his phone in his pocket. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Yeah, as he was executed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So the whole thing is just like, well, story's over, folks. | |
| Go back to sleep. | ||
| Good night, everybody. | ||
| You know I'm... | ||
| Johnny Carson. | ||
| The Rick Ross documentary? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've had Rick on the podcast. | ||
| Oh, you have? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Twice. | ||
| What a story. | ||
| Amazing story. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that guy became a drug kingpin in L.A., selling drugs essentially to fund the war with the Contras and the Sandinistas. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they're funneling the product. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| He was, you know, making millions of dollars for the U.S. government selling Coke. | ||
| and you know Michael Rupert who was a good friend of mine too who killed himself a few years ago who had also been on the podcast a couple times Michael was the guy that exposed that he was a Los Angeles detective oh wow and he was there's a very famous moment where Michael Rupert is addressing the And he stands up in the middle of all this stuff and says and exposes this whole deal. | ||
| He's like, I have personally witnessed the CIA selling drugs in central Los Angeles, in south central Los Angeles. | ||
| You ever seen that? | ||
| I haven't seen that, no. | ||
| See if you can find that, Jamie, because it's a fucking crazy video to watch. | ||
| Michael Rupert. | ||
| Exposes CIA selling drugs in court. | ||
| So why'd he kill himself? | ||
| He was depressed. | ||
| He had some pretty significant depression. | ||
| Long time being on the police force and all the stuff that he had to deal with in trying to expose corruption. | ||
| Listen to this. | ||
| Go full screen and crank up the volume. | ||
| As a former Los Angeles police narcotics detective that the agency has dealt drugs throughout this country for a long time. | ||
| This is allegations of CIA involvement in drug trafficking. | ||
| This is on C-SPAN, and this is something completely unexpected. | ||
| So when he stood up in front of these people and said that to the CIA, pull that up again so I can see the top of it, CIA Director John Deutch. | ||
| Obviously, that is an answer for a lot of you. | ||
| Now, can you please? | ||
| I refer... | ||
| All right, now, can you please? | ||
| I refer to... | ||
| Wait, wait, wait. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wait a minute. | |
| Wait. | ||
| Wait a minute here. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| If you don't like what's going on here, please lead now. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Lead. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Lead now because there are others who do want to hear what's going on in this room. | ||
| She's ineffective. | ||
| Is there another... | ||
| I don't know what's... | ||
| Here you go. | ||
| Go back to him again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here you go. | |
| Specific agency operations known as Amadeus, Pegasus, and Watchtower. | ||
| I have Watchtower documents heavily redacted by the agency. | ||
| I was personally exposed to CIA operations and recruited by CIA personnel who attempted to recruit me in the late 70s. | ||
| To become involved in protecting agency drug operations in this country. | ||
| I have been trying to get this out for 18 years and I have the evidence. | ||
| My question for you is very specific, sir. | ||
| If in the course of the IG's investigations and Fred Hitz's work, you come across evidence of severely criminal activity and it's classified, will you use that classification to hide the criminal activity or will you tell the American people the truth? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's pretty intense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And he, you know, he went through a lot with this and with many other things and just decided at one point in time he's suffering too much and took his own life. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| That's, it's really intense. | ||
| And, you know, I try not to be a cynic. | ||
| I mean, I'm, you know, a pretty open-minded, you know, and hopeful guy. | ||
| But with what we're kind of moving in towards with the next administration, I just... | ||
| You know about what's going on in the Philippines with, you know, that drug, the crazy drug policy, and what, Trump called him, you know, when he was president-elect? | ||
| Yeah, they spoke to congratulate him for winning. | ||
| For killing people? | ||
| Congratulations? | ||
| Yeah, and I guess Trump said on the call, like, that he was, congratulations on this drug policy. | ||
| It seems to be working. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| They're just assassinating people. | ||
| They're just killing people. | ||
| He's talked pretty openly about it, how he's just assassinating drug dealers. | ||
| And addicts and users. | ||
| They're just killing drug addicts. | ||
| That is the... | ||
| That's something that happens when you have so many people in one area. | ||
| I mean, the Philippines is thousands of islands, for people who don't know, and they're just jammed up with people. | ||
| And I think when you have a lot of crime and you have a lot of people, you tend to value those people less. | ||
| And it just becomes, especially when you're a dictator. | ||
| I mean, essentially, that guy's a dictator. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| I mean, whether he's elected or not. | ||
| He's a dictator. | ||
| What he's doing is barbaric. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Just fucking assassinating people. | ||
| You value people less just based on kind of economic, on class. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's kind of a class struggle. | ||
| A class struggle and also just the sheer volume of them. | ||
| They're not as valuable. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's like Norway, a smaller population of people. | ||
| I think you just value the people more. | ||
| I don't know why I use Norway as an example. | ||
| Yeah, but no, it's a good... | ||
| I mean, all the Scandinavian countries are good. | ||
| Did you see The House We Live In? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| It's a documentary, a war on drugs documentary. | ||
| No, I didn't see that. | ||
| Maybe I did. | ||
| Is that about five years ago? | ||
| Yeah, about four or five years ago. | ||
| I've seen so many of those things, I can't remember them all anymore. | ||
| There's so many of them now. | ||
| It's a really good one, and basically it comes up, the final hypothesis is that the war on drugs, it's a class war. | ||
| You know, originally we thought it was a race war, and it's still partially true, you know, and what's the guy who the first drug czar from the 40s and 50s, I'm forgetting his name, Adelson or whatever, but who, you know, he turned marijuana hysteria into Yeah. | ||
| Into a Mexican hysteria that they were bringing, and this was in the 30s and 40s, and created reefer madness. | ||
| Then heroin was kind of pushed into the ghetto, ended up in Rick Ross. | ||
| Harry Anslinger? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then crack brought into the ghetto and stuff. | ||
| But meth sort of becomes the exception because meth is primarily a white trailer park sort of trashy kind of thing. | ||
| How racist of you. | ||
| I know how racist. | ||
| That was politically incorrect. | ||
| But it's true, though. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| And so we do have a class struggle. | ||
| Well, even then, that's a class issue as well. | ||
| I mean, it just happens to be Caucasians. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Poor people who really get into the math. | ||
| Poor people. | ||
| Disenfranchised. | ||
| Disenfranchised, unheard of, you know. | ||
| No, I think it's definitely, you could say that the war on drugs is a class war. | ||
| But it's also like, where can they extract the money? | ||
| Where can they get the money? | ||
| Well, the DEA has to, they have to keep people employed. | ||
| And the way to keep people employed is to justify their job. | ||
| The way to justify their job is to continue making arrests and show that you need to make arrests. | ||
| And so you have to have laws in place, which is why. | ||
| You know that prison guards will lobby to make sure that marijuana stays illegal and other drugs are strictly enforced, that the policies are strictly enforced, just so they can continue keeping their jobs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| But when we still, like what Obama, during the Obama administration, he took the crack cocaine versus powder cocaine, you know, the discrepancies from, what, 20 to 1, and he got it down to... | ||
| Whatever it is, eight to one or something. | ||
| It's still ridiculous. | ||
| It's still insane. | ||
| It's still insane. | ||
| It's the same drug. | ||
| It's the same drug, but it's purely based on class and race. | ||
| Clearly now, as we've seen it and as the rhetoric that's been going on the last year during the election cycle, It's a much bigger problem than we thought it was. | ||
| I mean, I always knew, we always knew that this was a problem, race and class and stuff, but now, straight, you know, out on the table, all the chips on black and, you know, everybody's One of the things that I feel that's troubling about this election is that a lot of racists, like my friend Alonzo Bowden had a great quote. | ||
| He said, not all Trump supporters are racists, but all racists are Trump supporters. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's like the Belmar quote about Republicans. | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| Not all Republicans are racists, but all racists are Republicans. | ||
| Oh, that's not true, though. | ||
| There's a lot of racist Democrats. | ||
| That's a bad quote. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a terrible quote. | |
| I mean, maybe there was racists that voted for Hillary, sure. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| But it's true about me. | ||
| It's more fun than it is real. | ||
| You know, as a quote. | ||
| But it seems like they're out in the public now. | ||
| They're out in the open. | ||
| I mean, I've seen so many videos of people that are Trump supporters that are using the fact that Trump's in office now to, like... | ||
| To say a bunch of really disgusting racist shit. | ||
| To go crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they kind of got a hall pass, you know? | ||
| That's a good way of putting it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's like, obviously, you know, I know people, as you do, who voted for Trump. | ||
| Sadly, I do. | ||
| But whatever, you know, and not all Trump supporters are uneducated, racist, sort of whatever. | ||
| Yeah, some people did it for economics. | ||
| Some people did it for the economics thing, but the fact that they gave those other people a hall pass to act like that and just wait, you know, troubling, really troubling. | ||
| Well, it's going to be interesting to see this Jeff Sessions guy, what he decides to do, because the attorney general-elect, that guy that's coming in, is that what you say about him? | ||
| Attorney general-elect, like a president-elect, call him that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So he's a staunch marijuana hater. | ||
| He's a fucking dyed-in-the-wool, marijuana-is-for-bad-people kind of guy. | ||
| Just gotta get that guy high. | ||
| That's all we have to do. | ||
| I mean, I know he's probably 80, but it's not too late. | ||
| Just get him. | ||
| Somebody get him. | ||
| Just give him a little hit. | ||
| Don't fuck him up. | ||
| Just give him a little. | ||
| Just a little. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| Come on, dude. | ||
| You'll be fine. | ||
| Relax. | ||
| Let's go sit in the grass. | ||
| Look up. | ||
| Look at the sky. | ||
| Does it look different? | ||
| Look at the clouds. | ||
| You ever look at him that way? | ||
| That's a thin layer of gas. | ||
| It separates us from infinity. | ||
| What's your favorite music, man? | ||
| Do you like Pink Floyd? | ||
| Do you like Pink Floyd? | ||
| What'd you grow up on? | ||
| Put these headphones on, dude. | ||
| You like the Beatles. | ||
| I'm sure you like the Beatles, right? | ||
| Everyone does. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He might not. | |
| He might be one of those weird John Ashcroft guys that's really into gospel music. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And you remember that John Ashcroft song? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Let the Eagles soar. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my God. | |
| Like she's never soared before. | ||
| I think he was one of the scariest guys that ever attained any sort of office or had any sort of power. | ||
| Dude, Ashcroft, you remember, what state was he from? | ||
| Missouri, maybe? | ||
| I think it was from Missouri. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He lost the election for the governorship to a dead man. | ||
| Did he? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's how much people didn't like him? | ||
| A dead guy beat him. | ||
| And then Bush up whites. | ||
| Do you remember when he put coverings over the naked statues? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| He covered up the boobs in the rotunda. | ||
| He was so disturbed by their nakedness. | ||
| Well, we survived that. | ||
| Barely. | ||
| I mean, we went to a war that's still going on because of that asshole and the other assholes that are in that administration. | ||
| I mean, that administration was a dark, dark moment of despair. | ||
| These alleged weapons of mass destruction that never existed. | ||
| You know, all of it. | ||
| And now Trump is talking to Karl Rove again. | ||
| Oh, not to Dick Cheney. | ||
| He's talking to Dick Cheney. | ||
| Yeah, Dick Cheney's fucking putting on his Darth Vader mask again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| We should use this moment to say, rest in peace Carrie Fisher. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was a hard one. | ||
| She checked out, right? | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| 60? | ||
| She was only 60. I know. | ||
| Did she have a drug problem? | ||
| Did she have an alcohol problem? | ||
| Not current. | ||
| But she used to? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Was it a pill thing? | ||
| I had pills and coke. | ||
| But yeah, I think she was sober in AA, is the best I understand. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The problem is the damage those goddamn things that they do to your cardiovascular system. | ||
| Oh my god, yeah. | ||
| She's so devastating. | ||
| No, she lived hard. | ||
| She lived hard and I think suffered a lot of physical problems as a result. | ||
| So sad. | ||
| 60. Oh my god. | ||
| And George Michael. | ||
| And then George Michael. | ||
| 53. That was even sadder. | ||
| But you gotta think that he probably went out in a wave of dicks. | ||
| Just a tsunami of them. | ||
| He probably was just exhausted from orgies. | ||
| Somehow I just feel like he squeezed in a lot of life in 53 years. | ||
| I think he did too. | ||
| No pun intended. | ||
| Or pun intended. | ||
| Yeah, George. | ||
| Yeah, but with guys like that, I often wonder, you know, with being a songwriter or like a hit maker, is it Is it better to have had, you know, one hit or a few hits and then completely fade away? | ||
| Not that he faded away into obscurity. | ||
| Maybe he's not a good example. | ||
| Or to not have it at all. | ||
| Because I think George did kind of carry with him that, like, he was no longer current sort of thing. | ||
| Yeah, that's the weird thing where someone's not famous anymore, they're kind of a joke, whereas a regular person's not a joke. | ||
| Like, here's an example. | ||
| Do you remember when Gary Coleman was a security guard? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| He had to get a job, and it was a real problem because Gary Coleman was just trying to do his job and just trying to get paid so he can eat, you know? | ||
| He was just trying to feed himself like all the rest of us. | ||
| And people would come up to him and take pictures of him and mock him, and they would use him as a joke. | ||
| But you don't use a regular security guard as a joke. | ||
| Like, if you see a regular security guard, you're like, what's up, man? | ||
| How you doing? | ||
| Yeah, I'm going to go to this building right here. | ||
| I can see your ID. Cool. | ||
| Everything's fine. | ||
| You don't say, ah, you're a fucking security guard! | ||
| Look at you! | ||
| Right. | ||
| But because he used to be something greater, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, there's poor Gary Coleman when he was a security guard. | ||
| Yeah, that's so troubling. | ||
| And it kind of really plays into the whole idea of fame and perversion in America and the things that we hold dear, the things that are valuable to us, kind of the disillusion of American values, which I think that's the rise of Trump to me. | ||
| It's a values thing. | ||
| I had a guy give me a hard time once about Fear Factor being canceled, and he was a fucking couchier at CVS. He was working at CVS. He's like, what happened to his show? | ||
| And I said, it was canceled. | ||
| He goes, no more show, huh? | ||
| Like, all attitude. | ||
| I'm like, dude, shows go away. | ||
| Yeah, they go on and they get canceled. | ||
| He was shitting on me, but he was being aggressive about it. | ||
| It was so weird. | ||
| I was like, what a bizarre detachment from reality. | ||
| You're working at fucking CVS, dude. | ||
| I'm not giving you a hard time about being a CVS guy, but if I was the guy from Fear Factor and then I was a CVS guy, how bad would you shit on me then? | ||
| Because I'm just coming in as a guy buying some cough drops. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Like, what a weird thing that we have, this need to, when someone attains a very high status and then falls off of that, what we think, you know, we think they're down. | ||
| We want to attack. | ||
| It's like an animal thing. | ||
| But in your case, best thing that ever happened to you. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't think he knew. | ||
| He probably didn't know that I had a stand-up career or that I was doing the UFC or anything. | ||
| He was just like, oh, you're fucking losing now, huh? | ||
| What is your show? | ||
| I was like, crazy accent, all aggressive. | ||
| I was like, all right, dude. | ||
| But it was so blatant, it was confusing. | ||
| I was like, am I being punked? | ||
| Yeah, and the idea of like, you know, winning. | ||
| Just that idea. | ||
| You gotta win, man. | ||
| Whatever that means. | ||
| That's the Trump thing. | ||
| That's the Trump thing that's really disturbing, is that winning thing. | ||
| Gotta win. | ||
| Gotta win. | ||
| And not this lack of perspective. | ||
| I mean, he's fucking 70, man. | ||
| There ain't a lot of time left, bro. | ||
| I mean, if you're super lucky, you got 20 summers left. | ||
| If you're super lucky, if everything goes great. | ||
| And he's not that healthy. | ||
| No, he's fat. | ||
| He's fat. | ||
| His chin just has like a very sloping slab of skin that's loosely attached to his neck that goes down to his collarbone. | ||
| I mean, he doesn't look like a healthy 70 year old. | ||
| I don't think so either. | ||
| Sylvester Stallone is older than him. | ||
| That's a good piece of- Yeah, there you go. | ||
| To put it in perspective. | ||
| Or Sean Connery. | ||
| Both of them, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They're both older than him. | ||
| Yeah, but that whole idea, it's just that destruction of sort of like the things that we have instilled as being an important, like you've got to have a winning temperament. | ||
| I'm going to make America win again. | ||
| Why is that the most important sort of attribute for someone to attain to? | ||
| What does that even mean, win? | ||
| And it's so attached to a financial thing. | ||
| What kind of value system is that? | ||
| There are other ways to, quote unquote, win. | ||
| It doesn't have to be tied to money. | ||
| Well, the problem is it becomes attractive. | ||
| You know, when you see someone who has a slick back hair and a private jet, and he takes a photo with his expensive Gucci shoes on and his private jet, and it's on his Instagram, and then he's, you know, that all stuff becomes very attractive, and then people aspire to that. | ||
| And then, you know, you get that Gordon Gekko, greed is good thing. | ||
| Yeah, you're right, greed is good, but also, like, that level of aspiration, first of all, it's pretty much not attainable. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Well, that's attainable. | ||
| Yeah, but one, what, private jet rich? | ||
| I mean, that is... | ||
| Some people can do it. | ||
| They obviously have private jets. | ||
| That is the 1% of the 1% of the 1%. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I mean, that level. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, the people who are following those people on Instagram, who have, you know... | ||
| Intergram. | ||
| Intergram. | ||
| Okay, Grandpa. | ||
| Oh, you fucking kids in the Instagram. | ||
| On that series of tubes. | ||
| It's a series of tubes. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| The Facebook. | ||
| But, I mean, if you're trying, you know, you want to climb a mountain, you want to climb Everest. | ||
| If you want to be the Gordon Gekko guy, you want a private jet and a slick back hair. | ||
| But it never ends. | ||
| It does never end. | ||
| It never ends. | ||
| Well, that's what's weird when you see the really, really, really rich guys who are still smashing and just every day trying to attain new... | ||
| And we always assume they achieve enlightenment. | ||
| It was like this idea that, like, well, he's got $50 billion. | ||
| Why doesn't he just retire? | ||
| They never fucking retire. | ||
| Do you read Steve Jobs' last words? | ||
| Have you ever read that? | ||
| No. | ||
| What do you say? | ||
| You might want to bring him up, Jamie. | ||
| It's really, really fucking cool. | ||
| It's like he's... | ||
| It's his last whatever... | ||
| Maybe not the last word he said to his wife or something, but it's kind of his last cohesive thought was like, look, many people in the world views me as completely successful and I've achieved so much in business, but my personal life and everything that he was lacking. | ||
| So he was just sort of coming clean about the imbalance of it all? | ||
| He was kind of coming clean about the levels of discontent and the path of the heart. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The path of the soul, the path of the spirit, because he was essentially, you know, a spiritual guy and, you know, was a meditator, was a practitioner of Zen and into, you know, Neem Karoli Baba and all sorts of things. | ||
| But he got just so wrapped up in this vicious sort of cycle of having to produce product, product, product. | ||
| And, you know, Apple essentially, in his words, you know, he made it into, it was a product company. | ||
| And that's how we defined it. | ||
| And not even an idea company. | ||
| It was a product company. | ||
| And then products are based on having to have the latest version of the product over and over and over again. | ||
| And he just got wrapped up and kind of lost his soul. | ||
| Isn't it interesting that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were the two competitors that we always thought of, and Bill Gates was thought to be the business guy who's the cold, hard... | ||
| And he was. | ||
| In a lot of ways, sure. | ||
| Back in the day, yeah. | ||
| But if you look at him, in his older years, he became very charitable, involved in a bunch of humanitarian efforts, and does a lot of amazing work, and is using his substantial wealth... | ||
| For a lot of good and doesn't work anymore. | ||
| He's done with all that. | ||
| He's all just doing humanitarian work and helping people, which is kind of beautiful. | ||
| And he became this different guy as he got older. | ||
| He became wiser and became much more involved in doing good and trying to help and trying to use that immense amount of money that he acquired by being a ruthless sort of business gangster. | ||
| But doing it for good, which is kind of really fascinating that he decided, hey, I'm going to step back here. | ||
| I'm going to set back and think about what I'm doing and what's really important to me in this last stage of life. | ||
| And that's karma yoga. | ||
| That's what karma yoga is. | ||
| You know about the path of the sadhu in India? | ||
| Traditionally, the path of the sadhu. | ||
| You know, kind of historically and traditionally, the sadhu grows up, is born in India, and is raised into education, then to become a householder. | ||
| Householder meaning getting married and has kids, works, has career, provides for the kids, and then in the last third of his life becomes a sadhu, drops all of it, walks away. | ||
| Kids are grown up, out of the house, kind of leaves of his wife, which is kind of a Bummer for her. | ||
| Bummer for her, but in kind of a concept. | ||
| Maybe she was annoying. | ||
| Maybe she wanted to keep buying purses and shit, and he's like, no, we have to meditate. | ||
| No, I'm shopping online. | ||
| But then he takes off, and he becomes a wandering mendicant in India, and that's the path of the sadhu. | ||
| It's kind of broken into different phases. | ||
| I don't know if that's the right way to do it either. | ||
| Oh, I don't know, but it's fascinating. | ||
| It's an interesting way of looking at it that, okay, you've achieved a lot, you've accumulated a lot, and now I can go be of service. | ||
| Well, being of service is always a great idea. | ||
| The sadhus are really into hash, right? | ||
| Isn't that the big thing? | ||
| How many chillums you can smoke? | ||
| It depends what lineage you belong to. | ||
| I've sat with some of them, and the Naga Babas and Atakumba Meila and Allahabad. | ||
| I've sat with them. | ||
| It's wild, man. | ||
| It is amazing how when people discuss religion, if they discuss Hinduism or the Sikhs or any of the various strains of religion, Of religions that are inexorably connected to psychedelics, those psychedelics are rarely discussed. | ||
| I mean, if you go and you read the Vimanas or read any of the ancient Hindu texts, there's so many references to Soma and so many references to what is obviously some sort of a psychoactive substance. | ||
| But when people talk about Hinduism, it hardly ever comes up. | ||
| When you talk about yogis and sadhus, it hardly ever comes up. | ||
| In the modern sort of take on it, because there's kind of a revival within Hinduism of kind of an orthodox version of it, which is intoxicant-free. | ||
| And that's kind of a modern revival within the Hindu tradition. | ||
| You know, so they've kind of pushed that aside. | ||
| But, yeah, I mean, you know what bong is? | ||
| It's like a powdery pot thing that you just kind of, you know, you swallow some of it. | ||
| Yeah, how does that, what is that stuff made with? | ||
| It's, um, you take like the leaves and you grind up the leaves into like a fine powder and then there's some kind of cooking process. | ||
| And then, but within just the leaves, like the shake, all the scraps is enough and you can extract the THC. In some kind of cooking process and you make it into a fine powder and just... | ||
| Throw it down. | ||
| Throw it down and it gets you pretty toasty. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I know that they're also into the crystals and they take the crystals and mash them up and sort of make like kind of a hash out of the scrape from the THC crystals. | ||
| What is that called? | ||
| I know what you're talking about. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We both know. | ||
| Some sort of a mushy, sort of waxy type jazz. | ||
| They take that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, I mean, again, back to the original, you know, thread of our conversation. | ||
| It's like every tradition has some kind of A mind-altering sacrament. | ||
| Vedic texts. | ||
| Yeah, all these different... | ||
| I mean, look, they had to be... | ||
| They obviously were aware of these substances. | ||
| If they found these substances, there was no science back then. | ||
| There was no real understanding of what's going on in the world. | ||
| No real understanding of your body. | ||
| But there was this access to this stuff. | ||
| Hey, man. | ||
| See those things that are growing on that cow shit? | ||
| If you take that, you will meet God. | ||
| And then people did it and did meet God. | ||
| And they're like, holy shit, you're telling the truth. | ||
| Like, everybody wants... | ||
| Like, if you think about religions, if you think about the stories that people tell of the wise men and they experience the burning bush and God gives them the Ten Commandments and all these different things that happen, they're all sort of beautiful stories. | ||
| But your everyday life experience is so flat and fucking boring. | ||
| And then you do take these things. | ||
| You go, well, this is just going to be just like everything else. | ||
| Just flat and boring and bullshit. | ||
| And you take those mushrooms that you pluck off that cow shit and all of a sudden... | ||
| It's exposed to you in some grand way. | ||
| And then your whole life becomes about worshipping that. | ||
| I mean, that's... | ||
| McKenna always argued that all the ancient cattle-worshipping religions and cattle-worshipping civilizations and all these really old, old cultures, that that's what it was all about. | ||
| That these people had found out that cows grow mushrooms on their shit. | ||
| And that they weren't able to differentiate between... | ||
| They thought it was coming out of the cow's body. | ||
| The cow would shit it out and they didn't understand spores so they thought it was inside the cow and it would grow in the shed and that was your portal to God. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But you rarely hear that disgust. | ||
| I mean, you always hear it disgust in terms of like an agricultural resource, that that's why they worship the cows. | ||
| And you know, that just makes me think, it goes back to that, you know, and I'm somewhat of a very spiritual person and have a practice and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| But like, that just brings up the question to me is like, did we invent God as a result of those experiences? | ||
| Kind of like, this is a good Chris Ryan thing, if he was here, you know, kind of like in the hunter-gatherer kind of tribal... | ||
| You know, when we were just starting to learn to depict our experiences and talk about our experiences and creating like an oral history and sort of like the first kind of existential dilemmas and which many say came from, you know, psychedelic awareness from back in those days. | ||
| So is that what led to the creation of God? | ||
| To me, it doesn't make a difference being a believer of God. | ||
| I don't really care if it's real or myth or not. | ||
| It works for me. | ||
| It almost doesn't matter, right? | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| If it benefits you to believe in it, it benefits you. | ||
| People ask me that all the time. | ||
| Like, oh my God, you actually believe in flying monkeys and a blue guy playing a flute in the fields? | ||
| I've seen flying monkeys. | ||
| Those people don't know shit. | ||
| Those people talking shit. | ||
| I've seen jokers giving me the finger. | ||
| They're spinning in geometric patterns that were infinite. | ||
| I've seen a lot of shit that's way more ridiculous than a guy with a harp. | ||
| And not only have you seen it and have I seen it, but I can tell everybody listening how to see it. | ||
| Yeah, you can see it. | ||
| If you have the courage and the substances, you can see it. | ||
| Yes, you can. | ||
| And it works on everybody. | ||
| Except, I think DMT apparently doesn't work on everybody. | ||
| There's like one out of a thousand where it literally doesn't do shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, really? | |
| Jamie doesn't get high off of edibles. | ||
| This fucking freak over here. | ||
| You give Jamie a super powerful edible and barely does a goddamn thing to him. | ||
| Yeah, it took like 1,200 milligrams before a concert and drove home two hours later. | ||
| Jesus, man. | ||
| Jesus, because the edibles today and my... | ||
| He's a freak! | ||
| It's a goddamn hellion! | ||
| Working the controls over there. | ||
| I mean, for the first time in my life, I feel like kind of finally like an old hippie. | ||
| Like, oh my god, the edibles when I was a kid. | ||
| It's just not like that today, man. | ||
| No. | ||
| That shit's insane. | ||
| These fucking things. | ||
| This is Jombo Spray. | ||
| I took 10 hits of this before, maybe 12, I forget, before a Sam Harris podcast. | ||
| I was skiing downhill straight. | ||
| I wasn't crashing, but I was figuring out how to barely stay up the entire conversation. | ||
| I'm like, what in the fuck have I done? | ||
| I was so high. | ||
| It was probably as high as I've ever been in my life. | ||
| Was that the last Sam Harris podcast? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| The long one, yeah. | ||
| But Sam is a perfect guy to be that baked with, because all you have to do is just wind him up and say something, and he's so eloquent that he can just continue to go on these amazing, as long as you can just keep up with what he's saying, so you have good questions. | ||
| He is. | ||
| But I, and that's all due respect to Sam, and I do think he is smarter than me in terms of IQ, but I do think he uses that intelligence to kind of shuck and jive you a little bit. | ||
| Shuck and jive how so? | ||
| Well, I'm not like... | ||
| I mean, he's so smart and so articulate and obviously brilliant. | ||
| And I have mad respect for him, but I just don't think he's right. | ||
| About what? | ||
| Well, let's take Islam, for example. | ||
| I mean, there's just so many things, but I mean... | ||
| Islam and the right to prepare for violence and self-defense. | ||
| I don't really agree with that philosophy. | ||
| I don't agree with it because I think it just invites the consciousness into your head to where you are going to have to use it. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| The idea that self-defense and preparing for something sets up the stage to make something happen. | ||
| Different than, say, getting in the octagon and the MMA stuff. | ||
| Well, that's a competition thing. | ||
| That's a competition, yeah. | ||
| But you think maybe a guy walks around with a gun and a knife and a bulletproof vest. | ||
| I think it invites the consciousness into the atmosphere and it creates the energetic cycle of having to use that. | ||
| And then Sam kind of throws out those statistics that, well... | ||
| It's about the same odds as having a car crash as you are going to experience some kind of act of violence in your life where you will need to learn how to, I don't know, do something, self-defend yourself. | ||
| And I just, I don't... | ||
| Maybe you can throw out that math to me, and I think it depends on certain socioeconomic conditions, but I just don't think that's true. | ||
| I just don't want that consciousness in my life, and I don't think we need to dissolve that consciousness. | ||
| Well, I certainly think you're free to not have those thoughts in your head and to choose to take the path of love and acceptance and just passivity and move through this life, but... | ||
| The reality of human beings is, like, I've been, unfortunately, watching some videos online. | ||
| I watched this video today of a guy kicking some lady down the stairs for no reason. | ||
| He was behind her, and then they're looking out for her. | ||
| They're trying to find him in the UK. They've got photos of him. | ||
| But he just, she was walking in front of him, don't go on the stairs, and he walked up behind her, and just a random person kicked her down this flight of stairs, and she's horribly injured. | ||
| And I've seen a bunch of those and things do happen. | ||
| You can run into the wrong people. | ||
| Yes, they do. | ||
| They do. | ||
| Have you, you know, Steven Pinker, Pebbles, Angels. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, we are, and yes, those things happen and look around the world today and flip on the news and it's highly disturbing, but we are living in the most It was a peaceful time of our existence. | ||
| If you were a 30-year-old man in the year 1500, the highest cause of death was not disease or infection. | ||
| It was an act of violence. | ||
| You were going to be raping and pillaging, and you just had to defend your food supply for crying out loud. | ||
| And we have come to some kind of understanding, some kind of collective consciousness that has morphed itself together in the form of cooperation. | ||
| We have to share, and there's so many of us now, and it's getting more of us, the pen is getting smaller, we have to cooperate. | ||
| I agree with you, but what do you do with those guys that kick women down flights of stairs like that? | ||
| Um, you, I mean, I guess there is some sort of form of, um, you know, I guess punishment and we do have a, we live in a society where law and order is maybe a necessary evil. | ||
| And I, I, you know, and I've, Sure, there's some kind of, like, incarceration, but ultimately, you know, you gotta love them. | ||
| You gotta have compassion for them, and you gotta just teach them with compassion that their action was wrong. | ||
| Don't kick the lady down the stairs, man. | ||
| Here's why you shouldn't do that, and I love you, and it's gonna be okay. | ||
| People right now are up in arms and wanna kick your ass. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bring it. | |
| There's a bunch of people right now in Nebraska that are like, this fuckin' hippie! | ||
| Fuckin' Tim Leary's fuckin' hippie. | ||
| Fuckin' Leary's kid, this pussy! | ||
| Kick his ass! | ||
| Kick his ass, sea bass! | ||
| But, you know, on a different, you know... | ||
| It's a beautiful thought. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's Gandhi. | ||
| There's some people that you can run into, though, unfortunately. | ||
| You're better off... | ||
| It's like that expression about having a gun. | ||
| You're better off having it and not needing it than needing it and not having it. | ||
| Yeah, I don't agree. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| And I understand the argument. | ||
| I just don't agree. | ||
| Do you know about that guy who was... | ||
| Was it in... | ||
| I think it was in Minnesota. | ||
| He was running around stabbing people. | ||
| And then some guy who was a concealed carry permit holder pulled out his gun, shot the guy, and killed him. | ||
| And it was one of those things that people point to. | ||
| Like, hey, this guy was a competition shooter, concealed carry permit, and he saved people's lives because this guy was killing a bunch of people. | ||
| Yeah, but those case studies, compared to the case studies that go wrong, I don't know what they are. | ||
| I don't have the metrics, but I bet they're, what, 10 to 1, 20 to 1? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Sure, because it's way easier to get a gun, just to go and get a gun, than it is to become a competitive shooter. | ||
| Like, what that guy was, was the rarest of the rare. | ||
| Someone who's not just competent with a firearm, but an expert level. | ||
| Here he is. | ||
| Man who shot Crossroads Mall terrorists is USPSA competitor, three-gun shooter. | ||
| Yeah, so this guy is just a badass gun carrier. | ||
| And that's fine, but that is the rarest exception. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I'm positive of it. | ||
| Right, but it is real, right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's real. | ||
| It can happen. | ||
| So he was right. | ||
| So his thought was one day if I am carrying a gun, I'll be able to save people's lives. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| And protect myself. | ||
| Okay, I get that. | ||
| But the hundreds of others that go along that are just somehow there's so many loopholes in the system of crazy people who get guns and go to Sandy Hook. | ||
| Well, that's a terrible example. | ||
| It's not worth it. | ||
| And those are illegally acquired guns. | ||
| That's a gun that was acquired by a person who was mentally ill and his parents didn't protect the guns. | ||
| Yeah, that's a different story, but yeah, you're right. | ||
| I just think that the risk versus reward, it's just far too unbalanced. | ||
| Well, it's definitely... | ||
| The ability to just shoot someone and kill someone by pulling that little tiny muscle on your finger is kind of crazy. | ||
| I mean, the amount of power that you have in doing so... | ||
| It's a glitch in the matrix. | ||
| I mean, I hate using matrix analogies, but it is. | ||
| It's a glitch in the matrix, man. | ||
| And it just plays into kind of every fallacy of the human condition, you know? | ||
| And it's like, how did we let that happen? | ||
| How did we make it so easy to take someone else's life? | ||
| So if I make Zach Leary the President of the United States, does Zach Leary say no more military? | ||
| Does Zach Leary say police officers can't have guns, we all need love, everybody gets their guns taken away? | ||
| How do you deal with everything? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, and it's not something that you can just do. | ||
| Yeah, it's not something you can just do overnight. | ||
| I'm not naive enough or stoned enough or meditate enough to think that that is- Maybe we should get high. | ||
| I mean, rethink it. | ||
| Think about it in a different way. | ||
| And there are already 300 million guns in America. | ||
| I think there's more. | ||
| I think there are more guns in America than there are human beings. | ||
| And here's what's crazy. | ||
| It's not like we're like, well, we're good. | ||
| No, we're fucking making guns like crazy. | ||
| People are, as we're sitting here, they're chonk chonk chonk chonk chonk. | ||
| Machines are churning out guns. | ||
| But yes, exactly. | ||
| Who becomes president? | ||
| I know it's highly unpopular and people will get pissed at me, but we stop the sale of all unless you have very specific kind of UK style hunting exceptions. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| Do you eat meat? | ||
| I do. | ||
| You do? | ||
| I do. | ||
| I didn't for a while, but I do again. | ||
| Why'd you start again? | ||
| Um, I got sick, um, not from not eating meat. | ||
| I just, um, I had this terrible flu and it was just really, really sick and just like, you know, not a cold. | ||
| I mean, it was like, uh, terrible flu. | ||
| And all I could think about was I wanted a turkey sandwich. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| Fuck turkeys, huh? | ||
| And I was like, fuck it. | ||
| And I had a turkey sandwich and I felt better and I never went back. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Eat everything? | ||
| Burgers? | ||
| Everything? | ||
| The whole deal? | ||
| Yeah, I kind of do. | ||
| Do you eat factory farmed food? | ||
| I really, really, really, really try not to. | ||
| But you do? | ||
| I do. | ||
| I mean, I can't say that I don't, but I don't, I mean, in the most dire emergency. | ||
| I give you super hungry? | ||
| If I'm super hungry, you know where I do? | ||
| You sound like you're dying, right? | ||
| You know where I do? | ||
| It's kind of a loose way in the airport. | ||
| Ah, the goddamn airport. | ||
| Yeah, I'm in the airport and I'm just like, whatever. | ||
| I always get to the airport way too early because I just like being in the airport early. | ||
| I like to be in that, it's like a neutral zone between there and here. | ||
| I love hanging out in the airport. | ||
| And I get there, I'm hungry, and I'm just, I give in. | ||
| I'm like, fuck, man. | ||
| I used to fuck up at the airport all the time with blueberry muffins and chocolate croissants. | ||
| That was my shit. | ||
| Yeah, I'm a sucker for the Egg McMuffin. | ||
| Those are good too. | ||
| Sadly. | ||
| Those are good. | ||
| They taste good. | ||
| It's not the worst thing in the world for you, quite honestly. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| Except for the ham. | ||
| It's definitely factory farm. | ||
| Yeah, it's not the worst thing in the world for you, but McDonald's is the devil. | ||
| But what am I going to do? | ||
| I do the best I can. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| Yeah, it's a weird world. | ||
| Well, a lot of vegans would disagree with that. | ||
| They would say, well, you're definitely not doing the best you can if you're out there eating egg muffins. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That's not the best you can. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Oh, God, no. | ||
| Vegans and I argue a lot. | ||
| Do they? | ||
| Do you? | ||
| Yeah, I argue with vegans a lot. | ||
| What do you argue about? | ||
| On the social media. | ||
| Well, and it's weird because kind of philosophically, I'm on their side. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| Philosophically, but not in practice. | ||
| I'm not quite ready for that. | ||
| I am where I am. | ||
| But what I argue with them about is, and it's a constant social media argument, is that we are omnivores. | ||
| We are. | ||
| Yeah, we definitely are omnivores. | ||
| We eat what's around us. | ||
| We always have. | ||
| There's a way that you can eat cruelty-free meat, but there's not a way where you could have cruelty-free mass consumption. | ||
| The real problem is cities. | ||
| Unless you have a co-op where you guys are growing your own eggs. | ||
| What was the second part? | ||
| Sorry, I didn't understand. | ||
| You can eat cruelty-free, but you can't what? | ||
| In a mass consumption environment, like 7 million people living in Manhattan. | ||
| Good luck getting cruelty-free meat to all 7 million people inside that area. | ||
| You have to bring it. | ||
| What we've done... | ||
| Over the last 150 years is move completely away from agriculture in these cities and drive things in in trucks. | ||
| Have you ever seen some of the old models of the way when they were planting cities like in the early 1800s when they were designing New York and a couple other cities? | ||
| They had set up areas for agriculture, areas for livestock, and they had them in cities. | ||
| And so they didn't have this notion that we have now that everything would be driven in in trucks because they didn't have trucks. | ||
| So when they had cities in the 1700s and later, there was no way to get all that food to millions and millions of people. | ||
| So they literally had to grow stuff in cities, which is a way better way to do it. | ||
| Yeah, and Michael Pollan, if you've read any of his stuff, he's great. | ||
| He's also getting into psychedelics now, which is pretty cool. | ||
| Just recently? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| He's doing some really interesting research. | ||
| Who's a wonderful person who popped him into the Matrix? | ||
| I don't know, but I'm in touch with him and going to do a podcast with him. | ||
| Oh, that's great. | ||
| I'll figure it out. | ||
| But, yeah, I mean, his whole kind of, you know, in The Omnivore's Dilemma and some of those other books, like the biggest problem with our food supply is that we have lost our connection to how food got there up until 100, maybe 120, at the turn of the century, the 19th and the 20th century. | ||
| Everybody had a relationship with their food. | ||
| They knew you went to the produce person. | ||
| It didn't come on a shelf in a box. | ||
| You knew where it was sourced. | ||
| And if you ate meat, you saw the bloodiness and you just saw, even if you didn't kill it and slaughter it and butcher it, you knew. | ||
| You know, it wasn't this pre-packaged thing that just comes from magic, the bacon fairy, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's our problem, right? | ||
| Food comes from a shelf. | ||
| Nobody understands. | ||
| I think there's a giant disconnect. | ||
| And it's so many people. | ||
| The problem is, like, it used to be that a few people were disconnected and most people were connected. | ||
| And now it's completely turned on its head. | ||
| And when you have 20 million people in Los Angeles, and what percentage of the 20 million people in Los Angeles acquire their own food from either growing plants or hunting their food? | ||
| Like no one. | ||
| Almost none. | ||
| Like 0.111, whatever. | ||
| It's kind of crazy when you consider that it's an essential part of being a person is consuming food. | ||
| There's also this beautiful feeling that you get, and vegans have this feeling as well, when you grow your own food. | ||
| And you grow food in a garden, and you pick your salad, and you cut up your cucumbers. | ||
| This all came from the ground right out there. | ||
| Really interesting article that was written by a vegan that was essentially saying there are no vegetarians and that the only way is like it is actually impossible to be a vegetarian. | ||
| Not meaning that it's impossible for you to live and eat vegetables, but those vegetables need dead animals in order to be alive and that animals are consumed by plants and that is what fertilizer is all about and whether or not it's... | ||
| I thought fertilizer was just the poop. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| A lot of it is actual decaying matter, in order to be healthy in particular. | ||
| What we're doing most of it, you know about Fritz Haber? | ||
| Do you know what the Haber method is? | ||
| I don't, no. | ||
| During World War I, there was this German scientist named Fritz Haber, and he came up with the Haber method of extracting nitrogen from the air. | ||
| Most people think of the air as being oxygen, right? | ||
| But air is 78%, I think, nitrogen. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you can extract that nitrogen from the air and use it as fertilizer. | ||
| And so, because of Fritz Haber, they have been able to extract this nitrogen and use it to fertilize plants. | ||
| Because before, they'd use like emulsified fish and, you know, fish was like a big one, like dead fish and fish bones and things along those lines. | ||
| Because that is, when it decays and breaks down, that is the food for these plants. | ||
| Okay, so what would a vegan... | ||
| Why would the vegans oppose this in the sense that like... | ||
| I don't think they're opposing it. | ||
| They're not? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| No, I think it's just what he wrote it. | ||
| The guy who wrote it was a vegan. | ||
| But essentially he was saying that there's this massive cycle of life and even pointed to Michael Pollan's work because Pollan has written about the emerging science of sentient plant life. | ||
| And that he believes that what's going on with plants is very similar to what's going on with, like, maybe our understanding of a lot of different things. | ||
| It's like as our understanding expands, we have to sort of reclassify what we think those things are. | ||
| Like, for the longest time, they thought that fish couldn't feel pain. | ||
| And that was, oh, don't worry about it. | ||
| Fish can't feel pain. | ||
| And now they're saying, well... | ||
| We're pretty sure they can. | ||
| We have a different understanding of what pain is to them. | ||
| It might be a different sensation, but there's very clearly some alarms that are going off. | ||
| There's very clearly some sort of a reaction. | ||
| That same can be pointed out for plants. | ||
| Like plants, not only do they have a reaction, but plants, when you play the sound of caterpillars chewing leaves, certain plants, like the acacia tree, has the ability, when it hears Leaves being chewed. | ||
| It changes the taste of the leaves. | ||
| It extracts some sort of a chemical. | ||
| And that chemical does something to the taste of the plants that makes them so inedible that some animals have starved to death because upwind, There were animals that were chewing plants. | ||
| That sound came downwind through either smell or some sort of a communication thing that's going on with the mycelium and with the root structure. | ||
| And the plants downwind had changed their taste and the animals wouldn't eat them anymore and they were starving. | ||
| Wow, that's far out, man. | ||
| That just kind of makes me think like what's going to be the next sort of like We have to make peace with that everything needs everything else in order to make it. | ||
| Well, I think it's like a suffering and a respect thing, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then you also have to consider if plants are sentient life forms, how fucked up is it to have these gigantic, large-scale agricultural setups where you are completely unnaturally changing the landscape in order to grow corn or in order to grow... | ||
| Lettuce or strawberries like that is not normal like it's not normal to have 7,000 acres of corn right like in just corn all in a neat row that you could see from space and it's and it's destroying the soil too yeah it's completely destroying the soil but like with this idea of like having you said respect And pain, | ||
| kind of getting into that idea, like, do you think, and my opinion is results may vary and I'm not so sure, but if everybody had the data and saw the data about factory farming, for instance, that they would change and thus act accordingly and not eat that shit anymore? | ||
| Definitely not everybody. | ||
| Some people don't give a fuck. | ||
| I think some people just don't give a fuck. | ||
| And those Gordon Gekko type dudes, the slick back hair, they're like, fuck it, I'm here to win. | ||
| Give me that burger. | ||
| Well, I mean, I've thought about myself. | ||
| I mean, I've seen every one of those movies. | ||
| I've read every book, you know. | ||
| It didn't work. | ||
| I make my muffin from time to time, and I'm like, what is wrong with me? | ||
| Like, is there something? | ||
| Am I a sociopath? | ||
|
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What's this easy to do? | |
| What is that? | ||
| Because it's easy to do. | ||
| If somebody said, oh, you're hungry? | ||
| Why don't you shoot that pig in the head and cut off a leg and throw it on the smoker? | ||
| Well, then you would have a real issue. | ||
| You'd be like, I don't want to do that. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Well, why don't you pull those beats out of the ground? | ||
| Well, if you put on these headphones, you can hear the beats scream for their parents. | ||
| Like, oh, fuck. | ||
| Oh, fuck. | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't think anybody knows. | ||
| There's just something about plausible deniability that's kind of hardwired into us in all aspects of our life, not just food, but war and politics and money and greed and oil and everything that's what it takes to get oil to this damn country and everything that goes on to fill up our car. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Plausible deniability is definitely a way to look at it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The extreme ability to detach ourselves from the consequences of our actions, you know, because it's convenient in the moment. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And convenient in the moment to just buy that quarter pound or cheese, not think about it that it's a ground animal burger. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, it's only going to cost me two bucks. | ||
| Yeah, and you get it like that, which is kind of crazy. | ||
| I mean, it really is amazing. | ||
| If it wasn't connected to such horrific crimes against nature, it's amazing. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| That you could just go. | ||
| I mean, what an incredible system they've developed. | ||
| And outside of food, just what, you know, the economic factors for how convenience equals pleasure equals, like, an economic value that is usually low, how that has all sort of worked together to kind of create this system that we're living in now. | ||
| Again, this plausible deniability kind of hardwired thing to ignore it. | ||
| Walmart's a great example. | ||
| I mean, you know, there's sort of this disenfranchised middle of the country, you know, and they did lose their jobs, and that area of the country is decimated. | ||
| But they all shop at Walmart. | ||
| And that's part of what the problem is. | ||
| But it's cheap. | ||
| It's convenient. | ||
| You're still going. | ||
| And it's like, well, what's it going to be? | ||
| Pick a horse. | ||
|
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It's hard. | |
| What's interesting is that this is all really recent, right? | ||
| I mean, this is all from the Industrial Revolution on. | ||
| This is all this last couple of hundred years of civilization where we've sort of entered into this wage existence, you know, where people are... | ||
| Living this way and buying this horrible fucking factory produced food. | ||
| And even more recent, I mean, yes, it all can be traced back to post-industrial revolution stuff, but even just like the massive hyper-consumerism, that's only really taken off since the mid-90s. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a cool little movie out called The Minimalists. | ||
| I mean, after a while, I kind of, you know, I got it and I didn't finish the whole thing. | ||
| But the first hour is fascinating. | ||
| It's about these guys. | ||
| They wrote a book called The Minimalists and about, you know, they were all kind of corporate ladder kind of American successful guys and just consuming, consuming, buying shit, buying shit, buying shit. | ||
| And all of a sudden, they just kind of had the kind of big kind of cliched awakening, like, oh, my God, maybe I don't need all this shit. | ||
| But the data that they present from what's happened in the mid-90s on, sort of as a result of the internet boom with instant gratification, one-click shopping, and disassociation of just the accumulation of stuff. | ||
| And we live in bigger houses now than we've ever lived, square footage-wise. | ||
| They've never been so big before. | ||
| And yet, you know, they've put all these heat maps on. | ||
| They did the study where they put heat maps on these homes to see where people were living in the homes, hanging out. | ||
| And like the average family in like their huge kind of McMansion or something only uses like 40% of the house. | ||
| Yeah, that makes sense. | ||
| And also has a self-storage unit to go with it somewhere else. | ||
| You know, it's just this endless kind of relationship we have with it. | ||
| I watched Hoarders the other night. | ||
| Oh, my. | ||
| And there was some dude who bought two houses next to his house because he had so much shit that he had to move the shit to other houses. | ||
| It was fucking crazy. | ||
| Hoarders is gnarly. | ||
| But this is a weird hoarder because it was a guy who had some money. | ||
| Yeah, he bought two houses. | ||
| Yeah, it wasn't like a hoarder like some poor person that was going to yard sales and buying used clothes and then putting them in bags in their house and stacking them up to the ceiling with newspapers and stuff. | ||
| This was a guy who had all these collectibles, and he was a neurosurgeon, which is really, really interesting. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Yeah, and he lives in Vegas, and he wanted to be known for his collection. | ||
| He had crazy stuff. | ||
| Yeah, what's he into? | ||
| He had a lot of space memorabilia. | ||
| He had a scale model of one of the Challengers, or one of the space shuttles rather. | ||
| He had one of the test lunar modules that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong apparently had used in testing and in preparation for the Apollo missions. | ||
| He had a bunch of crazy shit all over his house. | ||
| Three houses fill this stuff, the courtyards and all around his pool was stacked up with shit. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| That's so insane. | ||
| It's just, you know, escapism. | ||
| This need to sort of like pacify our existence here. | ||
| I just, you know, as we kind of evolve and kind of grow into the future, it just seems like so few people can truly... | ||
| Be comfortable in their own skin and just be and be present and be comfortable and content, contentness. | ||
| We're constantly inventing new ways to escape, to disassociate, to get out of the moment. | ||
| What do you think that is? | ||
| What do you think is so compelling to us about the constant accumulation of material possessions? | ||
| This whole greed is good sort of mentality and moving up the corporate ladder without any sort of appreciation or acceptance in the fact that we're these finite life forms clinging to a spinning orb hurling through infinity. | ||
| All those inevitable and inescapable realities I mean, we look at them every day. | ||
| We look up. | ||
| I mean, that is undeniable that you are looking up as you leave your house and get to your car. | ||
| You have infinity above your head. | ||
| And you don't look at it. | ||
| I mean, what's going on with us? | ||
| I think... | ||
| We're born, this thing that we've kind of created, this construct that we call society, we're automatically born into a bad hand. | ||
| And I think it's completely bogus. | ||
| You're dealt a bad hand at birth. | ||
| It doesn't even matter if you're born into privilege. | ||
| I mean, sure, that's great if you're born into privilege versus the slums of Mumbai. | ||
| That's definitely better. | ||
| Yeah, that's definitely better. | ||
| I mean, of course, I'm not gonna... | ||
| If you're balling in Beverly Hills, that's way better than Liberia. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, or Syria. | ||
| You got a Bentley convertible? | ||
| Dude, you're doing way better than someone in Zaire with no feet. | ||
| No question. | ||
| But, like, you know, you're dealt this bad hand of, like, you know, being alive is hard. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, you're born, you're going to go into this building from ages, what, when do you go to school? | ||
| Ages four? | ||
| Is that about right? | ||
| Some people go to preschool at four, kindergarten is five, first grade six. | ||
| From four to 18, you're going to go into this big cement building to be taught these certain subjects in this certain order, and then you're going to leave that cement building and go into another one that's even more expensive. | ||
| And then you're going to leave that and you're going to get some kind of employment thing, which exists pretty much from nine to five for most people, unless you're fortunate or clever enough to kind of exist outside of that framework and create your own reality. | ||
| But most people are going to work some kind of structured life. | ||
| And I just, I think it's hard. | ||
| I think it's just hard to be alive. | ||
| It definitely is. | ||
| Well, it's not harder than it's ever been. | ||
| It's easier than it's ever been, right? | ||
| I mean, it's more safe than it's ever been. | ||
| Safer, more access to information than ever before. | ||
| Yes, but you know why I think it is, in some aspects, it's harder? | ||
| Because, well, yeah, I don't know if that's true, because back in the olden times, you did have to, you know, kind of compete against each other for survival. | ||
| But I think it could be argued that it's harder because this constant sort of, you know, onslaught of media and comparing ourselves to each other and to feel insecure if you don't look like that, if you don't look like this, if you don't have that, something's wrong with you if you can't afford to buy that. | ||
| You're not doing well. | ||
| You're fucking up, man, if you can't afford to buy that. | ||
| Or if you don't look like that, oh my God, I'm sorry. | ||
| Nobody's ever going to want to fuck you. | ||
| That's really sad. | ||
| No one's going to want to fuck you if you don't have the stuff. | ||
| That's awful. | ||
| You have to have all the stuff. | ||
| You've got to have all the stuff. | ||
| And it's a terrible thing to say, to teach our children, you know? | ||
| So I think it's hard to be alive. | ||
| It is in a sense. | ||
| It's very tricky. | ||
| And it's also, I think, we are being raised by babies. | ||
| I really do think that. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Well, I have children and I kind of get it now in a sense that before I had children, I used to think of people as being sort of static. | ||
| Obviously, I was younger. | ||
| Especially when you're really young, when you're like 20 or something like that, you don't really... | ||
| Take into consideration that the people around you used to be your age. | ||
| You kind of know it in an abstract sort of a sense. | ||
| But once you actually have a baby, and then like five years later the baby's talking to you and you're having conversations, you're like, oh, you're fucking learning shit now. | ||
| And then ten years later the baby's in high school and you're like, oh, Jesus Christ, you're almost a man. | ||
| And then you realize that, oh, we're all babies who had babies. | ||
| And you raise those babies and then they become adults and have babies of their own. | ||
| But there are no grown-ups. | ||
| It's bullshit. | ||
| It doesn't exist. | ||
| Like when you're a kid and you're sad, you go, oh, one day I'm going to be a grown-up and all this is going to make sense. | ||
| But that day never comes. | ||
| You get older, but you're a baby still. | ||
| You're just an old baby. | ||
| You're an old baby with a car and fucking credit card debt. | ||
| And then you have a baby, and then that baby grows up. | ||
| Well, I'm smarter than my dad. | ||
| He's a fucking idiot. | ||
| And it's like, you know, my dad didn't know shit. | ||
| He didn't even have the internet. | ||
| It's so funny. | ||
| And, you know, I think that's, and I'm not the first to say it, but that's such a huge thing with Trump. | ||
| He acts like a seven-year-old. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like, what does a seven-year-old do? | ||
| Like, you get your mug, Rogan. | ||
| You know, you write your name all over fucking everything. | ||
| That's so true! | ||
|
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I know. | |
| That's so true. | ||
| He puts his fucking name on everything. | ||
| He's probably got it on his socks and his underwear on the band. | ||
| It probably says Trump. | ||
| Oh my God, right. | ||
| Name my Trump underwear. | ||
| Have you ever stayed at a Trump hotel? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, I did in New York, and you know the toilet paper, like the little sticker they put on? | ||
| It's in a Trump insignia, but on the damn toilet paper. | ||
| Right, but it is called the Trump Hotel. | ||
| I mean, if you go to the Renaissance, it says Renaissance on the underwear too. | ||
| But it's much more ironic, though, with the Trump thing. | ||
| It's weird because it's a guy's name who's alive and now happens to be president. | ||
| Well, and he says it's a symbol of quality around the world or whatever that you see that. | ||
| Trump card. | ||
| Trump card. | ||
| But I think it's bullshit. | ||
| I think he's just a seven-year-old who likes to write his name on all his shit. | ||
| Well, the evidence is in how he tweets to people, you know, and he gets mad and tweets about shit and responds to people and argues with people. | ||
| You tweet on him? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I hardly tweeted anybody. | ||
| You don't get into that shit? | ||
| I definitely don't get into those kind of tweet battles on the internet, but I just think... | ||
| As I've gotten older and had some good experiences and bad experiences online Yeah, I've realized that you can like you were talking about like you go out and you seek Bad things if you have this in your mind that you're gonna go out and you're gonna be attacked So I'm gonna wear a gun I'm gonna have a knife and I'm gonna wear a bulletproof vest all these different things. | ||
| Yep You can also Seek negative interaction online you can go look for it when you find it you could react to it and that begets more of it and I think that you're far better off just Choosing the people that you interact with in actual real life and then when I look at things online I'm just observing I very rarely interact if I do it's a very friendly and I limit myself almost entirely to friendly interactions cool and anything that's negative I just You stay | ||
| away? | ||
| It's not worth it. | ||
| There's nothing to be gained. | ||
| If you get in an insult war with somebody and you make them feel bad, what do you get out of that? | ||
| Unless it's funny, what do you get out of that? | ||
| Unless it's tongue-in-cheek and everybody's having a good time? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And also, what you can do in 140 characters is absolutely ridiculous. | ||
|
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Ridiculous. | |
| It's insane. | ||
| You can't get into a meaningful, thoughtful debate in 140 characters. | ||
| No, but people seek it out. | ||
| They seek these debates out, and they ask you, like, what they think are hard-hitting questions. | ||
| Like, go fuck yourself. | ||
| Get involved in this 140-character thing. | ||
| It's like, it's silly. | ||
| The reason I ask is, you know, Duncan's starting to kind of tweet at Trump a little bit. | ||
| Does he? | ||
| What does he say? | ||
| Just kind of wacky shit, like, tweets at him. | ||
| I'm going to be the minister of, you know, whatever. | ||
| We've got to find some of them. | ||
| They're kind of funny. | ||
| Because I think Trump Sometimes he does read his tweets. | ||
| Oh, he reads his tweets. | ||
| I think he's reading his tweets. | ||
| He reads his tweets. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He gets in there. | ||
| I guarantee you he gets in there. | ||
| You ever see the debate that he had back and forth with Jon Stewart? | ||
| Oh, yeah, of course. | ||
| I mean, that was fucking hilarious. | ||
| Jon Stewart has put it into his act now. | ||
| That's so funny. | ||
| He tweets him at 1.30 in the morning, little Jon Stewart is a pussy and would be hopeless in a debate with me. | ||
| Like, can you imagine that he actually did that? | ||
| This is the guy that's the president now. | ||
| So great. | ||
| But yeah, but I mean, it says so much about the personality of someone. | ||
| And I don't get in Twitter wars because I don't really tweet all that much, but I get in Facebook wars. | ||
|
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Do you? | |
| You get in Facebook wars? | ||
| I do, and I'm just horribly impulsive about it. | ||
| Horribly impulsive to a fault. | ||
| Like what kind of stuff do you get involved? | ||
| You were saying you have issues with vegans. | ||
| Is that where you get into it? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's some vegan stuff. | ||
| I mean, a lot of politics stuff. | ||
| I mean, over the election cycle and I'm, you know, a little quick on the trigger to like, because, you know, with online and social media, it's just like you push a button and like, you know, calling people morons and stuff, although just far too quickly before taking a breath, stepping back and going, Maybe I shouldn't call you a moron. | ||
| That's probably not the best debate tactic. | ||
| Well, there's no benefit in it. | ||
| There's no benefit. | ||
| Even if you make them feel bad that they're a moron and you get your rocks off in some way. | ||
| And I've done it. | ||
| I absolutely have done it in the past. | ||
| But I try very hard not to engage in that kind of thinking anymore because I don't think... | ||
| All it does... | ||
| It's not going to help. | ||
| It also... | ||
| When you get into conflicts with people, negative conflicts create These centers of attention and those conflicts become these centers of attention and ultimately nothing happens in them. | ||
| They just sort of distract you like a little vortex of bullshit. | ||
| And I think and as I've gone older and started analyzing my own life and happiness and productivity and when I'm at my most creative, Is when I'm not engaging in any of that. | ||
| Like the least I am involved in the negativity and conflicts and debates and going back and forth and trying to make people feel bad and all that stupid shit that people get wrapped up in, you fucking idiot, you know, all that kind of stupid stuff. | ||
| The more, the least I do that, the more it frees up my resources and it frees up my mind. | ||
| And I don't have this like, I think anytime you get in conflict, Conflict with someone it creates like this negative center there's like like this this Vortex it's like weird area in your mind in your consciousness where that conflict exists It's on a shelf just stinking up the joint and I think the least amount of those that you have in your consciousness in your library of Memories the better off you are Yeah, | ||
| I tend to agree with that, and I tend to feel that, like, you know, especially, and it's for somebody of kind of my cloth, it's hyper hypocritical to, you know, attack somebody online, you know, over their political beliefs, for sure, you know, being a spiritual person. | ||
| But, you know, at the same time, like, especially now within the last year, this is a highly charged debate cycle, and I was, you know, convinced that, you know, how... | ||
| How could a cognitively adept human being justify voting for Donald Trump? | ||
| It just didn't make sense to me. | ||
| Well, how could one justify voting for Hillary, either? | ||
| Oh, I can make that. | ||
| Can you? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Don't you think that there's a lot of issues involved with Hillary Clinton? | ||
| Hillary said in the WikiLeaks documents that she was against marijuana legalization in every sense of the word. | ||
| I'm not... | ||
| The Clinton Foundation. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of things you could bring up. | ||
| I'm not a Clinton flag-waving kind of guy, but comparing the two. | ||
| To me, Hillary Clinton was just status quo. | ||
| Right, but isn't the status quo fucked up? | ||
| Yes, but the status quo is better than negative. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is going to be negative progress. | ||
| This is negative. | ||
| How certain are you that it's going to be negative progress? | ||
| Absolutely certain. | ||
| I mean, the Supreme Court alone. | ||
| I mean, you know, Ginsburg made the fatal flaw of not retiring sooner. | ||
| So, I mean, she's, what, 180 years old? | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| There's already one vacancy there. | ||
| What if she's on her vitamins, man? | ||
| Just hang in there. | ||
| She's not going to make it. | ||
| And, you know, so Trump in one term could presumably have three appointees. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that is negative progress. | ||
| But you know that he was a Democrat for almost all his life. | ||
| I know, but he's not now, man. | ||
| I mean, look, Steve Bannon and the CEO of Exxon, the CEO of Carl's Jr., Ben Carson being the HUD guy. | ||
| I mean, it's just absolute insanity. | ||
| Yeah, why didn't he make Ben Carson the attorney general, or rather the surgeon general? | ||
| I mean, why wouldn't he have him involved in something medical? | ||
| I mean, he's a very talented neurosurgeon. | ||
| Because he was the African-American guy who grew up on the projects, man, so he should run HUD. That was the argument. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah, that was it. | ||
| Seems like he knows more about medicine, right? | ||
| That guy's a doctor. | ||
| He's a fucking medical expert. | ||
| And he's actually good at that. | ||
| Yeah, he's fucking amazing at it. | ||
| I mean, he's like one of the top neurosurgeons in the world. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So he grew up from the projects. | ||
| African-American guy grew up out of there. | ||
| So he must know about housing and urban development. | ||
| So it's just complete insanity to me. | ||
| And it is taking two, three steps backwards. | ||
| The only silver lining that you can weave from it. | ||
| And it is... | ||
| You know, it's a good thing to weave is that there is kind of a collective consolidation of solidarity, kind of like, hey, you know, we need to rise up, get our shit together, figure out how to articulate the opposite vision, and perhaps defeat this later on down the line. | ||
| And that's cool. | ||
| People are waking up and there's great conversations happening. | ||
| Well, I think there's an ebb and flow that always exists in cultures. | ||
| You know, there's a push left and a push right, and we try this for eight years, and then we go that way for eight years, and some of it's productive and some of it's very negative. | ||
| But even the negative, ultimately, it fosters resistance, and that resistance is oftentimes positive. | ||
| And even in resistance, there's a lot of understanding the consequences of negativity that maybe wasn't really Yes it was. | ||
| And then, of course, he's been one of the worst people in terms of freedom of press, in terms of whistleblowers. | ||
| He's been one of the worst administrations ever. | ||
| Guantanamo never closed. | ||
| Drones, yeah. | ||
| Drones? | ||
| The drone wars? | ||
| Yeah, all this stuff. | ||
| There's absolutely no doubt about it. | ||
| But, you know, with sort of, you know, the ebbs and flows of progress versus no progress, you know. | ||
| And in this instance, in this context, it's just how many people are going to get hurt as a result of it. | ||
| That's like... | ||
| That's what I don't like. | ||
| That's why it's not worth it. | ||
| The lack of perspective that I think we have collectively as a culture, what you were talking about, about these people living their lives solely intent on acquiring material possessions and status and all the nonsense that goes with it. | ||
| How much of that can be attributed to the relative lack of exposure to psychedelics collectively that we have? | ||
| If you looked at If you looked at the entire 300 million people, you know how they do that red map and you see how many people are Republicans and how many people are Democrats, and it looks like one of the Avatar people got hit by a train. | ||
| That's what it looks like, right? | ||
| They got splattered. | ||
| But when you look at that, if you had a similar map, In terms of like how many people have had what I would consider a breakthrough psychedelic experience. | ||
| I know some people that have done mushrooms and they did a little bit and they felt good and no big deal. | ||
| And I had done quite a few things before my first real DMT trip. | ||
| And the first real DMT trip was like, okay, everything else is bullshit. | ||
| Like, this is so awesome and so mind-blowing, and just knowing that that's a real place that anyone can get to, relatively easy. | ||
| Not only that, this is not a precious material. | ||
| This is a material that exists in thousands of different plants all over you, everywhere you go. | ||
| Drive down the street, you'll find a fucking hundred different kinds of plants that have DMT in it. | ||
| So, the DMT experience, to me, was a I would say, like, I'm really like two different people. | ||
| I'm the pre-DMT person and the post-DMT person. | ||
| I mean, I'm real similar. | ||
| I talk the same. | ||
| But the person, the experiences, they're so vastly different that I was exposed to a whole new, infinite Area of the spectrum that I didn't know existed before. | ||
| I existed in this very small area. | ||
| I thought there was birth and death and love and sex and beer and fucking movies and all the other things you enjoyed. | ||
| I didn't even know that was real. | ||
| How many people out there are like that? | ||
| I mean, is there a million of us? | ||
| I mean, is there even... | ||
| Is there even 2 million? | ||
| I mean, how many people out of the 300 and whatever million people in this country have had breakthrough psychedelic experiences? | ||
| How many people did they say did LSD in the 60s? | ||
| It's a good question. | ||
| It changed the culture. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know what the number is, but I mean... | ||
| Too bad your dad's not around. | ||
| You can probably tell us. | ||
| You can probably tell us, yeah. | ||
| He was probably responsible for 40 or 50% of it, right? | ||
| Right, but what was the number? | ||
| It was, yeah, and this is, to me, this is a fascinating case study for us to look at, is, you know, in the 60s, you know, millions and millions and millions of people did some kind of psychedelic, right? | ||
| And if they didn't do a psychedelic, at least they, you know, smoked grass and put on certain peppers, at the very least. | ||
| And, yeah, great things were born out of that. | ||
| I mean, an argument could be made that if the 60s didn't happen and flourish and become what it became, that you and I wouldn't be sitting here right now being able to talk about what we're talking about. | ||
| I think that's a very good argument. | ||
| I think, yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But here we are, 2016, and Donald Trump is elected president. | ||
| So last time we had a global kind of consciousness shift that was massive and really shook us all up, I don't know, not enough happened. | ||
| So it's like, what's it going to take next time? | ||
| Okay, so let's just say, let's get 10% of the country to turn on. | ||
| And for me, I'm a little bit more elastic with it, and I think that can also be, you know, meditation. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Or floatation tanks. | ||
| Kundalini. | ||
| Floatation tanks. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not so hungry. | ||
| Holotropic breathing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whatever. | |
| The method isn't as important to me anymore. | ||
| But like, say, get 10 to 20 percent. | ||
| Of the people to do that, three, six million people, whatever it is, you know, then, you know, what is it going to change? | ||
| How are we going to integrate? | ||
| And we were talking about this a couple hours ago. | ||
| It's like the integration part. | ||
| And I think perhaps that's what we lost in the 60s. | ||
| We were so hung up on the veil getting pierced. | ||
| And my dad's, one of the best quotes is, in order to understand the 60s, you must understand the 50s. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| What a change. | ||
| I mean, the 50s were just, you know, very lock and step and white picket fence, 2.5 children, car, you know, soon tie, hair short, like there's no variation. | ||
| And we burst that bubble. | ||
| But, you know, the integration level, it just wasn't, it wasn't meaty enough. | ||
| You know, we still, we elected Richard Nixon in 1968. I mean, granted, Robert Kennedy was shot, but still, you know, and here we are 50 years later, and look what we're doing. | ||
| So, you know, it is great to turn on, and I love people turning on, and I think it's fantastic, and it's a great thing to talk about, like you are, and it's, you know, you have a huge megaphone in getting people to do that, but what are they going to do different? | ||
| That's what I'm more concerned with. | ||
| They're going to consider their life in a different way. | ||
| And I think that in many people, maybe not in all of us, but in many people, that changes the direction of The path that you're on, it changes the way you communicate with people, changes your understanding of each other and your understanding of the connections that we have with each other. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think there's a giant chunk of people that are what you would call influencers. | ||
| In this country, whether it's politicians or CEOs of large corporations. | ||
| Podcasters. | ||
| Well, I mean, I was going to say people that haven't had this experience. | ||
| Okay, yeah. | ||
| These influencers that live in this very flat plane of existence of acquiring material possessions, getting your dick sucked, doing a line of coke, driving in your limo, all the different shit that a lot of people look forward to that ultimately might not really be important. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or important, it might feel important in the moment, you know, in this ego gratification sort of a way, but without that ego obliterating experience to put it all into perspective, you might not understand that that state of mind is even achievable. | ||
| The undeniable ego-shattering experience of a severe mushroom trip or a DMT trip or anything along those lines is so beneficial in that it gives you that momentary break from the ego and from the momentum of the race that you might not really want to be in. | ||
| There's a lot of people that are doing things they fucking hate. | ||
| They hate all day long just in order to acquire shit that they don't really need. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| And that's the point I was trying to make earlier is this hand that you're dealt is bunk because so many people are trapped in that thing of doing something they hate. | ||
| But do they have to be? | ||
| It sounds like they're imprisoned. | ||
| They think they have to be. | ||
| That's what I'm talking about. | ||
| They think they have to be, but no, they don't. | ||
| They can break free. | ||
| They can pierce the veil. | ||
| They can go on a DMT trip or get in a flotation tank and break free. | ||
| No, you have the choice. | ||
| You break free even just by quitting some fucking shitty job and doing something you love. | ||
| Okay, but why don't more people do that? | ||
| Because they're scared. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Is it fear? | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Yeah, people are afraid of change. | ||
| They're afraid of the unknown. | ||
| They're afraid of uncertainty. | ||
| They're afraid of failure, for sure. | ||
| If you offer them some really convenient, stupid job that is absolutely going to stay there for them, or, hey man, take a chance to open a pottery studio. | ||
| Oh, I'm going to go broke. | ||
| People are terrified of failure. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think you're right, but I also think there's a level of that that's also kind of like graduate school in the sense that maybe a lot of people are just addicted to being pacified. | ||
| That, like, you know, I get my three hours of television at night, and I get my, you know, and just even considering that notion of what you're talking about is beyond the realm. | ||
| Just keep me plugged in. | ||
| I'm cool. | ||
| You know that expression, the comfort zone is beautiful but nothing grows there? | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| It's nice to be comfortable. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| Relax. | ||
| But you don't get better at anything. | ||
| You don't get better at life. | ||
| You don't grow. | ||
| And we're scared of uncertainty. | ||
| We want to survive. | ||
| We don't want to starve to death. | ||
| We don't want to be a failure. | ||
| We don't want to be that guy that used to be on TV and now he's a security guard. | ||
| All those things, the fear of not being successful is so stifling. | ||
| It so is. | ||
| When you say that, it just immediately triggered my own life and all the failures I've had, all the fuck-ups falling flat on my face many, many, many times. | ||
| But the getting back up, it's like that's where the work is. | ||
| That's where the awakening is. | ||
| I mean, it wasn't like, hey, everything's just... | ||
| Going perfectly and, oh wow, this is all my life, this is rolling out on a red carpet and I turned on or something happened and I, you know, touched the face of enlightenment. | ||
| No, it's because I fell in the dirt and you take those risks and shit happens. | ||
| And you, the grist for the mill, as Ram Dass would say, you know, you have that grist for the mill that makes it so much juicier and falling flat on your face, it's essential. | ||
| It's essential. | ||
| And I think you can apply that same sort of thinking to our entire civilization. | ||
| And I think right now, we might have skinned our knees. | ||
| We might have fallen on our face. | ||
| We might have gone face down in the mud and like, oh, fuck. | ||
| And I think we've got to get up and realize that we fucked it up. | ||
| And we'll see how bad we fucked it up. | ||
| And who knows? | ||
| Because one of the things about having an outsider in this, what I think is an impossibly corrupt society, It's an unfixable foundation filled with bullshit, which is what I think our society's built on, whether it's special interest groups or corporate greed or lobbyists or all the chaos, private prisons and fucking the war on drugs, all the chaos that I think any rational person that's not connected to it in any sort of a way where you're making profit off it would agree. | ||
| Like, this is an insane way for an enlightened society to behave and act. | ||
| It's broken. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Unfixable. | ||
| Just bullshit. | ||
| The awareness of that is more and more exposed today, online and in conversations, and people are more aware of that than any other time in human history. | ||
| But I feel like we're like a giant battleship. | ||
| It takes a lot to turn that fucker. | ||
| It takes a lot of Thinking and action, it takes a long time for that thing to actually spin around. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And the first, you know, the first step in that is like the acknowledgement that, hey, we skinned our knees or maybe fell flat face down into the mud or something. | ||
| And it's the acknowledgement that that is the case. | ||
| That's the scenario we're in. | ||
| And which is why I'm always so frustrated in that, like, you know, the general narrative or the general rhetoric, especially in politics. | ||
| Is, you know, the wrong conversations always being had. | ||
| Nobody's talking about the right shit. | ||
| We're treating the symptom. | ||
| We never treat the disease. | ||
| We're just treating the flu, you know, blowing our nose constantly and never ever acknowledging the disease. | ||
| You know, Bernie Sanders touched on acknowledging the disease. | ||
| He was the first guy, but really in a long time to make it that far. | ||
| And acknowledge the disease. | ||
| We are at risk of becoming an oligarchy. | ||
| It's the top 1% that is ruling the country. | ||
| He might be the first guy ever, right? | ||
| I mean, if you really stop and think about it, who got that close to the Democratic nomination? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Other than McGovern. | ||
| Yeah, but I mean, I think in older times, you know, in the 19th century, there was kind of, you know, hints that, you know, this could happen and kind of people insinuating, hey, the Industrial Revolution and Carnegie's and the Melons and the Rockefeller's like, watch out, this could get dangerous. | ||
| Eisenhower warned of the military industrial complex and he was a Republican. | ||
| And that was a creepy speech, right? | ||
| A creepy speech, but fascinating at the same time. | ||
| But yeah, so Bernie took it He did talk about the disease, which was fantastic. | ||
| So it is out there that we have these fundamental problems. | ||
| Until you fix the fundamental problem, nothing else is going to get better, which is essentially taking the money out of the game. | ||
| That's why I do think it's fixable. | ||
| I disagree with you in that. | ||
| I do think the machine is fixable. | ||
| How is it fixable? | ||
| You've got to take the money out? | ||
| That's unfixable. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| The whole thing runs on money. | ||
| How are you going to take the money out? | ||
| Have you read Republic Lost, the Lawrence Lessig book? | ||
| No. | ||
| You've got to read it, man. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| What is his solution? | ||
| Or watch his 20-minute TED Talk. | ||
| You can get the whole book in that, too. | ||
| What's his solution? | ||
| Get rid of lobbyists. | ||
| Yeah, man, that's easier said than done. | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| Well, someone like Trump is actually working to do that, whereas someone like Hillary is not. | ||
| Like, he's already put in a bunch of regulations to make sure that people cannot become lobbyists within a certain amount of time after leaving office. | ||
| After leaving office, but he also has, like, you know, the president-elect office is crawling. | ||
| At the same time, it's crawling with lobbyists. | ||
| Yeah, who knows? | ||
| You know. | ||
| I mean, I'm not a Trump supporter, but I'm not a... | ||
| I'm not... | ||
| I'm not convinced that having this complete outsider who's also a guy who's been feeding this machine with money and making these massive political contributions so he understands the system and how it works, I'm not completely I'm not completely denying the possibility that he might present some good... | ||
| I just think he's the wrong guy for the job. | ||
| I do believe in the outsider thing. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| That's a great part of him. | ||
| Bernie would have been fascinating. | ||
| Yeah, Bernie would have been fascinating. | ||
| He would have cost me a shitload of money, but I would have been willing to take that chance. | ||
| I would have loved to see it. | ||
| I would have loved to see what the fuck would happen, because that guy doesn't give a shit. | ||
| And he's not... | ||
| You can't buy him, man. | ||
| You can't buy him. | ||
| And you've got to watch this Lawrence Lesser talk. | ||
| It's a few years old now, but it really just... | ||
| It kind of rips apart and puts everything out on the whiteboard and into a keynote presentation about even the most well-intentioned politicians who are great. | ||
| Mr. Smith goes to Washington kind of shit. | ||
| Just great people who go in there with the best of intentions. | ||
| You know, at some point, you know, then they end up spending 25% of their time inside of the phone bank, the Democrat, the DNC phone bank, begging people for money. | ||
| And you know they do that. | ||
| And it's across the street from the Capitol, so it's not too far. | ||
| And it just escalates, and it's a snowball just going more and more and more. | ||
| And then it just becomes even the best intention. | ||
| But if you take money out of politics, then you have only people with money who get into politics, because they have so much money, they don't need anybody else's money. | ||
| Hence, Donald Trump. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, I mean, if you did it like, you know, first of all, if you did it like the UK does it and shorten the election season, you know, that's a great first step. | ||
| You know, you can't make it 18 months. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| And the amount of money- Team sport. | ||
| It's going on forever. | ||
| We've got to root, root, rah, rah. | ||
| We've got debates. | ||
| It's great television. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| It's great television. | ||
| People wear their red and their fucking blue and Make America Great Again hats are on sale. | ||
| But the amount of money that it takes to play that game. | ||
| I know, right? | ||
| What was he making per day from those hats? | ||
| Off Make America Great Again? | ||
| I bet millions. | ||
| No, he was making something like 80 grand a day or something from the hats. | ||
| Something stupid. | ||
| It's so bad. | ||
| There's those stupid looking hats, too. | ||
| It's not even a good design. | ||
| It's like somebody made it at the mall. | ||
| You know, those little hat shops. | ||
| What do you want it to say? | ||
| Bobby loves Jesse. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Make America Great Again! | ||
| Red hat, white letters, I'm the man. | ||
| I'm the fucking man. | ||
| I got the hat on. | ||
| The fucking man. | ||
| I don't even know what that means. | ||
| Yeah, he doesn't know what it means either. | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, America's never been greater in terms of safer, more access to medicine, more access to information, more access to education. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| It's never been better. | ||
| In that way, but like, you know, our education rankings, you know, it's sort of... | ||
| In the world? | ||
| In the world where we're used to place, you know, your typical high school graduate in the year like 1960, you know, it's like went to college and ranked number one in global math, science, you know. | ||
| That's because the rest of the world was in the Stone Age. | ||
| And we were the only civilization, I think. | ||
| I think we had just started civilization back then and no one knew about it yet. | ||
| And they all caught on. | ||
| We got fat off Twinkies in the mall and fucking Walmart poisoned us. | ||
| And then there's some shit from fracking that definitely got into the water. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I think... | ||
| Turn everyone on. | ||
| I'm fine with that, too. | ||
| I'm a pessimist in some forms, but I'm an optimist in others. | ||
| And what I'm optimistic about is that People care, and that this world that we live in, that this is a... | ||
| When everybody was crying after Trump got elected, and part of me was like, well, this is so preposterous. | ||
| Why are these people crying? | ||
| But the other part of me was like, that is when things get done, is when you have this outpouring of emotion, and then people... | ||
| Remember when those people were marching down Wilshire, and it was just fucking A huge line of people, like hundreds of thousands of people that shut down Wilshire and these people were filming it with drones from overhead. | ||
| I was like, wow, that's a crazy response to this guy winning the presidency. | ||
| And people were like hoping the electors, you know, the electoral college people wouldn't elect him and they would act on their, oh, fuck you, it's not going to happen. | ||
| Like, you're playing a game. | ||
| He won the game. | ||
| You can't take it away from him after he won the game. | ||
| Like, he didn't cheat, he won the game. | ||
| So this is the game, and this is how the game works. | ||
| B-B-B-Russia! | ||
| Listen, this is the game. | ||
| This is how the game works. | ||
| Now you've got to figure out why is this game in place? | ||
| Why do you have this fucking goofy game? | ||
| Why do you have this representative government? | ||
| Why do we continue this? | ||
| And if we can slowly move that battleship towards a more rational place. | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| And it does come from a consciousness shift. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's the first step. | |
| Always comes from a consciousness shift. | ||
| I think pot. | ||
| I think legal pot is the fucking real gateway. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| Because I think it calms people down. | ||
| It makes people nicer. | ||
| I think just that alone. | ||
| It's like the opposite of what alcohol does. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| It definitely does not increase aggression. | ||
| Or confidence. | ||
| It doesn't increase confidence at all. | ||
| It's the opposite for me. | ||
| It makes me more vulnerable. | ||
| You don't smoke it? | ||
| I like it. | ||
| Something changed in me. | ||
| I did when I was a teenager. | ||
| I loved it, man. | ||
| I'm a deadhead and that was my life. | ||
| But I take it now and it's just... | ||
| Paranoia? | ||
| Massive. | ||
| And also the confidence thing. | ||
| It does not bring out my best. | ||
| It makes me feel like if we smoked and we did this podcast... | ||
| You'd be freaking out? | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| What do I have to say to Rogan? | ||
| I sound like an idiot. | ||
| Duncan told me. | ||
| I would be like that. | ||
| It does not bring up my best. | ||
| So how long ago was this switch? | ||
| When did it happen to you? | ||
| Oh, quite a while. | ||
| I mean, I'm 43. More than 15 years ago. | ||
| So that's when you stopped smoking, 15 years ago? | ||
| No, I stopped yesterday. | ||
| I'm still freaking out because of yesterday's pot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, about that, yeah. | |
| So, do you do anything these days? | ||
| No. | ||
| Sort of psychedelics? | ||
| Not really, no. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| But, yeah, I keep a place in my heart for the psychedelic experience, should it arise again. | ||
| In between English muffins. | ||
| In between Eggman muffins. | ||
| You know, yeah, I mean, I'm open to that, and should the opportunity arise, I'm down for it. | ||
| I mean, with the psychedelic thing, I just... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I am open to it. | ||
| I just kind of did kind of hit the Alan Watts wall in a way, like, you know, the Alan Watts thing about him. | ||
| You know, I got the phone call, and then I learned to hang up the phone. | ||
| What is the Alan Watts thing? | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| The quote goes something like, I got the phone call, and then I kind of learned to hang up the phone. | ||
| I didn't need to stay on the phone. | ||
| Relating to psychedelics. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| I see. | ||
| So he got the message. | ||
| He got the message. | ||
| He didn't need to continually get the message over and over and over and over again. | ||
| McKenna, I think, was in that boat, too, before his death. | ||
| They were saying he talked a lot about it, but he really wasn't doing anything anymore. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| Smoked a lot of pot, though. | ||
| Did, smoked a little pot. | ||
| Because I always remember, Terrence, you know, the thing that us drug people have is repeatability. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's true, but I mean, after 5,000 fucking mushroom trips, I mean, Jesus Christ. | ||
| I mean, I've done acid, what, 200 times or something? | ||
| You could probably be, like, legally insane. | ||
| I think there's a certain amount of acid trips you do where they used to classify you as being legally insane. | ||
| Do you get some money from the government, bro? | ||
| How much? | ||
| Probably like 50 bucks. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But if you just ran around saying that I broke my brain and I'm disabled, I bet you could... | ||
| You juked the system. | ||
| I used to. | ||
| That's really funny. | ||
| You know, I had them. | ||
| It reminds me. | ||
| I used to have a pretty serious hard drug problem, too. | ||
| Hard drugs? | ||
| Yeah, which I've gotten, you know. | ||
| Which ones? | ||
| Heroin and crack. | ||
| Oh, damn, dude. | ||
| I've gotten through it. | ||
| The needle or the snorting? | ||
| Smoking. | ||
| Smoking the heroin? | ||
| No needles. | ||
| No needles. | ||
| Yeah, I stayed away from that, but, you know, made it through, and I'm good. | ||
| Damn, how'd you get on that? | ||
| How'd I get on it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Pain. | ||
| Pain. | ||
| You had some injuries or something? | ||
| No. | ||
| Pain. | ||
| Emotional pain. | ||
| Emotional suffering. | ||
| Pain lost. | ||
| Aimless. | ||
| Wandering the world. | ||
| Aimless. | ||
| Not knowing what to do. | ||
| And that was... | ||
| The escape was the heroin? | ||
| Somebody introduced me to it about that period in time. | ||
| And it just was like, oh, wow. | ||
| You know, heroin has the great ability of... | ||
| And it's really seductive and really fucked up... | ||
| Of making you think that your life is okay when you're in the gutter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| It has that sort of, that sheen that it just kind of, the bubble it puts over you. | ||
| You can be literally living in an alleyway, high on heroin, thinking you got it going on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, it's really weird and perverse like that. | ||
| And at that time in my life, my dad just died. | ||
| And when he died, what went with it was kind of my life. | ||
| I was 22, up until that point, my life was in that bubble. | ||
| He was larger than life. | ||
| He was famous. | ||
| Girls came with that. | ||
| Work came with that. | ||
| A scene came with that. | ||
| Friends came with that. | ||
| And when he died, that just... | ||
| I went poof. | ||
| Did girls want to bang you because you were Timothy Leary's son? | ||
| Of course, yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nice. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It worked out for a while. | ||
| Sweet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you put on, like, a guru attitude? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, just, relax, I've got it all going on, ladies. | |
| At that time, that stage in my life, no, it was a disaster. | ||
| It was a fucking disaster. | ||
| I try to do that now, though, on occasion. | ||
| Oh, but no, I had a good story, man. | ||
| This is really funny. | ||
| You were talking about soliciting the government for money for being an acid casualty, which is a good idea. | ||
| But I was really high on crack once and just kind of on a bender, just losing my mind on crack. | ||
| And I thought in the middle of the night it'd be a really good idea to join the CIA. And that they would want me, me specifically, being like Tim Leary's kid, they'd want me because I have access to shit that they want access to. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like I can be an insider. | ||
| I was a mole and I was high on crack and I downloaded the... | ||
| I filled out the form. | ||
| Oh my God! | ||
| You got that deep? | ||
| I got that deep. | ||
| Hours on it. | ||
| It's really long, complicated, the whole kind of... | ||
| To join the CIA? Print it out, sent it in the mail. | ||
| You sent it in the mail? | ||
| Oh, you're in the CIA. You're there with Anderson Cooper. | ||
| You work for CNN. Well, yeah. | ||
| You're in there. | ||
| And never heard back, but it was... | ||
| Never heard back? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Never sent anything. | ||
| They started laughing. | ||
| They just laughed and threw it in the garbage, I'm sure. | ||
| But it was really funny and kind of a great, delusional, high-end drugs moment. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So what did you think that you were going to do as a CIA operative? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know, man. | |
| What are we going to do? | ||
| Are we going to fix it from the inside? | ||
| With crack? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Something crazy, you know, just that's what a crackhead does at the time. | ||
| How did you get off the crack in the heroin? | ||
| Yeah, just recovery. | ||
| Did you go, oh, you went 12-step? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Like AA or Narcotics Anonymous, those kind of stuff? | ||
| Yeah, that kind of stuff, yeah. | ||
| Worked for me. | ||
| Now, is that one of those things you have to continually visit? | ||
| Do you have to constantly have meetings and stuff? | ||
| Well, you know, I'm kind of a... | ||
| You know, I'm kind of, in a way, as a card-carrying member, as it were, I'm kind of not the best card-carrying member of it, and I break from tradition in a little bit, in that, like, I don't know, I'm not a zealot. | ||
| Sure, maybe. | ||
| Yeah, maybe you do, but for me, I just happen to like it. | ||
| I just enjoy it. | ||
| Whether or not I have to go and, oh my God, I'm going to die if I don't, and I'm going to end up back in the gutter if I don't. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I believe there's a little hysteria with that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's kind of like the party line, which sometimes bothers me. | ||
| It bothers a lot of people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's sort of disempowerment. | ||
| Disempowerment. | ||
| I don't believe that with any tradition or anything like, oh my God, if you leave us, the shit's going to hit the fan. | ||
| I mean, you stop and think about a lot of destructive things you did when you were younger that you don't do now. | ||
| Like, well, I don't need a 12-step program to tell me not to do stupid shit. | ||
| I just know it's stupid shit, and so I don't do it anymore. | ||
| But the idea that you could potentially fall into that is what they hold over your head, right? | ||
| Yeah, but it's not that simple. | ||
| Like, oh my God, I know heroin is going to kill me, so that's it. | ||
| I'm just going to stop doing it. | ||
| It's not that rational. | ||
| Sadly, I wish it was that rational. | ||
| So what's the difference? | ||
| What's the disconnect? | ||
| The disconnect is that in order to, you know, Bill Wilson was really a groundbreaking dude. | ||
| Well, he was also an acid head, which is really kind of crazy. | ||
| Bill Wilson being the guy who founded Alcoholics Anonymous. | ||
| He did acid, what, five times? | ||
| And he also thought that acid could be a viable treatment method for people that are alcoholics. | ||
| There's some great... | ||
| It's completely ignored today. | ||
| And his thoughts and ideas about that, completely ignored by people in recovery because they think that, no, no, no, no, you don't get clean by taking something else. | ||
| They hate it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And before this sort of got popular, before the documentaries came out and all that about exposing Bill Wilson, I used to just blow AA members' minds with that. | ||
| I was like, did you not? | ||
| He did. | ||
| And he had correspondence with my dad when he was at Harvard. | ||
| I'm sure he did. | ||
| Yeah, they had some really interesting—these letters are fantastic. | ||
| And, yeah, he called it the great ego sublimator and thought it could be the solution for alcoholism. | ||
| And he did not change his sobriety to it. | ||
| You know, which is highly controversial. | ||
| Sobriety date? | ||
| His sobriety date, like when he said he got sober. | ||
| You know, he still, when he died, he said he had, whatever, 48 years sober. | ||
| But he was still doing acid. | ||
| Well, he had stopped doing acid. | ||
| But, you know, typically, you know, in the AA world, if you do acid, that's it. | ||
| You start over. | ||
| You start day one. | ||
| You start day one. | ||
| But he didn't. | ||
| He did not. | ||
| He looked at acid as being completely different than an intoxicant like alcohol. | ||
| It was a neuropsychotropic therapeutic agent, is how you refer to it. | ||
| Well, I think that is what it is. | ||
| And I think this blanket statement, you know, drugs, that word drugs, it's just like it applies to too many things that do too many different things. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It's like food. | ||
| Food's bad for you. | ||
| What? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Food's not bad for you. | ||
| Well, this food's bad for you. | ||
| Oh, yeah, okay, it is. | ||
| But this salad's good for you. | ||
| That's food, too. | ||
| And that's the problem with drugs. | ||
| The word drugs applies to things that are highly beneficial. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It's just, you know, in AA land, I get why they need to tow that company line. | ||
| But doesn't it... | ||
| I do get it because... | ||
| Again, it's disempowering in a way, isn't it? | ||
| Because you're treating everybody as if you are the weakest possible example. | ||
| Look, man, I'm not disagreeing with you at all, but I'm just saying I get it because... | ||
| It does work. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's all I can say about it. | ||
| I don't disagree. | ||
| I'm kind of wishy-washy about it, but it works. | ||
| To have a hard line. | ||
| I have seen people's lives who you just, you know, the doldrums, the, you know, the disenfranchised, I mean, left for dead get their lives saved and have really great, productive, amazing lives today. | ||
| And it's a really beautiful, cool thing to see. | ||
| Well, there's also, I think, we have to come to the realization that everyone's different biologically. | ||
| Yes, that's why. | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| Everybody's wired differently. | ||
| There is no one-size-fits-all thing. | ||
| And now what we're seeing with Ibogaine treatment that, you know, MAPS is doing, oh my God, so, so cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really, really promising. | ||
| And so, you know, I just encourage everybody to find their own dharma, find their own path, and kind of make what works for you. | ||
| You know, there's no prescribed method for spiritual awakening or life-saving or life-changing. | ||
| You know, you just have to, you know, balance it correctly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Listen to your heart. | |
| What is your life like? | ||
| Like, what do you do with your time? | ||
| What do you do for money? | ||
| Well, I do a few things. | ||
| My life is kind of split into two things. | ||
| You know, I have my podcast. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What is that called again? | ||
| It's All Happening. | ||
| It's All Happening. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I do that. | ||
| I'm actually starting another podcast. | ||
| I'm going to be hosting the Maps podcast. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, that's awesome. | ||
| So Maps is starting, and I'm going to help them get it off the ground and host it and start that. | ||
| So, you know, I kind of do that. | ||
| I can speak, you know, at festivals and kind of teach, you know, some spiritual stuff and kind of do that, write. | ||
| I've been working on a book. | ||
| But the other half of my life, kind of before I had my own little spiritual awakening, I was a technology consultant and a branding consultant and worked in digital marketing and had a lot of ad agencies and stuff and led kind of a 9 to 5 corporate life, which I've ditched, but I still keep some clients. | ||
| That's kind of a day job sort of thing, which is kind of fun. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| So what does that entail? | ||
| Anything that is, you know, a brand or an entity or a film or a music client, anybody wants to come to me and sort of define their internet strategy, how they want to behave online. | ||
| You know, whether that's just something as mundane as having a new website to coming up with a complete communication message about how they want to market their... | ||
| They're a thing. | ||
| So I kind of do that too. | ||
| So I divide my time sort of 50-50 between my stuff and then other people's stuff. | ||
| And when does this MAPS podcast launch? | ||
| January. | ||
| Oh, that's cool. | ||
| So just by having that name attached to it, you'll be able to get some pretty amazing guests. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| We'd love you to do it, of course. | ||
| I'll do it. | ||
| I'm in. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| Sign it up. | ||
| Yeah, Rick. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| Sign it up. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| So yeah. | ||
| 2017, folks. | ||
| Shit's going down. | ||
| So yeah, I keep busy, man. | ||
| Thank you, Billy. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, man. | ||
| Well, let people know, what's your Twitter handle? | ||
| Is it just Zach Leary? | ||
| Zach Leary. | ||
| Go to my website, ZachLeary.com. | ||
| And the podcast is called It's All Happening. | ||
| Is it available on iTunes? | ||
| Everywhere, podcasts, stuff, yeah. | ||
| Well, thanks, man. | ||
| Thanks for coming in, man. | ||
| Thanks for having me, man. | ||
| Fun time. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| Appreciate it very much. | ||
| Zach Leary, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Thank you, everybody. | ||
| We'll be back tomorrow with the great Greg Fitzsimmons, also known as Grapefruit Simmons. |
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