The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #564 - Sturgill Simpson

00:00:16.000 Fresh off the road, Sturgill Simpson, ladies and gentlemen.

00:00:21.000 Thanks for doing this, man.

00:00:22.000 I really appreciate it.

00:00:23.000 Yeah, man.

00:00:24.000 You kidding me?

00:00:26.000 Yeah.

00:00:27.000 I'm here.

00:00:28.000 You're here.

00:00:29.000 You know, I had heard about your music from several people online. 0.99

00:00:32.000 I don't remember who made me take the plunge and download your shit. 0.99

00:00:37.000 Like, a bunch of people had recommended you. 0.99

00:00:38.000 I had Shooter Jennings on, and along those lines, people said, like, hey man, if you really dig Shooter Jennings, you gotta check out Sturgill Simpson.

00:00:46.000 Right.

00:00:46.000 And so somewhere along the line, I downloaded, I think it was...

00:00:52.000 Well, I downloaded two CDs, but the Turtles All The Way Down song, that was the first song I heard. 0.62

00:00:59.000 I was like, oh shit, this guy's doing something unusual. 0.98

00:01:03.000 You're doing some psychedelic country music, man. 1.00

00:01:06.000 You're mixing shit up in a very bizarre way. 0.98

00:01:11.000 I don't know. 0.99

00:01:12.000 I grew up listening to everything.

00:01:15.000 But for whatever reason, if I go to write or sing a song, I can only do one of two things.

00:01:21.000 That's either Sing Country or Bluegrass is what I primarily grew up on.

00:01:28.000 I don't know.

00:01:28.000 The first record I did was a very traditional country record in terms of thematical and lyrical elements.

00:01:36.000 I've said this before, but it's true. 1.00

00:01:38.000 I reached a point where I'm very happily married.

00:01:41.000 I'm sober for the longest period.

00:01:46.000 So drinking songs and heartache and all that wasn't something that I was particularly very excited about tackling again.

00:01:52.000 Right.

00:01:53.000 Do you feel like you have to hit certain themes if you're doing country music?

00:01:57.000 Because it just sort of falls into that.

00:01:59.000 It seems to be somewhat self-restricting in a lot of ways.

00:02:03.000 It hasn't evolved very much, even since, you know...

00:02:08.000 The 60s or 70s.

00:02:09.000 There were periods that are very dated now, like 70s and 80s country.

00:02:09.000 Right.

00:02:13.000 You can hear the production values and it just...

00:02:15.000 There's nothing...

00:02:16.000 Even some of the most timeless singers that ever played the music, the records that they made got subjected to these really bad taste choices.

00:02:28.000 Right.

00:02:28.000 It just doesn't stand up.

00:02:30.000 So...

00:02:31.000 I don't know.

00:02:32.000 Dave, my producer, is a really close friend of mine, Dave Cobb, who actually did Shooter's first couple records.

00:02:37.000 Shooter's a buddy.

00:02:39.000 Love that dude.

00:02:39.000 He's a good dude.

00:02:40.000 Yeah, very, very sweet.

00:02:41.000 Such a cool guy to hang out with, too.

00:02:44.000 Yes.

00:02:45.000 Dave and I just kind of, you know...

00:02:47.000 I came to Nashville about four years ago.

00:02:51.000 I'm almost five now, I guess.

00:02:53.000 I knew more than anything what I didn't want to do.

00:02:53.000 And I just...

00:02:56.000 And...

00:02:59.000 I met with Dave.

00:03:00.000 Shooter actually, I think, told him one night we were all at a Billy Joe Shaver concert.

00:03:03.000 I didn't know any of those guys.

00:03:05.000 And they were sitting upstairs.

00:03:07.000 It was like Shooter and Jamie Johnson, some other cats, and Dave.

00:03:10.000 And apparently Shooter was like, hey, man, you see that guy right there? 0.97

00:03:13.000 And Dave's like, yeah, he's like, he's the best fucking country singer in Nashville. 0.85

00:03:16.000 So the next day, somehow my manager got an email from Dave, and we had lunch, and I was like, all right, I... He's from Georgia. 0.96

00:03:22.000 We both loved the same records growing up.

00:03:25.000 I just kind of feel like I know this dude.

00:03:26.000 I can work with this guy.

00:03:27.000 Right.

00:03:28.000 And there was nobody in there.

00:03:30.000 Because I paid for both albums entirely by myself.

00:03:33.000 I dug a big, giant hole of debt.

00:03:34.000 Wow.

00:03:35.000 How much does it cost to put out an album?

00:03:37.000 The first one...

00:03:40.000 I thought when I was doing it, this may very well be the only time I ever get to do this, you know?

00:03:45.000 Right.

00:03:46.000 And I wanted something that I could be proud of, and something my family could be proud of for once, you know what I mean?

00:03:51.000 I just knew it had to be right, and I couldn't compromise in any way.

00:03:54.000 And there was a certain sound we were after, so Dave, he said, well, let's just get the guys that played on those old records. 0.85

00:04:00.000 I'm like, yeah, let's fucking do that, you know? 0.56

00:04:02.000 I didn't know how the game worked. 0.98

00:04:04.000 Right, right.

00:04:05.000 So then I'm looking up, and the next thing I know, I'm in the studio, and there's this guy, like, Pig Robbins, who...

00:04:10.000 Pretty much invented country piano.

00:04:12.000 I think his first session was with George Jones on White Lightning. 1.00

00:04:16.000 What a fucking name. 0.99

00:04:17.000 Yeah, he played on Blonde on Blonde. 1.00

00:04:19.000 Yeah, he's this old, blind... 0.99

00:04:21.000 Pig Robbins? 0.56

00:04:22.000 Hargis Pig Robbins. 1.00

00:04:23.000 What a great fucking name. 1.00

00:04:25.000 God, that's an American name. 1.00

00:04:26.000 Yeah, man.

00:04:28.000 Actually, it could probably be English, too.

00:04:31.000 We had a lot of fun.

00:04:32.000 Who called a pig? 0.90

00:04:33.000 I mean, he toured with everybody.

00:04:34.000 He played on Patsy Clown Records and Bob Brown Records.

00:04:37.000 Wow!

00:04:38.000 So, you know, and I knew when those sessions ended, I knew that I had absolutely done my best, because I had to. 0.99

00:04:43.000 You know, these guys would just bust your balls in a second, you know. 0.97

00:04:48.000 And, uh... 0.99

00:04:50.000 So I feel like we sort of cleared my throat with that one.

00:04:53.000 And then, lo and behold, a year later, I found myself in a position where I was going to get to make another record.

00:04:59.000 I was like, alright, well, maybe this one will be a little bit more selfish or self-absorber for me.

00:05:04.000 So Dave and I incorporated a lot of other elements of I guess sonic templings you don't normally hear in most country music.

00:05:13.000 And that gave me the freedom to kind of go out there with the themes as well.

00:05:17.000 So I was doing a lot of reading at the time. 0.99

00:05:22.000 Always had like weird shit, you know. 0.99

00:05:25.000 We'll get there, but... 0.99

00:05:29.000 I don't know, man.

00:05:30.000 It was the most truly inspirational group of songs I feel like I've ever written.

00:05:35.000 Because it was just from such a fresh place.

00:05:39.000 You know, maybe that's why the record's done.

00:05:42.000 It's very unique.

00:05:43.000 You know, it's very unique in that it has a lot of country sound to it, but...

00:05:48.000 Like that Turtles All The Way Down song. 0.98

00:05:49.000 I mean, who the fuck is doing songs about mind-expanding, consciousness-expanding drugs in country music? 0.98

00:05:56.000 I mean, that's just not being done. 0.99

00:05:58.000 But it's still, like, really good country music.

00:06:00.000 Like, I like a lot of country music, you know?

00:06:04.000 Even songs that are...

00:06:06.000 Even like a song that's sort of a classic song with all those themes that you talked about before, like drinking, a heartache, if it's well done, I still really like it, you know?

00:06:17.000 Absolutely.

00:06:17.000 No, I mean, if it's pure and honest and it's great music, I just didn't feel like I had anything to offer there.

00:06:24.000 Right, right, right.

00:06:25.000 Yeah.

00:06:26.000 The sound, though, is...

00:06:28.000 I think people are starting to accept that...

00:06:30.000 Not even starting to accept, but sort of... 0.95

00:06:33.000 For a long time, country got classified amongst a lot of young people as being, like, a dumb kind of music, you know? 0.89

00:06:40.000 And unfairly so.

00:06:42.000 And I think that as some young people started getting into some of the other country, like getting into some Johnny Cash songs, for instance, you know, you start going, oh, this is country, too.

00:06:50.000 Okay, well... 0.92

00:06:51.000 You can't say Johnny Cash songs are dumb. 0.98

00:06:53.000 You just can't. 0.94

00:06:54.000 I mean, they were just... 0.99

00:06:55.000 He had too much crazy shit going on in those songs. 0.99

00:06:57.000 You know, it's undeniable. 0.99

00:06:59.000 There was a lot going on in between the lines.

00:07:01.000 Oh, there's a lot going on in A Boy Named Sue.

00:07:04.000 I mean, just think about that song. 0.99

00:07:06.000 I mean, he had some great fucking songs. 0.98

00:07:08.000 And then he did The Highwaymen, and that was an interesting song, too. 0.98

00:07:11.000 Like, that thing that he did with Willie Nelson and...

00:07:14.000 Who else was it?

00:07:15.000 Was it...

00:07:16.000 Christopherson and Waylon.

00:07:19.000 Yeah, and they did this crazy song about reincarnation that to this day, if you never heard it, go find that song, The Highwaymen.

00:07:29.000 And it's this really wild song because it's all different verses sung by a different guy.

00:07:35.000 Like, Willie will sing one verse.

00:07:37.000 And then Johnny comes in.

00:07:38.000 I fly a starship. 1.00

00:07:40.000 Oh my god, that's a good fucking song. 0.99

00:07:42.000 It's just... 1.00

00:07:43.000 Woo! 0.99

00:07:44.000 Well, you know, weirdly...

00:07:45.000 And it's funny to me that the country has this really rigid perception by the public.

00:07:51.000 I mean, if you look back at any of the really good, great country singers, they were all batshit, man.

00:07:57.000 I mean, it was just like some of the most colorful, weird characters to ever...

00:08:04.000 We're good to go.

00:08:09.000 We're good to go.

00:08:23.000 That's what it is.

00:08:24.000 It's an urban form of classism.

00:08:27.000 Like, you look at that style of music, and they automatically, some people did for a while.

00:08:32.000 But I think guys like Shooter, guys like you, you guys are opening up, and Honey Honey Band does a lot of country-type sound. 0.97

00:08:39.000 I think a lot of people are opening up people's ideas of what that sound really is, and you hear a great song, it's like, God damn it, that's a great song. 0.98

00:08:47.000 It doesn't matter if they've got a banjo playing in the background, you can't tell me that song didn't fuck you up. 0.99

00:08:51.000 You know? 0.99

00:08:51.000 Right. 0.99

00:08:52.000 I think people are starting to realize, like, there's just good, man.

00:08:56.000 There's just good.

00:08:57.000 There's good disco songs, man.

00:08:59.000 Okay?

00:08:59.000 You ever hear Kiss, I Was Made For Loving You?

00:09:01.000 It's a good goddamn disco song. 0.99

00:09:04.000 I don't give a fuck what anybody says. 0.99

00:09:05.000 I'm not a Kiss hater, man. 0.99

00:09:08.000 I loved the Monkees when I was a kid.

00:09:10.000 Dude! 0.99

00:09:11.000 The Monkees had some good fucking songs. 0.99

00:09:12.000 I don't care if they were put together in a project. 1.00

00:09:14.000 Neil Diamond wrote half that shit. 1.00

00:09:15.000 Did he really? 1.00

00:09:16.000 Yeah, that's why the songs are so fucking great, man. 0.97

00:09:18.000 Oh, wow. 0.96

00:09:19.000 That makes a lot of sense.

00:09:21.000 Wow.

00:09:21.000 That's incredible.

00:09:23.000 I like Neil Diamond songs. 0.99

00:09:24.000 I fucking said it. 1.00

00:09:25.000 I fucking said it. 1.00

00:09:26.000 I don't care what he's doing with his hair. 1.00

00:09:28.000 I'd like a goddamn Neil Diamond song. 0.99

00:09:30.000 Any day. 0.99

00:09:32.000 Yeah, man.

00:09:33.000 The guy was a genius.

00:09:35.000 I think when you expand your horizon and sort of open up your ideas of musical appreciation, I've tried really hard with a lot of stuff and it just can't catch.

00:09:44.000 Like every few months or so, I try with jazz.

00:09:46.000 I'll throw some Coltrane on and I'll be like... 0.99

00:09:49.000 I'll be in my car and then five minutes in and I fucking snap. 0.98

00:09:54.000 I just can't take it anymore. 0.98

00:09:56.000 And I'll throw some Kid Rock on or something just to turn it the other way.

00:09:59.000 I just can't do it.

00:10:00.000 It's probably the only music I never got into.

00:10:03.000 I like hillbilly jazz, but I don't know.

00:10:06.000 Charles Mingus and guys like that, maybe I can listen.

00:10:08.000 But even in brief doses.

00:10:11.000 I just prefer a melody.

00:10:13.000 I like a good song.

00:10:15.000 I think one thing that it's good for, I like jazz at a bar.

00:10:19.000 If you're having a couple drinks and some jazz is playing in the background, it's not a very recognizable song.

00:10:25.000 It's just interesting music.

00:10:26.000 It's interesting background music.

00:10:29.000 But as far as it being my main focal point, you know, not really.

00:10:33.000 Maybe I'm wrong.

00:10:34.000 Maybe I need to find the right stuff.

00:10:36.000 What do you listen to? 0.99

00:10:36.000 I tried a bunch of different shit. 0.99

00:10:38.000 Thelonious Monk. 1.00

00:10:39.000 I've tried some Coltrane.

00:10:41.000 Obviously, they're great musicians.

00:10:43.000 I mean, there's no denying they have skill.

00:10:45.000 But it just doesn't grip me in any way.

00:10:47.000 I don't know what it is.

00:10:48.000 You ever heard of Bitches Brew by Miles Davis? 1.00

00:10:50.000 Yes, yes.

00:10:51.000 That's a pretty killer live.

00:10:52.000 Pretty killer.

00:10:54.000 I can get down with that.

00:10:55.000 Yeah, I mean, there's some riffs that I really enjoy for a long, but I can't, like, sit down.

00:10:59.000 Like, I can sit and listen to the same Leonard Skinner album maybe, like, three times in a row, you know?

00:11:05.000 But it's very hard for me to listen to the same jazz stuff over and over and over again.

00:11:11.000 I just, I don't know, whatever it is.

00:11:13.000 I'm missing it.

00:11:14.000 Woody Allen's got it, and I'm missing it.

00:11:18.000 You know?

00:11:19.000 There's a saying, you know, you're going to go play jazz until the money runs out.

00:11:25.000 Yeah, I'm sure.

00:11:27.000 Well, we were just in Philadelphia.

00:11:30.000 I was in Philly on Friday night, and we passed by the jazz bar, and we thought, man, we should go after this show. 0.99

00:11:34.000 Go fucking see some jazz. 0.99

00:11:36.000 Never did it. 1.00

00:11:37.000 No.

00:11:38.000 No.

00:11:38.000 We thought about it.

00:11:39.000 It's one of those things I always say I should do.

00:11:40.000 I've never said that.

00:11:41.000 I've never heard of myself.

00:11:42.000 Let's go hear some jazz.

00:11:44.000 So, how did you get into singing country music? 0.81

00:11:47.000 Was that what you've always sang, or did you fuck around with other forms of music first? 0.93

00:11:51.000 Yeah. 0.89

00:11:52.000 Well, actually, I didn't really have a choice.

00:11:53.000 Both my grandfathers played...

00:11:55.000 Well, actually, in eastern Kentucky, where I'm originally from, everybody really plays music, but it's what you do after work, you know?

00:12:05.000 Really? 0.87

00:12:05.000 Yeah, my mom's brother, all his friends, they had this house, and it was these two twin brothers, and both of them never married, so they turned their house into a fucking practice space, and they just had this PA and lights and shit that stayed set up all the time. 0.87

00:12:19.000 Wow! 0.91

00:12:20.000 So I was a real young kid, and I'd go over there.

00:12:23.000 I'd always play guitar, and...

00:12:25.000 Yeah, I mean, before I even really knew anything about music or songwriting, I think I was learning how to play in a band just from hanging out with those guys.

00:12:33.000 Wow.

00:12:34.000 But yeah, it was never encouraged.

00:12:37.000 You don't think, oh, I can do this for a living.

00:12:40.000 If that makes sense.

00:12:41.000 Right.

00:12:42.000 You just do it because everybody's doing it.

00:12:43.000 Right.

00:12:44.000 And nobody thinks they're going to leave that situation.

00:12:47.000 Or for many other reasons, yeah.

00:12:49.000 Yeah.

00:12:49.000 It is what it is.

00:12:52.000 So yeah, Dad's dad was a big bluegrass guy. 1.00

00:12:54.000 Played mandolin and just shoved that shit down my throat. 1.00

00:12:56.000 I mean, repeatedly until I accepted it. 1.00

00:13:00.000 Mom, my other grandfather, he was like a big Merle Haggard, Marty Robbins guy.

00:13:05.000 Had an old Gibson, a very beautiful voice.

00:13:08.000 He probably more than anybody.

00:13:11.000 We'd watch Hee Haw and shit when I was a kid and TNN and he'd kind of tell me which of the guys were actually playing and the ones that were just holding the guitar as a prop.

00:13:20.000 Oh, wow. 0.88

00:13:21.000 Yeah.

00:13:22.000 Roy Clark and Jerry Reed and guys like that are huge. 0.95

00:13:25.000 Yeah, I knew by the time I was five, I don't give a fuck about anything else ever. 0.98

00:13:30.000 Wow. 0.98

00:13:30.000 I could have dropped out of school in third grade. 0.98

00:13:32.000 It would have been the same result.

00:13:36.000 So you're kind of groomed, at least in the music sense, but not maybe in becoming a professional.

00:13:36.000 That's interesting.

00:13:43.000 Yeah.

00:13:43.000 Yeah, without knowing it, maybe.

00:13:43.000 Right.

00:13:46.000 Because I've never really played many bands.

00:13:50.000 But yeah, I had an older cousin, Mike, too.

00:13:52.000 He was like six or seven years older than me, so... 0.91

00:13:55.000 You know, just older teenage neighbors with Chevy Novas and shit listening to Guns N' Roses, you know, when you're in fifth grade.

00:14:01.000 But Mike really, I remember very vividly one weekend, we'd go up to visit, they had a farm in Ohio, and I was probably in fourth or fifth grade, and I remember he knew I was really into music, and I was playing guitar already, and he's like, what are you listening to? 0.80

00:14:14.000 I don't know.

00:14:15.000 I mean, it probably was the Monkees or something.

00:14:16.000 He took me to his bedroom and he had one of those tower stereo systems with the glass door and the super headphones.

00:14:23.000 And he sent me...

00:14:24.000 And CDs had just come out.

00:14:25.000 You know, this was like 87, 88, I don't know.

00:14:29.000 And he just had this... 0.99

00:14:31.000 Already had this fucking mountain of CDs. 0.99

00:14:32.000 And he's like, here... 0.99

00:14:34.000 It was like Zeppelin box set and Cream and Hendrix and Humble Pie and Traffic and all these bands. 1.00

00:14:41.000 It was like a fucking bomb just went off in my head. 1.00

00:14:43.000 Wow. 1.00

00:14:43.000 And that was it. 1.00

00:14:44.000 I was done.

00:14:45.000 My life was ruined.

00:14:46.000 I very clearly remember the transition between records and CDs.

00:14:51.000 I remember the very first CDs showing up at the record store.

00:14:54.000 Because kids today probably don't even appreciate it because of the last ten years of the internet has dominated digital downloads ever since... 0.93

00:15:02.000 Napster came along, and then iTunes, and everybody knows how to get shit online. 0.92

00:15:07.000 And there's no record stores anymore. 0.88

00:15:08.000 Obviously there's a few.

00:15:09.000 But I mean, it used to be like a local community spot.

00:15:12.000 I lived in Newton, Massachusetts, and we used to go down to this place that was right across the street from a place that I worked at.

00:15:18.000 I worked at this...

00:15:20.000 Ice cream place called Newport Creamery. 1.00

00:15:22.000 We made hamburgers or washed dishes and did all that shit. 0.99

00:15:25.000 And across the street from Newport Creamery was the record store. 0.99

00:15:28.000 All kids would go there after school.

00:15:29.000 It was our own cultural...

00:15:31.000 It was the only output to the rock and roll of the world.

00:15:35.000 Every week a new record came out.

00:15:37.000 And I remember when the CDs came out, everybody was like, what is this? 0.99

00:15:42.000 What the fuck? 0.99

00:15:43.000 It's got a rainbow in it. 1.00

00:15:43.000 Look at it. 1.00

00:15:44.000 If you wiggle it, it makes rainbows.

00:15:46.000 Well, the digital thing, I think, In a lot of ways it's great, but I blame it almost entirely for the downward spiral of, you know, the quality.

00:15:56.000 Of music? 0.99

00:15:57.000 Yeah, I mean, in the 70s, man, if you got a record deal, you had to be bad the fuck ass. 1.00

00:16:01.000 Right. 1.00

00:16:02.000 There was no slop.

00:16:03.000 Right. 0.99

00:16:04.000 Pro Tools and shit to go in and make everybody, you know. 0.98

00:16:07.000 Yeah, right. 0.90

00:16:08.000 Actually, as a quote, Pig said this to me, he's like, you know what they used before Pro Tools? 0.99

00:16:13.000 Fucking pros. 0.99

00:16:14.000 You know. 1.00

00:16:18.000 That sounds like something a guy named Pig would say.

00:16:20.000 That's awesome.

00:16:22.000 Yeah, they used to have to, you know, the sound was a different sound too, right?

00:16:26.000 I mean, the people that are real vinyl heads, they'll tell you.

00:16:29.000 I don't recognize it.

00:16:31.000 I'm not educated.

00:16:33.000 Yeah, I mean, I'm a pretty... 0.98

00:16:36.000 I'm kind of an audiophile, fucking super geek about it. 0.72

00:16:39.000 Yeah, I've never gotten into it. 0.98

00:16:40.000 I should.

00:16:41.000 I should really get a record player. 1.00

00:16:43.000 I know Marin's really into that shit. 1.00

00:16:44.000 He keeps stacks of them at home. 1.00

00:16:45.000 He listens to them.

00:16:46.000 They meticulously clean them and put them down.

00:16:49.000 You have to have the right earphones.

00:16:51.000 I guess it's got, like, what is the sound that's different?

00:16:53.000 Because I don't listen to vinyl.

00:16:55.000 I think it's just, there's a warmth to it.

00:16:57.000 A warmth.

00:16:58.000 Everything just sounds really settled and cohesive.

00:17:01.000 Whereas in digital, I hear the separation, especially in the stereo.

00:17:01.000 Wow.

00:17:04.000 You can just hear, it's almost like you're sitting at the mixing board, and you just, like some asshole decided that guitar needed to be like a hard two o'clock right there. 0.97

00:17:12.000 But in a vinyl, it just kind of seems more three-dimensional, like it's coming from around you, I feel like. 0.97

00:17:17.000 Wow.

00:17:18.000 So you can sort of hear the different tracks?

00:17:21.000 Oh yeah. 0.99

00:17:22.000 You know, maybe I just don't have a fucking ear for music. 0.99

00:17:25.000 Maybe that makes sense. 0.99

00:17:26.000 Some of my choices.

00:17:28.000 You gotta know what you're listening for.

00:17:29.000 Is that what it is?

00:17:30.000 Yeah.

00:17:31.000 You weren't here when we had Russell Peters on.

00:17:34.000 Russell Peters is a stand-up comic, a friend of mine, very funny guy.

00:17:38.000 He's also a DJ. And we were playing some songs, and he could pick out, it was a rap song, and he could pick out what the samples were from.

00:17:46.000 And I was like, what?

00:17:47.000 How do you hear that?

00:17:48.000 Like, I didn't even hear.

00:17:49.000 He's like, yeah, you can hear right here.

00:17:51.000 Like, that would be from, you know, 1984. And I was like, I don't know how the fuck you just did that. 0.99

00:17:58.000 I trust you, but I don't know how the fuck you just did that. 0.99

00:18:01.000 He's got a separate knowledge base of old music too, to reference from. 0.98

00:18:05.000 Yeah, his is all old hip-hop stuff.

00:18:08.000 He loves old hip-hop stuff.

00:18:10.000 So, the thing about the record stores that people loved was that it was sort of like, because we didn't have the internet, you would go there and you would see these, it was on a big piece of paper.

00:18:25.000 Like, holy shit, here's, you know, here's the new Bruce Springsteen album.

00:18:30.000 Like, it's right there, and you see, oh, wow, it's like, this is what he made. 0.99

00:18:33.000 This is what he's been doing for the past year.

00:18:35.000 Bruce has been, you know, writing all these songs, and bam, here we go, we got it, wow. 0.99

00:18:40.000 You didn't have fucking YouTube. 0.91

00:18:41.000 You didn't have, you know, I mean... 0.99

00:18:43.000 I think that's the worst thing that ever happened is now everything's so accessible and the kids' attention span is so short.

00:18:48.000 They'll never know that experience to sit down and listen to an album all the way through and then just fucking obsess about it. 0.98

00:18:53.000 And then, you know, hold that physical thing, that sleeve in your hand, just like, what the fuck are these guys doing? 0.94

00:18:59.000 Like, they got a secret laboratory and there's something I don't know about, you know? 0.64

00:19:04.000 And mystery, I guess, was the most important element of rock. 0.99

00:19:06.000 And that's just fucking gone. 0.94

00:19:09.000 Do you remember when The Wall came out? 0.99

00:19:12.000 No, I was born in 78. I mean, I remember watching it way too young.

00:19:17.000 I was in high school when I found out about The Wall, so it was after The Wall had come out.

00:19:22.000 But I remember sitting there with my friend, we had the headphone jack thing plugged in so you could have two headphones, both listening to it.

00:19:30.000 And how everything ties in together, it seemed so beyond human reach.

00:19:38.000 Like that these guys figured out how to do all this.

00:19:40.000 They put these amazing songs and they just sort of flow into each other like some wild ride.

00:19:47.000 Or like Dark Side of the Moon, very similar.

00:19:49.000 You know, like the album they always link up to The Wizard of Oz.

00:19:53.000 I mean, that album...

00:19:54.000 Everything just flows together in this crazy way.

00:19:57.000 It did feel like they were in a lab somewhere.

00:20:00.000 Well, Marvin Gaye would do that a lot too.

00:20:01.000 Willie Nelson did a lot of concept records.

00:20:03.000 They call it Song Cycle, where you don't ever feel like there's an actual pause anywhere in the album.

00:20:09.000 It's just this one cohesive work.

00:20:11.000 Wow.

00:20:12.000 And that does take time.

00:20:13.000 We did a little bit of it on Metamodern. 0.95

00:20:16.000 Pink Floyd and some other albums were definitely referenced while we were cutting that shit towards the end. 0.99

00:20:22.000 When you first decided that you were going to be a professional country music singer, did you decide slowly and gradually, or did you just fucking dive in? 0.93

00:20:31.000 I only started my career attempting to have a career about four years ago. 0.95

00:20:36.000 Really?

00:20:37.000 And I never would have done it, to be completely honest.

00:20:40.000 It was really my wife's idea.

00:20:43.000 She's the one that really kind of encouraged me to go for it.

00:20:46.000 Because, you know, there's always something I did as a hobbyist.

00:20:49.000 I would write and play, and I'd get a lot of grief from friends, especially in my 20s.

00:20:52.000 They're like, why aren't you out?

00:20:53.000 You know, man, you should be doing something. 0.95

00:20:56.000 Because we'd go to shows at clubs, and they'd be like, this is fucking cool. 0.53

00:20:59.000 We'd rather be at home listening to you play, you know. 0.90

00:21:02.000 And I just, I don't know why.

00:21:03.000 I never thought...

00:21:07.000 Was it like the limitations of your environment maybe?

00:21:09.000 The people that you were around?

00:21:10.000 I moved to Nashville once in 2006. You can play in local bands and if that's what you want out of it, that's great.

00:21:20.000 There's a lot of people that do that on a hobbyist level.

00:21:23.000 Like I said, it's what you do after work.

00:21:25.000 For me, that just never felt rewarding enough.

00:21:28.000 I never felt like I was giving everything I could to it.

00:21:33.000 It's a very frustrating place, and I ended up putting it down a lot of times because of that.

00:21:38.000 I felt like it was bringing me more heartache.

00:21:41.000 I took jobs and worked normal jobs, and I was out working a railroad job in Utah for almost four years.

00:21:49.000 My wife was out there with me. 0.98

00:21:51.000 I guess, for whatever reason, from dealing with the stress of that, I didn't realize at the time I wasn't fulfilling my fucking purpose, Joe Rogan. 0.98

00:22:01.000 You know what I mean? 0.91

00:22:02.000 She kind of recognized that, and I started writing a lot as a result of dealing with the stress from my job and playing at home. 1.00

00:22:10.000 She just kind of told me, you know, you don't suck at this, and you're going to wake up at 40 and know you never fucking tried, and then I'm stuck with your miserable ass. 1.00

00:22:20.000 Ha ha ha! 1.00

00:22:21.000 We sold everything and literally, man, she and I and our dog in a Ford Bronco drove to Nashville.

00:22:27.000 Wow.

00:22:28.000 That was like four years ago.

00:22:31.000 Now I was older.

00:22:32.000 I was clean.

00:22:33.000 I was focused.

00:22:34.000 I had purpose.

00:22:35.000 The first year, you kind of got to get the lay of the land.

00:22:38.000 It's a hustle.

00:22:39.000 It's a total shark tank. 1.00

00:22:40.000 I just decided I wasn't going to have anything to do with that shit. 1.00

00:22:43.000 I'm not a social guy. 0.99

00:22:44.000 I don't go to bars and clubs and things like that.

00:22:47.000 So what is it like?

00:22:49.000 Man, it's, well there's so many facets to it.

00:22:53.000 You know, depending on what, the industry, there's so many sides of the industry that people fall into.

00:22:58.000 And most, and I'd say the bulk majority of it is complete and total shameless opportunists.

00:23:04.000 Hmm. 0.99

00:23:05.000 But then the musicians come and everybody, you know, the thing about musicians, we're lazy as fuck and nobody really wants to work. 0.91

00:23:11.000 So you get all these guys, these side players, they're looking for songwriters to get gigs supporting or backing up and they want like half the door of what you get paid for their services because they don't want to wait tables. 0.90

00:23:22.000 And there's guys that are really good and earn that money.

00:23:26.000 And then there's this side of it.

00:23:27.000 But it just really feels like, to me, the first time I feel like everybody I've met, it's like literally, hey man, how's it going?

00:23:33.000 What can you do for me?

00:23:34.000 And while they're talking to you, they're looking over your shoulder to see who else they should probably be talking to.

00:23:38.000 It's very Hollywood-like.

00:23:39.000 It's getting more and more.

00:23:42.000 Is that just because of your money, you think?

00:23:44.000 Because there's money in country? 1.00

00:23:45.000 There's a lot of fucking money in country music. 0.99

00:23:47.000 That's the only thing still selling CDs. 0.99

00:23:50.000 That's why the labels are still...

00:23:51.000 Still got CD players.

00:23:52.000 I saw something last night.

00:23:54.000 There's going to be no platinum albums this year.

00:23:57.000 None.

00:23:57.000 For the first time.

00:23:58.000 I mean, now if you have a hit record, you drop an album on a major label.

00:24:01.000 If you sell 200,000 copies in a week, that's a success. 1.00

00:24:04.000 Ten years ago, if you sold 200,000 copies your first week, they'd have dropped your ass. 0.99

00:24:08.000 Isn't that incredible? 0.99

00:24:10.000 So the whole thing is just...

00:24:12.000 It really is the Wild West.

00:24:13.000 With the internet and social media.

00:24:17.000 It affords guys like me and a lot of other people like me doing what I'm doing.

00:24:21.000 The opportunity to reach people without having to go down certain avenues, I guess.

00:24:27.000 And country didn't used to be like that.

00:24:30.000 Like Nashville used to be like what?

00:24:34.000 What was it like?

00:24:34.000 It was, you know, gatekeepers and...

00:24:39.000 Well, when exactly, do you mean?

00:24:41.000 I mean, before it became more Hollywood-esque, the way it is now.

00:24:44.000 Has it always had an element of show business to it?

00:24:46.000 Oh, for sure.

00:24:47.000 Yeah, they do tacky real well, and that's kind of what Rose invented, man. 0.99

00:24:52.000 But I wouldn't say Hollywood.

00:24:53.000 There's a certain LA element to Nashville that's kind of come on in the last two or three years more or so.

00:24:59.000 It's very hip.

00:25:01.000 I blame that Hootie and the Blowfish guy. 1.00

00:25:04.000 When he crossed over.

00:25:05.000 Darius Rucker.

00:25:06.000 Yeah, when Darius got in, a black guy who sings good country.

00:25:10.000 Charlie Pryor, man.

00:25:11.000 I know, but it's been a while.

00:25:13.000 Darius snuck right in there and all those white people came running with him. 0.60

00:25:13.000 Yeah, true. 0.60

00:25:19.000 That's what happened.

00:25:20.000 That's what happened.

00:25:21.000 He brought him in.

00:25:22.000 It's a very interesting situation.

00:25:27.000 There's a fakeness to it.

00:25:28.000 Yeah, it's very studied and effective.

00:25:30.000 Yes, studied and effective is the perfect way to describe it.

00:25:33.000 Fakeness is me falling short again.

00:25:38.000 A lot of journalists have been baited. 0.99

00:25:41.000 I can't tell you how many times they want me to get pulled into this negative conversation and just bash and talk shit on it. 0.98

00:25:48.000 And I could do that, but there's so much negativity already. 0.93

00:25:54.000 Whatever this opportunity is, I don't want to use it for that.

00:25:59.000 Well, you know what?

00:25:59.000 Right.

00:25:59.000 Quite honestly, the negative aspects of anything, whether it's show business or entertainment, I don't think there's anything negative about talking about them.

00:26:10.000 I think the positive effect of talking about them is that young people recognize that they're not crazy, that they sense something goofy about this, and then it becomes more clearly defined what's goofy about it.

00:26:20.000 And it gives them a high standard to not set a trap for themselves.

00:26:25.000 I know in comedy, there's a thing that guys do when they first start out, which really fucks you up.

00:26:32.000 You're just trying to get laughs.

00:26:34.000 You're saying things you don't even believe.

00:26:36.000 Right.

00:26:36.000 Because you're just hoping it'll work.

00:26:37.000 Because you're just terrified because you're on stage.

00:26:39.000 And I think...

00:26:41.000 Similarly in music, you could just start making stuff that you think like, you know, like one of those pros that writes those pop songs, you know, those guys, those weird dudes that just know how to like make something that clicks in, but there's like no feeling to it at all.

00:26:57.000 Well, they sit in cubicles in groups of four and five.

00:27:00.000 I'm not kidding.

00:27:01.000 That's a reality.

00:27:03.000 Yeah.

00:27:04.000 Go to work. 1.00

00:27:05.000 There's a big goddamn difference between that and someone who's writing shit like you're writing. 1.00

00:27:09.000 Someone who's writing shit that resonates. 0.99

00:27:12.000 I can tell, no matter what your influences are in this life, musically, or even while you're creating a song, it's all filtering through your unique individual vision. 0.99

00:27:23.000 And that's entirely missing from all these poppy things.

00:27:27.000 And that's something that people connect with.

00:27:30.000 I mean, look...

00:27:32.000 There's something personal about songs that you know the dude wrote it, you know the guy singing it, like my friends in Honey Honey Band. 1.00

00:27:39.000 They write all their shit. 0.89

00:27:41.000 So when they're singing it, and they're sitting here in the studio singing it, or you've seen them on stage, that's their creation. 1.00

00:27:47.000 It's 100%.

00:27:49.000 And there's a uniqueness to that, that your music has, that a lot of music, that it hits a different frequency, as opposed to a poppy frequency.

00:28:00.000 And these people that are coming in that are just trying to exploit it and monetize it, they probably, that doesn't register with them. 0.97

00:28:07.000 Or even if it does, they don't give a shit, because that's not where they're at. 0.98

00:28:09.000 They're just worried about the quarterly report. 0.99

00:28:11.000 Very seldom do any of the people running labels actually know anything or give a shit about music. 0.98

00:28:16.000 It's just really... 0.92

00:28:18.000 That's really more of a recent development.

00:28:19.000 A lot of them are run by very young guys now, like in their 30s, because the old ruse kind of went out, retired, and it kind of turned over.

00:28:28.000 A lot of the dudes that were in LA in the 80s making all those awful hair metal band records.

00:28:33.000 Those producers and engineers, once that industry dried up, a lot of them moved to Nashville. 0.96

00:28:37.000 If you turn on the radio today, you'll find that a lot of that shit sounds exactly like a Poison record. 0.98

00:28:42.000 There's a reason for that. 0.99

00:28:43.000 Right.

00:28:44.000 Wow.

00:28:45.000 That's interesting.

00:28:47.000 That formulaic way of creating it.

00:28:49.000 Making hits.

00:28:50.000 Yeah.

00:28:51.000 And I think...

00:28:54.000 Two or three decades ago, the label still offered up the other.

00:28:58.000 You had all these great bands that were making art, because they knew they were going to sell a fuckton of copies and make their money back, so they were willing to take the risk.

00:29:07.000 And now there's really no risk takers.

00:29:09.000 And I don't know if that's because of it, maybe there's a lack of visionaries.

00:29:14.000 Is it just because the money's dried up?

00:29:16.000 I think they're all sitting in their corner offices looking out the window wishing it would go back to 1996 and twiddling their thumbs and praying to a dying business model.

00:29:27.000 Because they're completely dependent on radio.

00:29:41.000 Wow.

00:29:48.000 That's so crazy.

00:29:49.000 That's sad to hear.

00:29:49.000 That's sad.

00:29:50.000 It's a business.

00:29:51.000 It is a business, but it's sad to hear.

00:29:53.000 It's just like flipping real estate or something.

00:29:55.000 There's no artist development anymore.

00:29:59.000 Luckily, I didn't try to do this at 22 or 26 because now I've worked real jobs and I was able to understand that, the mechanical aspect of it all.

00:30:09.000 That's not the only way to do it anymore.

00:30:11.000 You can just kind of bypass around that.

00:30:13.000 It's a much longer, harder road.

00:30:15.000 But then again, it's not.

00:30:17.000 Because if you catch fire, it just spreads across the internet.

00:30:22.000 It's a much more rewarding road, I can tell you that. 1.00

00:30:24.000 Oh, fuck yeah. 1.00

00:30:25.000 It's got to be. 1.00

00:30:26.000 I can only imagine.

00:30:27.000 I mean, I would imagine that being stuck singing some songs that you don't believe in and that are not really good, but everybody is really responding to, and you have something inside you that you wish you could have got out.

00:30:41.000 But now you're trapped.

00:30:43.000 You know, that's gotta suck. 0.95

00:30:44.000 I would imagine. 0.95

00:30:45.000 Do you remember when Garth Brooks came back as a different character?

00:30:48.000 Chris Gaines, man.

00:30:49.000 Yeah.

00:30:49.000 Put the wig on.

00:30:50.000 There was nobody there to say, hey, maybe you shouldn't do this.

00:30:54.000 Like, he was surrounded by yes people.

00:30:56.000 You just know.

00:30:57.000 Because somebody was like, yeah, that'll be cool.

00:31:02.000 Someone didn't say, wait, what, wait, wait, what?

00:31:05.000 What, wait, what?

00:31:07.000 You're gonna...

00:31:08.000 Hold on.

00:31:10.000 What are you gonna do?

00:31:11.000 You're gonna put a wig on?

00:31:12.000 And you're gonna change your name.

00:31:14.000 But everybody's gonna know it's you.

00:31:15.000 So what are you doing?

00:31:16.000 Are you playing a character now?

00:31:18.000 You're playing a character.

00:31:19.000 It was high art, man. 1.00

00:31:20.000 Yeah, you're a goddamn superstar. 1.00

00:31:22.000 Show's deep. 1.00

00:31:23.000 You're selling some...

00:31:23.000 You know, I got friends in low places.

00:31:25.000 Sold a lot of fucking copies. 0.99

00:31:27.000 And what are you gonna do now? 1.00

00:31:28.000 You're gonna put a fucking... 0.99

00:31:29.000 Look at him. 1.00

00:31:30.000 He had hair across his face.

00:31:30.000 Look at him.

00:31:31.000 Remember that shit? 1.00

00:31:32.000 He grew a soul patch. 1.00

00:31:34.000 Like, what the fuck was going on there? 0.99

00:31:37.000 It's his filtered interpretation. 0.99

00:31:39.000 I think he was going for like a Ryan Adams-y sort of thing.

00:31:43.000 I think he just straight went crazy. 1.00

00:31:45.000 Before he went fucking nuts. 1.00

00:31:47.000 That's a very distinct possibility. 1.00

00:31:49.000 He blew a rod right there.

00:31:50.000 He's redlining his engine.

00:31:51.000 Look at those eyes, man.

00:31:54.000 That was blowing a rod in the engine. 0.98

00:31:58.000 And then from then on, he kind of disappeared.

00:32:01.000 You never hear about Garth Brooks anymore.

00:32:03.000 Oh, he just came back.

00:32:04.000 Well, he's gonna, I mean, he'll still do well. 0.97

00:32:06.000 He's got a lot of fucking hits, but it's been a long time where Garth Brooks is in the public consciousness. 0.90

00:32:12.000 But meanwhile, in the 1990s or whatever it was, 80, I guess 90s, like early 90s, when did he, when was he just giganti? 0.98

00:32:20.000 Like early 90s.

00:32:21.000 He just kind of came out of nowhere.

00:32:23.000 Giganty! 0.99

00:32:24.000 Just knocked it right out.

00:32:25.000 Really, I think a lot of the stuff going on today is an absolute direct byproduct.

00:32:31.000 We're still getting the ripples of all that.

00:32:32.000 Because at some point, country music turned into a really shitty Van Halen concert.

00:32:37.000 You know what I mean?

00:32:39.000 Not David Lee Roth.

00:32:40.000 No!

00:32:41.000 Sammy Hagar.

00:32:42.000 Yeah, Van Hagar.

00:32:43.000 I knew what you were going to mean.

00:32:44.000 Come on, man.

00:32:46.000 You know, it's fascinating.

00:32:48.000 His first two are religion.

00:32:49.000 Yeah, dude.

00:32:51.000 I think that the original Van Halen with David Lee Roths are the greatest bands of all time, without a doubt.

00:32:58.000 Running with the Devil to this day. 0.98

00:33:00.000 It's like if I'm on the treadmill and I throw on Running with the Devil, I'll crank that bitch up an extra couple miles an hour. 1.00

00:33:05.000 Fuck it. 1.00

00:33:06.000 You know? 1.00

00:33:07.000 It's just one of those songs, man.

00:33:10.000 But they did just as well with Sammy Hagar.

00:33:12.000 They really did.

00:33:14.000 Might have done better.

00:33:15.000 They got more soccer moms. 1.00

00:33:16.000 Yeah, what happened there?

00:33:18.000 Commercially, I think it made them more accessible. 0.99

00:33:22.000 What the fuck is that? 0.98

00:33:23.000 I don't know. 0.99

00:33:24.000 That was my first concert ever.

00:33:26.000 My dad took me to see Van Halen in the fifth grade.

00:33:29.000 Really?

00:33:29.000 Yeah.

00:33:30.000 Fucking Eddie Van Halen for a fifth grader. 0.99

00:33:34.000 That's amazing, man. 1.00

00:33:35.000 In the fifth grade.

00:33:36.000 Yeah.

00:33:37.000 I think mine was the 9th grade when we went to see the J. Giles Band.

00:33:41.000 J. Giles Band was huge back then.

00:33:44.000 Angels of Centerfold.

00:33:46.000 Love Stinks.

00:33:48.000 They were giant, man.

00:33:49.000 They had a lot of deep cuts.

00:33:50.000 Yeah.

00:33:51.000 Giant in my high school.

00:33:52.000 Giant! 0.88

00:33:54.000 In 1981 or whatever the hell it was.

00:33:56.000 Where are you from?

00:33:57.000 Newton.

00:33:58.000 Well, that's where I went to high school.

00:34:00.000 I was born in New Jersey.

00:34:01.000 I grew up kind of all over the country.

00:34:03.000 Lived in San Francisco from age 7 to 11. Lived in Florida from 11 to 13. Boston from 13 to probably 23, 24. And then New York for a couple years.

00:34:15.000 And California.

00:34:17.000 So I'm from California now.

00:34:19.000 I'm more California than anything I've ever been in my life.

00:34:22.000 But this place is a mess. 1.00

00:34:24.000 It's a fucking mess. 0.99

00:34:27.000 It's not the worst place, though. 1.00

00:34:29.000 It's just there's too many people.

00:34:31.000 If you could whittle California, if you could whittle Los Angeles down to, like, one-tenth of its size, as far as, like, population-wise.

00:34:39.000 You know, if you ever go to Seattle... 0.99

00:34:41.000 I bet it was the shit in the 40s and the 50s, man. 1.00

00:34:44.000 It was the absolute shit. 1.00

00:34:46.000 It's just a matter of inconvenience and overpopulation. 1.00

00:34:51.000 I've lived in Seattle for a while.

00:34:53.000 Very few people. 1.00

00:34:54.000 That sound kicked my ass. 1.00

00:34:55.000 Oh, yeah. 1.00

00:34:55.000 Did it? 1.00

00:34:56.000 The rain?

00:34:56.000 What was it?

00:34:57.000 Among other things, yeah.

00:34:59.000 The rain, I think, is a direct contributor to a lot of the other problems people acquire while they live in Seattle.

00:34:59.000 The rain did get you.

00:35:04.000 But the rain keeps people from moving there, too. 0.99

00:35:07.000 There's a good thing about that goddamn rain. 0.99

00:35:09.000 But it's beautiful. 0.99

00:35:09.000 It really is. 0.99

00:35:10.000 So beautiful.

00:35:11.000 Especially the summers.

00:35:12.000 I mean, it's really hard to beat Seattle in the summertime.

00:35:16.000 It's just that other nine months of the most dismal... 0.98

00:35:18.000 I mean, I remember hanging my towel up to dry for taking a shower, and you'd come in there two days later, and it'd be like fucking lichen growing on. 0.97

00:35:25.000 It's just a Petri dish, you know? 0.98

00:35:26.000 Yeah.

00:35:27.000 So much precipitation that...

00:35:30.000 People are jacked up on coffee or heroin all the time. 0.96

00:35:33.000 But I have friends that live in Seattle that were fucking defended to the death. 0.97

00:35:36.000 Like right now the voodoo chicken is raising its fists in anger. 1.00

00:35:39.000 You, wait till I get a hold of you. 1.00

00:35:41.000 He fucking moved there from Indiana, my friend voodoo chicken. 1.00

00:35:45.000 That's what his official stage name is. 0.99

00:35:48.000 And when he did that, man, he liked it way better than Indiana.

00:35:52.000 And I'm like, that's good.

00:35:53.000 But have you ever lived in Los Angeles?

00:35:53.000 That's good.

00:35:55.000 Have you ever lived where it just doesn't fucking rain? 0.98

00:35:58.000 Like we're babies. 0.99

00:35:59.000 We're used to just soaking in that sun every day.

00:36:03.000 Every day.

00:36:03.000 We don't have a bad day.

00:36:04.000 Like 320 days a year?

00:36:05.000 How about 370?

00:36:07.000 We have extra days here.

00:36:07.000 Really?

00:36:09.000 Extra Sundays? 0.99

00:36:09.000 It doesn't fucking rain. 0.99

00:36:11.000 It's a total drought. 0.99

00:36:13.000 I mean, we're stealing water from the Colorado River or some shit. 0.92

00:36:15.000 I don't know how we keep everything hydrated. 0.97

00:36:17.000 Until some super genius guy figures out how to suck water out of the ocean. 0.66

00:36:22.000 You want to get some oceanfront property about 700 yards in because everybody's worried about the sea level rising.

00:36:30.000 All you have to do is figure out how to desalinate ocean water. 1.00

00:36:33.000 We'll drink that shit. 1.00

00:36:34.000 We'll use that shit in our toilets. 1.00

00:36:36.000 We'll just start extra golf courses with that fucking ocean. 1.00

00:36:38.000 That ocean won't be nothing. 0.99

00:36:40.000 Don't worry about that thing rising.

00:36:41.000 Oh, you're worried about...

00:36:42.000 There'd be too much water?

00:36:43.000 Oh, don't sweat it.

00:36:44.000 We got that.

00:36:45.000 It doesn't rain, and we're abusive when we find a resource. 0.98

00:36:49.000 If we could actually tap into the ocean, beachfront people would be fucking pissed. 0.94

00:36:53.000 Because the beach would be like a couple hundred yards away in a few years. 0.95

00:36:56.000 A mile and a half to the shoreline. 1.00

00:36:58.000 We'd suck that bitch dry. 1.00

00:37:00.000 It may come to that. 1.00

00:37:02.000 It might.

00:37:03.000 It really might.

00:37:04.000 It may very well.

00:37:05.000 I don't know.

00:37:06.000 You know, man, every time I come to California, it's always like in and out.

00:37:11.000 Yeah, quick.

00:37:12.000 We were here, we did Conan, and played at the Troubadour a month or two back, and we were here for about four days, and that's the most time I've ever spent consecutively in L.A., but I've never been able to really get the lay of the land.

00:37:26.000 I know I like Redondo.

00:37:28.000 Yeah, Redondo's nice.

00:37:29.000 Very chill, bohemian kind of feel.

00:37:32.000 That's where Tommy Buns lives.

00:37:34.000 Tom Segura lives in Redondo. 0.99

00:37:35.000 He fucking loves it. 0.99

00:37:36.000 It's very chill. 0.99

00:37:38.000 Like any of those beach communities are very chill.

00:37:40.000 LA's great.

00:37:41.000 It's great. 0.99

00:37:41.000 I talk shit about it sometimes, but it's just the amount of people. 0.99

00:37:44.000 I just don't think people value things that they have in too much abundance. 0.99

00:37:49.000 I think there's an issue with people when you get over a certain population. 0.98

00:37:52.000 I think we just naturally get a little more callous or You just don't give a fuck about each other. 0.69

00:37:58.000 Like, if you go to like a really small town and you go to the store, people say hi to each other. 0.99

00:38:03.000 Because there's not that many fucking people. 0.98

00:38:05.000 There's only a few thousand people in the town. 1.00

00:38:07.000 I mean, yeah, they're going to get some small-minded gossipy bullshit, too. 0.90

00:38:11.000 But I don't necessarily think that has to be the case in a small town. 0.92

00:38:16.000 But I think the benefit of being in a smaller population is people are just like a little less...

00:38:22.000 Intruded upon by sensory input.

00:38:24.000 Everybody's a little less on edge.

00:38:26.000 Yeah.

00:38:27.000 California's just...

00:38:28.000 There's 20 million people plus Mexicans in this city.

00:38:32.000 I say plus Mexicans. 0.97

00:38:34.000 With respect.

00:38:35.000 Because, I mean, people that have come over here from Mexico, which I think you should just be able to come over.

00:38:39.000 I don't believe in... 0.94

00:38:41.000 I think it's ridiculous that people who want to work, they should be forced to stay in this shitty patch of dirt because they just got a bad roll of the dice and they were born there. 0.93

00:38:49.000 I think we're just scared. 0.99

00:38:51.000 The good spots, like here, we're scared it's going to bounce out somehow and they're going to come over and fuck it up.

00:38:55.000 We just gotta figure out a way to not have it fuck it up.

00:38:58.000 Just gotta figure out a way to not have crime and poverty and all the different issues that we've just completely ignored in poor communities.

00:39:05.000 Not have that affect everybody's, like, level of happiness that's living in these big groups. 0.99

00:39:11.000 But just to imprison someone in a shit country, because they were fucked and they were born there, just seems kind of crazy and inhumane to me. 0.99

00:39:20.000 Just seems weird, you know? 1.00

00:39:21.000 It's pretty Eurocentric. 0.71

00:39:23.000 But I think the illegals, first of all, they're here. 0.95

00:39:28.000 They're Americans. 1.00

00:39:29.000 We're all immigrants, you fucks. 0.99

00:39:31.000 But if you counted them, I don't think they've ever really counted them. 0.99

00:39:34.000 I don't know how many that is.

00:39:35.000 So I say 20 million plus Mexicans because that's what it is.

00:39:38.000 It's like the greater LA area, which is a huge area.

00:39:43.000 It goes all the way down and wide.

00:39:46.000 It's so spread out and sprawled.

00:39:48.000 Something around 20 million people, which is just incredible.

00:39:51.000 That's just a nutty number.

00:39:53.000 I lived in Tokyo for a while.

00:39:55.000 Whoa.

00:39:56.000 When I was younger.

00:39:57.000 What were you doing there?

00:39:58.000 I was in the military.

00:39:59.000 I got stations over there.

00:40:00.000 Wow.

00:40:02.000 And it's like, you know, an island...

00:40:05.000 Roughly the size of California with the population in the United States.

00:40:09.000 But it was weird.

00:40:10.000 Something you said earlier about people being crowded.

00:40:14.000 I just went back last year and visited some friends of mine that helped me with a video project.

00:40:17.000 And I noticed it even more so now that I'm older.

00:40:21.000 But even on a crowded subway train where you're just jammed in like sardines or walking down the street, they're so aware of...

00:40:31.000 Well, self-aware and then just their surroundings.

00:40:33.000 You know, you could be crammed in this train literally nut to butt, but yet nobody's touching anybody.

00:40:39.000 You know, there's just really this awareness.

00:40:43.000 And...

00:40:47.000 Consideration and mutual respect that I think you don't really encounter in a lot of big cities here. 0.98

00:40:51.000 It's just this, get the fuck out of my way. 0.92

00:40:53.000 You know what I mean? 0.94

00:40:53.000 Yeah, I found it incredibly polite. 0.94

00:40:56.000 I went to Tokyo once, and I was like, everybody's so polite here.

00:41:00.000 It's amazing.

00:41:00.000 So friendly.

00:41:01.000 You know, that place is 20 times the size of New York City, and you could pass out in the darkest alley with a $100 bill sticking out of each year, and nobody's going to fuck with you. 0.98

00:41:11.000 But there's a bunch of African dudes that are moving in there from Africa, like straight from Africa, these hustler guys. 1.00

00:41:16.000 There's mostly Roppongi in some of the nightlife districts.

00:41:19.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:41:21.000 You walk down the street and they're trying to drag you into some massage joint and there's just a look about them like, oh. 1.00

00:41:26.000 Some sinister shit, man. 1.00

00:41:27.000 A wolf got into the chicken coop. 1.00

00:41:30.000 Well, it does have, there is a very dark underbelly side to Tokyo for sure.

00:41:36.000 But it's hard for guys like you and me to really go find that.

00:41:40.000 Well, I've had Ensign Inoue on the podcast several times.

00:41:43.000 He's an MMA fighter who was originally from Hawaii but lives in Japan now.

00:41:47.000 And he's Japanese and he's friends with all these.

00:41:50.000 He fought for Pride, which was the biggest MMA organization in the world at one point.

00:41:56.000 They were in Japan.

00:41:57.000 K2? No, no, that's K-1.

00:42:00.000 You're thinking of like kickboxing.

00:42:01.000 That's a big event, too.

00:42:03.000 They had some MMA events as well.

00:42:04.000 But Pride had these enormous shows where they would do like 90,000 seat arenas.

00:42:10.000 I mean, it was just gigantic.

00:42:11.000 And Ensign was one of their big stars over there, and he's down with the Yakuza, so he had all these crazy Yakuza stories.

00:42:16.000 Like...

00:42:17.000 You know, I hung out with a couple of Yakuza guys once.

00:42:20.000 One of them was a bookie and the other one, I guess he was just like a, you know, you're sitting in bars and you'd be drunk, you know, and they all, especially if they learn you're American or if you speak English, they all want to talk to you and just figure out what you're about.

00:42:35.000 And these guys, you know, they were drunk.

00:42:36.000 We just ended up kicking it for a couple hours.

00:42:38.000 Then I kind of put it together and realized what they did.

00:42:40.000 Wow.

00:42:41.000 And they asked me and a friend of mine that was with me if we wanted to go to another club.

00:42:45.000 And this guy had like this We're good to go.

00:43:01.000 We're good to go.

00:43:08.000 And there's a lot of that, but they're in one specific part of the city, mostly Shinjuku, where all the pachinko parlors and organized gambling takes place and the red light.

00:43:20.000 They make it very obvious who they are, you know what I mean?

00:43:24.000 Wow.

00:43:24.000 And it's an accepted part of the culture.

00:43:26.000 More and more so.

00:43:27.000 They've become less corrupt.

00:43:28.000 The government just kind of realized we can try to fight this or we can work with them.

00:43:33.000 They do a lot of things for the communities that they're in, strangely enough, you know, to kind of keep order. 0.98

00:43:39.000 But then at the same time you hear stories about some guy might owe a little too much money and they just literally go and beat him the fuck to death in a train station. 0.97

00:43:48.000 With baseball bats or whatever in front of people and they don't do shit about it. 0.99

00:43:52.000 Whoa. 0.97

00:43:53.000 There's a club owner in Roppongi that got murdered a couple years ago and I don't think anything came of that.

00:43:56.000 It's just like...

00:43:57.000 Just that's what happens.

00:43:58.000 That's what happens.

00:44:00.000 Whew.

00:44:01.000 Whoa.

00:44:03.000 They have MMA fights between gang members.

00:44:07.000 They have, like, Yakuza MMA fights. 1.00

00:44:10.000 Yeah, what the fuck? 0.99

00:44:13.000 Jesus Christ. 1.00

00:44:16.000 That's a crazy warrior society.

00:44:18.000 Which is interesting that they're so kind.

00:44:20.000 They adhere to Budo.

00:44:22.000 That's their whole trip, is maintaining samurai culture.

00:44:26.000 They despise all the westernization that happened post-World War II. It's all about codes and honor and the Budo way.

00:44:34.000 Yeah, Ensign Inoue, his nickname is Yamato Damashi.

00:44:38.000 Just warrior spirit and this samurai spirit that everything has to be done with Yamato Damashi.

00:44:43.000 Like when he would go into a fight, he would write notes to all his friends and his family because he thought he would die.

00:44:49.000 Yeah.

00:44:50.000 And write a goodbye note. 1.00

00:44:51.000 All that big horror and shit. 1.00

00:44:53.000 Just ready to go to war. 0.99

00:44:54.000 You know, that guy was... 0.93

00:44:56.000 And his fights were so fucking exciting because of that. 0.84

00:44:59.000 Because like he literally never worried about his own safety. 0.85

00:45:02.000 He would just go in there and just try to test himself and just swing...

00:45:06.000 Did you ever read any of Moriya Yoshiba or the guy that founded Aikido?

00:45:13.000 No, no.

00:45:15.000 He was more of a philosopher, really, than a martial artist?

00:45:19.000 Well, he was absolutely a martial artist, but a lot of his writings I always found more interesting, more so than the actual art.

00:45:29.000 Well, that was really a strange part of samurai culture.

00:45:32.000 I shouldn't say strange, but unexpected.

00:45:34.000 When I started investigating it, or reading about it rather, was that they were required to be balanced, and it was encouraged to be a very balanced person.

00:45:44.000 Balanced like in your discipline, balanced in your artistic expression.

00:45:49.000 Balanced in your understanding of emotions and fears.

00:45:52.000 It was very different than what we think of as, like, a warrior. 0.99

00:45:55.000 We think of, like, Stone Cold Murderer, Conan the Barbarian motherfucker, just... 0.97

00:46:00.000 I think it was just, at its essence, pure, absolute Buddhism. 0.98

00:46:04.000 Like, they just live completely in that moment all the time.

00:46:08.000 Whatever they do, they're so intensely focused and, you know, in anything.

00:46:15.000 Whether it's...

00:46:17.000 Trimming a flower or, you know, there's a very certain element to that culture that I've never seen anywhere else in the world.

00:46:26.000 Yeah, I wonder how that happens.

00:46:28.000 I'd like to talk to someone who's an expert in Japanese culture to explain how one society does fit into this very unusual pattern.

00:46:36.000 Mm-hmm.

00:46:39.000 I wonder how much of it had to do with sword fighting. 0.99

00:46:41.000 Well, you know, that's what you should talk about, you know, because you can't second guess in a fucking sword fight. 0.99

00:46:47.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:46:47.000 Like, in every... 0.98

00:46:48.000 Most, you know, these samurai movies, that's all bullshit, because a lot of these things were one stroke. 0.98

00:46:52.000 Mm-hmm. 0.98

00:46:53.000 You know, you had to choose that first stroke, and then...

00:46:55.000 Yeah.

00:46:56.000 Cutting a man in half.

00:46:58.000 So...

00:46:59.000 And then with any kind of society like that, Ido or Kendo, whatever, there's a lot of mutual respect, I would imagine. 0.52

00:47:06.000 Back in the day, if a peasant or somebody going to the fucking market, taking their fruit to sell, if they pass the samurai on the street and they didn't bow accordingly or just basically say good morning... 1.00

00:47:17.000 They cut their fucking head off, man. 1.00

00:47:19.000 Like, right there. 1.00

00:47:20.000 Like, no questions.

00:47:23.000 You know, imagine if, like, walking down the street on Santa Monica was like that today.

00:47:29.000 I mean, people's behavior would be very different towards one another.

00:47:32.000 Yeah, it's...

00:47:33.000 I don't think it's good to be cutting people's heads off. 0.72

00:47:36.000 No, I'm not saying that. 0.85

00:47:37.000 I know what you're saying.

00:47:37.000 But I do think...

00:47:38.000 I do think that when people are scared of other people in that way, or when they respect... 0.99

00:47:52.000 I don't necessarily think that's the way to go, but I do think there is an element of people that need to know that they get punched in their fucking face. 0.98

00:48:00.000 Like, there's a bunch of people that say rude shit to people, and they say it Only because they think they can, because they're protected by society, and because of that, they're oftentimes less respectful than someone who would be like a physically dominant person in the conversation. 0.99

00:48:16.000 Like, I've seen martial artists have conversations with people where, you know, they're way, way... 0.99

00:48:25.000 Way more kind or way more considerate in the way they've voiced their concerns or opinions about something versus people that have never been in a fight in their life that will get in people's face and scream and yell, and you motherfucker, and it's like, you're only doing that because this guy's not going to punch you. 0.99

00:48:42.000 You know, you're having this conversation because you're out in public and you know this guy's not just going to pick you up and drop you on your head. 0.99

00:48:47.000 But if he wanted to, he could.

00:48:49.000 Like, he shouldn't talk to people like that. 1.00

00:48:51.000 There aren't any repercussions for being an asshole. 1.00

00:48:54.000 Exactly. 1.00

00:48:54.000 Yes. 1.00

00:48:55.000 The repercussions are only verbal, and they feel like if they keep it on that ground, they can bully the bully, even.

00:49:04.000 They can go after them if they keep it completely verbal. 1.00

00:49:07.000 If they know the guy's not going to do anything, you big fucking stupid piece of shit, and they know he's not going to smash your head like a zit. 1.00

00:49:15.000 As long as you're protected by society, you can get away with being pretty shitty to some people. 1.00

00:49:22.000 So I don't think it's good to chop people in half with swords, but I do think it might have something to do with the reason why they're considerate.

00:49:32.000 You know, it's weird how cultures develop in these unusual ways when they're just separated.

00:49:39.000 Like, Japan is an island.

00:49:40.000 You know, they're separated from other people, so they've developed it.

00:49:44.000 I mean, there's similarities to other Eastern cultures and their approach to things, but they're different.

00:49:50.000 You know, they have their own thing going on.

00:49:52.000 I think every place has its own thing going on.

00:49:55.000 I was in D.C., I guess, back in April.

00:50:01.000 I was trying to catch a train to go to a show.

00:50:03.000 I can't remember if it was New York or Boston.

00:50:05.000 I was at the Amtrak station in D.C. Something happened where there was a downed power line way up north that had taken out a lot of routes.

00:50:12.000 They basically canceled or delayed all the trains going out of the station.

00:50:18.000 When they put the announcement up, It just... 0.99

00:50:21.000 The place fucking erupted. 0.99

00:50:23.000 I mean... 0.99

00:50:24.000 I've never witnessed such a self-important display of human behavior in all my life as in Washington, D.C. that day at the Amtrak station.

00:50:34.000 There's this line of suited, briefcased...

00:50:39.000 You know, they all just got right in the Amtrak employees' faces one at a time, like, trying to explain to them how much more important their life was than everyone else's who had just been inconvenienced, you know, sitting in this place.

00:50:50.000 Right.

00:50:51.000 And, I mean, it was like, I had to retreat into myself.

00:50:56.000 I was just so surrounded by it. 0.98

00:50:59.000 And I saw a pregnant lady get fucking bumped out of the way. 1.00

00:51:03.000 Whoa. 1.00

00:51:04.000 Some dude, I mean, this is disgusting, man. 0.90

00:51:07.000 I don't know. 0.93

00:51:07.000 Wow. 0.93

00:51:09.000 You would never see that in Japan.

00:51:12.000 Right.

00:51:13.000 People would just deal.

00:51:14.000 I don't know if you'd ever see that in England, you know?

00:51:18.000 I mean, who's to say? 0.95

00:51:20.000 Is that just the uber-successful, hyper-focused, shithead thing that we have that other countries just don't have? 0.97

00:51:28.000 Like, they have the discipline, but they don't have this... 0.98

00:51:31.000 Marauding focus thing that a lot of like American businessmen sort of embody this ideas go get you know it's Wall Street fucking Gordon Gekko greed is good now that kind of shit I was I would say you know Wall Street and DC places like this yeah tend to cultivate a bit more intense version of that I was just there Saturday night I had a great fucking time yeah it's a great party town but uh yeah I don't know what I mean I don't know what happened I just couldn't believe what I was seeing It seems like a weird place. 0.92

00:52:00.000 It affected me.

00:52:00.000 It's a weird place.

00:52:00.000 It really did.

00:52:02.000 I mean, that's the Death Star.

00:52:04.000 It's right there.

00:52:05.000 I mean, all the world's wars are all, like, sort of organized in this weird geometrical building there.

00:52:12.000 You know?

00:52:14.000 This is a thing.

00:52:15.000 It's there. 0.92

00:52:16.000 There's the penthouse, which is just outside of there, and then there's the White House, which is this weird fucking building in a park where the commander-in-chief of the number one conquering army the world has ever known, that's where he sleeps. 0.73

00:52:29.000 And everybody passes by the castle, some sort of strange formation, a big circle you drive around, everybody points at it. 0.70

00:52:36.000 It's a weird place to be.

00:52:39.000 You've read the history of the layout of the city and why it was laid out.

00:52:44.000 Yeah.

00:52:44.000 Do you remember it?

00:52:47.000 It's got all sorts of weird...

00:52:48.000 It's not Masonic, is it?

00:52:49.000 Yes.

00:52:50.000 Yeah.

00:52:50.000 Some weird Masonic implications.

00:52:53.000 It's all very specific in its geometry.

00:52:56.000 This may not be true, but I think I read somewhere that part of it, like why the streets are all one way and why it's so fucking confusing to drive around in D.C. is that in case it was ever invaded, they wanted to make it difficult...

00:53:08.000 For whoever was coming to get from the shore into the capital.

00:53:11.000 That makes sense.

00:53:13.000 That totally makes sense.

00:53:15.000 Why would you like to have it so you could do an easy drive-by?

00:53:18.000 Get on the highway and go really fast.

00:53:21.000 You want to make it super complicated.

00:53:25.000 What is that street?

00:53:26.000 Lombard Street in San Francisco?

00:53:27.000 That's what they should do. 1.00

00:53:28.000 Have that shit set up. 1.00

00:53:30.000 It's a cool city too. 1.00

00:53:32.000 Yeah.

00:53:32.000 Well, it's got a lot of weird history to it.

00:53:35.000 It's like, if you stop and think about it.

00:53:36.000 Yeah, there's a website on the sacred geometry and symbols of Washington, D.C. Oh, interesting.

00:53:43.000 And it sort of explains the whole thing.

00:53:46.000 Like, what it mimics and the different...

00:53:52.000 All the different dimensions.

00:53:54.000 It's freaky stuff, man.

00:53:56.000 It's freaky because you know that these guys, they really were into ancient cultures.

00:54:01.000 They really were into these weird groups that they would form. 0.98

00:54:05.000 I mean, that skull and bone shit, that's not fake. 0.99

00:54:08.000 Yeah, that's weird. 1.00

00:54:09.000 That's fucking weird. 0.94

00:54:09.000 That's real. 0.94

00:54:10.000 That's real.

00:54:11.000 I mean, they really are a part of all this stuff.

00:54:13.000 Were they into pine cones?

00:54:15.000 I don't know if they were into pine cones.

00:54:18.000 I know that was a big thing in a lot of ancient Catholic art.

00:54:22.000 Right.

00:54:22.000 Oh, there's giant pine cones outside the Vatican.

00:54:24.000 Yeah.

00:54:25.000 Yeah, the pine cone supposedly represents the pineal gland, which is the seed of the soul in ancient Egypt, which is where now they've actually proven that DMT is made.

00:54:36.000 It's pretty speculative until real recently.

00:54:39.000 At least in rodents, right?

00:54:40.000 Yes.

00:54:41.000 Which, I mean, it's a mammal.

00:54:42.000 Yeah.

00:54:43.000 Rick Strassman and that group that he's involved with, the Cottonwood Research Foundation, they put it together.

00:54:49.000 And just getting in a live rodent, being able to prove that this third eye in the middle of your head actually is producing psychedelic chemicals. 0.98

00:54:58.000 Pretty fucking crazy. 0.98

00:55:00.000 The people that knew that, they designed the White House. 1.00

00:55:03.000 Designed all that shit. 1.00

00:55:04.000 Oh yeah. 1.00

00:55:05.000 Sort of, probably.

00:55:06.000 They were probably copying people who knew it.

00:55:08.000 Probably didn't even know why. 1.00

00:55:10.000 They had buckets of that shit. 1.00

00:55:11.000 Do you think they had DMT back when they were building the White House? 1.00

00:55:14.000 I mean, it was here.

00:55:15.000 But was it?

00:55:17.000 You know, they didn't even find out about ayahuasca.

00:55:19.000 When was it first synthesized?

00:55:20.000 That's a good question.

00:55:22.000 I think ayahuasca was discovered by Western civilization in the 1850s.

00:55:26.000 Okay.

00:55:27.000 And I think they figured out what was in it when they were isolating the alkaloids in it.

00:55:34.000 And they originally wanted to call it telepathine, the alkaloid they isolated.

00:55:39.000 But then they found out that it was already isolated as the compound harmine.

00:55:44.000 And that's in the plant that is connected to ayahuasca that has the MAO inhibitor.

00:55:50.000 Right.

00:55:50.000 So this is all like the early 1900s, late 1800s, early 1900s.

00:55:55.000 How did they figure that shit out? 0.98

00:55:55.000 How did they know what plants to boil together in order to deactivate the enzyme? 0.98

00:56:00.000 And how'd they know for thousands of years?

00:56:02.000 Yeah, how'd they know?

00:56:02.000 Yeah, how'd they figure it out?

00:56:03.000 It's not an easy process.

00:56:05.000 I mean, how many species of plants can there be in the Amazon?

00:56:08.000 You know what I mean?

00:56:08.000 They found the right to?

00:56:10.000 Well, what's fucked up is that there's hundreds of thousands of different plants.

00:56:14.000 They found not just the right two, but they found out how to do it in this weird way where you have to mash up the vines and you add in the leaves and you boil it down.

00:56:25.000 It's a very involved process that takes hours to make true ayahuasca.

00:56:31.000 But nobody knows how they did it.

00:56:33.000 They say that the plants told them how to do it.

00:56:35.000 Which is just as good an explanation as anything. 0.99

00:56:38.000 If you're high on mushrooms, plants will tell you some shit. 0.99

00:56:38.000 I accept that. 0.99

00:56:41.000 I've had conversations with Traffic signals, you know what I mean?

00:56:47.000 Yeah.

00:56:50.000 Imagine if everything really was alive, we just couldn't tune into it, you know?

00:56:55.000 I mean, if your table really was alive, and your table really had consciousness, it just sits there.

00:57:02.000 Its consciousness is very different than ours.

00:57:04.000 It's not important for it to move.

00:57:07.000 It just is where it is.

00:57:08.000 If you chop it up, it doesn't freak it out, but it has some sort of a feel to it.

00:57:14.000 That's interesting.

00:57:16.000 I mean...

00:57:17.000 Obviously it's not provable.

00:57:19.000 No.

00:57:19.000 But that Rupert Sheldrake guy who was on before...

00:57:23.000 Rupert, who was on a couple weeks ago, he thinks that everything has a memory.

00:57:27.000 He thinks that objects contain a memory.

00:57:29.000 And that's why people don't want to live in a house where someone's been killed.

00:57:33.000 Like you walk in, you have a weird feeling.

00:57:35.000 I'd say one of the more common side effects of high-dose psilocybin is inanimate objects tend to develop personalities or you kind of perceive them as much more characterized than normally. 0.98

00:57:50.000 It's all condensed matter, you know, so who fuck knows, man. 0.98

00:57:54.000 Right. 0.99

00:57:55.000 Yeah, well, who does... 0.99

00:57:57.000 That's another part of the whole what is a thing, what is an object that really fucks with your head.

00:58:03.000 When you start thinking about the fact that most atoms, like it's mostly space.

00:58:08.000 Like there's all this...

00:58:09.000 Or dark space, yeah.

00:58:10.000 There's all this stuff in there where it's undefined.

00:58:12.000 Like there's a lot of nothing.

00:58:15.000 And it's all just...

00:58:18.000 It's sort of somehow or another cohesive and becomes a table.

00:58:22.000 It's like energy condensed to a very slow vibration, right?

00:58:25.000 Yeah.

00:58:26.000 That's the Hicks line.

00:58:27.000 Yeah.

00:58:29.000 Here's Tom with the weather.

00:58:30.000 All of it sounds bizarre.

00:58:32.000 Just the idea that atoms, we're trying to figure out what subatomic particles are, and there's these particles inside atoms. 0.73

00:58:39.000 Like, we don't know what the fuck is going on with all those things.

00:58:42.000 Like, what are all those? 0.97

00:58:43.000 Have you followed this hydrogen collider thing?

00:58:45.000 Which one?

00:58:46.000 The Higgs boson.

00:58:47.000 Yes.

00:58:48.000 Just fat.

00:58:49.000 I mean, I don't know.

00:58:52.000 That's the kind of stuff I was tripping out on when the record got written.

00:58:55.000 I mean, just like, you know, I don't know.

00:58:57.000 I don't pretend to understand it.

00:58:58.000 I'm definitely a hobbyist, but I'm fascinated by, like, string theory and the concept of independent, freestanding, dimensional realms of energy that all kind of hold one another together. 0.65

00:59:10.000 I'm fascinated that someone's mind is not just so tuned in to how the nature of the universe works, but so tuned in that they've taken this theoretical particle and made it the subject of this gigantic science project that involves hundreds of different fucking countries.

00:59:31.000 I think it's like 100 different countries, over 10,000 different scientists, something like that.

00:59:35.000 The photo gallery of the actual facility is one of the most insane things I've ever seen.

00:59:41.000 The amount of time and years it took them to build this thing is just...

00:59:44.000 It's incredible.

00:59:45.000 I don't even want to know what the price tag looked like.

00:59:47.000 It's billions.

00:59:48.000 Billions of dollars.

00:59:49.000 And it's all to collide particles so that they can produce...

00:59:52.000 Finally God particles.

00:59:53.000 Yeah, this Higgs boson particle.

00:59:55.000 It's amazing.

00:59:55.000 Point of origin.

00:59:57.000 Well, they also found that quark-gluon plasma, I think it is, which is supposedly the heaviest matter that they've ever discovered.

01:00:06.000 Let me pull that up.

01:00:07.000 It's some insane amount of weight these things have.

01:00:10.000 That's something that was figured out.

01:00:13.000 Yeah, quark-gluon plasma weight.

01:00:15.000 It's just insanely dense.

01:00:17.000 The densest matter created ever.

01:00:21.000 That they figured this out, that it is actually a real thing when they were doing some of the experiments.

01:00:28.000 The exotic material is more than 100,000 times hotter than the inside of the sun and is denser than a neutron star. 0.99

01:00:36.000 Wrap your fucking head around that. 0.99

01:00:40.000 It acts like a perfect liquid. 1.00

01:00:43.000 Can we see it?

01:00:44.000 I think they can, but very brief.

01:00:46.000 You know, it's like...

01:00:47.000 You're seeing it almost in a calculation.

01:00:49.000 Yeah.

01:00:49.000 Dark.

01:00:50.000 By triggering hundreds of...

01:00:51.000 I think it's so heavy that if you had a piece of it that you could look at, like a marble, it would probably sink through the center of the universe. 0.99

01:00:59.000 I mean, just go right through your fucking... 0.99

01:01:01.000 Right through the... 1.00

01:01:02.000 I mean, I don't know.

01:01:03.000 Like alien spit.

01:01:03.000 It would probably go to the center of the planet.

01:01:05.000 And just hang out there.

01:01:07.000 Yeah, alien spit. 1.00

01:01:08.000 Burn through the fucking courtroom. 1.00

01:01:09.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:01:10.000 That's insane.

01:01:11.000 Yeah, it's supposed to be unbelievably heavy.

01:01:13.000 Like, I could give you the numbers if I could find it, but I think it's one of those things where you can't even imagine.

01:01:21.000 It doesn't make any sense.

01:01:23.000 And that's something that they figured out is actually real.

01:01:26.000 I mean, if they're looking for the point of origin, right?

01:01:29.000 Like, they're looking for the god particle or whatever it calls the Big Bang.

01:01:35.000 There's this J-Swit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, he wrote a lot of really weird, controversial things, but...

01:01:45.000 I think he actually got blackballed by the Vatican in the early 20th century.

01:01:48.000 You ever read this book, The Phenomenon of Man, where he talks about the omega point?

01:01:53.000 No.

01:01:54.000 The origin, like the first point of all complex consciousness, or the source of the universe that emanated everything that we know and that ever has been into existence.

01:02:06.000 And he...

01:02:07.000 He was basically trying to establish a symbiotic relationship between science and religion and evolution and spirituality, which wasn't a very popular opinion in the Vatican in the 1920s.

01:02:22.000 He had this theory that it all emanated from this one point, the omega point, and that eventually consciousness will reach a state of complexity that's so advanced that it will no longer require a physical vessel or a human body or anything to inhabit itself.

01:02:37.000 And then it will keep evolving until it returns.

01:02:51.000 Well, once it goes back Basically, the reality as we perceive it, and this is according to a lot of modern quantum physics, it's just this manifestation that we sort of project out to convince ourself that we're not actually consciousness experiencing itself.

01:03:14.000 If that makes sense.

01:03:15.000 Like, you know, we're not little special flowers and individuals.

01:03:18.000 We're all literally the same thing.

01:03:19.000 People are pulling their car over to the side of the road right now, jumping out and running into the woods.

01:03:22.000 Yeah.

01:03:23.000 You just scared the shit out of people.

01:03:27.000 If the universe is 14 point whatever billion years old, like they say, I didn't.

01:03:32.000 It's not my idea.

01:03:34.000 No, it's a great idea.

01:03:35.000 What I'm saying is, why wouldn't it be, you know, who knows what? 0.96

01:03:39.000 It might be fucking 100 billion times older than that. 0.95

01:03:43.000 It might not have any age. 0.99

01:03:44.000 It might just be a constant cycle of that happening.

01:03:47.000 Down to a compressed, tiny spot, smaller than the head of a pin, the entire universe, and then, boom!

01:03:53.000 Big bang, over and over and over again.

01:03:55.000 It might just happen.

01:03:56.000 It might just compress.

01:03:58.000 I mean, just over the course of who knows how many billions of years and just continually do that.

01:04:02.000 If it happened once, like, why would we think that it's only, like, it's a one-time sale. 0.99

01:04:08.000 It's fucking sell, sell, sell. 0.99

01:04:10.000 The Big Bang is headed your way. 1.00

01:04:12.000 Well, it's just this one little Big Bang.

01:04:13.000 It's just pockets of...

01:04:16.000 Infinity stacked upon each other, you know. 1.00

01:04:18.000 Listen to this shit. 1.00

01:04:19.000 I found out what the weight of this stuff is. 1.00

01:04:21.000 This is gonna fuck your head up. 0.98

01:04:23.000 One cubic centimeter of this quark gluon plasma weighs 40 billion tons. 0.99

01:04:32.000 What?

01:04:34.000 It's pretty dense. 1.00

01:04:35.000 What the fuck? 0.99

01:04:35.000 How much is that? 0.99

01:04:36.000 What is 40 billion tons?

01:04:39.000 Times 2,000. 1.00

01:04:40.000 Fuck. 1.00

01:04:44.000 Bullets times a ton is 2,000 pounds, right? 1.00

01:04:47.000 A billion times 2,000.

01:04:48.000 What is that?

01:04:49.000 Does a skyscraper weigh 40 billion tons?

01:04:52.000 Does it? 0.99

01:04:53.000 What the fuck weighs 40 billion tons? 0.99

01:04:55.000 I don't know. 1.00

01:04:56.000 Do you think a skyscraper weighs 40 billion tons?

01:04:58.000 That's insane.

01:05:00.000 And that's a cubic centimeter.

01:05:01.000 So if you threw that at somebody, they're not catching it.

01:05:05.000 You'd be wrecking house, man.

01:05:07.000 Just go right through your hand.

01:05:09.000 Boom! 0.99

01:05:10.000 Right through the center of the earth. 1.00

01:05:12.000 A fucking cubic centimeter. 1.00

01:05:16.000 And a centimeter is tiny. 1.00

01:05:18.000 We don't use those little bitchy-ass little units of measurement in my America, but that's a little tiny fucking thing. 1.00

01:05:24.000 It's about that big, right? 0.99

01:05:25.000 It's tiny.

01:05:27.000 Cubic centimeter, 40 billion tons.

01:05:33.000 If there was a Big Bang, why wouldn't we think that there could be an infinite number of Big Bangs?

01:05:38.000 An infinite number of expansions and contractions, and maybe what we are currently, and we like to think of as the highest state of life available, what we are is just this is what exists when you have this state of the universe.

01:05:51.000 And there's a type of consciousness that exists when the universe becomes no longer physical.

01:05:56.000 And that might be what you're experiencing when you smoke DMT. You might be experiencing these other forms of reality that are there.

01:06:04.000 You just don't tune into them while you're in this state.

01:06:06.000 You can access them through these chemical doorways while you're sleeping, while you're meditating, when you reach these different tunes of mind that people have been exercising and having these...

01:06:36.000 Possibly.

01:06:38.000 Possibly.

01:06:42.000 I've never...

01:06:43.000 My experience is very limited.

01:06:46.000 I've only encountered it twice, and I've never had, I guess, what you'd call a breakthrough.

01:06:50.000 What have you had when you've done it?

01:06:53.000 It was like...

01:06:54.000 Well, the first time, I didn't know what I was doing.

01:06:57.000 And the bubbling, it was just weird...

01:07:00.000 Everything was just some weird associations that kind of freaked me out.

01:07:02.000 And I was like, there's no way this is going to be healthy.

01:07:04.000 But then the second time, I got this extreme...

01:07:08.000 I don't know how to describe it other than say it was an intense downward shift in what felt like gravity.

01:07:13.000 You know that crest at the top of the first hill on a roller coaster where everything just kind of...

01:07:17.000 I felt like something was pushing me down.

01:07:23.000 And then I'd read so much and researched so much.

01:07:26.000 Most of my understanding came from reading and how that tied together with other experiences that I've had or how that related to things that I've always been fascinated with or...

01:07:38.000 Subscribe to, maybe, on a personal notion.

01:07:42.000 It felt like something putting you almost in a trance.

01:07:47.000 But I was still very much aware.

01:07:49.000 I don't think I got a very strong dose.

01:07:52.000 Were you taking regular DMT or 5-MeO DMT? The NN. So you didn't have any visuals?

01:07:59.000 No, I had some visuals, but I wouldn't say that it was probably as intense as the strongest psilocybin trip I've ever had, but I was still very much...

01:07:59.000 Oh, I did.

01:08:07.000 I never lost cognitive thought.

01:08:08.000 I was aware.

01:08:08.000 I was in my body.

01:08:09.000 I could open my eyes.

01:08:10.000 I knew I was in the room.

01:08:12.000 Right, right, right.

01:08:14.000 Almost like these Easter Island head sort of things, sort of just kind of coming out of the void with chasers, and it felt like something, it was like the cusp of something, and it was kind of over.

01:08:29.000 The room definitely looked, there was a weird energy, like everything had this crystalline sort of melty effect, but it wasn't overwhelming.

01:08:38.000 Certainly not anything like what they've described, like some of the research volunteers talked about.

01:08:42.000 The volunteers are doing it slightly differently because they were doing...

01:08:42.000 Yeah.

01:08:45.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:08:46.000 The intravenous is supposed to be a motherfucker. 0.99

01:08:49.000 Actually, I got to visit with Dr. Strassman about five days ago. 0.99

01:08:53.000 He answered a lot of questions and went more into detail.

01:08:53.000 Yeah?

01:08:57.000 But yeah, there were like massive doses, man.

01:08:59.000 Yeah.

01:09:00.000 And four in a row before 80 to 120 milligram doses all in one morning back to back.

01:09:06.000 Yeah.

01:09:07.000 They're hitting hard.

01:09:09.000 Just...

01:09:11.000 Yeah, there's no resisting it at that point.

01:09:14.000 Yeah, my knowledge is from a purely amateur academia and incorporating that into certain other things.

01:09:22.000 How it may or may not resemble elements of Tibetan Buddhism and what people describe, like the bardos and independent realms of energy, where your soul is faced with these entities that test you in ways and how you react to those determine how you might transmigrate or reincarnate into another life.

01:09:40.000 I didn't even know about it until a year ago.

01:09:42.000 I was visiting a buddy of mine that was in town.

01:09:47.000 Which is really strange, because I've listened to your podcast off and on for a while, and I used to listen to a lot of Terrence lectures, and for whatever reason, I never heard about it.

01:09:56.000 Or maybe it passed in front of me when I was younger, and I didn't know what it was, and just said no, because it's related, it's like a PCP or something.

01:10:02.000 Right. 1.00

01:10:02.000 Get that shit away. 1.00

01:10:04.000 But yeah, I was sitting at a friend of mine's house, and his father, I can't remember if his father had already passed, or if he was just, he'd gotten very ill with terminal cancer, and... 0.99

01:10:14.000 He was pretty distraught about it, and we were just hanging out, and he was kind of telling me everything he'd been dealing with, and, you know, I didn't know what to really say, or to comfort him, you know, because he's obviously, you know, you find out your dad's dying. 0.96

01:10:26.000 He fucks you up. 0.98

01:10:26.000 Right. 0.98

01:10:27.000 Oh, yeah.

01:10:28.000 And, you know, I just was like, well, you know, man, some people think that there's no such thing as death, and... 0.51

01:10:35.000 You know, you live to die and we die so we can really live and you know like the Buddhists think that there's this other realm you go to It's just the most pure bliss and like this ocean of love and you and you feel that joy and euphoria and either go on to Nirvana or you go back into another life depending how you live this one and he's like man that sounds a lot like DMT I was like what the fuck is DMT and uh He's like, 0.96

01:11:02.000 Come on. 0.97

01:11:02.000 really, man? 0.97

01:11:03.000 I didn't have a clue.

01:11:06.000 He played an excerpt right there on the porch from one of your podcasts where you kind of got on this rant about it.

01:11:12.000 I'm like, alright, I need to dig in here because I'm seeing a lot of similarities and symbiotic Touchstones and I went home. 0.78

01:11:20.000 Man, I probably spent the next three months just reading everything I could find and scouring forums and then going back and reading metaphysical publications and a lot of theology and bouncing the shit around. 0.75

01:11:34.000 And then I found out my wife was going to have a child. 0.57

01:11:36.000 And it just was like my last great existentialistic dilemma, you know what I mean? 0.99

01:11:40.000 So I was like, I want to write a record about all this shit. 0.99

01:11:43.000 And record it like it was in outer space. 0.99

01:11:46.000 And then Dave and I just kind of wanted to tackle it from a standpoint in terms of the mix.

01:11:50.000 I wanted it to sound like a lot of my favorite records did that I used to listen to when I was high out of my fucking mind on Mushrooms or Dextromethorphan or anything else, you know.

01:11:59.000 And you can do all that with tape, I think.

01:12:03.000 Like we were talking about vinyl earlier, it's settled.

01:12:05.000 So when you put the headphones on, you want it to kind of just figure eight around your head, you know.

01:12:11.000 And you can do that with tape better than you can digitally?

01:12:14.000 A lot of people will say no, but I think the end result is a much better texture, for lack of a better term.

01:12:25.000 Right.

01:12:25.000 You know what I mean?

01:12:28.000 I don't know.

01:12:29.000 It's hard to explain.

01:12:31.000 But the digital manipulation with computers, what you can do with music now, it's pretty incredible, but it's so easy to overdo it.

01:12:38.000 Right.

01:12:38.000 And then you lose that human fingerprint.

01:12:41.000 The quality of the actual sound of the instrument itself.

01:12:44.000 Everything, I think, to a certain degree has to be understated.

01:12:47.000 Isn't there like there's something really cool about hearing the pick moving across the guitar when you know that that's what you're hearing?

01:12:54.000 Yeah.

01:12:55.000 It gives you this certain strange connection and then instead if that was like cleaned up and this perfect sound, this perfect synthesized sound, it's still a cool thing, but it's missing out on whatever Whatever makes...

01:13:11.000 Whatever that unique feeling that you get from someone's art is.

01:13:15.000 When you see someone...

01:13:15.000 You know?

01:13:16.000 Like, David Cho was here the other day and he had some paintings.

01:13:19.000 And just seeing his paintings and knowing him...

01:13:21.000 Yeah, and it's like...

01:13:21.000 He's amazing.

01:13:22.000 You're getting his unique art.

01:13:25.000 It's very uniquely his. 0.98

01:13:27.000 And that's what's missing with all this Pro Tools shit, right? 0.99

01:13:31.000 Well, you get perspective. 0.99

01:13:33.000 Yeah.

01:13:34.000 And, I mean...

01:13:36.000 With any real art, I think you just kind of, it's somebody, you know, it's what you do.

01:13:39.000 You observe and you assimilate and then you put out your perception of this thing in hopefully a way that everybody can relate to.

01:13:47.000 You know, you're kind of putting the unspeakable into a visual, you know what I mean, if that makes sense.

01:13:54.000 Sort of.

01:13:54.000 And what do you think about people that make, like, electronic music?

01:13:58.000 You know what, man? 1.00

01:13:58.000 Like, that kind of shit. 1.00

01:13:59.000 I love a lot of that shit. 1.00

01:14:00.000 I think anything, any good music is soul music. 1.00

01:14:04.000 And you can put soul into anything. 0.96

01:14:06.000 Like, somebody really put a lot of time into sequencing all that shit out. 0.99

01:14:09.000 And there's a lot of crap, just like anything else, you know? 0.99

01:14:12.000 Just like anything else. 1.00

01:14:13.000 But I dare anybody to go stand in front of a Skrillex concert and tell me that that's not bad to fuck ass, you know what I mean? 0.99

01:14:22.000 Yeah, exactly. 0.99

01:14:24.000 Yeah.

01:14:24.000 I can listen and appreciate anything as long as it's done from a...

01:14:28.000 And you can tell when it's not.

01:14:32.000 I mean, it's like with anything else.

01:14:33.000 Isn't that a good thing about today? 0.99

01:14:34.000 We were talking earlier about how if you had a record deal in the 1970s, you had to be a bad motherfucker. 0.99

01:14:40.000 You had to be. 0.99

01:14:41.000 But isn't it better that it's more accessible today? 0.95

01:14:45.000 Where you'll get more quantity and you'll get a lot of shitheads, but you're also...

01:14:49.000 The quality will slip through too.

01:14:51.000 Do you think?

01:14:51.000 Yeah.

01:14:52.000 No, I don't. 0.97

01:14:53.000 I don't think it's a good thing at all because now people have to sift through a lot of mediocre bullshit to find the real stuff. 0.91

01:14:59.000 But they found you, so if someone finds you, you could get spread pretty quick now.

01:15:03.000 Yeah, but it became, at some point, it became this thing where, you know, everybody wants to be in a band at some point.

01:15:09.000 Right.

01:15:10.000 And whether it's, excuse me, a lot of people now, hey, coffee man, bulletproof.

01:15:16.000 Yeah.

01:15:21.000 Right.

01:15:26.000 Right.

01:15:27.000 Right.

01:15:36.000 Get out there and earn it.

01:15:37.000 Right. 0.97

01:15:38.000 Even though, I mean, I got a wife that I love and a four-month-old son that I've seen exactly like 12 days of his life, and I spend all the time in a van with three or four stinky other dudes going out and playing to a bunch of drunk strangers, and it's still the greatest fucking job on the planet. 0.98

01:15:54.000 You know? 0.74

01:15:56.000 And if it never went anywhere beyond where it is right now for me, I feel like I've just basically clawed my way to the beginning, as it were.

01:16:04.000 And if we're playing clubs to 300 or 500 people, I mean, I can make a living at some point doing that.

01:16:11.000 And it's...

01:16:12.000 I'm not compromising in any way.

01:16:14.000 I don't have to wake up and report to anybody. 0.98

01:16:16.000 I'm not sitting in fucking meetings for a week about what my haircut should look like. 0.96

01:16:21.000 I just feel like there's a lot of people you used to see back in club dates and you can tell the blatant, blinding narcissism that permeates this industry where people literally almost come to fucking fistfights over who's going to play what set spot at this rinky-dink club that nobody gives a shit about just because they think There's gonna be somebody there that's gonna recognize my genius and that's gonna change everything. 0.98

01:16:47.000 And I think you get a lot of entitlement because of that. 0.84

01:16:52.000 And that's, to me, probably the worst aspect of working in the music business is entitled musicians.

01:17:01.000 Yeah, well, everybody comes at it from a different place, and everybody, I'm talking about sort of all aspects of show business, and everybody handles their own needs in a different way.

01:17:13.000 Some people go in less needy, some people are just completely obsessed with the idea of success, and it just permeates every cell of their body.

01:17:21.000 It's the end goal, as opposed to the actual art.

01:17:23.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:17:24.000 You can hear that shit pretty easy. 1.00

01:17:27.000 That's why people go crazy when that shit slips through, though, right? 1.00

01:17:30.000 When that stuff works? 1.00

01:17:31.000 Well, it's always worked.

01:17:32.000 I mean, it's not a new concept.

01:17:33.000 Pop music's been around since the very first days of the music business.

01:17:37.000 That's what it was all about.

01:17:39.000 But there's good pop music too, right?

01:17:40.000 Absolutely.

01:17:41.000 Yeah.

01:17:42.000 That's what's weird about it, right?

01:17:44.000 A good song is a good song.

01:17:47.000 I don't know.

01:17:49.000 You can go crazy thinking about it, so I try not to do that.

01:17:52.000 So is it necessary that you live in Nashville?

01:17:54.000 No, it's not at all.

01:17:55.000 I thought it would be.

01:17:57.000 In the beginning it was because you have to be playing in those clubs, which are some of the most thankless clubs in the entire nation.

01:18:04.000 You can't make money playing in Nashville.

01:18:07.000 It's where you go to find people that can help you.

01:18:09.000 Really?

01:18:10.000 And I've been very fortunate in that regard where I was found sort of by maybe the handful of actually trustworthy folks in town.

01:18:20.000 I mean, my manager never took a dollar from me for the first three years.

01:18:23.000 He was just kind of like a friend that gave me solid advice and told me what not to do because he'd watch guys like me get chewed up and spit out for 20 years, you know?

01:18:31.000 Right.

01:18:32.000 He was almost retired, basically, and he just said, I'll help you, and if it turns into a gig, I want the gig.

01:18:37.000 He was like, all right, man, you got a deal.

01:18:41.000 Just kind of like put this wall up between a lot of that shit that happens to a lot of people and they get taken advantage of and you end up bitter as a result and your creativity suffers. 0.92

01:18:51.000 Right.

01:18:52.000 So I just decided, well, if I just don't have anything to do with any of that, then that can't ever happen.

01:18:57.000 So now, four years later, you know, I have a great booking agent, I have a manager, and these people that kind of help facilitate us getting out and playing shows on the road.

01:19:08.000 I mean, I could start a tour from anywhere.

01:19:10.000 So my wife and I talked about that, and I was like, why do we even still live here?

01:19:14.000 Because we don't go out, you know.

01:19:17.000 Yeah.

01:19:18.000 It's like the Hollywood thing, too, right?

01:19:20.000 There's a lot of people that...

01:19:21.000 Or comics that are on the road all the time.

01:19:23.000 They still live here.

01:19:24.000 But you can practice here.

01:19:25.000 Do you need a place to practice?

01:19:27.000 Or you can practice in a studio, right?

01:19:30.000 Like rehearsals?

01:19:30.000 What do you mean?

01:19:31.000 Yeah, but you don't...

01:19:32.000 We never rehearse.

01:19:33.000 You never rehearse.

01:19:34.000 We got a very small, compact band.

01:19:34.000 Yeah.

01:19:37.000 We've been doing this...

01:19:38.000 In the beginning, we rehearsed every day for like six months to get the chemistry there.

01:19:43.000 Now the shows are basically...

01:19:44.000 I mean, every show is different.

01:19:44.000 It's very dynamic and...

01:19:47.000 We like to keep it lean because of that.

01:19:49.000 It's the freedom.

01:19:50.000 You can kind of just go here or there.

01:19:52.000 And everything's just sort of an extension of my acoustic guitar.

01:19:52.000 Right.

01:19:56.000 So we never write set lists.

01:19:59.000 Really?

01:20:00.000 Yeah, just kind of fill the audience, fill the room, and try to just maintain focus on dynamics.

01:20:05.000 So when you create new songs...

01:20:09.000 Do you write them together?

01:20:11.000 Do you write them yourself and then bring it to them?

01:20:14.000 Yeah, I always write them myself.

01:20:15.000 Typically I don't like to play songs I haven't recorded.

01:20:18.000 So I get in the studio, formulate it, and then get it down and committed, and then they kind of tend to come to life all on their own over the course of a year and a half.

01:20:27.000 You know, you end up at the end of a tour, that song sounds nothing like the one you put down on tape.

01:20:31.000 Why is that?

01:20:33.000 You get bored, so you push things and go to different places and try to just keep it exciting and take risks.

01:20:42.000 And it makes you a better musician.

01:20:45.000 Obviously, eight months later, from the time you recorded that song, If you've been playing every night for two hours, if you haven't become a better musician by that time, then you're doing this for the wrong reasons.

01:20:56.000 So now when you go in to make your next record, ideally, you've trained harder.

01:21:04.000 Right, right.

01:21:05.000 So you will change the rhythm?

01:21:09.000 Will you add lines to songs?

01:21:11.000 Only when I forget the other ones.

01:21:16.000 Does that happen?

01:21:17.000 All the time.

01:21:19.000 Yeah, man.

01:21:20.000 All the time.

01:21:21.000 But nobody can really understand what the hell I'm saying anyway, so I just fake my way to slur through it, and they're none the wiser.

01:21:29.000 Would you ever consider doing like a residency somewhere, like a Vegas type thing, where people always came to you?

01:21:35.000 Or would you think that you always have to tour?

01:21:36.000 That's the kind of thing you do when your career's over.

01:21:38.000 Is that what it is?

01:21:39.000 Not just getting started, I think.

01:21:40.000 I know, but I always wondered, like, man, we were talking when you got here, and you were beat because of traveling.

01:21:46.000 And I'm beat because of traveling.

01:21:48.000 And I was only traveling for two days.

01:21:50.000 You know, just the flying back and forth from Philly to D.C., L.A. to Philly, Philly to D.C., D.C. to L.A. Do that in two days, and you're just like, ugh.

01:21:59.000 If you could just stay put, if they could all come to you.

01:22:04.000 Is that possible?

01:22:05.000 You know what I mean?

01:22:06.000 Or as part of the gig, like the travel and the stuff that sucks and being away from your family.

01:22:12.000 That's where you, you know, musicians play music.

01:22:15.000 And that's where you become a musician.

01:22:18.000 Rule 10,000s and all that. 0.99

01:22:20.000 Mm-hmm.

01:22:22.000 It's so...

01:22:22.000 Truthfully for me, man, it's really bittersweet, everything that's happening right now, because I've been, like I said, off and on for a lot of different reasons that I've put it down over the years, but I've been doing this a long time at a very thankless capacity,

01:22:38.000 so it's all just been very passion-driven.

01:22:40.000 And then now...

01:22:43.000 I've got a newborn son and everything's happening and I'm just slammed so much that I'm exhausted a lot of times.

01:22:51.000 It's really weird because I'm out here and all this stuff we've worked so hard for has finally happened, but a lot of days I just really want to be at home.

01:22:57.000 Right.

01:23:00.000 That's the Catch-22, right?

01:23:01.000 Yeah, that's the Catch-22.

01:23:02.000 That's what I get for starting at 34. That's what you get for being successful, too.

01:23:08.000 Now you're busy.

01:23:09.000 If you weren't, you'd wish you were busy.

01:23:11.000 I'd be sitting on the couch wishing I had a gig.

01:23:14.000 Yeah. 0.96

01:23:14.000 It's damned if you do. 0.96

01:23:16.000 You're way better off with this damned. 1.00

01:23:18.000 Yes. 1.00

01:23:19.000 The damned if you do is way better than damned if you don't. 0.99

01:23:21.000 I just miss my family a lot. 0.99

01:23:23.000 Of course.

01:23:24.000 Can you take them on the road with you?

01:23:25.000 Ideally, that's the goal.

01:23:27.000 But, you know, certain other things.

01:23:27.000 Right.

01:23:29.000 I've got to take care of the band.

01:23:30.000 I've got to take care of the crew.

01:23:32.000 You don't really make money touring.

01:23:32.000 There's a lot of...

01:23:35.000 It's just how you build awareness.

01:23:35.000 No?

01:23:37.000 Wow. 1.00

01:23:38.000 What a pain in the ass. 1.00

01:23:39.000 So if you don't make money touring, how do you make money? 0.99

01:23:43.000 That's a good question, Joe Rogan.

01:23:44.000 I don't know.

01:23:46.000 Because album sales are a real issue now, right? 0.97

01:23:48.000 It's so funny, because people back home that I haven't talked to since I was in high school, and all of a sudden you start getting texts from unknown numbers and shit, and people you haven't talked to, and they're like, man, you fucking made it, man. 0.91

01:23:59.000 It's like, I'm just blowing it up. 0.83

01:24:01.000 It's like, they think because you get some press...

01:24:04.000 In 10 or 12 media outlets that you're just raking in the dough, and that's just not the reality. 0.99

01:24:09.000 Making records is fucking expensive. 0.97

01:24:11.000 Packaging records is expensive. 0.98

01:24:13.000 I wanted to put out vinyl.

01:24:15.000 That barely pays for itself.

01:24:16.000 Yeah, we never got into how much the first one cost.

01:24:19.000 We sort of started it, but we never...

01:24:21.000 The first one, because of some of the guys we used on the session. 0.72

01:24:24.000 Like the pig? 0.83

01:24:25.000 The pig and the guy named Robbie Turner. 0.98

01:24:27.000 He used to play steel for Waylon and other guys. 0.98

01:24:29.000 He used to play steel for Waylon.

01:24:29.000 Wow.

01:24:32.000 Man.

01:24:33.000 Gotta drink whiskey.

01:24:34.000 Yeah.

01:24:35.000 Well, there was this dream come true scenario where this investor came into the picture and I was going to help out and blah, blah, blah.

01:24:42.000 And then at the last minute it all went away due to negotiations.

01:24:49.000 So then I got stuck with the bill on this record that I thought I was going to have help making.

01:24:54.000 And it was all of a sudden done about $27,000 that I didn't have.

01:24:58.000 So spent that year on the road playing and then trying to pay that debt off.

01:24:58.000 Wow.

01:25:04.000 And then about a year later, once we're coming back off tour, we're about five grand in the black.

01:25:09.000 And I just spent all this time on the road with this young band I'd put together working out all these songs and just decided, all right, well, let's just go make a record.

01:25:20.000 Wow.

01:25:20.000 And it has to be quick.

01:25:22.000 Because we don't have the cash, you know.

01:25:24.000 So I paid the guys in the band $1,000.

01:25:27.000 And then the other $1,000 went towards paying the engineers.

01:25:29.000 And my buddy Dave, the producer, just kind of did it for free on spec to help out.

01:25:34.000 Wow.

01:25:35.000 And so I think the whole thing cost about $4,500.

01:25:40.000 And it was just very, very inexpensive to make an album.

01:25:46.000 And now this record that sort of started, I guess, what we'll call the beginning of a career...

01:25:53.000 If I'd have taken that in and tried to shop it to anybody, you know, any major label or music row entity or even a lot of indie labels and had laid that down, one, it's a country record. 1.00

01:26:05.000 Two, I'm talking about reptile aliens and fucking turtles and shit, man. 0.99

01:26:09.000 You know exactly as well as I do how that would have gone. 1.00

01:26:11.000 Yeah.

01:26:12.000 What's the turtle thing?

01:26:14.000 That's a jocular expression.

01:26:17.000 I got it from a Stephen Hawking book.

01:26:19.000 It's like an old comedic reference to the infinite regress problem in cosmology, which, you know...

01:26:31.000 Basically all the shit we were talking about earlier and there's a story I guess there was some professor at Oxford or somewhere giving a speech and explaining how the universe works and everything else and some little lady stood up and said you know that's really clever I know you think you're smart but you're wrong and he's like oh yeah well what's the truth and she's like well the earth sits on the back of this giant cosmic turtle and he carries it through space and he said well what's carrying the turtle and she's like oh that's very clever but it's another turtle And

01:27:02.000 he's like, well, what's under that?

01:27:03.000 She's like, you might as well, you're wasting your time.

01:27:05.000 It's turtles all the way down.

01:27:07.000 And so Hawking referenced this in Brief History of Time.

01:27:11.000 And it's weird because you can look back, um, Hindu cosmology and a lot of, uh, Some Native American tribes, they all held these, like, earthly turtles in high reverence and the symbology of it all.

01:27:24.000 And you find that story in different cultures throughout, you know, space, but thousands of years with this weird reference to this cosmic turtle.

01:27:33.000 And I know the Indians or the Hindus thought there were these four elephants standing on the back of the turtle and the earth was a flat disc resting on its back.

01:27:40.000 Whoa.

01:27:41.000 And it just cruised through space.

01:27:42.000 There's a lot of artwork you can find associated with this.

01:27:44.000 And I just thought...

01:27:45.000 That it was really, the record at its core is about love, you know, being like this one universal truth.

01:27:53.000 A lot of people look to religion, a lot of people look to drugs, and I'm not saying you can't get really spiritual experiences from all those things, but I think love at the end of the day is the one thing that really I've ever found forced me to want to wake up and really try to be a better human being every day,

01:28:10.000 you know.

01:28:11.000 So that was the main point of the album.

01:28:13.000 The Turtles thing was just kind of, it's a way of saying, if you get into an argument with somebody and you realize it's just pointless and you're going back and forth, it's Turtles all the way down. 0.86

01:28:22.000 Nobody really knows shit. 0.87

01:28:24.000 And we're all just trying to not kill each other. 0.96

01:28:27.000 So, I don't know.

01:28:29.000 I decided it would make a good country song.

01:28:32.000 That's a fascinating theory on her part. 0.99

01:28:35.000 I mean, what did she mean?

01:28:36.000 There's a picture of the earth with Turtles below it.

01:28:36.000 Look at that.

01:28:41.000 Who did that, Jamie?

01:28:43.000 I have no idea.

01:28:44.000 Hollingsworth?

01:28:45.000 Stephen?

01:28:47.000 What a bizarre idea.

01:28:49.000 There's some really, really cool visual...

01:28:53.000 What a bizarre idea.

01:28:55.000 I mean, why turtles?

01:28:57.000 What was she trying to say?

01:28:59.000 Turtles are the oldest known living species on the planet.

01:29:02.000 Are they really?

01:29:03.000 They predate crocodiles and other reptile species.

01:29:06.000 And the 13 symmetrical...

01:29:11.000 The design of the shells, a lot of ancient Indian tribes thought that that was in connection with the 13 lunar cycles.

01:29:18.000 It's just an ancient creature.

01:29:20.000 They live a long time.

01:29:21.000 They're very independent, self-sufficient.

01:29:22.000 They carry their homes on their back. 0.99

01:29:24.000 So they thought of them as really wise, old. 0.99

01:29:27.000 Plus the pineal gland, you know, if you cut that shit open, there's a little third eyeball sitting in there. 1.00

01:29:32.000 Some of them even have a translucent layer to the top of their skull where the pineal gland sits. 0.99

01:29:37.000 I used to have turtles for pets.

01:29:39.000 Really?

01:29:40.000 Had to get rid of them when my wife got pregnant. 0.98

01:29:42.000 Salmonella?

01:29:42.000 Well, they're just dangerous.

01:29:44.000 Stinky little fuckers. 1.00

01:29:44.000 They're dirty. 1.00

01:29:46.000 They will give off some fucking serious poop disease. 1.00

01:29:50.000 They're very messy. 0.99

01:29:51.000 And I would feed them goldfish.

01:29:53.000 They're not really meant for domestication, but they're sure cool.

01:29:56.000 I had piranhas at one point in time, allegedly, since they're illegal.

01:30:00.000 Say allegedly.

01:30:01.000 And watching piranhas eat is not nearly as cool as watching turtles eat. 1.00

01:30:05.000 Turtles are a motherfucker, dude. 1.00

01:30:08.000 They grab goldfish and just bite them in half. 1.00

01:30:08.000 Really fucking cool. 1.00

01:30:11.000 Just grab them with their paws. 0.99

01:30:13.000 It's like watching dinosaurs eat.

01:30:15.000 And they swim after the goldfish. 1.00

01:30:17.000 They're fucking predatory, man. 0.99

01:30:19.000 Like, I always thought of turtles as being like this sort of slow-moving thing that really didn't fuck with anybody. 1.00

01:30:26.000 Nope, nope. 0.98

01:30:27.000 Hungry turtles in a fish tank and some goldfish, and you just have an orgy of slaughter.

01:30:32.000 I mean, they're wild to watch, man. 0.98

01:30:34.000 You can imagine back when they were like, you know, turtles the size of a fucking school bus this morning. 0.99

01:30:38.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:30:38.000 Is that how big they were? 0.99

01:30:40.000 I guess.

01:30:40.000 I mean, everything else was huge.

01:30:42.000 I mean...

01:30:43.000 Yeah, I've never had that adequately explained to me, why everything was so fucking big.

01:30:49.000 And why the species that lasted diminished through evolution.

01:30:54.000 Like crocodiles used to be like 70, 80 foot crocodiles, you know?

01:30:57.000 Yeah, it was a different species of crocodile, but yeah.

01:30:59.000 The ones that are out now, though, they've been around for hundreds of millions of years.

01:31:02.000 So that means the ones around now survived the thing that hit the Yucatan.

01:31:07.000 Which is like, what?

01:31:08.000 Okay.

01:31:10.000 Sharks did too, right?

01:31:11.000 Sharks have been around in this state for more than 100 million years.

01:31:15.000 Yeah.

01:31:15.000 I don't get it.

01:31:17.000 It's amazing that those things are around, though.

01:31:19.000 We get a chance to look at an animal that would have walked freely amongst the dinosaurs.

01:31:24.000 When you see a crocodile, you're essentially seeing a prehistoric beast.

01:31:29.000 Yeah.

01:31:29.000 Crazy prehistoric thing covered in armor, waddles around, takes gazelles out.

01:31:35.000 Just looking for shit to kill. 1.00

01:31:37.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:31:37.000 Disgusting fucking monsters. 1.00

01:31:40.000 They make a hell of a pair of shoes though. 1.00

01:31:42.000 Get yourself a couple of nice Croc shoes. 0.98

01:31:44.000 Ooh, polish them bitches up nice. 1.00

01:31:46.000 Gators. 0.99

01:31:47.000 Yeah.

01:31:48.000 Alligators are, I mean, at one point in time they were really extinct or on the verge of extinction.

01:31:54.000 They were really endangered.

01:31:55.000 That's when I lived in Florida.

01:31:56.000 We used to feed them.

01:31:57.000 We used to throw marshmallows into this place called Lake Alice and they would come up and snatch up the marshmallows and And I never would have thought that they would get so plentiful that they would start hunting them.

01:32:07.000 But now, they're trying to kill as many alligators as they can.

01:32:10.000 They just can't keep up with them.

01:32:11.000 I took one of those fan boat tours down in New Orleans one time.

01:32:15.000 Oh, did you? 0.99

01:32:15.000 Where you go out with, like, some dude with three teeth and jumps on the lily pond and starts smacking these alligators in the head and shit. 0.99

01:32:23.000 But at the end of it, he had this little baby alligator in a cooler on the boat just torturing the shit out of this poor animal, you know, at a... 0.99

01:32:31.000 They pass it around. 0.94

01:32:32.000 And there's like 14 people on this pontoon out touring the swamp.

01:32:35.000 And everybody gets a chance to hold this little baby alligator.

01:32:38.000 So you imagine, it's probably scared shitless.

01:32:40.000 All these weird hormones. 0.98

01:32:43.000 So I'm the fucking very last person to get this thing, dude. 0.99

01:32:47.000 And I swear to God, as soon as my wife hands it to me, it just pissed all over me. 1.00

01:32:51.000 Because you're holding it by the tail, and it's just this fire hydrant of urine.

01:32:57.000 Just misting out all over me, man.

01:32:59.000 I'm just like, this was not meant to happen.

01:33:01.000 No, it was meant to happen.

01:33:02.000 You're the chosen one. 0.98

01:33:03.000 It was holding in its pee. 0.90

01:33:03.000 Right. 0.90

01:33:05.000 It's like, I'm gonna get to Sturgill, and I'm gonna let him know what's up.

01:33:08.000 I'm gonna anoint him with my...

01:33:09.000 I'm gonna anoint him.

01:33:10.000 Yeah.

01:33:10.000 I'm gonna let him know he's the chosen one.

01:33:11.000 It trusted you, because you were probably the only one that wouldn't smash its skull open if it pissed all over him.

01:33:18.000 I mean, there was nothing to do.

01:33:19.000 I just kind of had to hold it and let him finish.

01:33:21.000 Was its mouth taped up?

01:33:23.000 Yeah, he had like a big rubber band on it.

01:33:24.000 Yeah, we had an alligator on Fear Factor once.

01:33:27.000 Had a mouth taped up too. 1.00

01:33:29.000 Fuck that, man. 1.00

01:33:31.000 Yeah, this guy, he jumps out on this little grass pond and you just see like eight of them in succession come out of nowhere and start swimming towards him. 1.00

01:33:38.000 They all jump up.

01:33:39.000 You know, he understands the behaviorism and the sight line, but I'm just, and this guy had this massive scar on his bald head and literally three teeth in his head.

01:33:47.000 He's like, you know, and then I'm like, I'm going to watch this guy die.

01:33:53.000 Well, how'd they get the scar?

01:33:54.000 Did an alligator bite him?

01:33:55.000 I don't know.

01:33:55.000 How'd you not ask?

01:33:57.000 Man, I wanted to engage as little as possible.

01:34:00.000 To be honest...

01:34:01.000 I would have had to ask.

01:34:03.000 I think.

01:34:04.000 Yeah, I would have had to ask. 0.99

01:34:06.000 This guy fucks with alligators and he's got an alligator-sized bite on his head? 0.99

01:34:09.000 Well, he might... 0.99

01:34:10.000 I was afraid he might have been like a veteran.

01:34:12.000 It almost had like...

01:34:13.000 Oh, okay.

01:34:13.000 It was like a giant scar that went from the back of his neck over his skull.

01:34:17.000 Oh.

01:34:18.000 So I didn't want to...

01:34:19.000 Right.

01:34:20.000 Where'd you get the scar, man?

01:34:21.000 Yeah.

01:34:22.000 How'd that happen?

01:34:22.000 Lost all my friends.

01:34:24.000 Yeah.

01:34:25.000 You want to go on a boat ride?

01:34:27.000 Yeah.

01:34:28.000 I only have shaky memories of it, but every night in the middle of the night I hear the guns.

01:34:33.000 I hear the explosions. 0.99

01:34:34.000 That's fucked up. 0.99

01:34:35.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:34:37.000 You ever watch that show Small People where they make a living just killing alligators?

01:34:40.000 I know what you're talking about.

01:34:41.000 They have hundreds of alligator tags.

01:34:44.000 They'll get like a hundred tags.

01:34:45.000 And they can kill a hundred alligators in a season. 1.00

01:34:48.000 That's how many fucking alligators there are. 0.99

01:34:49.000 They're just selling the skins? 0.99

01:34:50.000 What are they doing for them?

01:34:51.000 Yeah.

01:34:51.000 Yeah, they sell the skins.

01:34:52.000 And the meat, too.

01:34:53.000 The meat is delicious, apparently.

01:34:54.000 It's the highest amount of protein.

01:34:56.000 It's got more protein per ounce of alligator meat than I think like any animal.

01:35:01.000 I've tried it a couple times.

01:35:02.000 It was really chewy.

01:35:04.000 I think it's how you prepare it.

01:35:06.000 I would like to try it fresh.

01:35:07.000 I've only tried it deep fried in batter.

01:35:11.000 It was forgettable.

01:35:14.000 But apparently if you get a fresh alligator and someone's a good chef and they understand how to cook it, it's really delicious.

01:35:21.000 But it's one of those things like a lot of wild game gets real tricky because there's no fat.

01:35:26.000 I think alligator is probably very similar.

01:35:28.000 Have you ever eaten rattlesnake?

01:35:29.000 Yeah, I've had rattlesnake before.

01:35:30.000 Yeah, it's weird.

01:35:30.000 That's really good.

01:35:32.000 It gets acquired too.

01:35:34.000 I liked it.

01:35:34.000 Yeah.

01:35:35.000 Flashed it in some butter.

01:35:37.000 Yeah.

01:35:38.000 Oh, did you cook it yourself?

01:35:39.000 No, my uncle cooked it.

01:35:40.000 Oh, wow. 1.00

01:35:41.000 He was one of those pilgrim motherfuckers that just... 1.00

01:35:41.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:35:45.000 That's a chewy meat too.

01:35:47.000 Yeah, it's pretty chewy.

01:35:48.000 But a really distinct flavor.

01:35:50.000 Yeah, the wild game tends to be very difficult to cook right. 0.97

01:35:54.000 If you cook it too much, you fuck it up. 0.88

01:35:57.000 You have to really be careful. 0.87

01:35:59.000 I bet alligators are probably similar in that way.

01:36:03.000 I worked with a guy in the yard, Corey was a big hunter, and he would bow hunt, and he moved up to Wyoming because he could get like four or six more tags a year than he could in Utah, and he'd drive that hour and a half every day.

01:36:16.000 Wow!

01:36:18.000 Blizzards to come to this job just so the kid would just eat up with it, man.

01:36:22.000 But apparently he set, I think, the longest distance shot in Wyoming at 23, and then he'd hunt moose and elk and everything else with a bow. 0.99

01:36:30.000 But he would cut in, he'd bring in these venison, like, filet cutlet medallions of elk meat, and we had a grill down at the Swiss Shack, and he'd cook that shit. 0.99

01:36:37.000 It was the best fucking thing I've ever tasted in my life. 0.99

01:36:40.000 Elk's delicious. 0.99

01:36:40.000 It was hard to go back to eating ground beef after tasting that, you know. 0.99

01:36:45.000 Yeah, elk is so good for you, man.

01:36:47.000 You just taste it in the meat that it's good for you.

01:36:50.000 Like, whoa.

01:36:51.000 Apparently moose is like that, too.

01:36:53.000 I never ate moose before.

01:36:54.000 But it's supposed to be unbelievably good.

01:36:56.000 Like, you eat it and you just go, my God.

01:37:00.000 I'm sort of in awe of those people that want to get 40 feet from a moose with a bow and arrow. 0.99

01:37:05.000 That's pretty fucking hardcore. 0.98

01:37:06.000 40 yards. 0.99

01:37:07.000 40 feet is fucking pushing it. 0.99

01:37:09.000 I mean, you better hit it right. 0.99

01:37:13.000 I mean, I'm sure it's happened.

01:37:14.000 I'm sure someone's been 40 feet, but you know how close 40 feet is?

01:37:17.000 I don't have any idea, yeah.

01:37:18.000 40 feet is where the bathroom is. 0.90

01:37:20.000 You could do it.

01:37:20.000 That's the pisser, yeah.

01:37:21.000 I mean, it could happen. 0.99

01:37:22.000 But goddamn, the fact that the moose hasn't run away or charged you or... 0.99

01:37:28.000 You have to call them in. 1.00

01:37:29.000 You have to pretend you're pussy. 1.00

01:37:30.000 Oh, what's up? 1.00

01:37:32.000 Trying to get some over here.

01:37:33.000 And then he comes waddling through all 1,500 pounds of those.

01:37:39.000 Sounds like a bull.

01:37:40.000 It's a giant animal.

01:37:41.000 I've seen them in real life. 1.00

01:37:43.000 They're mean as shit, right? 1.00

01:37:44.000 I wouldn't say they're mean. 1.00

01:37:46.000 They're defensive and aggressive.

01:37:48.000 Like a mother and a calf.

01:37:48.000 You don't ever want to run into that.

01:37:50.000 I was with a mother and a calf on an island.

01:37:52.000 We took a boat out to an island.

01:37:55.000 Me and Ari and this guy Matt, who's a guide up in Alaska, took us salmon fishing.

01:38:00.000 Valley River Shards.

01:38:01.000 We pulled up onto this island and there was a moose, a mama moose there with her calf. 0.93

01:38:06.000 And we were no more than 30 yards away from her.

01:38:09.000 It was real touch and go.

01:38:11.000 Like, I was looking at this moose and she was looking at us like, oh, for real? 1.00

01:38:14.000 Like, you motherfuckers are just going to pull up onto this island? 1.00

01:38:17.000 I'm on the island with my baby. 1.00

01:38:19.000 It wasn't a big island either.

01:38:20.000 But his dad owns the island and he has like a resort, like a camp set up, like for fishermen and hunters on this island.

01:38:28.000 And so it has like these cabins and shit there and generators and stuff.

01:38:31.000 And the moose is just hanging out there, just keeping a good eye on us. 1.00

01:38:35.000 But it's such a big fucking animal. 1.00

01:38:37.000 It's a horse. 1.00

01:38:38.000 It's a horse.

01:38:38.000 A horse-sized animal.

01:38:39.000 And they're just thinking about, should I stomp this motherfucker? 0.99

01:38:42.000 They just want to make sure you don't make any weird movements. 1.00

01:38:45.000 Nothing crazy, nothing predatory.

01:38:47.000 But we saw several moose while we were there.

01:38:49.000 They're enormous.

01:38:52.000 Big, big animals.

01:38:53.000 It's intense, man.

01:38:55.000 There was this island out in Utah.

01:38:58.000 It was a state park.

01:38:59.000 It was a buffalo reserve.

01:38:59.000 Antelope Island.

01:39:01.000 But there were all these hiking trails and shit. 0.98

01:39:02.000 You could go out there with these buffalo. 0.99

01:39:04.000 It would and sometimes could be roaming freely.

01:39:07.000 And a friend of mine, we'd gone out there to hike this peak.

01:39:09.000 And we're coming back down.

01:39:10.000 And you can look down.

01:39:11.000 We can see like five or six hundred yards down on the trailers these two buffalo just standing. 0.99

01:39:17.000 So, you know, we think, well, fuck, we'll just keep going. 0.98

01:39:19.000 By the time we get down there, they'll be gone. 0.99

01:39:21.000 You can see the herd off in the distance.

01:39:22.000 And we come around the bend.

01:39:24.000 It's clear of this big rock, and there they're standing.

01:39:26.000 And I didn't know, man. 0.99

01:39:27.000 I grew up, you know, around a lot of farms and cows and shit. 0.99

01:39:30.000 And you just walk right through them and get out of the way. 0.97

01:39:32.000 I don't know anything about buffalo.

01:39:35.000 And my buddy, he's just like immediately scared shitless.

01:39:38.000 Brooke ran and got up on this rock. 1.00

01:39:40.000 Just kind of not knowing what to do.

01:39:41.000 And I'm like, I don't know what I was thinking.

01:39:43.000 I just kept walking and I get literally 10 feet away from this thing.

01:39:46.000 He's standing sideways, broad across the trail.

01:39:49.000 And all of a sudden he just stops eating grass and turns and looks at me. 1.00

01:39:52.000 And I realize his head is the size of a fucking Volkswagen Beetle. 0.99

01:39:56.000 And I'm just like, alright, this was not... 0.99

01:39:58.000 How close were you?

01:39:59.000 Oh, like 10-15 feet.

01:40:01.000 Oh my god.

01:40:02.000 Easy. 1.00

01:40:03.000 And then it dawned on me how incredibly stupid I was. 1.00

01:40:06.000 Oh my god. 1.00

01:40:08.000 And then I'd be like, this thing probably runs 40 miles an hour.

01:40:10.000 Like, what am I going to do?

01:40:11.000 And I took...

01:40:12.000 I didn't know what else to do, so I took one more step towards it.

01:40:17.000 And it just, like, kicked up and kind of ran off. 0.99

01:40:19.000 But the fucking ground shook. 0.99

01:40:21.000 And I was just like... 0.99

01:40:23.000 Oh, man.

01:40:24.000 That would have been so bad.

01:40:27.000 No good songs.

01:40:28.000 Yeah.

01:40:28.000 No good times.

01:40:29.000 Brooke's just standing on the rock like...

01:40:30.000 You know, laughing.

01:40:31.000 Yeah.

01:40:31.000 You could have gotten watching trample to death.

01:40:34.000 Holy shit. 1.00

01:40:35.000 Yeah, there's a wild herd of buffalo in Mexico. 0.99

01:40:38.000 We're supposed to go hunting there sometime this winter for that show Meat Eater.

01:40:44.000 We're going to go buffalo hunting.

01:40:46.000 We're in Mexico.

01:40:47.000 Actually, with the guy, the producer of the show, Meat Eater.

01:40:49.000 I don't know.

01:40:50.000 Somewhere in Mexico, there's a giant wild herd of buffalo they brought there in the 1950s.

01:40:56.000 Most bison today, when you buy bison steaks, most of it's farm-raised.

01:41:01.000 There's very little wild buffalo left in this country.

01:41:04.000 A big percentage of it is owned.

01:41:06.000 It's property.

01:41:07.000 People have these big giant game preserves and they have buffalo on them that you can hunt and they have buffalo in these livestock places where you buy like farm-raised buffalo.

01:41:19.000 That's what buffalo has come down to.

01:41:22.000 Ted Turner's or...

01:41:23.000 Yeah, he's got a bunch of places that sell it, right?

01:41:26.000 No.

01:41:26.000 Isn't it just called Ted's or something like that?

01:41:28.000 It's got a big Buffalo logo.

01:41:28.000 I think so.

01:41:31.000 Apparently, there's a guy that I'm going to have on the podcast that Steve Rinella recommended to me that can explain in great detail what actually happened to the Buffalo, but that there's a lot of misconceptions about why the Buffalo population was so high.

01:41:48.000 And he says there's a direct correlation between smallpox that when the French and the Spaniards, when they brought over smallpox or whoever brought it, I guess it was the French, it wiped out like 90% of the Native American population.

01:42:01.000 And during that time, the buffalo population just exploded.

01:42:05.000 So when we came along and started slaughtering These buffalo in mass, when I say we, white people, obviously it wasn't you and me, it was a long time ago.

01:42:05.000 Flourished.

01:42:14.000 But those big piles of buffalo bones.

01:42:18.000 Yeah, we do.

01:42:18.000 Yeah, we still have the gilts.

01:42:19.000 White gilts strong.

01:42:20.000 The reason why those guys were able to find these animals in such giant numbers was because the Native Americans had experienced this massive loss of casualty.

01:42:29.000 I mean, massive 90% casualty rate because of smallpox.

01:42:33.000 Because they were apparently, at least in this guy's book, he's going to come on the podcast soon, we're working out the dates, they were on the verge of, I guess extirpation is what they call it, when it's local extinction, because the Native Americans had figured out horseback riding. 0.97

01:42:51.000 And once they figured out horseback riding, over the course of a couple hundred years, whatever it was, they had almost completely abandoned agriculture, and they were just chasing down the bison and killing them like fucking crazy. 0.73

01:42:59.000 Evolved hunters. 0.99

01:43:00.000 Yeah, so the idea was that they were on the verge of killing off the buffalo even before those crazy assholes came in and did it later on, hundreds of years later. 0.99

01:43:10.000 It's just the smallpox got them and then just... 0.99

01:43:13.000 Well, it would have been inevitable.

01:43:14.000 Even if we hadn't have showed up, they would have continued procreating. 0.97

01:43:18.000 There would have been more Indians and, you know... 1.00

01:43:20.000 Probably, right?

01:43:21.000 Native Americans.

01:43:22.000 It is kind of crazy we still call them Indians. 1.00

01:43:25.000 One fuck up. 1.00

01:43:26.000 Christopher Columbus, his dumb ass reciprocated down to me sitting here on your podcast and I just perpetuated it. 1.00

01:43:33.000 500 plus years ago, he thought he was in India. 1.00

01:43:35.000 He thought he was in India.

01:43:36.000 Good enough, Chris.

01:43:37.000 Good enough for Chris.

01:43:38.000 Good enough for me. 1.00

01:43:39.000 Them fucking Indians. 1.00

01:43:40.000 Look what I did. 1.00

01:43:42.000 Yeah, they were some brutal bastards, man. 1.00

01:43:44.000 Like, running around cracking babies' heads on rocks and shit. 1.00

01:43:47.000 And just, you know, serial killers, basically. 0.99

01:43:49.000 Well, the accounts of the missionaries that talked about what Columbus' people did, they're horrific. 0.99

01:43:56.000 And we never heard that shit when they had Columbus Day. 0.99

01:43:58.000 Like, I don't know why... 1.00

01:43:59.000 We still celebrate that idiot. 1.00

01:44:01.000 Yeah, it's very strange. 1.00

01:44:04.000 Very strange we celebrate that guy.

01:44:06.000 Seems like there's a bunch of people we've missed.

01:44:08.000 You know, how come there's no Gandhi Day?

01:44:10.000 Ha ha! 0.86

01:44:11.000 We celebrate Columbus.

01:44:13.000 We don't celebrate Gandhi Day.

01:44:15.000 I mean, I would settle for a Jimmy Carter Day.

01:44:18.000 Yeah, right?

01:44:18.000 Or a Christopher Columbus Day.

01:44:20.000 Carter's a good man.

01:44:21.000 He deserves a day.

01:44:22.000 Jimmy Carter should have a day.

01:44:23.000 I agree with you.

01:44:24.000 And still to this day, he's a very good man.

01:44:27.000 Very moral and ethical and just very different than what you perceive to be a guy who would be the President of the United States.

01:44:34.000 Hunter Thompson wrote a really great...

01:44:50.000 Yeah.

01:45:01.000 I keep wondering if that's possible again. 0.80

01:45:03.000 If somewhere in the future, because of the transparency that we're experiencing now with social media, with the internet, with the access to information that we have today, I wonder if eventually the bullshit artists will all be exposed to the point where they won't be viable anymore. 0.83

01:45:19.000 It's not a viable business model. 0.51

01:45:21.000 The accountability of the corporations that are financing these politicians will all be exposed. 0.99

01:45:25.000 Those find more bullshit artists.

01:45:26.000 I wonder if there's going to come a point in time where we'll start to see an emergence of people that are talking in a real sense. 0.98

01:45:33.000 Like you're talking about real music.

01:45:35.000 Well, there's got to be real politicians, too, that aren't hacks. 0.98

01:45:39.000 There's a bunch of shitty pop-singing politicians that get pretty far. 0.98

01:45:43.000 But we recognize them. 1.00

01:45:44.000 We know they're bullshit artists. 1.00

01:45:46.000 We hear speeches, these canned fucking hooey, rah-rah, Sarah Palin-style speeches, and we go, that's a pop star. 1.00

01:45:53.000 That's a shitty one at that. 0.99

01:45:55.000 There's got to be some real leader out there. 0.97

01:45:57.000 You know what I'm saying?

01:45:58.000 Someone who's not following a mold but speaking from the heart. 0.99

01:46:02.000 Someone who truly doesn't give a fuck. 0.99

01:46:04.000 They must exist. 0.99

01:46:05.000 And if they don't, it's possible they're gonna.

01:46:08.000 Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 72. That's the book.

01:46:11.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:46:11.000 It's a great fucking book. 1.00

01:46:13.000 I read part of it. 1.00

01:46:13.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:46:15.000 Shark Hunt was a good one.

01:46:16.000 Yeah, his documentary explains the creation of all this stuff, like how he became an embedded reporter.

01:46:23.000 It was so fascinating that he was like one guy out of all these guys that had nothing to lose because he knew he'd never do this again. 0.65

01:46:30.000 So he just was fucking going bonkers on them. 0.93

01:46:33.000 P.T. Barnard them all, man. 0.99

01:46:34.000 Yeah.

01:46:35.000 He talked football and got his way into Nixon's car.

01:46:37.000 Yeah, isn't that crazy?

01:46:39.000 Sitting with Nixon on the ride to the airport.

01:46:41.000 Hunter Thompson talking football.

01:46:43.000 They made sure, you're only going to talk football now.

01:46:46.000 None of this Vietnam stuff. 0.99

01:46:47.000 And they just talked football. 0.99

01:46:49.000 That would be bizarre as fuck. 0.99

01:46:52.000 Be sitting there with Nixon. 0.99

01:46:55.000 With, I mean, just the biggest hidden agenda ever, you know.

01:46:58.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:46:59.000 Just snowballing the president of the fucking United States knowing you're going to rip his asshole a lot apart in a book. 1.00

01:47:04.000 Yeah, right? 1.00

01:47:05.000 Complete and total character study.

01:47:07.000 Yeah.

01:47:08.000 Well, he was one of the most incredibly bizarre former presidents.

01:47:12.000 He's a very odd guy. 0.59

01:47:14.000 Did you see that book that was written out that they believed he was gay?

01:47:17.000 And that this guy that he was with all the time was his boyfriend.

01:47:22.000 Said the same thing about Lincoln, though.

01:47:24.000 Yeah.

01:47:24.000 Did they?

01:47:25.000 But didn't he, like, sleep with men to stay warm?

01:47:26.000 His bodyguard.

01:47:27.000 What's up with his bodyguard?

01:47:28.000 Yeah, a secret service agent. 0.99

01:47:29.000 They shared a bed, and now it's speculated they had a relationship due to some journal memoirs they found or some shit. 0.95

01:47:35.000 He can justify just about anything. 0.98

01:47:35.000 Holla! 0.98

01:47:38.000 Who cares? 1.00

01:47:39.000 Who gives a fuck? 1.00

01:47:39.000 You know, we could do well with a gay president. 1.00

01:47:42.000 You know? 0.99

01:47:43.000 Maybe even better.

01:47:44.000 Could be.

01:47:45.000 Yeah.

01:47:46.000 There'd be some empathy there.

01:47:47.000 Maybe.

01:47:48.000 Maybe not. 0.98

01:47:49.000 You know, Julius Caesar was gay. 0.97

01:47:50.000 You know what I'm saying? 0.99

01:47:52.000 Alexander the Great was gay. 1.00

01:47:53.000 A lot of fucking gay warriors. 1.00

01:47:55.000 That's what people like to sleep on. 1.00

01:47:57.000 Gay people will fuck you up, too. 1.00

01:47:59.000 I wouldn't fight a gay dude. 1.00

01:48:02.000 Whoop your ass, man. 1.00

01:48:03.000 Fucking mean as shit. 1.00

01:48:05.000 Nixon's darkest secrets. 1.00

01:48:06.000 New biography.

01:48:07.000 Digs up rumors. 0.93

01:48:07.000 Richard Nixon's gay affair with mafia banker. 0.93

01:48:11.000 Whoa. 0.99

01:48:12.000 That's a guy. 0.99

01:48:13.000 Yep, they're gay. 0.99

01:48:14.000 I'm just going to say yes. 0.96

01:48:15.000 I'm looking at the two of them together for sure.

01:48:19.000 Who knows? 1.00

01:48:20.000 Maybe Nixon didn't like to fuck anybody but America. 0.99

01:48:23.000 It was one of those things. 0.99

01:48:26.000 He didn't have a gender sexual.

01:48:27.000 He was nation sexual. 1.00

01:48:29.000 He just wanted to fuck America. 1.00

01:48:31.000 It's like a kin doll. 1.00

01:48:32.000 He just didn't have any...

01:48:33.000 Yeah.

01:48:34.000 It was nothing.

01:48:35.000 Just evil thoughts.

01:48:37.000 Well, he was a different breed back then. 0.84

01:48:40.000 A different breed of politician.

01:48:41.000 And post...

01:48:42.000 I mean, he's coming along post-Kennedy's assassination and...

01:48:47.000 Bizarre, dark time in America that was.

01:48:49.000 Well, that's when they kind of locked it all down.

01:48:51.000 That's when all the Schedule 1 lists started popping up.

01:48:56.000 Everything kind of...

01:48:57.000 Yeah.

01:48:58.000 Again, that's a valley, you know?

01:49:00.000 I mean, there was a Great Hill.

01:49:02.000 The Great Hill was like the 1960s, and then the 70s came along, and that was the big valley.

01:49:07.000 And that's where disco came from.

01:49:09.000 That's what happened.

01:49:10.000 Nobody had acid.

01:49:11.000 Nobody had mushrooms.

01:49:12.000 It's just cocaine, man.

01:49:13.000 Just dancing.

01:49:14.000 Feeling all that bad judgment.

01:49:17.000 Just like 80s country. 1.00

01:49:19.000 Bad judgment, but some good fucking music. 0.99

01:49:21.000 If it wasn't for disco, you wouldn't have Kool and the Gang, right? 0.99

01:49:25.000 And that's where it came from.

01:49:26.000 That's all dancing music. 1.00

01:49:27.000 Fucking BGs, man. 1.00

01:49:28.000 Yeah, there you go, dude. 1.00

01:49:29.000 They had some good jams.

01:49:31.000 They do, right?

01:49:31.000 Seriously good jams.

01:49:32.000 People don't want to admit that.

01:49:35.000 More than a woman? 0.99

01:49:36.000 Come on. 1.00

01:49:36.000 It's a good goddamn song. 1.00

01:49:40.000 Jamie's gonna disagree. 0.99

01:49:41.000 I was singing it.

01:49:41.000 It's a shame.

01:49:42.000 Those guys are gone.

01:49:44.000 I mean, even the Stones stuck their foot in the disco water.

01:49:44.000 Yeah, there was some...

01:49:48.000 There was some funk to a lot of their songs that didn't exist in the earlier music they were creating.

01:49:48.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:49:55.000 Product of the times, man.

01:49:56.000 Yeah.

01:49:57.000 What's today's time? 0.99

01:49:59.000 I mean, when you see this new door opening up for you, you know, when you see, like, all of a sudden your career, like you said, you've clawed your way to the beginning, you're obviously, there's some shit going on, man. 0.85

01:50:10.000 I mean, I told you my friend Justin told me about you right when I, like, he goes, man, he goes, there's this dude, Sturgill Simpson. 0.98

01:50:17.000 And as soon as he said that, I go, dude, I've been listening to nothing but him for two fucking weeks. 0.57

01:50:21.000 And we were laughing and joking around. 0.95

01:50:23.000 There's something going on, man. 0.99

01:50:24.000 When my friend Justin finds out about shit, I always pay attention because he's got fantastic taste in music, but I had already found out. 0.99

01:50:31.000 Like, there's something going on. 1.00

01:50:33.000 You've hit this sort of frequency where people are checking out your shit. 1.00

01:50:39.000 It could be over tomorrow, man. 0.99

01:50:41.000 Yeah, but it's not going to be.

01:50:42.000 Let's be honest. 1.00

01:50:43.000 This shit's going to ride. 1.00

01:50:45.000 Just hang in there, fella. 1.00

01:50:46.000 Well, I've got a very clear plan.

01:50:50.000 Do you?

01:50:50.000 No matter what, I'm going to adhere to it, so...

01:50:52.000 You want to tell us the plan? 1.00

01:50:54.000 Or is it secret shit? 0.99

01:50:55.000 It's not really a secret. 0.99

01:50:56.000 No, I'm going to make a total of five records and then...

01:50:59.000 That's it?

01:51:00.000 ...be done.

01:51:01.000 Why?

01:51:03.000 I feel like, well, there's a certain methodology to the entire thing, but I don't know.

01:51:12.000 I don't know what else I would have to say beyond that.

01:51:15.000 And each one successfully kind of incorporate other elements of music that I love and get more progressively opened up.

01:51:25.000 And so you've got this mapped up in a formal way?

01:51:29.000 Roughly, yeah.

01:51:30.000 Do you have it written down somewhere?

01:51:32.000 In various forms, voice memos and notes and things.

01:51:36.000 But yeah, just the layout and then the sonic execution.

01:51:40.000 But then beyond that...

01:51:43.000 A lot of artists keep recording in order to maintain some sense of relevancy or just because, well, it's been a year's time to make a record.

01:51:51.000 I just don't ever want to find myself in that position where I'm...

01:51:54.000 I don't know.

01:51:57.000 I think I'd rather keep it more concise and focused and just try to know that I absolutely did my best every time.

01:52:04.000 And then I think after five albums, I don't know, I'll probably...

01:52:07.000 I already feel somewhat limited in terms of songwriting and how much freedom there is to really get out what you want to say.

01:52:14.000 So I might try something else at some point.

01:52:16.000 Like just writing outright.

01:52:18.000 Like writing a book?

01:52:20.000 Yeah.

01:52:21.000 So just looking at it as another form of expression.

01:52:23.000 But I think it's weird that you think that you're going to run dry.

01:52:28.000 Like what makes you think you're going to run dry?

01:52:31.000 It's not an issue of running dry.

01:52:34.000 I just...

01:52:37.000 Certain things that I want to say or, you know, make a statement with.

01:52:42.000 And use the opportunity to hopefully make it other than something just about me.

01:52:47.000 You know, try to promote a bigger message, I guess.

01:52:50.000 And at some point you just end up repeating yourself.

01:52:54.000 That's fascinating.

01:52:54.000 Hmm.

01:52:56.000 I hope that's wrong.

01:52:57.000 I hope you just keep banging them out and having a good time.

01:53:01.000 But you're the only one who knows what's going on in your head.

01:53:04.000 You're the only one who's ever going to know your vision.

01:53:07.000 Right.

01:53:10.000 So the real job is just keeping myself out of a situation where I have to compromise that.

01:53:16.000 That's fascinating though that you've done that, that you have this idea of these stages that you're going to put out.

01:53:22.000 So you're only going to put out three more albums or five more?

01:53:24.000 Three more.

01:53:25.000 That's it?

01:53:26.000 Yeah.

01:53:27.000 But you've been doing music for how many years now?

01:53:29.000 My whole life.

01:53:30.000 But I mean professionally?

01:53:32.000 For the two albums?

01:53:34.000 Well professionally really just like the last two years.

01:53:36.000 I put my first record out in 2013. Okay, so two years for two albums.

01:53:42.000 So it's almost an album a year.

01:53:44.000 So you've only got three more years to go.

01:53:46.000 And then what are you going to do?

01:53:48.000 I have no idea.

01:53:50.000 Oh, come on, man.

01:53:51.000 Just keep making music.

01:53:52.000 Study Ponentuken in the jungle or something. 1.00

01:53:54.000 I don't know.

01:53:55.000 Do you plan on doing that?

01:53:56.000 Like expanding your horizons in some sort of great and unforeseen way?

01:54:00.000 I mean, by not doing this when I was younger, I was out doing a lot of other things that kind of culminated into whoever the hell I think I'm trying to be today.

01:54:09.000 So incorporating those experiences and a lot of those stories and people I've known and characters I've met, and then maybe even embellishing upon that in a somewhat autobiographical sense, but still telling these stories in a way that other people say, yeah, I feel that way too.

01:54:09.000 Right.

01:54:24.000 You know, you don't want to just say, hey, this is what the world looks like.

01:54:28.000 It's just, this is what it looks like to me, and hopefully other people can resonate with that.

01:54:33.000 But it's an interesting...

01:54:36.000 There's a line you have to really kind of straddle between commercial viability and...

01:54:44.000 Making art. 0.99

01:54:45.000 Is this a rigid idea that you have, or do you think that it's possible that you can get to that three albums from now and then go, you know what, I'm enjoying the fucking shit out of this. 0.98

01:54:55.000 I'm not gonna stop. 0.97

01:54:56.000 I'm just gonna figure out a new concept.

01:54:58.000 I'm gonna go Chris Gaines.

01:55:02.000 No, I'm just kidding.

01:55:04.000 Is that his name, Chris Gaines?

01:55:05.000 Chris Gaines, man.

01:55:06.000 The Garth Brooks character.

01:55:08.000 Maybe that's what he was doing.

01:55:11.000 Well, I mean, outside of that, I think...

01:55:13.000 Well, I say that just because I have those albums pretty clearly in my head, and I do what they'll sound like and what they'll be about.

01:55:20.000 And, you know, someday you're dead, and everybody that ever knew you is dead, and it's like you were never here.

01:55:27.000 But that little thing, I don't know what else I would really have to say about...

01:55:34.000 My version of the human experience past a certain point unless I go turn it off and do another 30 or 40 years of living and then make five more albums.

01:55:43.000 Any real artist, their best work is always in their pinnacle peak and then right before they die.

01:55:48.000 And then you get this ocean of mediocrity of just kind of fumbling through existence there.

01:55:55.000 It's a very repeated element.

01:55:59.000 That's an interesting perspective, because you really think that when a guy puts out an album, or these parallels to authors, to a lot of different art forms, you spend your entire life thinking, and then you express yourself like the culmination of this life.

01:56:18.000 Well, there's a really interesting thing of somebody, I think my buddy Jason Isbell put up there and retweeted, talks about it takes 20 years to write your first record, you get a year to write your second record. 0.98

01:56:31.000 And it really doesn't matter what you do, because music's the devil's work, and you're fucked anyway. 0.69

01:56:37.000 But yeah, it's like, you know, you squeeze all this... 0.99

01:56:40.000 I had a good 30 years of fucking up and mistakes and lessons and, you know, a lot of personal...

01:56:49.000 You know, development and certain experiences that I had that led me to kind of recognize and look at things that caused me to live that way. 0.95

01:56:57.000 And then to come out of the other side of that, like, really supported and understood by someone that met me at my absolute worst and then helped me to get right here.

01:57:06.000 It's just like I have all this clarity now.

01:57:08.000 And, you know, I think the only way...

01:57:13.000 To ever really grab that... 0.99

01:57:15.000 I mean, I probably could have made some great records in my 20s because I was so fucked up. 0.99

01:57:19.000 I'll never know. 0.97

01:57:21.000 So I'm just trying to reference those feelings as I remember them the best I can.

01:57:26.000 And people think, oh, I made this record. 0.99

01:57:27.000 This guy's just sitting around fucking smoking DMT and he's on drugs. 0.99

01:57:31.000 There were no drugs involved making this record. 0.99

01:57:35.000 It's been, you know, I really don't even smoke dope that much anymore, especially with the sun.

01:57:39.000 Certainly not when I'm at home, usually on the road, and it's only then anymore to cure boredom.

01:57:45.000 So it's just really weird to find myself, but I still had to tell that part of my life through story.

01:57:50.000 When you were in your 20s, you were partying a lot?

01:57:54.000 I wouldn't even say partying.

01:57:56.000 It was always more exploratory for me.

01:57:58.000 I never had an addictive personality, but I never...

01:58:01.000 I don't know.

01:58:03.000 I just read a lot of the wrong books way too young and had this weird...

01:58:07.000 Romantic vision.

01:58:07.000 Romantic.

01:58:09.000 That everything was encapsulated under the umbrella of experience, and I wanted to experience everything.

01:58:13.000 And some things you just shouldn't experience.

01:58:15.000 Like what?

01:58:16.000 I mean, whatever, man.

01:58:18.000 I mean, whatever's in front of me, whatever I could find.

01:58:23.000 I just never...

01:58:25.000 I always just wanted to know.

01:58:30.000 When I got out of the Navy, living in Seattle, those were some darker days.

01:58:34.000 You were saying that earlier about Seattle not just being the weather, but what the weather does to people.

01:58:40.000 Yeah, at some point I just became very disenchanted, disillusioned with the military, so I got out and stuck around there for like a year.

01:58:49.000 So there's that disenchantment, disillusionment, and then there's living in Seattle where you're dealing with the dreariness at the same time.

01:58:56.000 Yeah, amid a really kind of...

01:59:01.000 You know, I was excited, this young relationship, and I was going to all these parties and meeting people and exposed to things I probably never would have been otherwise, and just kind of, you know, took it at face value for experience and jumped in, and then there was a lot of, you know, there was a lot of hard narcotics in that area,

01:59:18.000 and I realized that those weren't very well for me, and Like heroin?

01:59:23.000 Heroin, methamphetamine, anything you're looking for.

01:59:26.000 Whatever you can grab or afford.

01:59:28.000 I wasn't 21. I couldn't go out and drink.

01:59:30.000 So there was all these other methods of escapism that I kind of fell into.

01:59:35.000 I got really bad off for a while.

01:59:37.000 Actually, as a result, I ended up missing my grandfather's funeral.

01:59:40.000 I knew if I came home, my family would come.

01:59:43.000 My dad used to be an undercover narcotics officer.

01:59:46.000 There was some weird...

01:59:49.000 A lot of shame there after that, you know what I mean?

01:59:51.000 Right.

01:59:52.000 So I eventually ended up back in Kentucky and got away from that, and then it was just really just...

01:59:57.000 I never really was a very ambitious guy.

01:59:57.000 I don't know, man.

02:00:00.000 Just sort of drifted and existed a lot, and I don't know.

02:00:06.000 If something...

02:00:07.000 It was more exploratory just because I knew there was something else beyond whatever this is.

02:00:14.000 Maybe that's what I was trying to find, but...

02:00:17.000 Now, how did you get involved with Rick Strassman?

02:00:20.000 How did you find out about him and how did you meet him?

02:00:22.000 Well, like I said, my buddy played when we were talking on the porch last year and then he played your little excerpt.

02:00:28.000 I went home that night and just kind of started scouring the internet on the subject and a lot of things related to it and I found Dr. Strassman's book.

02:00:36.000 Downloaded it and read it probably three times and it just absolutely blew my mind.

02:00:42.000 All the correlating aspects of that conversation.

02:00:46.000 And I think what might have ultimately led him to it or what he was looking for in terms of its relation to...

02:00:53.000 I don't...

02:00:54.000 You should have him on someday.

02:00:55.000 Oh, he's going to be on soon.

02:00:56.000 Oh, is he?

02:00:57.000 Okay.

02:00:57.000 Yeah, he's going to be on soon to promote the new book.

02:00:58.000 What date, Jamie?

02:00:59.000 The 12th, I think.

02:01:01.000 12th.

02:01:01.000 Yeah, we had a great conversation in his kitchen about five days ago.

02:01:05.000 I mean, he was very gracious enough to invite me out.

02:01:09.000 He's a very, very nice guy.

02:01:10.000 Oh, extremely...

02:01:11.000 I mean...

02:01:12.000 He's a cool dude.

02:01:13.000 He's so sweet.

02:01:14.000 He probably would never think that himself, but he's like, in so many ways, it was...

02:01:18.000 I'm really glad I went.

02:01:20.000 And it answered a lot of questions and even questions I didn't even know I had.

02:01:25.000 But it was interesting to find out why he approached it and what he got.

02:01:29.000 He probably knows more than anybody else on the subject at this point, but he's like a musician that has been touring a record for a year.

02:01:36.000 He's so tired of talking about it.

02:01:37.000 This was all 25 years ago.

02:01:39.000 Right.

02:01:39.000 He's moved on, but...

02:01:41.000 People are still finding out about it, though.

02:01:43.000 It's still fairly obscure.

02:01:45.000 Although, for his day-to-day existence, it's sort of overwhelmed his day-to-day existence for the past 20-plus years.

02:01:53.000 But for a lot of folks, they're just starting to read his work.

02:01:56.000 He emails every day.

02:01:57.000 He's like, Yeah.

02:01:58.000 So yeah, once I finished the record and had it mixed and mastered, I'm sort of like looking back through everything that sort of led to this happening.

02:02:06.000 And I knew...

02:02:07.000 I went into it before we put the album on.

02:02:10.000 I really did think, okay, well this is going to be the end of my career. 0.95

02:02:14.000 People are going to think this guy's nuts or what the hell.

02:02:17.000 But the work that...

02:02:19.000 That Dr. Strassman did, and I guess the bravery it took on his part to open that conversation back up in a field, especially in the professional medical world, was so stigmatized.

02:02:30.000 I can't imagine the balls that must have taken after spending years of your life following this profession and all the school you underwent.

02:02:38.000 So I wrote him an email. 0.95

02:02:40.000 I got his contact off Cottonwood.

02:02:41.000 I just wrote him basically saying, hey, thank you.

02:02:43.000 I wrote, you know, I shared the record with him through a file.

02:02:47.000 I was just like, I just want to thanks for your work and the inspiration that I got from the book and along with some other things.

02:02:52.000 And he wrote back and it sort of, you know, email buddies sort of thing.

02:02:57.000 And then I was going out to Phoenix and so I just stopped by and have a cup of coffee.

02:03:05.000 It's like anybody else, you know.

02:03:06.000 Yeah, he's just a regular guy.

02:03:10.000 But he's got some really fascinating stories of his explorations in this realm, not just physically, but just dealing with the red tape that was required to do a real FDA study.

02:03:22.000 Two years of bureaucratic nightmare, man.

02:03:24.000 Yeah, to do one of the first psychedelic studies that, you know, have a real scholar involved in testing people on some serious Schedule I hallucinogens. 0.98

02:03:36.000 The Army Research Lab, they were aware of that shit in the 60s. 0.93

02:03:40.000 Absolutely. 0.99

02:03:41.000 That's how McKenna found out about it.

02:03:43.000 Terrence McKenna got a hold of DMT through a friend who was a chemist at the Army Research Lab, and apparently this guy had a barrel of it.

02:03:53.000 Oh, yeah.

02:03:54.000 Which, if you know about the effective dose of DMT, a pinky nail is a lot.

02:04:01.000 If you had a pinky nail-sized piece of DMT or pile...

02:04:05.000 We're good to go.

02:04:35.000 It's what Terrence McKenna would call a heroic dose, five dried grams.

02:04:41.000 And I was like, who's this McKenna guy?

02:04:43.000 And so I started looking into McKenna and reading some of the things that I could find about him online and then listening to some audio recordings.

02:04:52.000 But he was already dead by the time I had found out about him, unfortunately.

02:04:58.000 But his, you know, his discovery of DMT and the way he described it in one of his audio recordings was just one of the most amazing things I've ever heard.

02:05:07.000 Because this is a guy who had already done like LSD and Morning Glory Seeds and he had experienced psilocybin and he thought he had really traveled.

02:05:15.000 He kind of knew what was available and out there.

02:05:17.000 Well, he did.

02:05:18.000 I mean, in dentists they did a lot of traveling, I guess, but Man, like the iboga and, like I said, DMT, I don't really have any experience to speak of firsthand, so I try not to talk about it.

02:05:29.000 We've got to change that.

02:05:31.000 We've got to hook that up.

02:05:32.000 Hey, man.

02:05:33.000 Allegedly. 1.00

02:05:33.000 Well, you know, Dr. Strassman said that, and I'm inclined to agree, although at this point, like, I should have a fucking PhD in this shit. 1.00

02:05:43.000 I've read about it, and I don't even know what the firsthand aspect is, but... 0.96

02:05:46.000 He said at this point in my life now that all these things are formulating and my career is budding and I have a newborn son that there's a high potential it could make for a pretty unsettling experience because it's all this stuff that's finally happening in my life that's so positive.

02:05:59.000 Like the idea of thinking you're dying and having to let go of that could make for an unsettling experience.

02:06:04.000 You'll be fine.

02:06:05.000 Yeah.

02:06:06.000 I believe you.

02:06:06.000 Okay.

02:06:07.000 You'll be fine.

02:06:07.000 Yeah.

02:06:08.000 I mean, I've had some...

02:06:09.000 I wouldn't say heroic. 0.98

02:06:11.000 I'd say foolish dosage. 0.78

02:06:13.000 You know, the first time you ever buy a mushroom is nobody's there to tell you, hey, well, this is how much it takes, you know? 0.97

02:06:20.000 Right.

02:06:21.000 So I think I bought like a quarter and just ate the whole bag, man.

02:06:24.000 And that was my first...

02:06:25.000 I mean...

02:06:25.000 What is that?

02:06:26.000 Seven grams.

02:06:27.000 It's like seven or eight grams.

02:06:28.000 Whoa.

02:06:28.000 How was that?

02:06:29.000 That was a great time, man.

02:06:31.000 Yeah.

02:06:32.000 You know, I never got the freak outs.

02:06:35.000 Well, that's good.

02:06:36.000 You have a good soul.

02:06:38.000 LSD, the few times I tried LSD, though, I didn't really enjoy it because every time it seemed like on the tail end of the trip, it takes this turn and there's almost a sinister underlying energy about it.

02:06:52.000 I don't know that I've never experienced with psilocybin.

02:06:56.000 Psilocybin is very giggly.

02:07:00.000 It's the starting gate for psychedelics and to that I say go eat 12 or 15 grams and tell me that you're Yeah, the starting gate is only if you have a small...

02:07:09.000 It's overwhelming.

02:07:11.000 It's completely overwhelming.

02:07:12.000 And also very, very visionary.

02:07:15.000 Like you see, I remember just seeing...

02:07:18.000 Stan Hope and I did mushrooms the day the war started.

02:07:22.000 The day the Iraq war started.

02:07:24.000 The first one?

02:07:24.000 The first one.

02:07:25.000 Not in the 80s.

02:07:27.000 Oh, right.

02:07:27.000 You know, the one after 9-11.

02:07:30.000 And we were blitzed.

02:07:30.000 Gotcha.

02:07:34.000 As they were announcing on television the war was starting, and I'll never forget, Stan was like, oh my god, they've got a kickoff.

02:07:41.000 They're like, war coverage begins at 5. He's like, the war has a kickoff.

02:07:45.000 And we just fell to the ground.

02:07:47.000 We're howling, laughing.

02:07:48.000 And the walls around us were all made of these honeycomb geometric patterns.

02:07:54.000 Everything was basically gone.

02:07:57.000 I was trying to still have conversations with him, but he was just this...

02:08:00.000 Sea of patterns, you know, that like blurrily represented what his physical form was, but it was all just like really tiny flower of loves, you know, that little flower of life thing.

02:08:12.000 I mean, his entire body was made out of those, as was all the walls around us. 0.99

02:08:18.000 I mean, it's almost identical to dimethyltryptamine, the molecular footprint, right?

02:08:22.000 It's pretty close.

02:08:23.000 Take a high dose.

02:08:24.000 4-fox-4-aloxy-NN-dimethyltryptamine is how it's been explained.

02:08:28.000 I think what happens is...

02:08:29.000 Extra oxygen...

02:08:31.000 We're obviously not chemists, ladies and gentlemen. 0.98

02:08:34.000 Yeah, we are not fucking studying the periodic table. 0.76

02:08:36.000 If you read Strassman's accounts of it, where they talk about how it's synthesized in the body, it's very similar. 0.94

02:08:44.000 It's got a lot of the same elements as real natural human neurotransmitters, so it's very easily accepted into the mind.

02:08:53.000 The blood-brain barrier accepts it apparently.

02:08:55.000 Craves it, apparently.

02:08:57.000 Well, yeah, I mean, demethyltryptamine, for sure, we know that.

02:09:01.000 We know that it's created in the liver, it's created in the lungs, it's not just created in the pineal gland, it's created in other parts of your body. 0.96

02:09:08.000 They also know that it's in like, you know, who knows how many fucking plants, like a shitload of plants. 0.92

02:09:14.000 It's just out there. 0.99

02:09:15.000 It's all over the place.

02:09:17.000 You know, I think it's cool that guys like him are out there.

02:09:20.000 It's so important.

02:09:21.000 I know I've had some unbelievably profound introspective healing experiences, especially from mushrooms on the high doses.

02:09:30.000 Yeah.

02:09:30.000 I mean, it really forces you to look at a lot of things maybe you don't want to or you're unable to and just kind of pulls apart the defense mechanism, you know.

02:09:40.000 Yeah, destroying the ego.

02:09:42.000 The one thing that allows people to push forward in spite of You know, or because of everything that they've learned their whole life.

02:09:53.000 The built-up defense mechanisms, the built-up definitions of yourself.

02:09:57.000 And then, you know, you're pushing forward with all this stuff attached to you like it's like an armor. 0.98

02:10:02.000 But really, you find out that that's really the shit that's kind of holding your perspective back. 0.58

02:10:06.000 And if you release all that armor and just look around and release this idea of you and then just experience it. 0.97

02:10:15.000 It's a very different world you're living in.

02:10:18.000 That different world is rarely tapped into in regular life, but that different world resets your entire perspective of your existence. 0.99

02:10:27.000 And if that's not good for you, what the fuck is everybody doing meditating? 0.97

02:10:31.000 Why is everybody going to church? 0.99

02:10:32.000 Why is everybody going to workshops?

02:10:35.000 We're trying to get better.

02:10:36.000 Everyone's trying to get better.

02:10:37.000 I've never seen a single thing in life that has the same effects that psychedelic drugs do.

02:10:44.000 And yet they're illegal.

02:10:46.000 It's one of the weirdest aspects of our time, that these things have these unbelievably profound effects.

02:10:53.000 But they're illegal.

02:10:54.000 Whereas there's, you know, X number of sanctioned drugs that don't have these effects, that are deadly. 1.00

02:11:01.000 Make an asshole bleed and everything else. 0.99

02:11:03.000 Yeah, all sorts of things. 1.00

02:11:04.000 I'll just sell that shit all day. 0.99

02:11:05.000 Well, I mean, they're trying to crack down now on the prescriptions, on pain medication prescriptions, because there are so many people that are addicted to them, and they've realized, look, we've made a nation of junkies. 1.00

02:11:15.000 I mean, I'll tell you, the part of the country you're from, man, I mean, that is fucking, that is prescription drug central, right? 0.98

02:11:23.000 Hillbilly heroin, man. 1.00

02:11:24.000 It's unbelievable.

02:11:25.000 It's right.

02:11:26.000 I mean, the town that I'm originally from is called Jackson.

02:11:30.000 It's like right in the middle of southeast Kentucky, like hard Appalachia.

02:11:33.000 And I remember as a small child, it was very much a wonderful community.

02:11:39.000 There was small business.

02:11:40.000 Main Street was thriving.

02:11:41.000 Everybody knew everybody.

02:11:45.000 And then, but all the major industry was based on coal, which slowly evolved from strip mining, or from deep mining, I'm sorry, into strip mining once they figured out they could get the coal with less bodies.

02:11:56.000 And so that just kind of leveled the topography.

02:11:59.000 But then even when that industry sort of dried up and they moved on, well, the coal pulled out and then Walmart and Oxycontin moved in.

02:12:07.000 And it, I mean, within a matter of years, it just completely changed the entire face of the region.

02:12:13.000 And now it's just, you know, people say poor.

02:12:13.000 Wow.

02:12:16.000 You don't even know what fucking poor is, man. 0.99

02:12:21.000 It's sad because there's no... 0.99

02:12:29.000 There's not even the idea of the possibility of opportunity coming to that region. 0.92

02:12:34.000 No industry is going to come in there and start building car manufacturing plants because then they have to train the shit out of there.

02:12:40.000 It's just not logistically very sound for any type of...

02:12:52.000 That would be incredible.

02:13:07.000 He's really trying to get that.

02:13:09.000 Kentucky was at one time the nation's leading hemp manufacturing point.

02:13:14.000 The Hemp Museum is in a little town called Versailles.

02:13:16.000 They're doing a lot of interesting things in Kentucky.

02:13:19.000 Kentucky reintroduced elk.

02:13:21.000 And they have giant successful herds of elk.

02:13:21.000 Yeah.

02:13:24.000 I mean, they're hunting them now.

02:13:25.000 They've reintroduced them.

02:13:27.000 They've done it over a period of a few decades.

02:13:29.000 They used to have elk all across the country.

02:13:31.000 It was illegal for a long time to hunt elk in Kentucky, because they were getting the population to kind of grow back out.

02:13:37.000 Well, there was none.

02:13:37.000 There were none.

02:13:38.000 Yeah, so the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation brought elk in, and they sort of seeded the area, and now it's become very successful.

02:13:47.000 Now they have hunts.

02:13:48.000 Well, there used to be a lot of elk.

02:13:50.000 Yes.

02:13:51.000 Back in the Daniel Boone days.

02:13:53.000 Davy Crockett days. 0.98

02:13:55.000 He hunted the shit out of them. 0.99

02:13:56.000 He hunted the shit out of them. 1.00

02:13:57.000 Yeah. 0.97

02:14:00.000 I don't know.

02:14:01.000 But it's interesting that Kentucky is on the ball with hemp as well.

02:14:05.000 Right.

02:14:05.000 Well, the tobacco industry took a big hit, and that really hurt the state economy.

02:14:09.000 They have to do something.

02:14:11.000 I hope hemp does...

02:14:13.000 I hope really that's what becomes the next savior.

02:14:16.000 And it will change the consciousness, too.

02:14:19.000 You know how that's going to go when DuPont and all the petroleum industries and everybody else start throwing more money and making it not happen.

02:14:25.000 That's why it was illegal.

02:14:28.000 I wonder if they're going to be.

02:14:30.000 Yeah, that is why it was made illegal in the first place.

02:14:31.000 But I wonder if they're going to be able to do that.

02:14:33.000 Because I feel like even they don't have enough resources to stop that kind of truth forever.

02:14:39.000 Right.

02:14:39.000 It's already kind of out there.

02:14:41.000 And what you're seeing with what's going on in Colorado is even Warren Buffett's companies are getting in on it.

02:14:47.000 Warren Buffett has a company that leases giant warehouses specifically to weed growers.

02:14:53.000 They have commercials where they're showing how they have these tiered systems.

02:14:58.000 Where there's like second floor and first floor.

02:15:01.000 You could fit in more weed plants than a single floor warehouse. 0.99

02:15:05.000 This is Warren motherfucking Buffett. 0.98

02:15:07.000 And his company is involved in actively pursuing marijuana growers to lease their warehouses. 0.99

02:15:14.000 To grow marijuana.

02:15:17.000 Because it's legal there.

02:15:18.000 So it becomes a part of...

02:15:19.000 Yeah, is it going to be big corporations that are profiting on it?

02:15:23.000 Maybe.

02:15:24.000 But guess what?

02:15:25.000 It's not hard to grow.

02:15:27.000 Right.

02:15:27.000 You know, it's not hard.

02:15:28.000 I mean, this is not creating OxyContin's in some sort of fucking laboratory where you have to wear a space suit. 0.95

02:15:34.000 You know, you're talking about a plant that grows like that. 0.97

02:15:37.000 You don't even have to do anything to it.

02:15:39.000 Just stick it in the ground and come back in a month. 1.00

02:15:40.000 You get some shit growing there. 0.99

02:15:42.000 It's super easy. 1.00

02:15:43.000 I mean, it is a hardy... 0.99

02:15:45.000 It's kind of hard to fuck up, really. 0.99

02:15:46.000 It's hard to fuck up. 0.99

02:15:47.000 I mean, you can do it better. 1.00

02:15:48.000 You can make the kind of weed that these botanist motherfuckers in California and Colorado and Washington State are making. 0.99

02:15:57.000 You know, like everything else, at some point it is going to go mainstream, and then they're going to commodify the hell out of it and commercialize it, and everywhere you go is going to look like a 14-year-old's bedroom. 0.98

02:16:09.000 This is Warren Buffett's company.

02:16:11.000 Look at this.

02:16:14.000 What is this called?

02:16:15.000 Cubic Designs.

02:16:16.000 Scroll so we can see it, so we can see the name of the company, Cubic Designs. 0.96

02:16:19.000 So this is like, see how he's got these tiered systems that is entirely for fucking growing weed. 0.73

02:16:27.000 Well, we're gonna go tour a big girl off in Washington State when we play it. 0.95

02:16:32.000 I love it.

02:16:33.000 I think it's amazing.

02:16:33.000 I love it.

02:16:35.000 I think the corporations are gonna get in on it, but I don't think they're gonna be able to control it.

02:16:39.000 I just think something like weed is too easy to grow.

02:16:43.000 They're definitely gonna make a lot of money.

02:16:45.000 They could definitely get exclusive deals with certain providers and stores.

02:16:49.000 Maybe they could make it difficult to have a license to own a store where you could sell a shitload of it.

02:16:54.000 But if it's legal, people are going to grow it.

02:16:56.000 They're going to grow their own.

02:16:57.000 They're going to grow neighborhood growing weed operations.

02:17:01.000 And if they do allow small businesses to grow it, I think The law as it stated today is that you have to grow the marijuana and then sell it.

02:17:10.000 You couldn't grow it and then sell it to me and then I buy it and sell it.

02:17:15.000 I couldn't do that.

02:17:17.000 I would have to grow my own and sell my own.

02:17:20.000 So you have to be a grower as well as a dealer.

02:17:22.000 Which is fine.

02:17:24.000 A small group of people could cultivate a large amount of marijuana and make a shitload of money.

02:17:32.000 That's good.

02:17:34.000 I saw this really not too long episode of Vice where they were looking at the industry.

02:17:40.000 I guess they're not allowed to use banks.

02:17:41.000 Yeah.

02:17:42.000 In Colorado, they're showing these...

02:17:44.000 Starting to change. 1.00

02:17:45.000 Blackwater guys escorting payouts every day and shit. 1.00

02:17:47.000 I was just like, holy... 0.99

02:17:48.000 You don't even consider that aspect.

02:17:50.000 How much money they probably took out of the cartel's hands the first few years.

02:17:54.000 Oh, yeah. 1.00

02:17:55.000 Fuck yeah. 1.00

02:17:56.000 It'll be interesting to see what this all really turns into. 1.00

02:18:01.000 I wonder if people have been threatened.

02:18:03.000 Well, it's too much money, right?

02:18:05.000 It's too much money.

02:18:09.000 Yeah, it's a curious thing because it's extremely profitable and it's current.

02:18:16.000 And people are aware of the profitability of it.

02:18:19.000 People are aware of the...

02:18:20.000 Not only that, they're aware that traffic incidents of pulling people over for DUIs is at an all-time low.

02:18:26.000 Murder is dropped.

02:18:27.000 Everything's dropped.

02:18:28.000 Violent crime dropped.

02:18:29.000 I mean, you're showing a huge increase in the amount of money that's being generated as far as for state revenue.

02:18:35.000 More than $100 million in taxes this year.

02:18:38.000 Yeah.

02:18:39.000 And then you're showing these drops in crime, drops in DUIs, drops in murder.

02:18:45.000 Like, there's nothing you can say other than, let's try this somewhere else. 0.52

02:18:50.000 Any state that's struggling, any state that doesn't have some sort of a massive resource pool, like natural oil or gas or something like that that it's relying on, if they are in need of an industry, boy, that's a fucking pretty easy one.

02:19:03.000 It's right there for you. 0.99

02:19:04.000 Dive on in, bitches. 1.00

02:19:06.000 You can make some money. 1.00

02:19:07.000 Three months from now, just going to make you some more money all over again.

02:19:10.000 I wonder what's going to happen.

02:19:11.000 I wonder how many states are going to adopt at this next upcoming election.

02:19:14.000 I would imagine it's going to be another couple, at least.

02:19:17.000 I would like to see five or six more just jump in and start just wildly... 0.99

02:19:22.000 You know what would be the shit? 1.00

02:19:23.000 If Texas jumped in. 1.00

02:19:25.000 Utah's talking about it.

02:19:26.000 Are they really? 0.93

02:19:27.000 You know, because the Mormons figured out, well, if we can make a fuck ton of money off this, too. 0.80

02:19:31.000 So, I mean, if Utah's talking about it, then...

02:19:35.000 I think the South will still be the last part of the country where it ever materializes. 1.00

02:19:40.000 There's a lot of fucking stoners in Utah, man. 1.00

02:19:42.000 There's a lot of stoners in Utah. 1.00

02:19:43.000 I was in Utah.

02:19:44.000 I did Salt Lake City.

02:19:46.000 Salt Lake City is a really liberal town, weirdly enough.

02:19:49.000 It is.

02:19:49.000 It's weird.

02:19:51.000 I think they all kind of moved out to the outskirts, so now you've got this little hotbed of rebellion right there in the middle of it all, you know? 1.00

02:20:00.000 Wise Guys Comedy Club, that place is the shit. 0.91

02:20:03.000 And it's right in Salt Lake, and all my friends who work there, they all come back and go, Dude, have you been to Salt Lake? 0.99

02:20:09.000 It's the best kept secret in the United States. 0.99

02:20:11.000 Oh, it's fucking banging! 0.97

02:20:13.000 They're nice people too, man. 0.99

02:20:15.000 That is a nice town.

02:20:17.000 And a lot.

02:20:22.000 If they grow it too, they're going to start seeing massive amounts of profit, and they're going to see a shift in consciousness.

02:20:28.000 That's the big thing, the shift in consciousness.

02:20:30.000 It might take a few more years to recognize that and the effects of that, but people are just going to be nicer.

02:20:35.000 It's just going to happen.

02:20:37.000 You can't smoke a ton of weed and keep the entire population with the same anger level.

02:20:43.000 It's going to change.

02:20:44.000 It'll change the way people interact with each other, and that will, in turn, change the entire culture.

02:20:51.000 It's the genie's out of the bottle.

02:20:52.000 You don't really see fights breaking down in coffee shops in Amsterdam.

02:20:55.000 It's very rare.

02:20:56.000 Very rare.

02:20:57.000 Yeah.

02:20:57.000 But, oddly enough, a lot of jiu-jitsu guys like to smoke weed.

02:21:01.000 Really?

02:21:01.000 And then go do jiu-jitsu.

02:21:03.000 Bruce was a big pothead, wasn't he?

02:21:04.000 Yeah, he used to eat hash.

02:21:05.000 Yeah.

02:21:06.000 Yeah.

02:21:07.000 I thought that that killed him.

02:21:08.000 I remember when I was a teenager. 1.00

02:21:10.000 Is that bullshit? 1.00

02:21:11.000 They said his brain swelled from the hash or something like that. 1.00

02:21:14.000 Yeah, he apparently had a head injury.

02:21:14.000 What?

02:21:17.000 This is aneurysm.

02:21:18.000 Yeah, I think he also had some sort of a reaction to the drugs he was taking for it.

02:21:23.000 I should probably Google that.

02:21:24.000 I think you're right.

02:21:25.000 I think Linda gave him something for his...

02:21:27.000 Yeah.

02:21:27.000 Anyway.

02:21:28.000 Yeah, he used to get stoned as hell and work out all day, right?

02:21:31.000 Yeah, he loved hash, apparently.

02:21:34.000 Apparently he was really into it, man.

02:21:37.000 But if you've ever eaten hash, you would kind of get it. 0.63

02:21:42.000 The eating of marijuana is one of the least respected but most ass-kicking of all the psychedelic experiences.

02:21:50.000 I prefer edibles. 0.70

02:21:52.000 Yeah, man. 1.00

02:21:53.000 The shit that they're throwing around today. 1.00

02:21:55.000 There's this dude called Los Hermanos de Gumi. 1.00

02:21:58.000 Is that the name of them?

02:22:00.000 The Gumi brothers? 0.63

02:22:01.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:22:01.000 These motherfuckers. 1.00

02:22:03.000 My friend Ari had this Comedy Central taping and these guys showed up with these gummy bears. 1.00

02:22:07.000 And then I go, I'm looking at the gummy bear.

02:22:10.000 It's a bear.

02:22:10.000 I go, how much did I eat?

02:22:11.000 The guy goes, no more than the head.

02:22:13.000 I'm like, well, why are you making it so big?

02:22:16.000 What do you mean no more than the head?

02:22:18.000 What happens if I eat more than the head?

02:22:19.000 He's like, don't do it.

02:22:20.000 I'm like, why?

02:22:21.000 You made it!

02:22:23.000 You made it! 1.00

02:22:24.000 Joey Diaz eats the whole fucking thing. 1.00

02:22:26.000 Oh, man. 1.00

02:22:27.000 He's a hero.

02:22:28.000 He's a man amongst men.

02:22:29.000 We were out here months ago for this, played with Greg Allman down at the Annenberg Center, and some guy came, or somebody gave us these little, man, they were tiny.

02:22:39.000 They were like these little, tiny little cupcakes with like a peace sign on the top of it.

02:22:44.000 No bigger than a nickel.

02:22:46.000 And, um...

02:22:49.000 It just absolutely destroyed me.

02:22:51.000 I had to somehow find my way back to my hotel room just to lay down.

02:22:59.000 There was nothing fun about it.

02:23:01.000 I was completely non-functional.

02:23:05.000 It was a Saturday night at 8 p.m.

02:23:06.000 and I was just done.

02:23:08.000 Yeah, they're saying that Bruce Lee's brain had been swollen when they checked his autopsy.

02:23:15.000 They said there was no visible external injury.

02:23:18.000 However, according to autopsy reports, his brain had swollen considerably from 1,400 to 1,575 grams, which is a 13% increase, which is pretty big.

02:23:28.000 He was only 32. The only substance found during his autopsy was equagesic.

02:23:34.000 I don't know what that is.

02:23:36.000 I'll Google it.

02:23:38.000 Okay, the only substance...

02:23:39.000 Okay.

02:23:40.000 The doctor said in an interview that he died from an allergic reaction to the muscle relaxant in equagesic, whatever it is, which is described as a common ingredient in painkillers.

02:23:52.000 Doctors announced Lee's death officially.

02:23:55.000 It was ruled death by misadventure.

02:23:58.000 Hmm.

02:23:59.000 Wow.

02:24:00.000 That's interesting.

02:24:02.000 But I guarantee he had some head injuries.

02:24:08.000 Because he was sparring. 0.99

02:24:09.000 You know, if you're doing the kind of shit that he was doing, he was experimenting a lot with various martial arts and had a, most likely, he got hit. 0.99

02:24:17.000 I mean, that's just a part of the game. 0.98

02:24:19.000 And if he was doing really experimental, wild stuff like I know he was, I mean, he's involved in a lot of different, sort of assimilating a lot of different martial arts styles.

02:24:29.000 I'm sure Don Inosanto got a shot or two in there somewhere, you know, I mean, come on.

02:24:33.000 Yeah, all of them.

02:24:34.000 There's some recently released video of him sparring at some karate tournament thing.

02:24:42.000 He has his headgear on, his full body armor on, and him and his dude are going at it.

02:24:46.000 If he was involved in stuff like that, most likely he was getting hit in the head.

02:24:50.000 It's just the way it is.

02:24:51.000 He worked with a lot of boxers.

02:24:53.000 I know he worked with Gene LaBelle.

02:24:55.000 He did some judo with Gene.

02:24:57.000 It's just the nature of martial arts, especially when you're involved in striking sports.

02:25:02.000 So who knows what it was that caused his head to bleed.

02:25:05.000 But it wasn't eaten hash.

02:25:06.000 No.

02:25:07.000 That's a shame.

02:25:09.000 Have you gotten a hold of some of the LA edibles while you're here?

02:25:12.000 This trip, no.

02:25:13.000 Yes, you have.

02:25:15.000 You just don't know it yet.

02:25:17.000 No.

02:25:19.000 Man, the last experience kind of put me off, dude.

02:25:21.000 I'm not kidding.

02:25:21.000 Don't be scared on me.

02:25:22.000 All three of us ate that fucking cupcake and all three of us were done. 1.00

02:25:26.000 I mean, they gotta put a dosage list on that shit. 1.00

02:25:30.000 They do now. 0.99

02:25:31.000 They put dosage numbers on.

02:25:32.000 It was not cool, man.

02:25:33.000 I mean, it was just not...

02:25:34.000 My night was over.

02:25:36.000 Well, they have these things called chibichus, and some of them I think will go up to 250 milligrams, which is just insane.

02:25:44.000 An effective dose is like 20 or 30. That's insane.

02:25:47.000 Like 20 is not bad for like a mellow, easygoing, body high.

02:25:51.000 30, you're pushing the boundaries of paranoia.

02:25:54.000 40, 50, you're in a cold sweat.

02:25:57.000 250. Joey Diaz ate two of them.

02:26:01.000 There's a chocolate bar at a place I go to.

02:26:02.000 It's 40 doses.

02:26:03.000 Game over.

02:26:04.000 40 doses in one chocolate bar?

02:26:06.000 And a small bar, too. 1.00

02:26:07.000 What the fuck, man? 1.00

02:26:09.000 How big is small? 1.00

02:26:10.000 Not a big bar, you know, where it's like five pieces.

02:26:12.000 Right.

02:26:13.000 Like how many inches wide?

02:26:13.000 Like a little...

02:26:15.000 A snicker size.

02:26:17.000 40 doses.

02:26:17.000 40 people.

02:26:18.000 Why?

02:26:19.000 I mean, why?

02:26:20.000 Imagine if you ate it by yourself, though.

02:26:21.000 Like you said, one or two hits, and it's like...

02:26:23.000 Because you want to see Buddha.

02:26:24.000 Right, you do.

02:26:24.000 There's only one way to see him.

02:26:25.000 You've got to see Buddha.

02:26:26.000 You've got to close your eyes, shut the lights out, and watch the dance.

02:26:29.000 Yeah, I don't know.

02:26:30.000 At some point, I realized, I almost felt like I was getting anxiety from smoking it.

02:26:37.000 And definitely the carcinogen, and as a singer now, I've really got to be cautious about it.

02:26:42.000 So I just kind of quit smoking.

02:26:43.000 And then the edibles, you're right, it's an entirely different feeling.

02:26:47.000 It's more of an anti-anxiety, almost like an overall body high.

02:26:50.000 Whereas if you try to go out on stage, I can't smoke and perform because you get so internalized, I feel like I can't connect with the crowd at all.

02:26:58.000 Right.

02:26:59.000 So I just learned a long time ago not to do that.

02:27:03.000 But with the edibles, man, it almost just...

02:27:06.000 Opens you up.

02:27:07.000 Opens you up.

02:27:08.000 And it's much more expressive, I think.

02:27:10.000 Do you know about the conversion in your body?

02:27:13.000 The 11-hydroxymetabolite?

02:27:13.000 I have no idea.

02:27:15.000 People who have heard this on the podcast, please bear with me.

02:27:18.000 I know you've heard this.

02:27:19.000 When you eat marijuana, it produces something called 11-hydroxymetabolitis.

02:27:23.000 It passes through your liver.

02:27:25.000 And apparently, it's four to five times more psychoactive than THC. Oh, absolutely.

02:27:29.000 That's why it's such an intensely different experience.

02:27:31.000 It's because it's a totally different drug when you eat it.

02:27:34.000 Yeah.

02:27:35.000 Well, in the sensory deprivation tank, it's very psychedelic when you eat it because you're in that experience which is so bizarre as it is.

02:27:46.000 Yeah, you don't even really need drugs in those things, do you?

02:27:49.000 No, you don't need anything.

02:27:50.000 What's that like?

02:27:51.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:27:51.000 You have one?

02:27:53.000 You want to do it?

02:27:55.000 How long are you here for?

02:27:56.000 I fly out tomorrow at noon.

02:27:58.000 We'll see what we can do.

02:28:00.000 You should try it, though.

02:28:01.000 At some point in your life, for sure.

02:28:02.000 I don't know if they have one in Nashville, but they're popping up all over the country.

02:28:05.000 They had one in D.C. when I was in D.C. People from the show in Philly, they have one in Philly.

02:28:11.000 They're showing up all over the country.

02:28:13.000 People are starting to open up these tank centers.

02:28:15.000 This is another thing that didn't...

02:28:17.000 It didn't exist.

02:28:18.000 In most cities, it was really hard to find one.

02:28:22.000 If you have your own, you've got to maintain the pH levels.

02:28:24.000 Mine has a full filter.

02:28:26.000 I have a commercial level one.

02:28:28.000 Float Nashville.

02:28:29.000 Bam, son!

02:28:30.000 You're in!

02:28:31.000 I work on buying a car first.

02:28:34.000 It's not expensive.

02:28:35.000 You don't have to have one.

02:28:36.000 You go and rent one out.

02:28:36.000 Right.

02:28:38.000 Just go and set an appointment.

02:28:39.000 I would love to try it.

02:28:40.000 You should definitely try it.

02:28:41.000 It's one of the most profound feelings of relaxation you'll ever feel in your life.

02:28:45.000 So you have a complete and total disassociation experience?

02:28:49.000 You lose feeling of your body, right?

02:28:52.000 Yeah, you don't think you're there anymore.

02:28:54.000 You think your mind has been released from your body and your mind's flying through space, completely untethered from the body.

02:29:01.000 You don't feel the water.

02:29:02.000 The only time I've ever experienced that, even on...

02:29:07.000 I never had any type of complete disassociation experiences, even on really high doses of psilocybin.

02:29:13.000 The one time I ever...

02:29:14.000 I think what I would classify as the most psychedelic experience I've ever had was from a drug that's not even normally associated with the psychedelic family, which is dextromethorphan.

02:29:23.000 What is that?

02:29:24.000 DXM. It's...

02:29:26.000 A lot of kids, like...

02:29:28.000 Pound bottles of Robitussin. 1.00

02:29:30.000 By the time you consume enough DXM that's in the Robitussin, you're doing so much horrible shit to your body. 0.99

02:29:36.000 I only encountered it one time. 0.98

02:29:39.000 We were at this festival in Charlotte, North Carolina.

02:29:41.000 A friend of mine had somehow gotten hold of this pure medical grade dextromethorphan.

02:29:48.000 We had a digital scale with gel caps weighing it out.

02:29:50.000 It was about 400 milligrams.

02:29:54.000 It's just the most amazing, completely inexplicable experience I've ever had.

02:30:00.000 Wow.

02:30:01.000 My buddy Brian, he's like, you know, Sturgill, you need to hear music on this. 0.98

02:30:06.000 He's like, it's as good as it fucking gets. 0.98

02:30:07.000 So, first off, the weirdest part of the whole experience is we're out in this KOA campground in North Carolina, and we're just surrounded by hippies, and there's tanks going off and shit, and that ain't my thing. 0.99

02:30:19.000 Tanks? 0.98

02:30:20.000 Yeah, nitrous tanks.

02:30:21.000 They'll come at these hippie festivals.

02:30:22.000 I thought you meant like...

02:30:23.000 No, no, no.

02:30:23.000 No.

02:30:24.000 I don't understand.

02:30:25.000 Hippies have tanks? 1.00

02:30:26.000 We had to make it back down to the parking lot where his truck was parked through this trail. 1.00

02:30:32.000 You couldn't see shit, man. 0.98

02:30:33.000 It was like the most complete flutter vision ever. 0.99

02:30:36.000 And I'm just stumbling, not walking into trees.

02:30:39.000 And Brian was like, oh man, just close your eyes.

02:30:42.000 I'm like, what are you talking about?

02:30:43.000 What?

02:30:44.000 He's like, just close your eyes, trust me.

02:30:45.000 And I closed my eyes, and I swear as I'm sitting here, it was all of a sudden, like, I could see the trail, plainest day, directly in front of me, and almost like the entire canopy had this moon lamp just turned on and flooded it with light, and everything was so clear.

02:31:00.000 And we walked all the way back down to his truck.

02:31:02.000 With your eyes closed?

02:31:03.000 With our eyes closed.

02:31:04.000 What?!

02:31:04.000 I swear to you, man.

02:31:05.000 I'll never...

02:31:06.000 To this day, I'm not even, you know...

02:31:09.000 It was insane.

02:31:12.000 Did you only do it once? 1.00

02:31:13.000 What the fuck? 1.00

02:31:13.000 One time. 1.00

02:31:14.000 I've never even met anybody that's even heard of it or knew where to find it since, but Brian used to get tons of this shit, and he'd just lay with his headphones on for like eight hours in his living room and listen to music, and you're completely... 0.95

02:31:24.000 Is it illegal? 0.95

02:31:25.000 Well, I mean, to possess it in that kind of quantity, I wouldn't have...

02:31:29.000 You have to have permits and things like that to...

02:31:33.000 But we got to the truck, and he had a Toyota Tacoma, you know, with the bucket seats, and a really nice stereo, like a booming-ass stereo.

02:31:40.000 I mean, he's putting, like, Band of Gypsies or something.

02:31:42.000 And I laid that bucket seat back, man, and closed my eyes.

02:31:45.000 And within a matter of a second, I mean, half a minute or a minute, I wasn't in that truck anymore.

02:31:50.000 I wasn't in this bucket seat.

02:31:51.000 I felt like you never floated down a river on an inner tube.

02:31:53.000 Yeah.

02:31:54.000 It's the same feeling, except instead of an inner two, I was laying in my own little personal cloud.

02:31:58.000 Just as I'm sitting here talking to you, I was in this cloud, cruising through this golden, sienna, purple sunrise sky, just like the most booming...

02:32:09.000 It's the most blissful euphoria I've ever felt listening to Jimi Hendrix.

02:32:14.000 And this lasted like six hours, man.

02:32:15.000 You're just like cruising through the sky.

02:32:20.000 Wow.

02:32:21.000 I've never had that from any of what people commonly associate as hallucinogens or...

02:32:28.000 That stuff sounds intense.

02:32:30.000 Yeah, I talked to Dr. Strassman about it and he said there's never really been any studies.

02:32:35.000 There's not a lot known.

02:32:36.000 You're a guinea pig. 0.94

02:32:38.000 Sturgill Simpson, human guinea pig. 0.91

02:32:40.000 Well, this was all years and years ago, man.

02:32:42.000 I don't know that I'm...

02:32:44.000 You should do a trip report on Arrowhead.

02:32:46.000 Oh, really?

02:32:47.000 Oh, the forum.

02:32:47.000 Yeah.

02:32:48.000 I know what you're talking about.

02:32:49.000 Yeah.

02:32:50.000 Well, that's one of the most important resources Arrowhead is for people understanding what they're getting into.

02:32:56.000 There's a lot of really educated, very well-thought-out reviews of the various compounds and different...

02:33:04.000 Different effects they have in people's trip reports.

02:33:07.000 I didn't know anything about it until then, and I've never seen it since, but I do remember the guy saying that the difference in three or four or two hundred milligrams is, you know, a thousand times stronger trip.

02:33:18.000 So, you know, nobody's ever really documented the ladder, so to speak.

02:33:23.000 A thousand times stronger trip?

02:33:25.000 Four or five hundred milligrams, you know, you can...

02:33:29.000 Wow.

02:33:30.000 Is there any negative downside?

02:33:32.000 The only thing I remember is I might have had a slight allergic reaction, because I remember feeling like I had sun poisoning, and I was really scratching my back, kind of tripping out on this for a second.

02:33:44.000 This was on the early onset, and the guys were like, what are you doing?

02:33:46.000 I was like, man, I think I got...

02:33:47.000 Too much sun today, my back's really itching, and Chad was like, no, it's not.

02:33:53.000 You're fine.

02:33:54.000 And as soon as he said that, the whole sensation went away.

02:33:57.000 But there was nothing negative about the experience.

02:34:01.000 And when it's over, the comedown just goes away?

02:34:04.000 You go back to baseline and it just kind of wears off.

02:34:06.000 Wow.

02:34:07.000 That's so weird.

02:34:08.000 You always wonder if it was easy for people to do research on psychedelics and it was respected and it was something that people pursued as opposed to being like, you know, if you do research on certain things,

02:34:24.000 you could be thought of as a pariah. 0.99

02:34:26.000 It could fuck with you. 1.00

02:34:27.000 You know, you could be ostracized. 1.00

02:34:29.000 People could say, oh, this guy just wants to get high.

02:34:31.000 He's just trying to get people high.

02:34:33.000 He's just doing experimental drugs.

02:34:35.000 He's not doing serious research.

02:34:37.000 Or they think there's some hidden agenda or zealotry behind it, right?

02:34:40.000 Yeah, it could be.

02:34:41.000 There's a massive hospital in Lexington, Kentucky that was called the Narcotics Farm.

02:34:46.000 And it was a criminal...

02:34:52.000 Yeah.

02:35:10.000 I can speak of this.

02:35:11.000 Well, like, kind of ridiculous approaches to dealing with heroin and methadone addiction, and I know they did some psychedelic studies, I'm sure, back there, but, you know, the hospital still stands there, and it's just the most ominous, creepy building.

02:35:24.000 Methadone is a weird one, isn't it? 1.00

02:35:26.000 Oh, that's horrible shit, man. 1.00

02:35:27.000 They use it to get people off heroin, but yet it's worse for you than heroin. 1.00

02:35:31.000 The withdrawals are way worse, yeah.

02:35:33.000 It just makes them well, too, right?

02:35:36.000 It doesn't get them high?

02:35:37.000 Is that the deal?

02:35:38.000 Whatever the genetical attachment...

02:35:41.000 Heroin is one of those drugs that actually modifies your body's biochemistry in a way that you become physically dependent on it.

02:35:50.000 So they're kind of facilitating whatever it is that causes the sickness when you withdraw.

02:35:57.000 But it's way worse for you.

02:36:01.000 And it doesn't get you high.

02:36:02.000 Nobody talks about really good methadone music.

02:36:05.000 Yeah, right. 0.99

02:36:06.000 People did heroin and made some fucking incredible music. 1.00

02:36:09.000 Nobody did methadone and made some awesome shit. 0.99

02:36:12.000 There was these guys that used to come to the pool hall that used to hang out in white plains, and they were called the methadoneans. 0.99

02:36:19.000 That's what we would call them.

02:36:20.000 They were these dudes that came over from the methadone clinic, and they'd come over and play pool, and they were just zombified, just dead in the eyes.

02:36:29.000 Yeah, what's his deal?

02:36:31.000 He's one of those methadoneans.

02:36:32.000 These poor guys come over from the methadone clinic.

02:36:35.000 What do you guys do around here when you gotta take a massively, intensely painful piss?

02:36:40.000 Go run!

02:36:40.000 Oh, you gotta do it right now?

02:36:41.000 Go take a piss. 0.97

02:36:42.000 We're almost done anyway. 0.85

02:36:44.000 You run and I'll tell everybody how to get to your website.

02:36:47.000 Sturgill Simpson as he takes his little girl's bladder to the bathroom.

02:36:51.000 Not everyone can deal with bulletproof coffee and all that stuff.

02:36:56.000 Water.

02:36:58.000 Just sitting there.

02:37:00.000 I have that.

02:37:02.000 You have it?

02:37:03.000 I said you'll have that sometimes.

02:37:04.000 Not you.

02:37:05.000 Yeah, occasionally.

02:37:06.000 You in a third person sense.

02:37:08.000 But I get it occasionally too, man.

02:37:10.000 It definitely does happen.

02:37:12.000 Sturgill's website.

02:37:13.000 His Twitter is Sturgill Simpson.

02:37:16.000 And if you go to it, it's actually that image.

02:37:20.000 The image of the earth sands the turtles underneath it.

02:37:25.000 Similar image.

02:37:27.000 But Sturgill's...

02:37:28.000 The CDs that I have... 0.99

02:37:31.000 Like I said, I'm a big fucking fan. 0.93

02:37:33.000 He's got several songs that I'm really into that I'm listening to right now on iTunes. 0.96

02:37:40.000 But the CDs...

02:37:42.000 Let me find them on my playlist here.

02:37:47.000 Metamodern Sounds and Country...

02:37:52.000 That's the name of one.

02:37:54.000 That's the latest one.

02:37:55.000 That's the one that's the most psychedelic. 0.98

02:37:57.000 And then the other one is High Top Mountain, which is fucking fantastic. 0.90

02:38:01.000 I really, really dig it. 0.93

02:38:03.000 They're very different, but both of them are equally unique and kick-ass.

02:38:11.000 I love all of it.

02:38:12.000 I'm sure he's got a website, too.

02:38:14.000 Must be like SturgillSimpson.com, right?

02:38:16.000 Whoa, check this out.

02:38:18.000 His website?

02:38:19.000 No, well, sort of.

02:38:21.000 Colorado health officials want to ban almost all recreational edibles. 0.99

02:38:25.000 Ha ha, pussies. 1.00

02:38:27.000 Really? 0.99

02:38:28.000 Yeah, HuffPo.

02:38:29.000 Wow, SturgillSimpson.com is his website. 0.95

02:38:32.000 That's ridiculous.

02:38:33.000 We're just reading something on Huffington Post that the health officials in Colorado want to ban all edibles. 1.00

02:38:40.000 Because kids are getting into them and shit. 0.99

02:38:42.000 They're just nerfing the world. 0.99

02:38:44.000 That's all they're doing.

02:38:45.000 They're just nerfing the world.

02:38:46.000 I saw a really sensationalist piece about this on some national news program the other night because children were getting a hold of them and having overdoses.

02:38:55.000 There's no...

02:38:56.000 It's really scary.

02:38:58.000 So you're gonna outlaw Clorox too?

02:39:00.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:39:00.000 Because your kids get under the fucking sink? 1.00

02:39:02.000 You're a bad parent? 1.00

02:39:03.000 Clorox is way worse, first of all.

02:39:05.000 Because the kids that are having the overdose on pot, they're not dying.

02:39:05.000 Right.

02:39:07.000 They might freak out, but they're not gonna die.

02:39:10.000 It's not toxic.

02:39:11.000 Right. 0.98

02:39:12.000 It's like anything that can fuck your kids up. 0.95

02:39:14.000 Just don't let them get to it, you know? 0.52

02:39:15.000 Yeah, don't let your kid play with hammers.

02:39:18.000 You know? 0.99

02:39:18.000 Shouldn't fucking go to Home Depot and shut it down. 0.99

02:39:21.000 It's stupid. 1.00

02:39:22.000 Take away spoons. 1.00

02:39:23.000 Yeah, the idea that adults, a grown adult, should not be able to buy an edible that has a clearly marked label. 0.99

02:39:29.000 All these experiences that we're talking about, like you ate this little thing that was the size of a nickel, you got fucked up. 0.98

02:39:33.000 You learn. 0.99

02:39:34.000 You learn.

02:39:35.000 You're here.

02:39:36.000 Everyone's fine.

02:39:37.000 It's like the lowest worry version of overdose ever.

02:39:42.000 Because the overdose is just, ah!

02:39:44.000 Well, when I say overdose, all it means is I'm going to go lay in bed and have a really good time instead of walking around and having a really good time.

02:39:50.000 But there's no ill effects.

02:39:51.000 No ill effects.

02:39:52.000 Your body doesn't break.

02:39:53.000 Your mind doesn't melt.

02:39:55.000 You're going to be fine.

02:39:56.000 At the end of the day, you might just get a really great night's sleep.

02:40:00.000 Yeah.

02:40:00.000 I'm not really recommending you give it to your kids, but if your kids get a hold of it, just stay with them.

02:40:06.000 Stay in the room with them.

02:40:08.000 Everybody's going to be okay.

02:40:09.000 They linked two deaths to them.

02:40:11.000 Whatever.

02:40:12.000 One somebody ate one and fell off of a hotel.

02:40:15.000 Another guy, it says, Richard Kirk may have been on pain meds in a pot edible when he killed his wife.

02:40:21.000 Well, pain meds.

02:40:22.000 I guarantee you I'd go with that.

02:40:23.000 The pot edible would have probably... 0.81

02:40:25.000 Pot edible was probably wrestling with the pain meds as he was grabbing hold of the trigger. 1.00

02:40:30.000 Fuck all that, man. 1.00

02:40:31.000 You can't blame a guy falling off a roof on pot. 1.00

02:40:34.000 What are you doing on the roof, stupid? 1.00

02:40:36.000 Pot didn't tell you to get up on that roof. 1.00

02:40:37.000 Why'd you fall off that roof?

02:40:39.000 You know, he probably just fell off that roof no matter what he was on. 1.00

02:40:42.000 You can't fuck around on roofs, dummy. 1.00

02:40:44.000 Especially when you're blitzed. 1.00

02:40:46.000 That's a silly idea. 1.00

02:40:47.000 Who knows what he was doing, but to blame that on Pot is fucking stupid. 1.00

02:40:51.000 Instead of blaming that on Pot, how about you think about how many fucking people don't jump off the roof when they're on Pot? 1.00

02:40:57.000 It's like a lot more. 0.97

02:40:59.000 It also says that the cookie he ate didn't give him the recommended immediate effect that he wanted, so then he ate six times the recommended dose. 1.00

02:41:09.000 Silly bitch. 1.00

02:41:10.000 You can die for a cigarette standing on the fucking corner, you know? 1.00

02:41:13.000 Rest in peace, silly bitch. 1.00

02:41:15.000 You know, people make mistakes, man. 1.00

02:41:17.000 You can't blame the substance.

02:41:18.000 I mean, it's like, what are we going to do?

02:41:20.000 Are we going to outlaw cars because people get in accidents?

02:41:22.000 Are we going to outlaw knives because people stab people?

02:41:25.000 The idea that adults can't make their own decisions has been the folly of man since civilization was created.

02:41:33.000 We have to figure out what decisions are the right ones, educate each other, and then move forward from there. 0.99

02:41:39.000 But to tell someone that they can't handle it, because Jim over here jumped off the fucking roof. 0.99

02:41:45.000 Everybody, all those positive experiences they had eating pot, we're going to flush those down the toilet. 0.99

02:41:50.000 Because we lost Jim.

02:41:52.000 Okay?

02:41:53.000 Jim is a wild man. 1.00

02:41:54.000 Jim is fucking crazy. 1.00

02:41:55.000 Yeah, Jim used to work a tightrope and he used to do fucking backflips off the garage. 1.00

02:42:01.000 But whatever. 0.91

02:42:01.000 We loved him and he's gone, so no more pot for everybody. 0.91

02:42:04.000 Like, what are you talking about?

02:42:06.000 I mean, are we going to outlaw guns every time someone commits suicide?

02:42:09.000 What are we going to do?

02:42:11.000 What kind of a goofy world are we going to create?

02:42:13.000 Because if you just make everything illegal, everything that kills you is going to be illegal.

02:42:18.000 You're going to have nothing.

02:42:19.000 You're going to have no electricity. 0.99

02:42:20.000 There'll be no water because people could fucking drown. 0.92

02:42:23.000 There'll be no food because sometimes food goes bad and people die of food poisoning. 0.96

02:42:27.000 There'll be everything.

02:42:29.000 You're going to take away everything.

02:42:30.000 You literally, if you want to take away things that kill people, you literally have to remove life itself.

02:42:36.000 No more dogs, because dogs bite people. 0.97

02:42:38.000 No more spiders, because spiders can poison you. 0.93

02:42:40.000 We're going to have to poison all the spiders, because they can poison people.

02:42:42.000 But we can't have spider poisoning, because that kills babies if they get added under the sink. 1.00

02:42:46.000 So, we'll have no life.

02:42:48.000 There will be no life.

02:42:50.000 It's just preposterous.

02:42:52.000 And the idea that Colorado is going to step in and legislate that. 0.99

02:42:55.000 What we need to do is get all those fucking people high. 0.99

02:42:58.000 Where is that coming from? 1.00

02:42:59.000 I mean, what? 0.98

02:42:59.000 Some dummies. 0.98

02:43:00.000 Yeah. 0.96

02:43:01.000 What's the issue?

02:43:02.000 I didn't...

02:43:03.000 They're worried about people freaking out on edibles.

02:43:05.000 That's all it is.

02:43:06.000 Is it so strong?

02:43:07.000 Yeah, but so what?

02:43:08.000 Don't eat as much.

02:43:09.000 Lower the dose.

02:43:10.000 You know what's really strong?

02:43:11.000 It's everywhere.

02:43:11.000 Alcohol.

02:43:12.000 Go to a fucking store, drink a bottle of Jack Daniels, you're dead. 1.00

02:43:15.000 You're dead in three hours. 1.00

02:43:16.000 Or whatever it takes. 0.99

02:43:18.000 Maybe you've got a better tolerance than me, but if you drink a gallon jug of Jack Daniels, most likely you're a goner.

02:43:27.000 There's some truth there.

02:43:29.000 I used to...

02:43:31.000 I don't really drink at all anymore.

02:43:33.000 I think most of that is probably related to my job.

02:43:36.000 Because you spend night after night looking out at rooms full of people that are very drunk.

02:43:41.000 Right.

02:43:42.000 And it gives you a certain...

02:43:44.000 I don't know. 0.99

02:43:46.000 Plus, looking back on my life, all the dumbest shit I ever did, alcohol was pretty much directly related. 0.99

02:43:52.000 The worst decisions I ever made. 1.00

02:43:52.000 All of it. 1.00

02:43:55.000 It wasn't because I was on hard drugs.

02:43:57.000 Go figure.

02:43:59.000 No, it's the number one sanctioned drug.

02:44:02.000 I mean, it's what everybody does to have a good time.

02:44:04.000 After work, let's go have a drink.

02:44:06.000 I'm not opposed to having a drink.

02:44:07.000 I like having a drink.

02:44:08.000 I really do.

02:44:09.000 I don't drink too much.

02:44:09.000 I like drinking.

02:44:11.000 I don't get fucked up. 0.99

02:44:12.000 But I've been fucked up, and I've had a great time. 0.99

02:44:14.000 You know? 0.99

02:44:15.000 Yeah, it's bad for you, but so is a lot of...

02:44:17.000 There's really nothing worse than a drunk.

02:44:20.000 Very few things. 0.77

02:44:21.000 Very few things worse than an obnoxious drunk. 0.98

02:44:23.000 Yeah, especially a violent, obnoxious drunk. 0.99

02:44:26.000 It's the worst.

02:44:27.000 The worst is you ever been on a date with a girl and you're sober and she's drunk?

02:44:31.000 That's disastrous.

02:44:32.000 Really drunk girls are the worst. 1.00

02:44:34.000 Really drunk guys. 0.83

02:44:35.000 That's the worst. 0.99

02:44:36.000 They're the worst. 0.81

02:44:36.000 I think really drunk guys are the worst because they're more violent than the really drunk girls. 0.81

02:44:40.000 You know, it's sad that the shows, they're the only ones that ever want to talk to me.

02:44:44.000 Like, the other guys in the band are young, and they get hit on by the girls.

02:44:47.000 The girls never want to talk to Sturgill, man. 1.00

02:44:48.000 It's always, like, the really big, like, large, drunk guy.

02:44:54.000 And they all, like, give me the bear hug, and I get the whaling thing. 1.00

02:44:59.000 And then they're just, like, hugging me, and I'm levitating off the ground, and they're giving me, like, this thing, like, fucking man, you're the shit, dude. 1.00

02:45:06.000 Yeah, like, one song, man, damn, dude. 1.00

02:45:08.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:45:09.000 Those are the only people that want to talk to me.

02:45:11.000 The really huge, wildebeest, drunk, really redneck guys. 0.96

02:45:17.000 That's my curse.

02:45:18.000 Yeah, they're fun to talk to, man. 0.99

02:45:19.000 They're fucking great. 0.95

02:45:20.000 I have a good time talking to a lot of those dudes. 0.99

02:45:23.000 I do.

02:45:24.000 I think there's a certain romance and fun involved in alcohol consumption that I embrace.

02:45:30.000 It's not the end-all, be-all, but it's not bad.

02:45:33.000 There's some fun to alcohol. 1.00

02:45:35.000 You know, it's an irresponsible, oftentimes reckless, stupid, impulsive feeling and state of mind. 1.00

02:45:41.000 But, with the right people, that shit works. 1.00

02:45:46.000 It's bad for your health. 1.00

02:45:47.000 That's the number one issue.

02:45:49.000 I know a lot of people that shouldn't smoke pot.

02:45:50.000 Everything hits people differently. 1.00

02:45:50.000 Fuck yeah. 1.00

02:45:52.000 Yeah, I know a lot of people that shouldn't drink, though. 1.00

02:45:55.000 A lot more people that shouldn't drink than shouldn't do anything else.

02:45:58.000 I have friends that smoke pot but can't drink.

02:46:01.000 They're alcoholics, but they'll still smoke pot. 1.00

02:46:03.000 So they don't drink.

02:46:04.000 Well, it's not even so, but they can.

02:46:04.000 Yeah.

02:46:07.000 They can smoke pot and they're fine.

02:46:09.000 But if they drink, they're off the rails.

02:46:11.000 The gene.

02:46:12.000 Yeah.

02:46:12.000 That weird...

02:46:13.000 A lot of Irishmen.

02:46:14.000 A lot of that weird gene.

02:46:16.000 It just hits them like a truck.

02:46:18.000 They can't do it.

02:46:19.000 They can't regulate it.

02:46:20.000 It takes over.

02:46:21.000 Woo-woo! 1.00

02:46:23.000 I mean, we were in Ireland a couple weeks ago. 0.99

02:46:27.000 You talk about some fucking great people, though, man. 0.99

02:46:29.000 Oh, yeah. 0.98

02:46:31.000 If all the places in Great Britain or Europe that we've played, it feels the most like the States.

02:46:31.000 Just...

02:46:37.000 Because they're just like, you know...

02:46:38.000 And a lot of the British and the Scottish audiences are so intensely attentive and appreciative that it's almost disconcertingly quiet. 1.00

02:46:47.000 When you get to Ireland, they're just like, Fuck! 1.00

02:46:49.000 Yeah! 1.00

02:46:51.000 You're like, yep, okay, done this before.

02:46:53.000 They like American country music? 0.99

02:46:55.000 They fucking love it, man. 0.99

02:46:56.000 Wow, that's awesome. 0.99

02:46:57.000 Scottish and the Irish especially.

02:46:59.000 It all came from there.

02:47:00.000 Really?

02:47:01.000 Yeah, all country, bluegrass, anything, it's all just a derivative of Scotch-Irish folk music that came over with the settlers.

02:47:07.000 We just kind of... 0.99

02:47:08.000 No shit! 1.00

02:47:09.000 Drink whiskey and sit on a porch for a hundred years and it just got faster and faster. 1.00

02:47:13.000 No shit! 0.99

02:47:14.000 But yeah, traditional Irish music and a lot of Scottish fiddle tunes, like the mandolins tune in D, just like a bagpipe, because when the pipes got outlawed, they started playing a lot of those songs on stringed instruments. 0.99

02:47:28.000 Why did the pipes get outlawed?

02:47:28.000 Wow!

02:47:31.000 For being annoying?

02:47:32.000 No, for basically it was their... 0.99

02:47:34.000 For sucking? 0.93

02:47:35.000 There's the British equivalent of the law against inciting a riot. 1.00

02:47:39.000 You know, like somebody pulled out some fucking bagpipes back in the day, like some shit was going to go down, man. 0.99

02:47:46.000 Wow, they made a law against bagpipes. 0.99

02:47:49.000 Yeah, they outlawed them for a long time.

02:47:51.000 That's hilarious.

02:47:51.000 How long?

02:47:52.000 I don't know.

02:47:53.000 Like years?

02:47:54.000 Yeah.

02:47:55.000 Jamie will find out.

02:47:56.000 Wow.

02:47:57.000 That's insane.

02:47:58.000 All of that tradition kind of came over.

02:48:00.000 It's where a lot of country music, the melodies and the themes and the elements, they're very similar. 0.99

02:48:05.000 Is that why I like that Lord of the Dance shit? 0.97

02:48:08.000 Like when they were step dancing, a little bit like line dancing? 0.99

02:48:12.000 Yeah, well...

02:48:12.000 Isn't it?

02:48:13.000 That's a little questionable.

02:48:14.000 I don't know.

02:48:14.000 We'll go...

02:48:15.000 I don't know.

02:48:16.000 What, Michael? 0.99

02:48:16.000 What the fuck was his name? 0.99

02:48:17.000 The Lord of the Dance? 1.00

02:48:19.000 Flatly.

02:48:19.000 Flat...

02:48:20.000 Flatly.

02:48:20.000 That was short-lived.

02:48:21.000 People are like, yeah, let's go Irish dancing.

02:48:23.000 No.

02:48:24.000 No.

02:48:24.000 Let's not.

02:48:25.000 He did it for a little while.

02:48:26.000 I think he still... 0.99

02:48:27.000 Actually, I think I saw a fucking billboard for it when I was over there. 0.99

02:48:30.000 There's a few suckers left in town. 0.99

02:48:31.000 Oh, man.

02:48:34.000 Most people got hip to that and went, wait, wait, wait, wait. 1.00

02:48:37.000 What the fuck are we watching? 0.99

02:48:39.000 What is that dude doing up there, man? 0.99

02:48:41.000 That was weird.

02:48:42.000 Yeah.

02:48:43.000 But yeah, it's all interconnected.

02:48:45.000 That's amazing.

02:48:46.000 They really do.

02:48:46.000 I didn't know that.

02:48:48.000 I mean, man, especially in Glasgow and Dublin, we feel like we've almost been adopted at this point.

02:48:53.000 Really?

02:48:53.000 They're so appreciative.

02:48:55.000 How often do you play over there?

02:48:56.000 I've been over...

02:48:58.000 Five or six times this year. 1.00

02:49:00.000 No shit! 0.98

02:49:01.000 Yeah, actually, we haven't really started our US tour on the album. 0.99

02:49:04.000 The album came back in May, but I've spent the majority of the year in Europe.

02:49:06.000 Wow, why is that?

02:49:08.000 It's just, it's important.

02:49:09.000 It was always important to me, like, to go there and play for those people.

02:49:14.000 Why?

02:49:15.000 Just free travel, really, man.

02:49:15.000 I don't know.

02:49:17.000 And plus, you get to fucking play music every night and see Europe. 0.98

02:49:20.000 Right. 0.99

02:49:21.000 I think...

02:49:23.000 Honestly, well here, careers can be such...

02:49:26.000 It has the potential to be a little bit more flash in the pan base over here.

02:49:30.000 People get bored quicker.

02:49:32.000 But I've just had a lot of friends that are musicians that said if you make the effort and you go over and they see you taking the trouble and the time to come over, they're loyal, they're just fans for life.

02:49:43.000 I'll probably still be touring over there long after any career I have here has dried up.

02:49:47.000 Really?

02:49:47.000 Yeah.

02:49:48.000 That's amazing.

02:49:49.000 What about, is that England as well, or just Ireland?

02:49:51.000 England, not so much.

02:49:53.000 I mean, there's a market, but it appears to be sincerely and genuinely appreciated in the Celtic areas.

02:50:04.000 Dublin and Belfast and Glasgow and Edinburgh and, you know, these are really very musical cities at their core.

02:50:12.000 But they just, you know, anything poetry-related or, you know, storytelling, they just really love it.

02:50:19.000 How upset were they that YouTube put their songs on every iPhone?

02:50:23.000 Were they bummed out?

02:50:24.000 I don't know.

02:50:25.000 Was Dublin pissed?

02:50:26.000 They've gone soft. 0.96

02:50:28.000 I go out of my way to stay as much the fuck out of their business as possible when I'm there. 0.64

02:50:34.000 Right.

02:50:35.000 Just show up and do my job.

02:50:37.000 Because it's always, you know...

02:50:38.000 Do you know the story about U2 putting their...

02:50:41.000 U2 put their new album on every iPhone.

02:50:41.000 No.

02:50:44.000 The other day I'm in my car and my phone starts playing random.

02:50:47.000 And all of a sudden I got some U2 song.

02:50:49.000 Oops, I'm sorry.

02:50:50.000 Bono apologizes for U2 album being automatically added to Apple, iTunes libraries.

02:50:55.000 Now that you say that, man, I was backstage yesterday syncing my phone up to a new laptop. 0.94

02:50:59.000 I got on the road and I was getting all the cloud shit and I looked down and there's a fucking U2 album. 0.99

02:51:04.000 Exactly. 0.99

02:51:05.000 Okay.

02:51:06.000 I was wondering, why is this here?

02:51:08.000 Yeah, why is that there?

02:51:09.000 I don't want that.

02:51:10.000 I don't want that.

02:51:11.000 I'm in my car the other day, and I have my car plugged in.

02:51:13.000 I got the thing, you know, that plugs into the stereo system.

02:51:16.000 It's playing random.

02:51:17.000 I just do that sometimes.

02:51:18.000 So they monopolized iTunes, basically.

02:51:20.000 Well, they figured out a way to launch their album on iTunes, but the problem is a lot of people that buy an iPhone aren't U2 fans. 0.99

02:51:29.000 That's a fucking very presumptuous thing, and you're dealing with billions of these fucking things being sold.

02:51:35.000 So, how many of them have U2 songs on them? 0.99

02:51:38.000 All of them!

02:51:39.000 I mean, how many are they selling?

02:51:41.000 I mean, they might sell 100 million iPhones, right?

02:51:43.000 That's all with a U2 album on it. 1.00

02:51:46.000 That's stupid. 1.00

02:51:47.000 That's not how many U2 would sell. 1.00

02:51:49.000 U2's a very popular band.

02:51:50.000 I'm sure a lot of people would be super happy to get U2's song for free with a new iPhone.

02:51:55.000 But a lot of people wouldn't.

02:51:56.000 They just sold them with them.

02:51:57.000 They pushed them onto their existing phones.

02:51:59.000 Yes.

02:52:00.000 I had a 5S. Oh, really?

02:52:02.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:52:02.000 Just showed up.

02:52:03.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:52:03.000 Oh, no.

02:52:04.000 So when you update the operating system?

02:52:06.000 Not even that.

02:52:07.000 No?

02:52:07.000 Just showed up.

02:52:08.000 What?

02:52:09.000 Just through iTunes.

02:52:10.000 No.

02:52:11.000 Yeah, just showed up. 0.58

02:52:12.000 That's dirty.

02:52:13.000 Oh, that's even dirtier.

02:52:14.000 Like you already purchased it and you just didn't download it yet.

02:52:16.000 Oh, my God. 0.56

02:52:18.000 That's actually disgusting.

02:52:19.000 That's a disaster.

02:52:20.000 That's why he said sorry.

02:52:22.000 Why did he let that go? 0.99

02:52:24.000 I read the other day where he also said that he's been wearing those fucking glasses for 20 years because he's got glaucoma. 0.99

02:52:31.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:52:31.000 Do you buy that? 1.00

02:52:33.000 You look a little incredulous.

02:52:35.000 The jury's out.

02:52:35.000 Yep.

02:52:37.000 I wonder.

02:52:37.000 Jury's out.

02:52:38.000 Yeah, he's probably got called on it.

02:52:40.000 You know, people are like, hey, man.

02:52:42.000 Why is it just now coming up, though?

02:52:44.000 I mean, people have been wondering what the...

02:52:46.000 I mean, remember they had, like, the fly, these big black ones back in the day. 1.00

02:52:50.000 Everybody just let that shit slide. 1.00

02:52:52.000 Like, nobody was like, hey, man, what the fuck? 1.00

02:52:55.000 I wonder if he smokes weed. 1.00

02:52:56.000 Because if you have glaucoma, you're allowed to.

02:52:59.000 It reduces interocular pressure.

02:53:01.000 It's one of the legit reasons to get a medical marijuana prescription.

02:53:04.000 My grandfather has really bad glaucoma now, but he's never, I would never, I don't even know how I would approach that conversation.

02:53:11.000 To give him weed?

02:53:11.000 Yeah, he's such an old school, like, just a hillbilly, you know.

02:53:16.000 Right.

02:53:17.000 Just never, never, you know.

02:53:19.000 I don't even know how I would convince him that this actually will make you feel better.

02:53:24.000 Just sit them down.

02:53:26.000 You know.

02:53:28.000 Sit them down.

02:53:29.000 Yeah.

02:53:30.000 Get them drunk first.

02:53:31.000 Yeah, he's a pretty stoic guy, man.

02:53:34.000 Well, then just sit him down.

02:53:35.000 Maybe I just don't tell him.

02:53:36.000 Just give him the brownies. 0.98

02:53:37.000 I might freak out and have a heart attack and die.

02:53:39.000 Well, that would be very bad.

02:53:41.000 Yes.

02:53:42.000 Yeah.

02:53:42.000 Sit him down.

02:53:43.000 All right.

02:53:44.000 Sit him down.

02:53:44.000 You're a grown man now.

02:53:45.000 He might listen to you.

02:53:46.000 I get a time off to go home and actually see him.

02:53:47.000 I might do that sometime.

02:53:49.000 Listen, man.

02:53:50.000 We just ran through three hours.

02:53:50.000 We're out of time.

02:53:52.000 Really? 1.00

02:53:53.000 Holy shit. 1.00

02:53:53.000 Yep. 1.00

02:53:54.000 Crazy, right?

02:53:54.000 That's nuts.

02:53:55.000 Time flies.

02:53:56.000 Yeah.

02:53:57.000 It all just slips away.

02:53:58.000 Tell people, your website, SturgillSimpson.com, your two albums, you can get them on iTunes, and I listed them off while you were taking a leak.

02:54:10.000 If anybody's interested, you gotta, I mean, my favorite songs, there's a bunch of them. 0.85

02:54:15.000 You Can Have the Crown, I fucking love that. 0.98

02:54:17.000 Off your first one, that's a great fucking... 1.00

02:54:20.000 Why are you laughing? 1.00

02:54:21.000 Oh, man.

02:54:22.000 It's nothing.

02:54:24.000 Nothing.

02:54:25.000 What?

02:54:26.000 It's that song.

02:54:29.000 Everybody's got that song they wish they never wrote.

02:54:31.000 That's your song?

02:54:32.000 That's my song, man.

02:54:33.000 Dude, that song's great! 0.98

02:54:34.000 I fucking love that song. 0.97

02:54:35.000 It was a lot of fun, and I wrote it in about 20 minutes at like 7.30 in the morning, and we ended up recording it that day. 0.98

02:54:42.000 We just happened to go into a studio, actually Waylon's old studio in Nashville, Hillbilly Central.

02:54:46.000 We got the opportunity to record in there, and Dave was like, what do you got that's new?

02:54:50.000 And I'd written that song and another song literally that morning before I knew we were going to be in there.

02:54:54.000 And so I played it for him and the rest of the guys.

02:54:57.000 Of course, they're just laughing their ass off.

02:54:58.000 Right.

02:54:59.000 And they're like, we've got to cut that.

02:55:00.000 So we cut it.

02:55:01.000 And then at the end of the day, I heard the playback.

02:55:04.000 And I'm like... 0.99

02:55:05.000 I'm going to be singing that fucking thing when I'm 60 years old. 1.00

02:55:08.000 That's going to be the one. 1.00

02:55:10.000 And sure as shit, man, every show, every fucking show, it never fails. 1.00

02:55:17.000 There's that one guy, and in between every song, King turd, motherfucker! 1.00

02:55:22.000 You know, just like, planet turd! 1.00

02:55:24.000 You know, he follows us.

02:55:26.000 It has to be the same guy.

02:55:27.000 I don't know.

02:55:28.000 Well, when you start off a song saying, I've been spending all my money on weed and pills, that's how it launches.

02:55:36.000 You've got to get both albums, folks.

02:55:38.000 They're both very different, which I thought was really fascinating, too, before I got to meet you and understand what it's from, what caused it.

02:55:46.000 And then the other one, Metamodern...

02:55:49.000 Meta-modern sounds and country music.

02:55:52.000 I love that, too, man.

02:55:53.000 Thank you, man. 1.00

02:55:53.000 Dude, you're the shit. 1.00

02:55:55.000 Thank you very much. 1.00

02:55:55.000 Thanks for being you. 1.00

02:55:56.000 Thanks for being on here.

02:55:58.000 And please, reconsider your five-album thing.

02:56:00.000 Thanks, Shooter.

02:56:00.000 Who else for telling you about it?

02:56:02.000 Yeah.

02:56:02.000 It's the internet, man.

02:56:03.000 The internet knows all. 0.99

02:56:04.000 It's fucking scary. 1.00

02:56:05.000 All right, you dirty bitches. 1.00

02:56:06.000 We'll see you soon, this week. 1.00

02:56:08.000 A lot of podcasts, including that lady, Sue, from Life Below Zero.

02:56:12.000 I'm very excited to talk to her.

02:56:14.000 Cameron Haynes is here on Friday, too.

02:56:17.000 Awesome.

The Joe Rogan Experience - October 20, 2014

Joe Rogan Experience #564 - Sturgill Simpson

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Transcript