The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #683 - Ethan Nadelmann

00:00:01.000 An unusual early morning for me.

00:00:04.000 An early morning episode of the podcast, Ethan.

00:00:06.000 Very nice to meet you, man.

00:00:07.000 Thanks for doing this.

00:00:08.000 Good to meet you, too.

00:00:09.000 No, it's my pleasure.

00:00:10.000 So, Drug Policy Alliance.

00:00:11.000 How far are we away?

00:00:12.000 Let's get this done.

00:00:14.000 Come on.

00:00:14.000 Well, it depends what it is, right?

00:00:16.000 When it comes to legalizing marijuana, I mean, we got momentum that nobody could have believed we'd had just four or five years ago, right?

00:00:21.000 So, in that sense, things are flying.

00:00:23.000 I don't think it's in the bag yet, though.

00:00:25.000 You know, one of my biggest concerns is a sense of overconfidence where this whole thing could trip up.

00:00:30.000 Yeah, my biggest concern is that, and it's also like Jeb Bush and guys like that. 1.00

00:00:36.000 Or that fat fuck from New Jersey. 1.00

00:00:39.000 Christie, can you believe the Kripola coming out of his mouth on this stuff? 1.00

00:00:42.000 Somehow he's going to identify that niche of the Republican Party that wants to keep locking up people for weed.

00:00:47.000 And then Rubio was saying stuff like that the other day.

00:00:49.000 I have a theory.

00:00:50.000 I have a theory.

00:00:51.000 I think what he's trying to do is make sure he's never president.

00:00:54.000 I really do. 1.00

00:00:55.000 I really think that that guy is so deeply embedded in corruption in New Jersey that the moment he actually becomes a serious candidate for president, I think this shit is gonna come out of the closet like a broken fire hydrant. 1.00

00:01:10.000 Yeah, it could be Joe. 1.00

00:01:11.000 He's going to find out.

00:01:12.000 I think also his popularity has fallen so low in New Jersey right now that he just wanted to get out of town.

00:01:17.000 I think that's why he's running president.

00:01:19.000 It's better than dealing with stuff in Trent and acknowledging all the screw-ups he's had.

00:01:22.000 I mean, I'll tell you something, we led, Drug Policy Alliance led that effort to legalize medical marijuana in Jersey back a few years ago.

00:01:28.000 Governor Corzine, last bill he signed, was that one.

00:01:30.000 And then Christie came around, he diddled and doddled and didn't want to do it, wanted to have Rutgers University grow the weed.

00:01:36.000 They didn't want to grow the weed.

00:01:37.000 What?

00:01:38.000 Yeah, it was weird.

00:01:39.000 And then finally, he went on vacation, like about 18 months this term.

00:01:42.000 He came back and he goes, I want to do this now.

00:01:45.000 And I kept wondering whether he had a puff on vacation.

00:01:49.000 I mean, who knew?

00:01:50.000 Now, mind you, New Jersey's still hobbling along, you know, and Christie, the funny thing also is when it comes to ending the drug war more broadly, he's highly unpredictable.

00:01:57.000 You know, we took on the bail bond industry, the private bail bond industry that's trying to keep people locked up for as long as possible in local jails.

00:02:04.000 And Christie ended up coming on our side.

00:02:06.000 The bail bond industry was working to make sure that people stayed in jail?

00:02:10.000 I gotta tell you, if you look at all the corrupt actors in the prison industrial complex, you know, you get the prison guards union, you get the private prison corporations, the private bail bond industry.

00:02:20.000 I mean, if ever there was a sordid gang, that had to be it.

00:02:24.000 And so we led that effort.

00:02:25.000 We got Christie to come along with us, push them back, you know.

00:02:28.000 So Christie's done some decent stuff.

00:02:30.000 He'll talk about addiction as a health issue.

00:02:33.000 There was an issue, you know, people dying of overdoses, and we wanted to deal with that.

00:02:37.000 And he was initially vetoing it.

00:02:38.000 Then we got Bon Jovi involved.

00:02:40.000 He wanted to get a photo op with Bon Jovi, so his daughter had OD'd and fortunately lived. 0.98

00:02:44.000 So, you know, he came along then.

00:02:45.000 So he's been a mixed bag, but for some reason on this marijuana thing, he's just going over-the-top anti-legalization.

00:02:51.000 I don't really get it.

00:02:52.000 I think he's...

00:02:54.000 I really honestly think that he's trying to make sure that he's never president.

00:02:57.000 I really do.

00:02:58.000 I think he understands the tide, and I think he's terrified.

00:03:00.000 I think he has a lot of skeletons in his closet.

00:03:03.000 He's involved in New Jersey politics.

00:03:05.000 New Jersey politics is so much more corrupt than New York politics, which is the most corrupt part of the country.

00:03:11.000 Yeah, although, you know, we're breaking some records in New York.

00:03:13.000 You think just last six months, both the head of the Assembly and the head of the Senate have both been indicted, you know?

00:03:19.000 So, you know, it's neck and neck between us and Jersey, you know?

00:03:23.000 I mean, New Jersey's got that strong tradition in history.

00:03:26.000 I remember, you know, Christie made his name by being the federal prosecutor going after these guys.

00:03:31.000 Then he gets himself involved in this Bridgegate scandal, you know, where the guy on one side of the bridge shut down traffic for two days because, you know, somebody had done something they didn't like.

00:03:40.000 So I think Christie had his moment back in 2012, 2011 when he was hot and riding high in the polls and his whole bullying act was going over well.

00:03:48.000 I think he's down and done with already.

00:03:50.000 He just wants to be out of town.

00:03:51.000 Well, you can only shine like that as a bully for so long. 0.97

00:03:55.000 Because if you're that guy that's yelling and screaming at everybody else and sticking your fat gut out there, eventually people start going, hey man, what about you? 0.97

00:04:02.000 I mean, you know the sad thing? 0.95

00:04:03.000 That's the way Giuliani was. 1.00

00:04:04.000 And the only thing that saved his ass... 1.00

00:04:06.000 It was 9-11. 0.99

00:04:07.000 9-11 comes along, all of a sudden he goes from being like 20% of the polls to 90%, and he's the heroic mayor.

00:04:13.000 But quite frankly, people were burnt out on his act, and it was only, and God forbid, a crisis like that gives Christie a second run.

00:04:19.000 Well, Giuliani was like the antidote for Mayor Dinkins.

00:04:23.000 Yeah.

00:04:24.000 That's right.

00:04:25.000 Dinkins was like this really calm, laid-back guy.

00:04:28.000 Really racist people would call him the janitor.

00:04:31.000 Folks who weren't around back in the 90s in New York don't know that, first of all, Times Square was a completely different animal.

00:04:38.000 You go to Times Square now, it's this beautiful tourist trap.

00:04:41.000 It's all neon lights and shining stars.

00:04:43.000 I kind of miss the old Times Square.

00:04:46.000 It was seedy.

00:04:47.000 It was seedy.

00:04:48.000 It's now got overtopped the other way, you know, where it's like Disneyland on 42nd Street.

00:04:53.000 Who would have ever imagined that, though?

00:04:54.000 If you could ever go back to New York City in the 1980s and then see what Times Square was like and then come back again.

00:05:01.000 You know what it is?

00:05:02.000 I mean, because I live in New York City, and so I live in the center of the universe, and what you realize is that there's only so long the center of the universe can go on without, you know, people reinvesting in it.

00:05:11.000 The island of Manhattan has got to be the most amazing island in the world.

00:05:15.000 And, I mean, it's just glowing these days.

00:05:18.000 What do you like about it?

00:05:20.000 Well, first of all, I mean, I like being in this...

00:05:22.000 You know, some people say it's a nice place to visit.

00:05:25.000 I want to live someplace else.

00:05:26.000 For me, I want to live in New York.

00:05:27.000 I want to ride that energy.

00:05:29.000 And then as long as you can get out often, I mean, the key is being able to get out of town.

00:05:33.000 And I'm out of town about half the time, so I get to go out, see the stars, see the ocean, you know, take hikes, and then go back and ride that energy.

00:05:42.000 I love the fact that it's a pedestrian city.

00:05:44.000 I don't own a car.

00:05:45.000 I can walk to work.

00:05:47.000 I can take the subway.

00:05:48.000 And then I want beauty.

00:05:50.000 This past weekend, for the first time, Californians and others might not appreciate this, but you're all over the place.

00:05:55.000 I drove my bike from the Upper West Side of Manhattan down to Brighton Beach, about a 20-mile bike ride, over the Brooklyn Bridge, through Brooklyn, along the New York Harbor.

00:06:04.000 It was gorgeous.

00:06:05.000 And the next day, I took my bike up the Hudson River, up to Dykeman Street.

00:06:08.000 So there's great beauty there.

00:06:10.000 Everything's there.

00:06:11.000 I could live my entire life and not go more than five blocks from my apartment and everything's available.

00:06:17.000 So the diversity of people living there, you know, everybody comes through there.

00:06:22.000 And New York's just the center.

00:06:24.000 It's hopping.

00:06:26.000 To you.

00:06:26.000 It's perfect for you.

00:06:27.000 It's perfect.

00:06:28.000 My friend Jeff, my manager actually, is a great friend of mine.

00:06:31.000 He's been there forever and he couldn't imagine living anywhere else.

00:06:34.000 But he also has a house on an island that he visits occasionally and he'll stay there for a week.

00:06:39.000 Yeah.

00:06:40.000 And just sort of like...

00:06:41.000 I've got to tell you, there's this place called Fire Island, which is about an hour outside of New York City.

00:06:45.000 That's where he lives.

00:06:46.000 Yeah, and so there's the Pines is the famous place where all the gay community is.

00:06:50.000 And then there's all the other little towns.

00:06:52.000 And I've been out there twice this summer.

00:06:54.000 It reminds me almost of Venice.

00:06:56.000 It's an island with no cars.

00:06:58.000 My office is half a block from Penn Station.

00:07:01.000 Jump on the train, one hour, then a half-hour ferry, and all of a sudden I'm on this gorgeous little island that's got no cars on it, and you just relax.

00:07:09.000 And the no cars things is what keeps people away.

00:07:12.000 There's a lot of deer on that island.

00:07:14.000 Yeah, there used to be more.

00:07:15.000 Now they're putting all this birth control stuff in the water for the deer.

00:07:19.000 Isn't that hilarious?

00:07:19.000 Yeah.

00:07:20.000 Birth control in the water for deer.

00:07:22.000 I shouldn't say in the water because that would get everybody, but yeah, they had to deal with that problem.

00:07:27.000 They're doing something.

00:07:27.000 What are they doing, in food or something?

00:07:29.000 Something like that, yeah.

00:07:31.000 Costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, by the way.

00:07:33.000 Is that right?

00:07:33.000 Yeah, they're trying to do the same thing to the Hamptons, because the Hamptons has a real deer issue, and there was two options.

00:07:39.000 One, bring in hunters, and they were going to hunt at night, snipers.

00:07:42.000 You reminded me, there was a piece in the Wall Street Journal I don't know, years, years ago, maybe decades ago.

00:07:48.000 The Institute for Advanced Study is like, it's this gorgeous place next door to Princeton University, and it's where Albert Einstein was.

00:07:56.000 Some of the greatest philosophers and scientists, it's where they go when they're in their older years and do their thinking, bucolic setting.

00:08:03.000 And they were overwhelmed with deer.

00:08:05.000 So the question was, what to do?

00:08:06.000 Well, you couldn't shoot them in this bucolic place, right? 1.00

00:08:09.000 So what they did was they hired archers, professional archers, to kill them with bows and arrows.

00:08:14.000 And there was this uproar, you know, like this thunk, thunk, you know, all of a sudden, you know, there were the philosophers in the middle here, thunk, thunk, some deer bites the dust.

00:08:21.000 But yeah, you know, one way or another, you got to deal with that stuff.

00:08:23.000 Well, it's food, too.

00:08:25.000 These same people are eating cheeseburgers.

00:08:27.000 They're eating turkey sandwiches.

00:08:28.000 They're eating dead animals that are killed in a way more horrific way and live in a way more horrific condition.

00:08:35.000 I know.

00:08:35.000 I've always thought I have an obligation as an occasional meat eater to actually see the process by which the food I eat is produced.

00:08:42.000 I have to admit I've never made good on that commitment to myself.

00:08:45.000 I just started doing it about three years ago.

00:08:47.000 I started hunting three years ago, and I'm addicted to it now.

00:08:50.000 I love it.

00:08:51.000 I get almost all my meat from hunting.

00:08:52.000 I had bear last night.

00:08:53.000 I served bear to my five-year-old and my seven-year-old.

00:08:56.000 Wow.

00:08:57.000 See, now me, I grew up Jewish and kosher.

00:09:00.000 I'm still kosher.

00:09:00.000 It's the one relic of my traditional upbringing.

00:09:02.000 And so traditionally, Jews don't hunt, you know?

00:09:05.000 Although it's weird, you meet Jews from the South, you know, Jews who hunt. 1.00

00:09:08.000 It's kind of a contradiction in terms.

00:09:10.000 Are there Jews in the South that hunt?

00:09:11.000 Oh my God, yeah.

00:09:12.000 You know, it's part of the culture, part of the tradition.

00:09:14.000 You know, most of those Jews don't keep kosher, so they don't care. 1.00

00:09:16.000 So there's gotta be some. 0.89

00:09:17.000 And then you got Texan Jews. 0.86

00:09:19.000 They're a special breed.

00:09:19.000 They gotta do it.

00:09:20.000 There's Texan Jews? 0.94

00:09:21.000 They probably hide.

00:09:22.000 Probably like Jews in Lebanon we were talking about yesterday. 0.96

00:09:26.000 When you say that you're kosher, what exactly does that mean? 0.96

00:09:30.000 Like you have to have a rabbi kill your beef and he has to say some voodoo and then cut its throat? 0.95

00:09:34.000 More or less. 0.58

00:09:37.000 I mean, basically, some of it's ground in the Bible.

00:09:42.000 In some clause, it says, do not eat the meat of a calf in its mother's milk, so you don't eat meat together with dairy.

00:09:47.000 And then they say, with meat, the animal's got to have a split hoof and chew its cud.

00:09:54.000 So it has to be a cow as opposed to a pig.

00:09:56.000 Actually, venison would be okay.

00:09:58.000 Cow, deer, sheep.

00:10:00.000 Then it needs to be slaughtered in a special way, which for millennia was the most humane way of killing. 0.87

00:10:05.000 It has to be absolutely perfectly sharp.

00:10:07.000 In the last couple of decades, there's now a dispute, because in Europe, they're beginning to ban the kosher way of killing because it's no longer the most humane way, according to the science.

00:10:15.000 Well, it takes more time.

00:10:16.000 Have you ever seen it?

00:10:17.000 I haven't.

00:10:18.000 It's rough.

00:10:19.000 It's rough.

00:10:20.000 I've seen it.

00:10:21.000 I went to a butcher, not to a butcher, rather, to a slaughterhouse once.

00:10:25.000 A kosher one? 0.97

00:10:26.000 Well, they do kosher as well.

00:10:27.000 It was a slaughterhouse for Fear Factor.

00:10:30.000 We were doing a Fear Factor stunt there, and the stunt was these people had to dunk their head in these giant buckets of blood, so we had to have this cow's blood that was chilled to slightly over 32 degrees, and we could only keep it for a short amount of time, or it could possibly contain pathogens.

00:10:49.000 It was really cold water, or really cold blood, rather.

00:10:52.000 So they gave me a little tour of the place and explained to me how they do it.

00:10:56.000 And they have this area where the cow goes in, they lock the cow in place, and a piston goes through the cow's head and kills him.

00:11:02.000 But they're like, you know, the guy was pretty adamant about it.

00:11:05.000 He's like, we have a rabbi that comes and they do the kosher slaughters. 1.00

00:11:09.000 And he goes, and it's way worse.

00:11:11.000 It's way worse.

00:11:11.000 They hold the cow in place with the thing, and then they slice its neck, and it bucks and kicks and falls to the ground.

00:11:18.000 For millennia, it was a more humane way, because in the old days, you just knock it over the head and all this stuff, and the kosher way was if the blade was not razor sharp, if it had the tiniest nick in it, and you discover that afterward the animal was not kosher.

00:11:30.000 So there was a way of doing it that was closely better, you know?

00:11:33.000 But, you know, it's the one...

00:11:35.000 I grew up...

00:11:36.000 My dad was a rabbi.

00:11:37.000 I grew up traditional and all that, Sabbath observant, and this is the one thing I'm still keeping.

00:11:41.000 But why?

00:11:42.000 Why do you keep it?

00:11:43.000 It's partially my own sort of commitment, my Jewish connection, a sort of daily reminder of that.

00:11:49.000 It's partially a family thing, like a family, you know, we grew up this way, and it's partly superstitious.

00:11:54.000 Right.

00:11:54.000 That this is part of my bargain with the cosmos, with my bargain with God, you know, that...

00:12:00.000 Okay, I'm going to do this little sacrifice in my life.

00:12:02.000 And it's, you know, I've led a blessed life, and hey man, maybe this is part of it.

00:12:06.000 Why risk it by stopping it?

00:12:07.000 Have you ever had bacon?

00:12:08.000 I've had some of these things by accident.

00:12:10.000 Like I've had ham by accident, probably had shrimp by accident.

00:12:13.000 Never had it intentionally.

00:12:15.000 Don't think I've had bacon.

00:12:16.000 Although when I eat in the diner, they got the bacon grease on the eggs I get.

00:12:20.000 You know, I love the smell of bacon, I'll say that.

00:12:22.000 You love the smell, but you've never eaten it?

00:12:24.000 No, because it's just this thing I stuck with.

00:12:27.000 Glorious.

00:12:27.000 What about bear bacon?

00:12:28.000 Could you eat bear bacon?

00:12:29.000 No, no.

00:12:30.000 It's split hoof chew.

00:12:30.000 It's good.

00:12:31.000 That's it.

00:12:32.000 But they don't have a split hoof.

00:12:34.000 They have paws.

00:12:35.000 That's what I'm saying.

00:12:35.000 They need the split hoof.

00:12:36.000 Oh, I see.

00:12:37.000 Yeah, that's the thing.

00:12:38.000 And the only exception is if you're starving to death.

00:12:40.000 And you can eat anything.

00:12:41.000 What about chickens?

00:12:41.000 Chicken's fine.

00:12:42.000 Chicken and duck.

00:12:42.000 But that doesn't have a split hoof.

00:12:43.000 No, because that goes into the separate category of poultry.

00:12:46.000 So you can't shoot birds, but you can eat that.

00:12:49.000 You can't shoot them?

00:12:50.000 Well, I don't think so. 0.99

00:12:52.000 I think it's also got to be slaughtered a certain way.

00:12:54.000 So there's kosher chickens as well.

00:12:56.000 Kosher chicken, kosher duck.

00:12:57.000 And living in New York, you've got a lot of choices.

00:12:59.000 When you travel around, mind you, the kosher industry, food industry, is growing faster than the organic food industry proportionally.

00:13:07.000 Really?

00:13:07.000 I've got to tell you, I mean, doing this thing here with you in California, you go to Manhattan Beach now, you go whatever, you've got the Trader Joe's, big kosher sections, and it's not just Jews, it's all sorts of other people who still see it as, and in fact, to some extent, it's more reliable, good quality.

00:13:22.000 The highest end's not going to be kosher, but in terms of reliable, good stuff, you know, people say kosher's a pretty good bet. 0.63

00:13:29.000 That's interesting.

00:13:30.000 More than organic.

00:13:31.000 I would never have imagined that.

00:13:32.000 It's not bigger than organic, but it's growing proportionally faster.

00:13:35.000 Wow.

00:13:35.000 And that's partially because you have Orthodox Jews are the fastest growing part of American Judaism, right?

00:13:41.000 Really?

00:13:41.000 Yeah, liberal Jews like me have one kid.

00:13:43.000 I got one kid, two kids, right?

00:13:45.000 Orthodox Jews are having, you know, five or ten kids, so they're growing incredibly fast. 1.00

00:13:50.000 Right?

00:13:50.000 So they're a market, and you have Orthodox Jewish communities popping up all around the country, Manhattan Beach out here in California, LA's got a big Orthodox community, you know?

00:13:59.000 And then there are people, a lot of African American people see it as basically, you know, they hear, there's kosher's better.

00:14:05.000 And then, remember, the Muslim halal is very similar to similar rules.

00:14:09.000 No pig, the slaughtering's, I think, somewhat similar.

00:14:12.000 So a lot of people, a lot of Muslims buy kosher food, because for them- How ironic. 1.00

00:14:16.000 Isn't that something?

00:14:17.000 The Jews won't buy halal in place of kosher, but I think some Muslims will buy kosher because it meets the halal conditions. 0.60

00:14:24.000 Headline reads, Muslims more tolerant than Jews.

00:14:26.000 There you go. 0.63

00:14:27.000 There you go.

00:14:28.000 It happens.

00:14:29.000 Yeah, there's that area around Cantor's Deli in L.A. Have you ever been to Cantor's?

00:14:33.000 I don't think so.

00:14:33.000 Oh, you gotta go.

00:14:34.000 It's the best deli in all of L.A. by far.

00:14:36.000 It's so good.

00:14:37.000 The pastrami's off the charts.

00:14:39.000 The best pastrami in L.A. One of the problems, though, is some of these delis that used to be kosher, now they're just kosher style.

00:14:45.000 It's like they got to pastrami and stuff like that, but it turns out, because it's expensive to pay the rabbi to bless it in the slaughtering, so I have to make sure it's actually strictly kosher.

00:14:55.000 Dude, get into that, huh?

00:14:57.000 You know, it's been my thing.

00:14:59.000 I've had more people, more friends than others rag on me for this than anything.

00:15:05.000 People say, so would you ever stop?

00:15:06.000 And I say the only way I'd ever stop, I think, is if they made it a law that I had to keep kosher.

00:15:11.000 If they made it a law you had to keep kosher, I'd break kosher the very next day.

00:15:14.000 Well, who would make it a law?

00:15:16.000 Well, that's what I'm saying.

00:15:16.000 It's not going to happen in America, but look at what's going on in Israel, where the religious parties are becoming more and more powerful and dominant, and you go to Jerusalem, and here's the rules on the Sabbath, here's the rules on this, here's the rules on that.

00:15:27.000 One can envision a generation from now that in Israel, you might have, you know, the religious folks driving everything and make a law like that. 0.98

00:15:34.000 If they did that, and I'm still alive, I'll stop.

00:15:37.000 So if they did that in Israel, you would stop in America? 0.83

00:15:40.000 Probably.

00:15:40.000 Just out of protest?

00:15:41.000 Just out of protest.

00:15:42.000 Just because you want bacon.

00:15:43.000 That's what's up.

00:15:44.000 You just want that bacon.

00:15:44.000 You know what happens?

00:15:45.000 I'll tell you, the hardest thing when you keep kosher, I've never had lobster, never really had shrimp. 0.93

00:15:50.000 You've never had lobster, that's right.

00:15:52.000 The hardest stuff is when there's a beautiful steak or a beautiful piece of duck or a lamb out there, and it's basically no different than the kosher stuff, but I can eat it because they didn't pay the rabbi to bless it and they slaughtered it differently. 0.83

00:16:04.000 That's the one that hurts, right?

00:16:06.000 I go out to people and they say, oh, do you mind if I order some pork or a lobster?

00:16:10.000 I say, please, whatever you do, don't order a beautiful lamb chop or steak or something like that.

00:16:15.000 Something that you can actually eat.

00:16:16.000 That's going to torture me. 0.98

00:16:17.000 I'm eating my damn piece of fish for the eighth time that week, and, you know, there's a beautiful steak that I can't eat. 0.99

00:16:22.000 So is fish always kosher? 0.99

00:16:23.000 Is that the deal?

00:16:24.000 The rule is if it comes from the sea, it's got to have fins and scales.

00:16:28.000 Jesus Christ.

00:16:29.000 So octopus is off the charts, too.

00:16:30.000 You name it.

00:16:31.000 All that stuff's off.

00:16:32.000 Got to have fins and scales. 0.96

00:16:33.000 All the shellfish is off and scallops and, for that matter, things like shark and skate.

00:16:39.000 Catfish is the one I cheat with a little bit, and there's a debate about swordfish.

00:16:42.000 I go with...

00:16:43.000 I'm part of the school that says swordfish is kosher.

00:16:47.000 You know, my dad was a rabbi.

00:16:49.000 He came down that side.

00:16:50.000 I'm going with my dad.

00:16:51.000 Is your dad still alive?

00:16:52.000 No, I died a long time ago. 0.99

00:16:53.000 I would have fucking had a lobster the moment that dude was in the dirt. 0.99

00:16:55.000 Oh, yeah. 0.99

00:16:56.000 Hey, he didn't even grow up keeping kosher.

00:16:58.000 He loved rabbit, you know?

00:16:59.000 He loved him.

00:17:00.000 Oh, God.

00:17:01.000 When he became a rabbi, he had no choice, you know?

00:17:04.000 It just seems so odd to me that a rational man like you, who's obviously intelligent and educated, would follow that.

00:17:10.000 You know what's good about this?

00:17:11.000 It gives me a sense of empathy for other people with irrational attachments.

00:17:16.000 Like irrational attachments to drugs.

00:17:19.000 Exactly, exactly.

00:17:20.000 Irrational attachments to anything.

00:17:21.000 My view is irrational attachments are fine, maybe even good, so long as they don't hurt anybody else.

00:17:26.000 My keeping kosher doesn't really hurt anybody else, right?

00:17:29.000 And there's all sorts of other attachments to religious things, to types of gods, to habits, to name it.

00:17:34.000 If it's not hurting anybody else, I can kind of, you know, I got that little empathic sense for what it means to be irrationally committed to something.

00:17:41.000 All right, man.

00:17:42.000 Look at you.

00:17:43.000 You're looking at irrational thinking in a rational way.

00:17:46.000 Yeah.

00:17:47.000 I like it.

00:17:47.000 Gotta do that, you know?

00:17:48.000 To be just totally rational, that'd be kind of boring, too.

00:17:52.000 So, let's get back to drug legalization, because we've got, right now, we've got two states that are across the board 100%.

00:17:58.000 We've got Washington State and we've got Colorado.

00:18:01.000 What's on the ballot right now?

00:18:02.000 Remember, also, Alaska and Oregon joined the group last November.

00:18:07.000 So we have four states that are legally there, and Oregon's going to open up sales, I think, in a few months.

00:18:12.000 And Alaska should open up sales.

00:18:14.000 I can't remember if it was the end of this year, beginning of next.

00:18:16.000 So we've got four states that have legalized, each one of them doing it with 55% of the vote, typically getting more votes than the guys who are running for governor or attorney general in those states got those years.

00:18:26.000 Wow, that's amazing.

00:18:27.000 So it's big.

00:18:28.000 DC did everything except legalize.

00:18:31.000 They basically said you can grow your own, you can transfer it, but they haven't set up formal sales yet because people worry that Congress will sort of put a hammer on them, right?

00:18:41.000 So you can't go to a store.

00:18:42.000 No.

00:18:43.000 No stores in D.C. There's a little movement on Capitol Hill right now that might allow some room there.

00:18:48.000 But the city council, the mayor in D.C., who are on board with legalization, but they're just saying, do we want to provoke Congress?

00:18:56.000 Because a lot of those guys would just come down hard.

00:18:59.000 They're used to treating D.C. like the plantation.

00:19:02.000 I mean, it's one of the great absurdities in American politics that you've got a population of, what, 600, 700,000 people?

00:19:07.000 I think it's as big as a few of the smaller states, but they've got no representation on Capitol Hill.

00:19:12.000 They've got a member of the House who can't vote.

00:19:14.000 They've got no members of the Senate.

00:19:15.000 They can vote for president, right?

00:19:17.000 And then they've got Congress, basically, you know, the ability to veto any law they pass. 0.81

00:19:22.000 And they have an extremely fucked up situation as far as the haves and have-nots in their own town. 0.88

00:19:28.000 They really do. 0.95

00:19:29.000 Although, there's a shift in the...

00:19:31.000 I mean, D.C. was traditionally like two-thirds African-American.

00:19:34.000 Now, as it's become more gentrified, it's still about 50% African-American.

00:19:38.000 Well, the issue is not just the African-American, it's the poverty.

00:19:42.000 There's massive poverty and crime in certain sections of D.C., and the fact that that's the nation's capital, they can't even clean up their own backyard.

00:19:49.000 Yeah, no, that's right.

00:19:50.000 They've completely ignored it.

00:19:52.000 It was really highlighted when Marion Barry was president.

00:19:55.000 I should say it's gotten better since those days in the sense that there's been more to address those issues.

00:20:01.000 There's been some gentrification.

00:20:03.000 Poverty's not as bad.

00:20:04.000 They've still got bad crime rates.

00:20:05.000 It's not as bad as Baltimore's been or a bunch of other cities.

00:20:09.000 Well, Baltimore's one of the worst places in the country.

00:20:10.000 Baltimore's been terrible.

00:20:12.000 Detroit, New Orleans.

00:20:13.000 Although you've got a few places out here in California who have a hard time.

00:20:15.000 Oh, for sure.

00:20:16.000 DC's weird in that you can go from really nice to really bad in a couple blocks.

00:20:22.000 I was shocked when I was driving through DC because I was like, this is crazy.

00:20:26.000 You've seen these really, you know, cute white couples with their little Stroller, and they're in these really nice brownstones, and they have a Volvo parked in front of the house, and right next to them is a BMW. And then you go two blocks down, and you see people drinking on the street,

00:20:43.000 and there's kids with no shoes on, and it's garbage piled up everywhere.

00:20:47.000 I was like, this is really nuts.

00:20:49.000 That could be partially about gentrification.

00:20:51.000 You know, property's less expensive.

00:20:52.000 So first, typically, gays will move in, right, because they don't have kids to worry about and such. 0.97

00:20:56.000 And then after that, you get some young couples and others moving in.

00:20:59.000 And so you begin to get that.

00:21:00.000 You saw the same thing in parts of New York City, right, with Upper East Side or Lower East Side.

00:21:05.000 You know, it's when things begin to change that way that you get that kind of stuff.

00:21:09.000 Well, isn't that the big complaint about New York City is that so many rich financial people have moved in that the entire city used to be this artist community and now that's kind of Brooklyn now.

00:21:19.000 Well, the funny thing is now they're saying Brooklyn's becoming more like Manhattan and Queens is becoming the new Brooklyn.

00:21:25.000 Really?

00:21:25.000 And I got to say, living in the Upper West Side, where it's...

00:21:29.000 I mean, I'm lucky I'm in a rent-stabilized apartment there, and I live in a beautiful tree-lined street in a little apartment.

00:21:35.000 But then you see the banks moving in and taking over the street corners, right?

00:21:39.000 And you see more chain stores coming in.

00:21:41.000 And so Manhattan has become this beautiful place, but less and less affordable.

00:21:45.000 Now Brooklyn, most of the people who work for me in New York are living in Brooklyn, but now they've got to move out to the further, further away from Manhattan part of Brooklyn.

00:21:53.000 And now Queens and the Bronx and Upper Manhattan are becoming the places.

00:21:57.000 I mean, look, the city's hopping, it's great, it's amazing.

00:22:01.000 The downside of our economic growth has been that.

00:22:04.000 The same thing with Wall Street.

00:22:05.000 Wall Street is, the gap between rich and poor in New York City is horrific and huge.

00:22:12.000 On the other hand, Wall Street is providing massive amounts of tax revenue, and New York City taxes itself at a very high level, so we actually have better services in New York City than most parts of the world.

00:22:22.000 My friend Shane was living in Brooklyn, and me and my family came to visit, and we hung out with him one night, and he had this apartment that overlooks The Manhattan skyline.

00:22:32.000 And we were looking at it and I was like, this might be the best looking view on the planet.

00:22:37.000 There's something about that.

00:22:40.000 I think there's two types of amazing views.

00:22:42.000 There's the amazing views of the mountains and nature, which is pretty stunning.

00:22:47.000 But there's something about the Manhattan skyline that is so insane that someone built that.

00:22:55.000 It's gorgeous because it's all lit up and the shapes are cool and it has the history behind it and you're looking at all this activity and bustling people back and forth.

00:23:05.000 And then there's also the magnitude of the amount of effort that was put into creating something like that.

00:23:11.000 Occasionally I'll be on a plane that's coming from the north, say, from Albany or Montreal or wherever it's coming from, and it lands up going down the Hudson River, right?

00:23:20.000 And, you know, Manhattan's basically a long island.

00:23:22.000 It's like, I don't know, 15, 20 miles long and about a mile wide or so.

00:23:26.000 And you look down at that thing in Manhattan and New York Harbor, and there's the Statue of Liberty, and there you can see Staten Island and Brooklyn and Jersey around it.

00:23:35.000 And then you see the Empire State Building, and then you see the Freedom Tower, and you see Central Park in the middle of it, one of the largest inner city parks in the world.

00:23:43.000 It brings tears to my eyes still.

00:23:45.000 It's just incredible.

00:23:46.000 Yeah, it's a pretty awesome spot, but you can't get weed there!

00:23:49.000 Well, what do you mean you can't get weed?

00:23:50.000 It's hard!

00:23:51.000 You can get a weed anywhere!

00:23:51.000 You gotta hide!

00:23:52.000 You gotta talk to some dude.

00:23:54.000 David Lee Roth got arrested trying to get weed there. 1.00

00:23:56.000 You know, you got to be either really unlucky or dumb. 1.00

00:23:58.000 What kind of an asshole cop arrests David Lee Roth, by the way? 1.00

00:24:01.000 I don't know. 1.00

00:24:02.000 It's David fucking Lee Roth. 0.99

00:24:03.000 Give him a pass. 0.99

00:24:04.000 How dare you, sir?

00:24:05.000 But I got to tell you, I think our delivery services are very well developed in New York City, you know?

00:24:09.000 Right, but they're always under the wire.

00:24:11.000 Like, that was always the problem that I had in L.A. before it was legal.

00:24:14.000 I used to deal with this dude named Jake the Snake. 0.99

00:24:16.000 That was his fucking nickname. 0.99

00:24:18.000 I'm not kidding, and he wasn't a wrestler. 1.00

00:24:19.000 Jake the Snake was so annoying.

00:24:21.000 He was so annoying, and he would sell...

00:24:24.000 I would get it from my friend Eddie, and Eddie would get it from Jake the Snake.

00:24:28.000 And we would have to deal with this guy.

00:24:30.000 So we'd have these conversations with this guy every now and then.

00:24:34.000 And I always felt like it wasn't a bad guy.

00:24:36.000 It wasn't that he was a bad guy.

00:24:37.000 But it was annoying that he had to deal with this dude who was willing to do something illegal.

00:24:41.000 Because there were some criminal aspects to it.

00:24:43.000 So there's always going to be like...

00:24:45.000 And I got to say, I'm lucky because one of the perks of my job is I can just rely on the kindness of strangers.

00:24:51.000 I mean, wherever I go, people are going to eat and eat.

00:24:55.000 It's hard to take it home with me, right?

00:24:57.000 But even in New York, people are kind of...

00:24:59.000 So I haven't had to buy weed in a very long time, I'm happy to say.

00:25:03.000 Good for you.

00:25:04.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:25:04.000 And now you saw that, hey, my job has got some very nice elements to it.

00:25:10.000 And this is one of the informal positive benefits to it.

00:25:13.000 But New York is now, they finally, the state just approved 20 outlets for medical marijuana.

00:25:19.000 So most of those are going to be in the city.

00:25:21.000 It's still going to be a very strict system.

00:25:22.000 We led that effort in New York last year to legalize medical marijuana.

00:25:26.000 Unfortunately, Governor Cuomo acted in total bad faith and made a system that's far, far too tight.

00:25:31.000 No logical reason for it.

00:25:33.000 But that said, the state just approved five companies to have five growth sites with 20 outlets.

00:25:40.000 So they're locking down the profit aspect of it.

00:25:43.000 They are.

00:25:44.000 I mean, my God, it's going to be a boondoggle for these five. 1.00

00:25:47.000 That's so fucked up. 1.00

00:25:48.000 Why do that? 1.00

00:25:49.000 That doesn't make any sense.

00:25:50.000 Is that the case for tomatoes?

00:25:51.000 Is that the case for any other piece of produce?

00:25:53.000 Anything grown from the earth?

00:25:55.000 What about lettuce?

00:25:56.000 Can you buy lettuce anywhere?

00:25:57.000 Can you imagine if there was a company in New York that locked down the lettuce market? 1.00

00:26:01.000 And the only way you can get a salad from this one fucking company... 0.99

00:26:04.000 No, I agree with you totally. 0.99

00:26:06.000 It's the same thing.

00:26:06.000 I don't know if you heard what's going on in Ohio, right?

00:26:08.000 And Ohio's going to get to vote to legalize marijuana this year, 2015, the only initiative on the ballot this year as opposed to next year.

00:26:15.000 Jamie's from Ohio.

00:26:16.000 He's been ranting and raving about it.

00:26:17.000 Well, it's in the papers today because the initiative just qualified yesterday, right?

00:26:21.000 And what they found, I mean, basically what happened there was 10, I think it was roughly 10 business interests got together.

00:26:28.000 Right?

00:26:29.000 To put an initiative on the ballot.

00:26:31.000 They each ponied up like over $2 million a piece.

00:26:34.000 Right?

00:26:34.000 We asked for our help in drafting it, and we said we'd help them draft it to get some good stuff in there.

00:26:38.000 But the one thing they did that nobody likes is they put into the initiative that only the 10 investors, or technically the properties they own, will be allowed to produce marijuana wholesale in Ohio in perpetuity.

00:26:52.000 Right?

00:26:53.000 It's like you think, wait a second, this is an agricultural product.

00:26:55.000 We're going to have a constitutionally mandated oligopoly where only 10 properties can grow for the state forever and ever? 0.98

00:27:02.000 And so I'm profoundly torn, because that oligopoly model in the Constitution sucks.

00:27:07.000 Yeah, Jay, you were talking about this yesterday. 1.00

00:27:10.000 Yeah, it's bullshit. 1.00

00:27:11.000 It's bullshit. 1.00

00:27:12.000 And you should pass on it, and you should get weed illegally. 1.00

00:27:14.000 That's what I say. 1.00

00:27:15.000 Fuck those people. 1.00

00:27:15.000 Because what they're trying to do is they're trying to take something that's good and profit off of it in a way that only they can profit off of it. 1.00

00:27:22.000 And lock everybody out, and they think they're being sneaky. 1.00

00:27:25.000 They can go fuck themselves. 1.00

00:27:26.000 Well, I'm torn. 1.00

00:27:27.000 Because on the other hand, if this thing wins this year, Ohio is a major swing state in American politics.

00:27:34.000 2016, all the candidates are going to be vying in Ohio.

00:27:37.000 Meanwhile, the thing will only be in theory, because it will not have been implemented, and there's all sorts of people trying to block the oligopoly provision.

00:27:44.000 So an Ohio win, this oligopoly provision, if it all works out well, this thing wins.

00:27:51.000 It opens up the national discussion, forces the candidates to talk about this issue, puts it in Ohio in a major way.

00:27:57.000 Meanwhile, everybody's so revolted by the oligopoly model, you already have the state legislature trying to knock it out with a competitive initiative.

00:28:04.000 The thing's going to land up in the courts anyway.

00:28:06.000 I don't see any of the other states adopting this model.

00:28:09.000 I mean, none of the other initiatives on the ballot in 2016 have this oligopoly provision in it.

00:28:13.000 I think the sense of revulsion at kind of doing that sort of thing.

00:28:16.000 So my sense is, if it all works out well, Initiative wins.

00:28:20.000 The oligopoly thing never gets implemented.

00:28:22.000 That's why you're here, Ethan.

00:28:24.000 We need to hear this.

00:28:25.000 This is beautiful.

00:28:26.000 We need to hear this kind of stuff.

00:28:27.000 Now, do you face any pressure at all to not talk about the fact that you smoke weed yourself, being the fact that you're a part of this drug policy alliance and you have to put ties on and meet with some serious folks?

00:28:41.000 You know, it's been an evolution, Joe, because I would say when I really got going in this in the late 80s, I was very careful about that, because that was the height of the drug war, right?

00:28:52.000 And not only that, my dissertation research, I wrote my PhD at Harvard, and it was on the internationalization of criminal law enforcement.

00:29:00.000 So just three years earlier, I had had a security clearance.

00:29:02.000 I'd worked in the State Department's Narcotics Bureau.

00:29:05.000 I'd wrote a classified report on drug trafficking and money laundering.

00:29:08.000 I traveled all around South America and Europe interviewing DEA guys and foreign drug enforcement guys.

00:29:13.000 I'd written a dissertation and the book On international drug controls called Cops Across Borders.

00:29:18.000 So I just knew these guys, and they had opened their doors to me.

00:29:21.000 And now three years later, I'm out there saying, we've got to talk about legalization.

00:29:24.000 And at that point, when the drug war was like McCarthyism on steroids, right?

00:29:29.000 So I was very discreet.

00:29:30.000 I never would deny that I had smoked marijuana, but I would never talk about being a current consumer.

00:29:35.000 And then as things began to ease up into the late 90s, early 2000s, I began to be a little looser with it, but I still would not say go to the cannabis cups would invite me and I maybe showed up at the hemp fest in Seattle a couple of times, but I'd still be careful.

00:29:51.000 Now the times are changing.

00:29:52.000 Right?

00:29:53.000 And it's a lot like the evolution with gay people in America, right? 0.96

00:29:55.000 At the points at which different people feel comfortable coming out and all this sort of stuff.

00:29:59.000 And so now I'm quite comfortable saying, yeah, you know, I smoke weed.

00:30:02.000 I've been an occasional consumer since I was 18. It's been a net positive in my life, you know?

00:30:08.000 Actually, even a few years ago on Psychedelics, we do this big biennial conference, and a few years ago it was in LA, and I said, this is the kind that I did it, I said, you know, I'm Jewish, right?

00:30:21.000 And so once a year, I fast on Yom Kippur.

00:30:24.000 Twenty-five hours, no food, no water.

00:30:26.000 I think it's good for the soul to, you know, do a fast once a year.

00:30:30.000 And I say that's the way I view doing psychedelics as well, you know, that people should keep doing psychedelics at least once a year, well into their elderly years, because it's a good way to stir up the emotional sediment, the intellectual sediment, and stay honest as you grow older.

00:30:44.000 And so I think, you know, I felt coming out about that as well, I think the times, you know, we're in a day and an age in America right now where we can talk about this and need to talk about it more openly.

00:30:54.000 And what is your psychedelic of choice that you like to do annually?

00:30:58.000 Well, mushrooms is sort of the standard.

00:31:00.000 Right.

00:31:00.000 I mean, that's one, you know, just over-christification.

00:31:03.000 You know, I just did a sort of megadose, and it was really clarifying.

00:31:07.000 How many grams is a megadose?

00:31:08.000 You know, for me, I'm doing a quarter ounce.

00:31:10.000 You know, like six, seven grams of dried mushrooms.

00:31:13.000 Jesus. 1.00

00:31:13.000 You're a fucking hero. 1.00

00:31:15.000 You don't want to be around me. 1.00

00:31:16.000 Sasha Shulgin used to call me a hard head, you know.

00:31:19.000 I need a big dose to...

00:31:21.000 I mean, ayahuasca I've done a few times, both once in a Santa Dime ceremony and once in just a more laid-back way, and that was really amazing.

00:31:29.000 You know, LSD, you know, that one, I mean, I've enjoyed it.

00:31:34.000 I've never done a megadose with that.

00:31:37.000 You know, I think it's...

00:31:38.000 But it's not resonated with me the way mushrooms have.

00:31:41.000 You ever do DMT? No.

00:31:44.000 Well...

00:31:45.000 Well, sort of.

00:31:46.000 You've done ayahuasca.

00:31:47.000 You've had a milder version of it.

00:31:50.000 I mean, there was one time somebody had made up a guy who was a good scientist, had made up a thing that was a combination of DMT and ketamine. 0.99

00:31:59.000 Fuck that. 1.00

00:32:01.000 Fuck that. 1.00

00:32:02.000 No, no. 1.00

00:32:03.000 He was an interesting guy, and he did it.

00:32:07.000 I'm sure he was if he's doing that.

00:32:09.000 Well, I'll tell you something.

00:32:09.000 He had found that he was dealing with significant depression, and he found that this combo actually lifted his baseline depression.

00:32:17.000 And now there's all this research about ketamine being fairly effective as an anti-depression drug.

00:32:22.000 Well, we've actually had a friend on, Neil Brennan, who talked about it.

00:32:25.000 He's a good friend of mine who's a stand-up comedian.

00:32:29.000 The co-creator of The Chappelle Show.

00:32:30.000 Very funny guy.

00:32:31.000 But he's had some troubles in his life and went through legal in Los Angeles.

00:32:36.000 Went through legal ketamine treatments for depression.

00:32:39.000 And he goes, he wasn't exactly sure what it was going to be like, so he sits down.

00:32:43.000 They do it intravenously.

00:32:45.000 Right, so he sits down in this doctor's office and they whack him out and he goes, dude, I'm on a 45-minute journey through the universe. 0.94

00:32:53.000 He goes, this is like the strongest fucking trip I've ever been on and I can't believe I'm doing this in a doctor's office.

00:32:59.000 John, I've got to ask you, I was reading your bio before and I saw that you have an isolation tank that used it. 0.85

00:33:03.000 Have you ever read John Lilly's book Confessions of an Itinerant Scientist?

00:33:07.000 I've read that.

00:33:08.000 I read The Deep Self.

00:33:10.000 I've read a couple of his books.

00:33:11.000 Well, I remember reading that book, Confessions of an Itinerant Science.

00:33:13.000 And for your listeners who don't know, right, John Lilly was the great pioneer of satician communications, communications with whales and dolphins and all that.

00:33:20.000 And also the person who may have invented the isolation tank.

00:33:23.000 He did.

00:33:24.000 And he goes through this period in his life where he starts injecting ketamine every hour on the hour in his isolation tank, like 12 to 18 hours a day.

00:33:32.000 Almost kills himself.

00:33:34.000 In the end, lives to be like in his mid-80s.

00:33:36.000 And that's the way in which he ventures into trying to figure out what the world is all about.

00:33:41.000 My friend Todd McCormick has his tank.

00:33:45.000 He owns his tank, and he did ketamine in that tank with Lilly.

00:33:49.000 Is that right?

00:33:50.000 Todd did that?

00:33:51.000 Yeah.

00:33:51.000 Todd did ketamine.

00:33:54.000 He was about to do the tank, and Lilly asked him, do you want ketamine or no?

00:33:58.000 And he's like, when John Lilly asks you if you want to do ketamine before you get into his tank, you say yes.

00:34:04.000 Yeah.

00:34:05.000 Whacks him with the ketamine. 1.00

00:34:06.000 He goes under and apparently he was like screaming or something while he was in there because he's out of his fucking mind. 0.99

00:34:12.000 First of all, the tank by itself is a psychedelic experience. 0.99

00:34:15.000 Shut the door.

00:34:16.000 I mean, you're more aware and you can shut it off at any time.

00:34:22.000 It's more of a conscious decision to enter into the psychedelic state.

00:34:25.000 But when you add that to the ketamine, apparently it's just this unbelievable journey through the mind and Todd was just not prepared for it.

00:34:33.000 So Lily, who had another tank next to his other tank, gets in the second tank, whacks himself out and visits him. 0.83

00:34:42.000 Goes and visits him in the fucking ketamine dimension while they're both in side-by-side parallel isolation tanks. 0.97

00:34:51.000 That's something to tell your grandchildren about, in my opinion. 0.99

00:34:53.000 Forget about who won the World Series.

00:34:55.000 So you've done psychedelics in your isolation tank?

00:34:58.000 I've only done mushrooms and edible weed in the isolation tank.

00:35:02.000 The edible weed is my favorite.

00:35:04.000 The high doses of edible weed is one of the most underrated psychedelics today.

00:35:10.000 There's a lot of people that don't understand that if you get a really high dose, and it doesn't even have to be a big thing.

00:35:17.000 That's the thing. 0.99

00:35:17.000 What they're doing today with these concentrates and hash oils, they have these fucking gummy bears, man. 0.99

00:35:23.000 Gummy bears that are 250. Some of them, what is the Chiba Choo? 1.00

00:35:28.000 500 milligrams?

00:35:29.000 They have 500 milligram...

00:35:31.000 THC Chiba Chews.

00:35:32.000 If you eat one of those and get into the isolation tank, you will go on a journey that I liken to any DMT trip, any mushroom trip.

00:35:41.000 Like the Vedic texts, a lot of the Hindu scriptures, they were all written by people who were eating hash. 1.00

00:35:46.000 Uh-huh.

00:35:46.000 Like a lot of the really crazy visuals and it's like the Garuda and all that stuff.

00:35:50.000 You see that shit when you eat it. 0.99

00:35:52.000 It's a really joke because I tell you, for me, I mostly associate the high dose edible with just being knocked on my butt and just like, you know. 1.00

00:35:59.000 Didn't go high enough.

00:36:00.000 Yeah.

00:36:00.000 Well, that could be it because there have been some good experiences and not quite.

00:36:04.000 I know what you're talking about, but I haven't gone to that level with it.

00:36:07.000 I've only gone a couple of times by accident.

00:36:11.000 The real accidental ones in places where I didn't know that I was going to do it.

00:36:15.000 I've had some terrible journeys on planes.

00:36:19.000 I'm like, I don't like flying.

00:36:20.000 It's annoying.

00:36:21.000 I've got to do it too often.

00:36:22.000 So I'll take something right when I pull up to the airport.

00:36:25.000 I don't want to have anything on me when I'm going through security.

00:36:27.000 So I'll eat a cookie or something right before I get...

00:36:29.000 And then as the bags are going through, then I go to Starbucks, get a cup of coffee. 0.99

00:36:34.000 Then I sit down at the gate and I'm like, oh, fuck. 0.99

00:36:38.000 I might have taken too much. 0.99

00:36:39.000 And then, you know, give the ticket, get on the plane, and then once I sit down, I'm like, okay, at least I know I'm going to be here for the next six hours. 1.00

00:36:45.000 And then the universe dissolves and you get shot through some wormhole and to the center of your mind and you reexamine your childhood and like, fuck! 0.99

00:36:56.000 I don't know, man. 0.99

00:36:57.000 I've got to tell you, I've done that edibles on planes a few times.

00:36:59.000 One time, just somebody, like you said, don't want to carry on a plane, have a little nibble before, Chicago to LaGuardia, I land and, oh my God, please, somebody get me home here, you know?

00:37:10.000 On the other hand, another time I'm thinking, flying to Europe, I'm thinking, God, this stuff knocks me out of time.

00:37:14.000 Why don't I just do a little edible instead of a sleeping pill?

00:37:16.000 Because I don't like some of the sleeping pill effects.

00:37:18.000 It didn't work, man.

00:37:19.000 It was kind of fidgety and it was closed and you know, so I've stayed away from the edibles on the plains of late They're very tricky because you you really have to be in the right state of mind and you really you have to treat them with respect I think edibles have always been associated with silliness and I think that's the trick that they've played on us like Have a little pot brownie man.

00:37:40.000 We'll be we'll get crazy.

00:37:41.000 I know it's not silly.

00:37:43.000 It's serious business And the fact of it, I mean, it's funny because now with all the concerns about edibles, you know, somebody asked me the other day, what's the thing that most surprised me about the evolution of this whole marijuana reform thing in the last 5-10 years?

00:37:54.000 And it's been the emergence of the edibles.

00:37:56.000 If you had asked me 5-10 years ago, I would not have anticipated that edibles and drinks and oils would play such a major role in legal marijuana.

00:38:03.000 Oh, yeah.

00:38:04.000 Vapor pens, too?

00:38:06.000 Vape pens.

00:38:06.000 But at least those are more...

00:38:07.000 The vape pens I might have seen because of the anti-smoking stuff coming in and the e-cigarettes coming along.

00:38:12.000 But the edible stuff and the gummy bears and the chocolates and all this sort of stuff...

00:38:16.000 Breath strips?

00:38:17.000 Breath strips.

00:38:17.000 Have you had one of those?

00:38:18.000 No.

00:38:18.000 Oh...

00:38:20.000 Don't ever eat a full one.

00:38:21.000 Is that right?

00:38:22.000 Yeah, you gotta break them up, man.

00:38:23.000 You gotta break them up.

00:38:24.000 They're too strong.

00:38:25.000 Me and Tommy Shigura, who's a good friend of mine, stand-up comedian, we tore one in half and ate it on a plane.

00:38:30.000 We were doing some gigs in Florida, popped it on the way to, it was a nighttime flight, a red eye, and we landed and we both turned and looked at each other and we were like, how terrifying was that?

00:38:41.000 Terrifying.

00:38:42.000 What was in that?

00:38:43.000 I don't know.

00:38:44.000 Well, I got to tell you, dealing from a policy perspective, I mean, we're doing everything we can to have some responsible regulation in this area.

00:38:51.000 You need better testing.

00:38:52.000 You need to know that if you're buying a cookie, the stuff's going to be evenly distributed.

00:38:56.000 Buying a chocolate bar, evenly distributed.

00:38:57.000 People got to figure out their dose, you know?

00:38:59.000 I found for me, like right now, I know about seven milligrams is just kind of a nice...

00:39:04.000 Seven?

00:39:04.000 Seven.

00:39:05.000 Relatively low dose.

00:39:07.000 That's really hard to find.

00:39:08.000 Usually the low is 20. No.

00:39:10.000 Well, what I'll do is I'll get a candy bar that's broken up into bits of 10, and I'll split it a little more than half or something like that.

00:39:15.000 So that's like a calm, mellow, easy kind?

00:39:18.000 It's calm, nice to kick back, relax, maybe go for a swim, go for a massage, maybe go to a movie.

00:39:23.000 I mean, it's that level, right? 0.99

00:39:25.000 And the higher level can be good, too, but it's got the risk of knocking me on my ass. 0.98

00:39:29.000 The higher level to me is like this, it's a potential like a treasure hunt maybe. 0.97

00:39:37.000 A treasure hunt for ideas or an exploration of maybe there's something I missed.

00:39:43.000 You know, maybe like, because I'm always trying to like dig down into my psyche and find out what I don't like about me or what I need to improve or what I need to work on more or what...

00:39:52.000 What aspect of my career, my life I need to be putting more attention to?

00:39:56.000 And usually the pot sort of lets me know about that.

00:39:59.000 The pot in the tank.

00:40:01.000 That's my big exploratory journey.

00:40:03.000 Eat a cookie, get in the tank, and then get out and go, okay, I gotta go to work.

00:40:07.000 That's interesting.

00:40:08.000 For me, pot sometimes does that, but it's unpredictable when it's going to work that way, you know?

00:40:13.000 And then I grab the opportunity.

00:40:14.000 I may be sitting in a concert and had an edible or smoke, and all of a sudden, like, my brain's flying, and I'm getting stuff down, you know, listening to music.

00:40:22.000 But for me, the thing about the mushrooms, which I don't like to do, and also when you get older, it takes more of a toll.

00:40:28.000 You don't recoup, you know?

00:40:29.000 Like, I do mushrooms, and the next day, it's like, I'm burnt out.

00:40:32.000 Really?

00:40:33.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:40:34.000 Now, that wasn't true when I was in my 20s, early 30s, but I'm in my 50s now, you know.

00:40:37.000 Do you ever try 5-HTP when you come back from it?

00:40:40.000 I was just talking with someone about that this morning.

00:40:42.000 I don't think I have tried that yet.

00:40:44.000 That's a big one, because...

00:40:45.000 And for mushrooms or MDMA? Well, for either one, but much more so for MDMA than for mushrooms, because that's a direct effect.

00:40:51.000 That's exactly what it's doing.

00:40:53.000 But mushrooms has a toll on it as well.

00:40:55.000 And a lot of people that have done the heavy mushroom trips have found success in taking L-tryptophan and 5-HTP afterwards.

00:41:03.000 L-tryptophan actually converts to 5-HTP, and 5-HTP converts to serotonin.

00:41:07.000 And you can get those over-the-counter, right?

00:41:09.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:41:09.000 I'll get you some.

00:41:11.000 Do we have any new mood here?

00:41:12.000 Do we have any new mood here?

00:41:13.000 We have some.

00:41:14.000 We'll get you some.

00:41:15.000 Yeah.

00:41:16.000 This is it right here.

00:41:17.000 Yeah.

00:41:18.000 Oh, no, no.

00:41:19.000 Thank you.

00:41:20.000 Yeah, that's a combination of 5-HTP and L-tryptophan.

00:41:25.000 And all that stuff does is it gives your brain the building blocks to produce human neurotransmitters.

00:41:30.000 I mean, that's what it does.

00:41:31.000 It gives your brain the building blocks to produce that stuff to produce serotonin.

00:41:35.000 Well, I have to say, one of my great regrets is that MDMA, you know, I first did it, I guess, in the early 90s when I was in my early 30s.

00:41:44.000 And I loved it, you know, and did it both, you know, for going to occasional rave with my wife at the time or friends.

00:41:51.000 But I have to say now, it just doesn't seem to work for me as well anymore.

00:41:54.000 That the downside begins to exceed the upside.

00:41:57.000 And it's a bummer.

00:41:58.000 I've only done it once, and the downside was so strong.

00:42:02.000 The upside was amazing.

00:42:03.000 I mean, I've done too much.

00:42:05.000 I took two tabs, and the experience was beautiful, and it taught me so much about insecurity, so much about, like, the way I behave and the way people behave and interact with each other.

00:42:16.000 How much of it is just based on insecurity, you know?

00:42:19.000 It was weird. 0.99

00:42:20.000 Like, this sounds gay as fuck, but this is exactly what happened. 0.99

00:42:23.000 Me and this dude were on a couch, and we were holding hands, and we were talking about how good it feels to just hold hands. 0.99

00:42:29.000 Then we weren't scared to, like, hold hands with another dude.

00:42:33.000 It was totally non-sexual.

00:42:34.000 It's so funny you say that story, because I remember one time with a group of close friends, and some of these friends are, like, leading academics and in drug policy, drug studies, and, I mean, major figures.

00:42:44.000 And we'd become good friends, and we would occasionally get together and do, you know, do an MDMA thing, like, once a year.

00:42:49.000 And I just remember one of my friends who's a distinguished professor, four of us were sitting on the couch, and he just laid down on top of our knees, and we all just put our hands on him.

00:42:59.000 And it was so loving, so wonderful.

00:43:01.000 So I know what you're talking about.

00:43:03.000 It's non-sexual.

00:43:04.000 It's a weird thing.

00:43:04.000 The MDMA, apparently they say, I've never tried, I said I only did it once, but people say that it's really hard to have sex when you're on it.

00:43:12.000 Right.

00:43:13.000 Well, the thing is, it's not the sex drug, it's the hug drug.

00:43:15.000 Yeah.

00:43:16.000 Right?

00:43:16.000 I mean, that's the thing.

00:43:17.000 And it's, you know, something you can get aroused on it, but it's, you know, at some point, that's been my experience.

00:43:22.000 You can get aroused and all that sort of stuff, but at some point, the energy is shifting towards more hug energy, empathic, loving energy, you know, whereas, for example, psychedelics can sometimes go in a highly sexual direction.

00:43:33.000 Yeah.

00:43:34.000 Well, that was the argument that McKenna had for mushrooms being the catalyst for human evolution.

00:43:38.000 Do you know about all that?

00:43:40.000 Do you know McKenna's theories?

00:43:41.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:43:42.000 Yeah.

00:43:42.000 I mean, I kind of like the theory, the notion of hunter-gatherers and the hunter-gatherers who consumed, you know, psilocybin mushrooms or whatever were the ones who were going to be better at whether it was warfare or hunting or a whole range of other things.

00:43:54.000 So it's intriguing.

00:43:55.000 And Terrence was a remarkable speaker.

00:43:58.000 Who's the best being?

00:43:59.000 He was so fascinating, so unique.

00:44:01.000 I only met him a few times, but one of the last times he called me up because I think he was supposed to speak at UCLA or USC, and at the last moment they were going to prohibit him from speaking or whoever was loaning them the hall or something like that.

00:44:14.000 And so he just called me up and I called the local ACLU and they got on it and we solved the problem.

00:44:19.000 Wow, that's great.

00:44:20.000 That's beautiful.

00:44:21.000 So you led to one of Terrence's speeches.

00:44:23.000 That's great.

00:44:23.000 I think so, yeah.

00:44:23.000 And his brother Dennis McKenna, he and I were both at the First World Ayahuasca Congress in Ibiza last October.

00:44:31.000 And that was something.

00:44:32.000 I mean, here you have...

00:44:33.000 And it was odd that it was Ibiza, because Ibiza's right to party island, and ayahuasca's not a party drug.

00:44:37.000 It's a serious thing.

00:44:39.000 But there were about a thousand people in this conference hall in Ibiza.

00:44:43.000 You had leading academic scientists like Dennis McKenna.

00:44:46.000 You had shamans, both New Age shamans and traditional shamans from Latin America.

00:44:50.000 You had people who were...

00:44:51.000 There was a guy, Polish guy, who would do an occasional ayahuasca ceremony where he would invite musicians who would then make music together under the influence of ayahuasca.

00:45:00.000 And then I was invited because the organizers wanted to know how does ayahuasca connect to broader drug policy reform.

00:45:06.000 So that was quite a gathering.

00:45:08.000 Dennis is amazing.

00:45:09.000 I love that guy.

00:45:10.000 I've had him on a few times now and had some beautiful conversations with him.

00:45:14.000 I'm always like, I can't believe I'm sitting here talking to Dennis McKenna.

00:45:17.000 He's psychedelic royalty.

00:45:19.000 Yeah.

00:45:20.000 He really is.

00:45:22.000 It's funny.

00:45:22.000 I've never gone on one of those ayahuasca tours down in South.

00:45:26.000 Have you ever done that?

00:45:27.000 No.

00:45:28.000 I hate bugs.

00:45:29.000 I hate bugs.

00:45:30.000 Apparently Dennis does too, so he does them in a different part of Peru.

00:45:33.000 It's a dry climate.

00:45:36.000 It's not a moist jungle climate.

00:45:37.000 He's like, you don't have to go to the jungle.

00:45:39.000 I'm like, yeah, why go to the jungle? 1.00

00:45:41.000 It's fucking mosquitoes, man. 1.00

00:45:42.000 You get eaten alive. 1.00

00:45:44.000 But for some people, it's like part of the beauty of the journey.

00:45:47.000 It's like the suffering of dealing with the bugs. 0.99

00:45:50.000 My friend Amber got bit on the leg by a spider, and her whole fucking leg turned black. 0.99

00:45:55.000 Or black and blue, rather. 0.99

00:45:56.000 It was giant, huge.

00:45:58.000 Some people doing these things out in the forest, and they start walking off in the middle of the ceremony, nobody ever finds them again.

00:46:04.000 They get eaten up by jaguars.

00:46:06.000 Yeah, no, I was perfectly happy to do my first ayahuasca experience in Santa Barbara, California.

00:46:10.000 That's perfect.

00:46:11.000 Yeah, no bugs.

00:46:12.000 That's the place.

00:46:13.000 Just rich people.

00:46:15.000 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:46:16.000 The only thing that's a horror is the plastic surgery around you.

00:46:19.000 That's true, yeah.

00:46:20.000 But I'll tell you, the ayahuasca thing, too, it reminds me, when you read about the emergence of LSD and mescaline in the 50s, and the guys who went around dosing people, you know, Cary Grant, famous actors, politicians.

00:46:31.000 Cary Grant used to He didn't dose people?

00:46:33.000 No, he didn't dose people, but he became an enthusiast.

00:46:36.000 She was a famous female swimmer who then was in movies. 0.87

00:46:40.000 I forget her name.

00:46:42.000 But, you know, you had famous people doing it, Life Magazine writing about it.

00:46:45.000 And I think ayahuasca is almost a bigger version of that right now.

00:46:49.000 You're having ayahuasca ceremonies happening all around the world.

00:46:52.000 I mean, not just the U.S. or North America and South America, but in Europe, Asia.

00:46:56.000 I mean, it's extraordinary.

00:46:57.000 And so many people describing profound and transformative experiences.

00:47:02.000 And it's not totally without risk, but the benefit-risk ratio is so enormous.

00:47:07.000 Well, what is the risk, though?

00:47:09.000 There's no physical risk.

00:47:11.000 The risk is only psychological.

00:47:13.000 And if you're a psychologically unstable person, you really shouldn't be doing anything to perturb your consciousness.

00:47:18.000 If you have issues with psychosis or you're bipolar, you know, there's a lot of people that have, like, legit.

00:47:24.000 That's right.

00:47:24.000 The other thing with powerful psychedelics is if you have a cardiovascular risk because you're so stimulated.

00:47:31.000 And then the thing is, because ayahuasca, you know, every shaman makes the batch a different way.

00:47:35.000 So you're not exactly sure what's in that stuff.

00:47:38.000 And then there's the thing about making sure the person's safe while they're under the influence.

00:47:42.000 You know, it's like the horrible story that happened with that guy in Colorado with the edible, right?

00:47:45.000 Who had never done it before and he jumps off a balcony.

00:47:48.000 Or the horrible stories about people doing LSD and thinking they can fly.

00:47:51.000 Do you know Bill Hicks joke on that?

00:47:54.000 What's the joke?

00:47:54.000 Yeah, Bill Hicks goes, what a tragedy.

00:47:57.000 Someone jumped up. 1.00

00:47:57.000 He goes, what an idiot. 1.00

00:47:58.000 He goes, if he thought he could fly, why didn't he take off from the ground first? 1.00

00:48:02.000 This whole bit about it, about a young man on acid.

00:48:05.000 It was a bit about a positive drug story.

00:48:07.000 Yeah.

00:48:08.000 And his thing was like, all the media ever tells you about is these negative drug stories about a guy jumped off the roof.

00:48:14.000 Well, I mean, as marijuana is becoming more legalized in our society and hopefully around the world, and as we move forward on the psychedelics to begin to open them up as well, and now all the new psychoactive substances and some of the synthetics, which may have some upsides to them,

00:48:31.000 but the key is going to be putting out a norm out there about what it means to use it safe.

00:48:36.000 I mean, for example, doing mushrooms or LSD and going to a concert with 50,000 people around or 10,000 people around, generally not a good idea.

00:48:44.000 Unless they're also on LSD and you know them all.

00:48:47.000 That's true.

00:48:48.000 That's true.

00:48:49.000 That might work okay.

00:48:50.000 Maybe.

00:48:51.000 But that's the scary thing.

00:48:52.000 It's like people think, oh, let's go do this as a party drug.

00:48:55.000 And all of a sudden, all sorts of information overload and you're losing perspective and all this sort of stuff.

00:49:00.000 And people don't know what's going on.

00:49:02.000 Or you see going to Burning Man, right?

00:49:04.000 And I remember meeting a guy who had done some weird drug.

00:49:06.000 And he had just totally flipped out.

00:49:08.000 He thought an animal was trying to eat him alive, right, while he was flipping out.

00:49:12.000 And fortunately, you know, Rick Doblin, the guys at Maps, had set up these kind of, you know, safety zones.

00:49:17.000 And so they were able to get this guy away from the cops, because the cops were going to shackle him, put him on a helicopter, and take him to a jail, which could have been horrible.

00:49:25.000 And instead, they gave them to Rick, and Rick was able to talk this guy down and, you know, do it. 0.95

00:49:30.000 But we have to be aware that when people are taking these powerful, mind-altering substances, which can have these wonderful things, as you and I have experienced, we've got to be aware that there are people who are not as stable as they think they are, people who have deep-seated shit going on, and they don't know what's buried that's going to come flying out, 0.53

00:49:46.000 people who don't understand that, yeah, if you're going to jump, jump from the first floor, not the fifth floor. 0.68

00:49:51.000 So we've got to make sure...

00:49:53.000 Don't even jump from the first floor.

00:49:54.000 Jump from the ground.

00:49:55.000 Jump from the ground, exactly.

00:49:57.000 It's going to be so key.

00:49:59.000 Just to shift away from the silos for a second, one of the issues we're working on big time is trying to reduce the number of people dying from overdoses involving either heroin or pharmaceutical opiates.

00:50:10.000 The last couple of years, more people have died of an accidental overdose involving heroin or other pharmaceuticals than in a car accident.

00:50:18.000 It's the number one cause of accidental death in America today, right?

00:50:22.000 I mean, it's absolutely crazy stuff, right?

00:50:24.000 And in fact, when we say overdose, it suggests you took too much.

00:50:27.000 Most of what are overdoses actually are drug combinations.

00:50:29.000 They're typically doing this opiate, your pharmaceutical opiate, oxycodone, whatever it might be, might even be prescribed to you, with booze or with benzos, Valium-type drugs, right?

00:50:38.000 So what we're trying to do is to put out there the notion that if you're doing opiates, don't combine it with booze.

00:50:46.000 Don't combine it with tranquilizers.

00:50:48.000 There's a miracle drug called naloxone, and we're trying to make that stuff as widely available.

00:50:52.000 It's like an antidote for an overdose.

00:50:54.000 Make it available.

00:50:55.000 We're passing 9-1-1 Good Samaritan Laws, so if people are around and a buddy of theirs overdoses, they don't just flip out.

00:51:01.000 They call 9-1-1 right away the way they do with a heart attack.

00:51:03.000 So, you know, it's true with the psychedelics of marijuana, but even with the drugs that we see as less elevated in a way, but that huge numbers of people are using, like the opiates, it's really important that we become more and more of a society that understands the notion that we need to make it safer to use these drugs,

00:51:21.000 right?

00:51:21.000 We've got to keep people from getting hurt the way that people get hurt.

00:51:25.000 Well, we had a guy on here yesterday, two guys, Chris and Mark Bell, who they were a part of a documentary called Bigger, Stronger, Faster, which was about steroids, and now they have a new one called Prescription Thugs, and it's all about the opiate pill industry.

00:51:43.000 How many people die from it and how many people are addicted to it and the numbers I wasn't prepared for the numbers when we had them on and we started exploring the numbers They were talking about this from 2010 there was 8.7 million people Abusing these pills on a daily basis in this country.

00:52:00.000 Yeah, I mean that's a staggering I mean, nobody really knows the number, right?

00:52:05.000 Because what it means to abuse it and whether it is abuse.

00:52:07.000 But, you know, 20 years ago, you had a massive problem of the undertreatment of pain, right?

00:52:14.000 That people were so flipped out about using opioids that people who were terminally ill...

00:52:18.000 Children who are terrible burn victims, people going through a traumatic post-operative recovery from surgery and stuff like that, were not having their pain treated.

00:52:28.000 And the failure to treat pain appropriately can shorten people's lives, lead to major depression, lead to other drug-taking, and all that sort of stuff.

00:52:35.000 So over the 90s, early 2000s, we began to solve that problem.

00:52:39.000 So now opioids are used much more correctly.

00:52:41.000 But then what happened is that what we really have in America is an epidemic of chronic pain.

00:52:48.000 Really?

00:52:49.000 Lower back pain, sciatica, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel.

00:52:55.000 I mean, tens of millions of Americans, maybe close to 50 or 100 million Americans, go through some chronic pain episode during the course of every year or two, whatever it might be.

00:53:05.000 And it turns out that for many people going through dealing with chronic pain, opioids don't work that well, right?

00:53:12.000 They just don't work.

00:53:13.000 They're appropriate for sort of severe pain and they're appropriate for some chronic pain patients.

00:53:19.000 So what happens is people start taking this stuff.

00:53:21.000 They have chronic pain.

00:53:23.000 And they're taking opioids, and the doctor's giving them the opioids, and then they're building up tolerance.

00:53:27.000 So they're taking higher doses, which is building the risk, right?

00:53:29.000 And then maybe they're combining it with like a Valium-type drug to reduce their anxiety, or maybe they're taking alcohol because that makes them feel better.

00:53:36.000 And then what happens is at some point your heart, you know, your breathing stops, right?

00:53:40.000 And so what we need to do, that overprescription of these opioids, it's not just by physicians who are criminals and are doing these things for money.

00:53:49.000 It's not just black marketeering of this stuff.

00:53:52.000 It's also a lot of people just trying to help, good meaning doctors trying to help people who are suffering with pain by giving them the opioids they think they want and need, when it turns out that's probably not the best way to deal with it.

00:54:05.000 Well, there's an issue that people have with pain that comes from work.

00:54:11.000 From sitting down all day.

00:54:13.000 There's an issue that people have from not taking their body as important or taking the health of their body as significantly as they should.

00:54:23.000 I think that there's a lot of people that just don't know the consequences of sitting at a desk with bad posture all the time.

00:54:31.000 Like these chairs that you're sitting in?

00:54:32.000 These things are special ergonomic chairs that make you kind of support your body weight up straight.

00:54:38.000 They're called Capisco chairs, which is a company called Ergo Depot.

00:54:42.000 But before I got these, I sat in regular office chairs. 0.98

00:54:45.000 At the end of every episode, my fucking back, the middle of my back would be killing me. 0.96

00:54:50.000 And this eliminated them. 0.98

00:54:52.000 Ergonomic chairs are very important.

00:54:54.000 Sometimes people like to sit on those balance balls.

00:54:56.000 That's important.

00:54:56.000 But what's also important is taking care of your health and fitness.

00:55:00.000 Taking care of your body, like yoga.

00:55:02.000 If more people did yoga, they would have way less back pain, way less joint pain, way less stress, but they don't have the time.

00:55:10.000 Or if they do have the time, they choose to do that time to go get drunk.

00:55:14.000 Or they're like me.

00:55:15.000 And I've had more people tell me to take up yoga than any other piece of advice in my entire life, and I just can't get into it.

00:55:20.000 Have you tried it?

00:55:22.000 Yeah, I've tried it many times, you know, and I just...

00:55:24.000 Now, you know, I'm sitting...

00:55:25.000 You know what I realize?

00:55:26.000 I'm in your beautiful ergonomic chair here, Joe, but I'm slouching.

00:55:29.000 So now I'm going to sit up straight, let me readjust the mic here, you know, and then I'll feel better, I'll breathe better, you know?

00:55:35.000 I've got to tell you something.

00:55:36.000 But what do you mean by you can't get into it?

00:55:38.000 Ah!

00:55:39.000 I just don't enjoy it.

00:55:41.000 You're not supposed to enjoy it. 1.00

00:55:42.000 It sucks! 1.00

00:55:43.000 It's an hour and a half of suck. 1.00

00:55:45.000 Yeah, but you know other parts of life suck. 0.98

00:55:47.000 Why don't I do that? 0.98

00:55:47.000 The idea is that there's a benefit for that suck. 0.98

00:55:50.000 One of the things I love about weed is I love to stretch when I do weed. 0.74

00:55:56.000 I get into my body, you know, and that's the thing.

00:55:59.000 It's just whether it's swimming, but the only time I like feeling that, you know, stretching my...

00:56:03.000 I hate stretching my hands, but when I'm high, Yeah.

00:56:07.000 Well, you know, that's what McKenna believed that yoga was in the first place. 1.00

00:56:11.000 Yoga said, McKenna had this one lecture that was talking about yogis and that the real secret about sadhus is that they're high as fuck. 0.98

00:56:20.000 And what yoga really is, is it's almost like a how-to manual on how to properly use cannabis. 0.96

00:56:27.000 and that they believe that eating cannabis especially or smoking hash and then going into these yoga poses would they would achieve these higher states of consciousness and so they would pass this down from generation to generation and the Indian in India rather the Hindus Have a long history of both eating hash and smoking hash,

00:56:46.000 and he believed that that was the dirty secret of yoga.

00:56:50.000 That yoga was really all about how to use cannabis correctly, which is why it feels so good to stretch when you're high.

00:56:56.000 I'll tell you a few things about that.

00:56:57.000 One, I think it was the San Francisco Chronicle, just last month or so, had a piece about yoga where they basically asked people to smoke before they go and do the yoga class.

00:57:05.000 The other thing is, have you seen this book?

00:57:07.000 And what did they say?

00:57:07.000 What was the results?

00:57:08.000 I mean, people...

00:57:09.000 It's the same thing.

00:57:10.000 So many people are like me.

00:57:11.000 They get more into their body, right?

00:57:13.000 That marijuana helps in that respect, you know?

00:57:15.000 The other thing is, have you seen this book that was just reissued called Zig Zag Zen?

00:57:20.000 No.

00:57:20.000 You should have this guy on.

00:57:22.000 Alan Bediner.

00:57:25.000 Zigzag Zen.

00:57:26.000 Zigzag Zen.

00:57:27.000 And the painter, you know who Alex Gray is?

00:57:29.000 Sure, a good friend of mine.

00:57:30.000 Alex is the one who did the artwork for it, and Alan Bediner did the writing.

00:57:34.000 And as I recall, what the book is about is he was struck by all of these kind of Zen spiritual leaders in America for whom their psychedelics experience in their younger years was pivotal to their evolution and to their becoming a master of some type of meditation,

00:57:51.000 but who would not talk about it.

00:57:53.000 Right?

00:57:54.000 And it's very interesting because, you know, there's also, you have in some of these, you know, spiritual worlds, whatever, that they're looking down on the use of marijuana or psychedelics, that you should keep your body as a sacred vessel and keep it free from these substances.

00:58:07.000 But in fact, you see a lot of evidence that these things go really well together.

00:58:10.000 Well, the issue is legality and also most of these people have actual jobs. 1.00

00:58:15.000 And when you have an actual job and you start talking about drugs, people look at you like you're some sort of a fucking crazy person. 0.97

00:58:22.000 If you work as an insurance company and you say, well, on the weekend, you know what I did this weekend? 0.99

00:58:26.000 I smoked DMT with my friends and I experienced God. 0.99

00:58:29.000 They're like, what the fuck is wrong with Ethan? 0.99

00:58:31.000 I know. 1.00

00:58:32.000 This crazy asshole. 1.00

00:58:33.000 And then you get passed up for job promotions. 1.00

00:58:36.000 They think you're a loose cannon.

00:58:37.000 It can be detrimental to your interest or your family, especially if you have children.

00:58:41.000 There's a lot of people that have children that don't like to talk about drugs or even admit they smoke pot anymore.

00:58:46.000 I've experienced that resistance.

00:58:47.000 All over the place.

00:58:48.000 Or what about if your kids are inviting their friends over, and then you have to worry about that your kids' friends will tell their parents, oh, so-and-so's parents smoke weed or whatever, and then all of a sudden you have the neighbors and the fellow parents getting all worked up about that or telling their kids they can't go over.

00:59:05.000 Well, listen, I go through that.

00:59:06.000 I mean, that's me.

00:59:08.000 Look, I have pot tattooed on my body.

00:59:11.000 I have a DMT molecule on my left arm.

00:59:14.000 It's pretty well known that I'm into drugs.

00:59:16.000 I like them.

00:59:16.000 I think they're awesome.

00:59:18.000 But I'm healthy as fuck. 0.99

00:59:21.000 And you're also an independent operator, as am I, but it's so true. 0.99

00:59:25.000 I gotta tell you, the emails I get from people who, you know, solid employees for 20 years, and then a drug test popped out, and they were totally fine at work.

00:59:34.000 It's just because they got high on the weekend and they lose their job after 20 years.

00:59:38.000 Exactly.

00:59:38.000 That sort of stuff that's going on.

00:59:39.000 I think, by the way, John Oliver may be doing something on this issue soon.

00:59:43.000 Well, it's a nonsense issue.

00:59:45.000 The idea that you can get high on Friday and lose your job on Monday.

00:59:48.000 How come you can get drunk all weekend and show up on Monday and be fine?

00:59:51.000 Well, I'll tell you something.

00:59:53.000 I'll give you a policy dilemma.

00:59:55.000 So, back in 2010, the ballot initiative in California legalized marijuana.

01:00:00.000 Richard Lee, the fellow who was driving that, and we agreed.

01:00:02.000 We put in a provision there that basically said people could not be fired for testing positive for marijuana so long as they were totally competent at work, not high at work.

01:00:12.000 And we wanted to protect people who were having a joint in the evening or on the weekend, right?

01:00:16.000 Right.

01:00:16.000 The Chamber of Commerce flipped out.

01:00:18.000 Right?

01:00:19.000 And the problem is, is you don't want to provoke some very powerful bears and all this sort of stuff.

01:00:23.000 So now when we're drafting these initiatives around the country for 2016 and beyond, what we find is we do not include a clause protecting people because we know the one thing that might get the Chamber of Commerce to all flip out, you know, and to basically defeat the initiative.

01:00:37.000 And then what you basically hope is that as marijuana becomes more legalized...

01:00:41.000 You can revisit it.

01:00:41.000 And I think that's what's happening.

01:00:43.000 I haven't looked as yet in Oregon and Washington, but my guess is that the number of employers who are drug testing for marijuana is decreasing, right?

01:00:51.000 I mean, look, it's always been a bad way to determine performance, right?

01:00:55.000 Because we know marijuana stays in the system.

01:00:56.000 You know, the craziness of drug testing.

01:00:58.000 If you want to get totally bombed on a Friday night and be okay at work Monday morning in terms of drug testing, don't smoke a joint, right?

01:01:05.000 Alcohol and cocaine is the right combination for you.

01:01:07.000 That's a crazy message to send with drug testing, right?

01:01:11.000 Yeah, because cocaine's out of your system in like 24 hours or so.

01:01:14.000 Exactly, and the alcohol, same thing. 1.00

01:01:16.000 It's stupid. 1.00

01:01:17.000 It's really stupid, and these stereotypes are ridiculous. 1.00

01:01:19.000 These stereotypes of pot smokers are dumb and lazy, and they insult me. 1.00

01:01:24.000 It really drives me nuts, and I hate having to defend it, because you're defending just these ignorant stereotypes that were propagated by reefer madness. 0.98

01:01:34.000 I mean, that was like we really started it all off, and the effectiveness of the propaganda that Hearst Publications put out in the 1930s, it's Amazing how well that worked almost a hundred years later.

01:01:44.000 You know what else it is?

01:01:46.000 And I used to make this analogy more often than I do today, but I'd say, you know something?

01:01:51.000 In America, 50 years ago, everybody knew a gay person.

01:01:56.000 They just didn't know they knew a gay person.

01:01:59.000 Right?

01:01:59.000 And therefore, their image of who was gay was determined by what they saw in the media, somebody getting arrested in a men's room, or somebody flamboyantly walking down Christopher Street in New York City, or people who are very, very effeminate, right?

01:02:11.000 Now, of course, everybody knows a gay person, right?

01:02:14.000 It could be their cousin or their employer.

01:02:16.000 You know, it's all around the place.

01:02:18.000 And therefore, our image of who is the gay person, right, has become – we don't have any associations.

01:02:22.000 It's just the person who seems effeminate or just the person doing odd stuff.

01:02:25.000 Well, similarly with marijuana, everybody in America knows not just a marijuana user, but a responsible marijuana user.

01:02:32.000 The problem is they don't know they know them.

01:02:34.000 Therefore, who's their image of the person who used the marijuana user?

01:02:38.000 They think of that high school dropout or the kid with, you know, hemp leaves and his blonde dreadlocks who's a troublemaker at school.

01:02:45.000 They think of their friend's kid who got in trouble with drugs.

01:02:47.000 That's who they think of.

01:02:48.000 Now, mind you, the kid who just got straight A's and is going to an Ivy League school or to UC Berkeley or Stanford or whatever, and who's also smoking weed, that kid's being more discreet.

01:02:58.000 And nobody knows he's doing weed except his friends.

01:03:00.000 So we have a biased image of who, in fact, the marijuana user has been in America.

01:03:05.000 Now, as it becomes more legalized, as people become more open and out with it, I've been struck at all the people I've known for many years who are finally saying to me and admitting to me that they've been using marijuana or psychedelics regularly for a long time.

01:03:17.000 Now we're seeing that thing begin to shift in our society the same way we saw it happening with gay people in this country. 0.99

01:03:23.000 I think you're right, and I think I've seen a giant shift just within the last 15 or so years.

01:03:28.000 You know, I started smoking pot when I was 30. I'm 48 now, so I've been smoking pot for 18 years.

01:03:35.000 And before I smoked pot, I thought it was for losers. 0.93

01:03:38.000 I really did. 0.93

01:03:39.000 I got lucky.

01:03:40.000 I met my friend Eddie Bravo, and he is this really creative musician, and he explained to me that it helps him, like, write music and create music, and he's this interesting guy that I used to do jiu-jitsu with.

01:03:52.000 That's also a weird thing about martial arts.

01:03:55.000 A tremendous amount of UFC fighters smoke pot.

01:03:58.000 I mean, a massive amount.

01:03:59.000 Where it's a huge issue for them involving drug tests.

01:04:03.000 You know, that they have to stop smoking weed for the last four weeks or so in order to pass drug tests.

01:04:08.000 When I say, I mean, more than don't.

01:04:11.000 More UFC fighters smoke pot than don't smoke pot.

01:04:15.000 Oh, well, the NBA is giant.

01:04:18.000 Possibly the NFL. I met a retired football player, Marvin Washington, at the end of last year.

01:04:23.000 And he was getting involved in the medical marijuana thing, but he's a really brilliant guy and cares about the broader policy issues.

01:04:30.000 We landed up drafting with him and three other Pro Bowl winners basically a public letter calling on the NFL to change its marijuana testing policy.

01:04:42.000 To admit that marijuana has medical value, that it's safer for many players, that when it comes to dealing with concussion injury, that marijuana may actually have a therapeutic dimension to it.

01:04:51.000 Well, not just may, does.

01:04:52.000 Does.

01:04:53.000 Without a doubt.

01:04:54.000 So the evidence is there.

01:04:55.000 I was also encouraged...

01:04:55.000 Anti-inflammatory properties of it?

01:04:57.000 Do you see the U.S., the International Olympics Committee, what they've done now is I think they've changed the level or when they test for marijuana.

01:05:04.000 So they basically are saying, if you haven't used marijuana within 24 hours before a match, you're not our concern anymore.

01:05:12.000 So you see an evolution happening, and at different rates in different types of professional sports.

01:05:17.000 You do, and it's so important.

01:05:19.000 It really is.

01:05:20.000 Because otherwise, you're basing your laws and the way you punish people on ignorance. 0.99

01:05:24.000 It's foolishness. 0.99

01:05:26.000 And the idea behind it is foolishness. 0.97

01:05:27.000 What are you doing? 0.60

01:05:29.000 Yeah, I mean, it came out, I mean, part of this was what came out of the drug war ideology, right?

01:05:32.000 Drug testing sweeps into American society in the Ronald Reagan days in the mid-80s.

01:05:36.000 Drug war goes crazy in the late 80s.

01:05:39.000 Everybody's feeling you have to drug test.

01:05:41.000 Most major corporations are drug testing.

01:05:43.000 So we just got caught up in that.

01:05:45.000 You know, being a professor at Princeton, late 80s, early 90s, and I saw the kids, like, they knew they were going to be applying for jobs where you needed to be drug tested.

01:05:54.000 And it just began to shape the whole way they thought about this sort of stuff.

01:05:57.000 Yeah, it's just so unfortunate because it doesn't make you a bad person.

01:06:01.000 It doesn't make you a lazy person.

01:06:03.000 These are the thoughts that are implied in testing people.

01:06:06.000 The idea is like, hey, I am your employer. 0.94

01:06:09.000 I don't want you fucking up on the weekend and then coming into work on Monday all scrambled. 0.94

01:06:14.000 But there's no evidence. 0.94

01:06:15.000 Well, I would say this, because what I always want to do is to give the other side what I think might be true or might conform with their own experience.

01:06:23.000 For some people, marijuana, smoking too much marijuana does make them lethargic.

01:06:27.000 Well, act if they smoke it at work.

01:06:29.000 Sure.

01:06:30.000 Look, nobody wants kids waking and baking before they go to school, right?

01:06:35.000 Some people can smoke marijuana 24-7.

01:06:37.000 It's sort of medical, doesn't harm their workability.

01:06:39.000 Other people, it's a problem.

01:06:40.000 You know, it can be amotivating for some people.

01:06:43.000 Look, it's a drug, and that means that some people can use it in the wrong ways problematically.

01:06:47.000 The problem is, and this is where we fundamentally agree, the large majority of people who use marijuana do so responsibly and are not having a problem with it.

01:06:56.000 And there's a huge number of people who use marijuana in a way that actually enhances their life.

01:07:00.000 And there are many of them who find it preferable to using pharmaceutical medications or alcohol or things like that.

01:07:06.000 There are people, I know brilliant intellectuals and academics, who've done some of their best work and come up with some of their best ideas under the influence of marijuana or psychedelics.

01:07:14.000 So marijuana can be a huge positive in many people's life.

01:07:17.000 It can be neither here nor there in some people, and for some people it's a negative.

01:07:21.000 Including Carl Sagan, who was a huge proponent of marijuana.

01:07:24.000 I think that the people that have issues with marijuana have issues.

01:07:29.000 And that's one of the things that's been sort of dusted under the rug.

01:07:32.000 You're blaming it on marijuana.

01:07:34.000 These people that smoke pot and it ruins their life.

01:07:37.000 I mean, I had a joke about it where I was like, it's just because pot got there first. 0.97

01:07:40.000 It could have been anything that fucked your life up.

01:07:42.000 It's usually some sort of an underlying traumatic issue that you're trying to run away from or hide or cover up.

01:07:48.000 Yeah.

01:07:48.000 I mean, the problem, of course, is when people in power hold that.

01:07:51.000 I mean, I'll tell you, on both ends of the country, Governor Cuomo and Governor Brown, I don't know what their issue is with marijuana.

01:07:58.000 Well, their issue is that there's financial interests that are trying to lead them in the way of illegal...

01:08:05.000 John, I don't think so.

01:08:06.000 I actually think I've talked to both of them about it.

01:08:08.000 And I can see...

01:08:09.000 And both of them are willing...

01:08:10.000 I think both of them have been decent governors in other areas of their life.

01:08:14.000 I think some of them are okay on sort of rolling back some elements of the drug war.

01:08:17.000 They're kind of mixed in that regard.

01:08:19.000 But Cuomo just has this weird anti-marijuana thing I don't get.

01:08:23.000 And Brown talked to him a few months ago about the same thing.

01:08:26.000 Well, when you say weird, okay, well, let's be specific.

01:08:29.000 It's not political. 0.96

01:08:31.000 Cuomo being such a jerk on New York's medical marijuana law and trying to carve it down so only like five businesses can run this thing. 0.98

01:08:39.000 I mean, all the stuff he did. 0.99

01:08:42.000 Medical marijuana is supported by 80% of New Yorkers, right?

01:08:44.000 There was no political reason for him to do that sort of stuff.

01:08:47.000 But somehow, some weird anti-marijuana thing was in there.

01:08:51.000 Hold on, but that doesn't seem like an anti-marijuana thing at all when you're talking about boiling down to five businesses.

01:08:56.000 It sounds like a business interest.

01:08:57.000 Look, there may have been some of that there.

01:08:59.000 May have been?

01:09:00.000 That seems like the only motivation.

01:09:02.000 It seems to be there's no rational motivation other than financial.

01:09:06.000 I don't know.

01:09:07.000 Because in the end, there was a whole competitive process for who got the five licenses.

01:09:11.000 It's hard to sell one of the governor's friends.

01:09:13.000 We haven't seen any evidence yet that it was governor's buddies who benefited.

01:09:16.000 I think there was something that he felt a need to be hyper-controlling in this area.

01:09:20.000 I think sometimes people go through...

01:09:21.000 But he's not ignorant.

01:09:23.000 He's got to know the financial...

01:09:26.000 The massive profit margin, the massive possibility for profit that these people are going to experience.

01:09:32.000 He's not ignorant.

01:09:33.000 He's got to know that you're talking about something in Colorado that just the tax revenue alone has been $100 million.

01:09:40.000 But that's a good reason for him to have done the right thing, right?

01:09:42.000 The question is why does a guy like that try to sabotage a good bill and put in a bad bill in place?

01:09:48.000 What's your thought?

01:09:49.000 I don't know.

01:09:50.000 All I know is something – sometimes you think it could be that something involving a friend of theirs, a kid of theirs, their own personal experience.

01:09:57.000 I think it's something personal oftentimes.

01:10:00.000 And with Jerry Brown, I've heard rumors with both governors that they used to smoke.

01:10:03.000 I've never heard – I've heard other people say, oh, no, these guys are – Jerry Brown in California didn't used to smoke?

01:10:07.000 Who the hell knows?

01:10:08.000 That would be more shocking.

01:10:08.000 Something that he did.

01:10:09.000 Who knows?

01:10:10.000 But I mean, I got to tell you, Jerry- He's probably high right now.

01:10:11.000 You talk to Jerry, I don't know, Jerry, you think, oh, marijuana's the downfall of American civilization, right?

01:10:15.000 I mean, but there's a part of him- Is that what he says?

01:10:17.000 He actually, he does say that, publicly and privately.

01:10:19.000 And he actually seems to almost believe that at times. 0.97

01:10:22.000 And I think the other part of his brain is smart enough to know it's ridiculous. 0.56

01:10:25.000 But there's a lot of people who have had a negative encounter with marijuana. 0.86

01:10:29.000 They've had a kid who started smoking weed and waking and baking and went out and got into bigger trouble with other drugs.

01:10:34.000 And I think they just, this is bad, this is bad.

01:10:37.000 Or there are people who've had experienced problems with alcohol in their family and they think if alcohol was that bad, weed's going to be even worse.

01:10:43.000 I think there's still that irrational stuff driven oftentimes by knowing somebody or knowing of somebody where they associate marijuana with bad things having happened to that person.

01:10:53.000 I think Jerry Brown's got a bigger problem in that no one even knows he's the governor.

01:10:57.000 That guy became the governor of California after Arnold Schwarzenegger, and no one paid any attention.

01:11:02.000 Literally, no one even knows he's the governor. 0.98

01:11:04.000 You never fucking hear Governor Jerry Brown. 0.98

01:11:06.000 You said that, and I know. 0.99

01:11:09.000 You said that, and I go, oh yeah, he's the governor.

01:11:11.000 Oh yeah, I forgot.

01:11:12.000 Sometimes that's a good sign.

01:11:14.000 Well, he used to be the governor a long time ago.

01:11:16.000 Everybody knows Christie's the governor of New Jersey, and he ain't so popular anymore.

01:11:21.000 But he was a governor, and he was an interesting candidate for president in the 1980s, right?

01:11:26.000 Was it the 80s or the 90s?

01:11:27.000 The 80s or 92, maybe?

01:11:28.000 What year was it?

01:11:29.000 Might have been 92, the year that Clinton beat everybody else off.

01:11:33.000 It was a long-ass time ago, and they were calling him Moonbeam, Governor Moonbeam, and they were making fun of him.

01:11:39.000 But he had some unique ideas when it came to running for president.

01:11:42.000 I actually thought he was a really interesting candidate back then.

01:11:45.000 I remember that.

01:11:46.000 I remember that.

01:11:47.000 And I actually, I mean, from New York, you know, it's funny.

01:11:49.000 When I bumped in on a plane, we're chatting, and then we're making chit-chat as the plane lands, and he goes, how's that New York governor of yours doing, Cuomo?

01:11:56.000 And I say, he's kind of like you.

01:11:58.000 He's a pretty good governor overall, but he stinks on the things that matter when it comes to drug policy.

01:12:03.000 And actually not all those things.

01:12:04.000 Did you say that to his face?

01:12:05.000 I said it to his face. 0.99

01:12:06.000 Were you ready to get hit? 0.95

01:12:07.000 No, he laughed. 0.94

01:12:07.000 He laughed? 0.94

01:12:08.000 Let's say he smiled.

01:12:10.000 He smiled.

01:12:11.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:12:12.000 No comment, though?

01:12:12.000 No, I've got to tell you, Joe.

01:12:13.000 You want to see something ugly, go on YouTube and type in the words, rude debate, or type in the words, really rude debate.

01:12:19.000 And what pops up is me and Jerry Brown pummeling one another on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!

01:12:24.000 show.

01:12:25.000 In 2008, when we had a ballot initiative that would have been the biggest prison reform ballot initiative in the history of America, and Jerry Brown was then the Attorney General, and he did everything he could to kill it.

01:12:36.000 And so we just went at it one day.

01:12:38.000 About what?

01:12:39.000 What's his rationalization?

01:12:40.000 I think at that point, he wanted to run for governor.

01:12:42.000 He wanted to have the prison guards behind him.

01:12:45.000 The Prison Guards Union was making very clear that if they were going to be supported, he had to block this.

01:12:48.000 They got every former governor and governor and gubernatorial candidates to get up and stand up against this.

01:12:54.000 I got to tell you, if California passed that ballot initiative, Prop 5, back in 2008, it would have solved the big part of the prison problem in this state at that time.

01:13:02.000 That seems like...

01:13:03.000 I hear stuff like that.

01:13:04.000 I feel like it's treasonous.

01:13:06.000 I really do.

01:13:07.000 When I feel like a guy is doing for his own benefit, trying to block something that would be beneficial to people, especially recognizing that we have a huge issue with the prison industrial complex in this country, and the idea that we had privatized prisons in the first place, the idea that someone's profiting off of putting people in jail,

01:13:24.000 and the idea that they're actively lobbying to make sure that there's more laws in place that are going to incarcerate people so that they can make more money, the idea that that's illegal, that drives I gotta tell you, between the prison guards union on the one hand and the private prison corporations on the other,

01:13:41.000 I mean, just thank God they hate one another, the prison guards unions and the private prison corporations, because those guys have just been venal in that regard.

01:13:48.000 It's just money, man.

01:13:49.000 It's just money.

01:13:49.000 Whenever you get money involved in anything, when you get money involved in pharmaceutical industries, when you get money involved in the marijuana thing with these five different corporations that are going to control all the pot, money.

01:14:01.000 It's fucking money. 0.99

01:14:01.000 People trying to get more money. 0.99

01:14:03.000 It is, but the basic idea, Joe, where you were saying before that you have a prison guards union that needs to keep the prisons full in order to pad their overtime pay, or that you have a prison corporations that are making money if more people get incarcerated,

01:14:19.000 and they'll end up becoming advocates for laws that lock up more people, or advocates for opposing the reform of laws that are blocking up too many people. 0.80

01:14:26.000 Look, being a prison guard is a shitty job. 0.91

01:14:28.000 What those dudes need to do is grow weed. 1.00

01:14:31.000 That's what they should do.

01:14:32.000 You want to know something interesting?

01:14:33.000 That's a great job.

01:14:33.000 Prison Guards Union did not oppose the Marijuana Legalization Initiative in 2010. Really?

01:14:38.000 Yeah, and I think the reason is, I think there's two reasons.

01:14:41.000 I think one is, marijuana prohibition sends a lot of people to local jails, but not that many to state prison.

01:14:47.000 But the second reason is, if you're a prison guard and you're living in the middle of God knows where, you know, California, surrounded by nothingness, what do you want to do when you get home from work?

01:14:56.000 You want to get high.

01:14:57.000 Exactly, you know?

01:14:59.000 In fact, my guess is the Prison Guards Union is like anybody else right now.

01:15:02.000 They probably got members of their union who are medical marijuana patients and dealing with state laws that probably prohibit their using marijuana.

01:15:09.000 Do you think that with the current climate that we have with social media and the ability to distribute information and when outrageous laws are trying to get passed, you can tweet them and Facebook them and people find out about them and there's online petitions.

01:15:26.000 Do you think that this...

01:15:29.000 Is lending itself more to transparency and this transparency is beneficial to getting these more rational laws passed or more rational ideas promoted?

01:15:40.000 It's a great question.

01:15:41.000 I think it leans in our favor.

01:15:43.000 It's not the cure-all.

01:15:45.000 It means that the ability of young people to express themselves to legislators, the fact that more and more legislators pay attention to Facebook and Twitter and things like that, I think that's generally good for us.

01:16:13.000 An absolute humanitarian and social and racial nightmare, right? 0.99

01:16:18.000 So we see all of that happening.

01:16:20.000 We see bills being introduced to reducing the prison population in the states and at congressional level.

01:16:25.000 And then a new drug scare pops up.

01:16:27.000 All of a sudden...

01:16:28.000 It's flaca or bath salts or synthetic cannabis or blah, blah, blah.

01:16:32.000 And then there's this knee-jerk reaction, like, you know, criminalize first, ask questions later, right?

01:16:37.000 And that's the thing we're still dealing with, that people will begin to come to their senses about more sensible policies, and then they get scared.

01:16:45.000 And when they get scared, they do dumb things and pass bad laws.

01:16:49.000 That's interesting, because things like bath salts only exist because what we would call, quote-unquote, legitimate drugs are illegal.

01:16:56.000 So you find a workaround What's the market for synthetic cannabis?

01:17:01.000 Most of that has to do with the fact that people are worried about drug testing for marijuana.

01:17:05.000 God, all of it.

01:17:06.000 All of it.

01:17:07.000 Nobody would choose. 0.98

01:17:08.000 If you had a choice between regular pot or synthetic, whatever the fuck it is, what is that stuff anyway? 0.98

01:17:13.000 What is it even coming from? 0.97

01:17:14.000 You know, it's either synthetic cannabinoids, or maybe it's...

01:17:17.000 There's also, I think, cathinone, which is the ingredient that's in kat, you know, the thing they chew in East Africa and Yemen. 0.98

01:17:25.000 That's like an amphetamine.

01:17:27.000 It's a stimulant.

01:17:28.000 I mean, it's sort of like used the way that Indians chew coca in Bolivia and Peru and Colombia.

01:17:31.000 So when it's done in the chewing the leaf, it's fairly innocuous.

01:17:36.000 When you extract the chemical, you can then make it into something much more potent and much more problematic.

01:17:41.000 Oh, see, I was under the impression that even chewing the leaf had more of an amphetamine-like effect.

01:17:46.000 It is.

01:17:47.000 But same thing like chewing coca leaf, right?

01:17:49.000 Chewing coca leaf releases its slow drip of cocaine into the system.

01:17:54.000 But it's basically almost a healthy form of cocaine consumption.

01:17:58.000 Yeah.

01:17:58.000 Isn't that funny?

01:17:59.000 Yeah.

01:17:59.000 It's hilarious that the leaves itself, like, chewing the leaves, like, I have a friend who was recently in Peru, and they would all do it.

01:18:07.000 They'd give you, like, a bag of it, and they were on these hikes, and they would chew it, and I'd be like, what was it like?

01:18:11.000 He's like, well, it's like coffee, but better.

01:18:13.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:18:14.000 And it actually has, like, flavonoids in it, and, you know, like, vegetable proteins, or, you know, what are the properties of vegetables that are healthy, like...

01:18:25.000 Phytonutrients like different like it's actually good for you.

01:18:28.000 You're chewing green vegetables 20 years ago the World Health Organization organized a global study of coca and cocaine they had experts from 19 countries and after this extensive survey what they found were two things one was that the vast majority of people who use cocaine sniff cocaine whatever did not have a problem with it were not addicted to it even though there was obviously a minority who had a big problem and The second thing they found was that the chewing of coca leaf by the Indians probably had a net benefit from a health perspective for exactly the reasons

01:18:58.000 you're talking about.

01:18:59.000 There were vitamins in the leaves that they were consuming.

01:19:02.000 When you chew coca leaf during the day, you're consuming essentially the equivalent of a few lines of cocaine, which over the course of a day is like having a few cups of coffee in a way, right?

01:19:12.000 And what they found is the only downside was that to release the cocaine from the coca leaf, you had to add a little lime, and the lime could hurt, I think, something in the cheek.

01:19:20.000 The enamel in the teeth, too, right?

01:19:22.000 Something like that, yeah.

01:19:23.000 There's an issue with people that chew coca leaves all the time, they have these rotten-looking teeth.

01:19:28.000 Yeah, that may be from the Lyme.

01:19:30.000 I don't know.

01:19:31.000 It may just be that they generally have bad, you know, teeth hygiene in those parts.

01:19:36.000 It's just like people say about meth mouth and losing your teeth.

01:19:38.000 That's not about methamphetamine per se.

01:19:41.000 It's that methane sort of, you know, reduces the moisture in your mouth.

01:19:45.000 And so you have to take extra special care of your teeth if you're using amphetamine with any regularity.

01:19:50.000 And most people know that people taking amphetamine aren't taking extra special care of anything.

01:19:55.000 Well, the funny thing is this.

01:19:56.000 If you look at the 10 to 20 million kids, teenage boys in America taking Ritalin or these other things so they can focus better in school, some of them being prescribed it appropriately, others not, that's essentially the same as amphetamine or methamphetamine.

01:20:09.000 Isn't that crazy?

01:20:10.000 And the methamphetamine that people are smoking and getting in trouble with, if you take that in an oral form, like a pill, it's essentially indistinguishable from the Ritalin the kids are taking in schools.

01:20:19.000 You know, I was reading an article on sugar and the negative aspects of sugar, of processed sugar, and how much of it is in our diets and how much of it is in things that you don't even consider.

01:20:29.000 And that's really essentially the same thing when you're talking about extracting it from fruits.

01:20:33.000 Because everybody agrees that eating fruits is healthy.

01:20:35.000 And that's, you know, I mean, when you're eating bananas and you're eating apples and oranges, why does it taste good?

01:20:41.000 Well, you know...

01:20:42.000 There's sugar in it.

01:20:43.000 Natural sugars.

01:20:44.000 But those natural sugars, when you get them in that form with the fiber, with the plant itself, with the vegetable itself, is actually good for you.

01:20:51.000 It's actually good.

01:20:52.000 Same as the coca leaves.

01:20:53.000 The three most powerful drugs known to humankind?

01:20:55.000 Sugar, fat, salt.

01:20:56.000 Sugar, fat, salt.

01:20:57.000 Sugar, fat and salt, yeah.

01:20:59.000 And that the ability of the sort of food producing corporations and their, you know, science and their ability to produce products that kind of, you know, hit that part of the brain in a way that sort of is beyond your capacity.

01:21:11.000 When they look at the explosion of obesity and people being overweight in America and many other parts of the world, part of that is about the parts ability of food producing companies to produce products that hit that part of the brain.

01:21:22.000 I remember Chris Rock, he at one point doing a routine, and he was talking about Krispy Kreme donuts.

01:21:28.000 And he goes, I found the secret ingredient of Krispy Kreme donuts.

01:21:33.000 Crack cocaine, right?

01:21:34.000 But in point of fact, if you think about it, I remember walking past the Krispy Kreme donut outlet when they first opened up, and you could not walk past it without this part of your brain twitching.

01:21:43.000 In the same way that somebody who's addicted to drugs gets a twitch when all of a sudden they smell or see that drug in place.

01:21:49.000 So the power of those substances, their psychoactive properties, we're used to them.

01:21:54.000 These are powerful drugs we know and love.

01:21:56.000 But in point of fact, if you ask what's doing more harm to the health of Americans today, sugar, refined sugar, or cocaine or heroin, could well be refined sugar.

01:22:08.000 Well, there's an article, like I said, that I was reading that was...

01:22:11.000 They were making the argument that it's a toxin.

01:22:14.000 They were saying, essentially, sugar is a very common toxin that people consume.

01:22:18.000 But as you say, when it's consumed in natural forms, or for that matter, consumed in moderation, no big deal.

01:22:24.000 But when you're taking large amounts, we see all the...

01:22:27.000 Cereal and drinks and...

01:22:29.000 Yeah, I mean, just what you get in a glass of Coca-Cola, that's way more sugar than you're supposed to have in your day.

01:22:35.000 Yeah.

01:22:35.000 And it's in a Coke.

01:22:36.000 One Coke.

01:22:37.000 And how many people have three, four Cokes throughout the day? 1.00

01:22:39.000 And you see these people with their guts, and they have all these issues with their body, and your face is fucking fat. 0.99

01:22:45.000 Like, what is that? 0.99

01:22:46.000 Well, you're taking in too much sugar, way too much.

01:22:49.000 Yeah.

01:22:49.000 You look at people from the early 1900s, what they looked like.

01:22:53.000 I mean, obviously a lot of that is refrigeration.

01:22:55.000 They didn't have as much food.

01:22:56.000 People were much smaller then because it was literally malnutrition.

01:23:01.000 It's a common aspect.

01:23:02.000 We've gone completely the other way.

01:23:03.000 Now we have enormous human beings.

01:23:05.000 People are way bigger than ever.

01:23:06.000 The It's a Small World ride in Disneyland had to be...

01:23:09.000 They had to carve their trench deeper.

01:23:11.000 They had to shut down the ride and carve their trench deeper.

01:23:14.000 I was at Disneyland the other day, and I was with my daughters and their friend.

01:23:18.000 So there was three little girls and me.

01:23:21.000 But we couldn't sit in the same row because you can't have more than three people because they've got this thing.

01:23:27.000 I'm like, I weigh more than the three of them do together.

01:23:30.000 Like, this is crazy.

01:23:31.000 Like, you can't sit with them?

01:23:33.000 When are the airlines going to adjust the width of the seats to accommodate this thing?

01:23:36.000 No kidding.

01:23:37.000 I travel a lot, and my one nightmare is sitting next to somebody who's just kind of double-sized, and all of a sudden part of them's in my seat.

01:23:44.000 How about triple?

01:23:45.000 I mean, my friend Ralphie Mae is a stand-up comedian.

01:23:48.000 I don't know if he flies first class, but even if he does, it's not first class enough. 0.99

01:23:52.000 He's 500 fucking pounds. 0.99

01:23:54.000 I don't know how, I literally don't know how he does it. 0.99

01:23:56.000 Although I did read that the country's turning the corner on this, that it's actually beginning to come down.

01:24:00.000 Really?

01:24:01.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:24:01.000 Because the fat people are dying. 0.98

01:24:03.000 I think the message is beginning to sink in. 0.78

01:24:06.000 Really?

01:24:06.000 Because, you know, some of it is just a matter of just kind of being a little more conscious, you know?

01:24:11.000 I mean, that whole supersize me stuff and all this kind of stuff.

01:24:14.000 But once you get that big, it's way past that.

01:24:18.000 That's lap band stuff.

01:24:19.000 Well, Ralphie's had a couple of surgeries.

01:24:21.000 I think he's had at least two of those lap band things and he blows through them.

01:24:24.000 I know several people who've had that operation broke whatever they fixed.

01:24:31.000 You know, like they shrink your stomach down and then you wind up having to go back and having another operation because you're stretching this tiny new stomach out too much.

01:24:41.000 Because it's a psychological issue more than it is even a physical issue.

01:24:46.000 It's the same thing when you're talking about people that abuse marijuana. 0.99

01:24:49.000 Well, is it marijuana that's causing you to do that, or is it some underlying trauma that you're trying to smother with food, with sugar, with pot, with alcohol, with whatever the fuck it is? 0.94

01:25:00.000 It seems like this psychological issue is as much of a factor as the physical addiction. 0.90

01:25:06.000 There can be no doubt there are physical addictions to food and sugar, but what is really going on there that's overwhelming your life and making you indulge in it?

01:25:16.000 What some people would say, and I think there's really something to this, is that if we have an epidemic of anything in our country and maybe in many modern societies, it's pain.

01:25:28.000 And it's a combination of pain that sometimes manifests physically, but actually has to do with emotional pain and a sense of emptiness, and that food and psychoactive drugs are ways of filling this sort of stuff.

01:25:40.000 I mean, I will tell you that we were talking about, you know, back pain and all this sort of stuff before and about the overuse of opioids.

01:25:47.000 Probably back in the early 90s, two things happened to me in short order that really affected, really powerfully affected my understanding of the mind-body relationship.

01:25:56.000 The first one was doing MDMA for the first time.

01:25:58.000 And that was sort of just kind of not just mind opening, but opening of my consciousness around mind-body consciousness.

01:26:04.000 But the second one was I had gone through three terrible episodes of back pain and sciatica.

01:26:11.000 And, you know, I got MRIs and CAT scans, and I had the herniated discs, the L4-L5, L5-S1, the whole sort of thing.

01:26:17.000 I was 48 hours away from being operated on, you know, and surgery was risky.

01:26:22.000 And then I called a friend of mine, Andy Weil, Dr. Andrew Weil, who's a well-known integrative medicine guy, and he said, don't get the surgery.

01:26:29.000 He said, go see this doctor, this guy named John Sarno at the NYU Institute.

01:26:33.000 You know what I'm talking about?

01:26:35.000 And Sarno's theory was all of this stuff about herniated disc causing lower back pain and leg pain and radiating down. 0.99

01:26:42.000 He goes, it's overwhelmingly bullshit.

01:26:44.000 And his theory is that what's really going on is that there's nothing physically wrong with your body, that there's underlying emotional anger, angst, whatever it might be, and that your brain plays a trick by turning this emotional pain into physical pain. 0.99

01:26:58.000 And it does that through a process of reducing the flow of blood around those nerves and muscles, etc.

01:27:03.000 So without going on with this, this approach, Sarno approach, worked for me.

01:27:07.000 I went from having this horrific pain to sort of coming out of it very quickly, being able to pick up my little daughter again, do the sports I used to do, and seeing myself as having a totally healthy back.

01:27:19.000 That it's not just lower back pain and sciatica.

01:27:21.000 This is not just faith healing.

01:27:24.000 His stuff is 90% supported by the science on this stuff, more than any other theory of this stuff.

01:27:31.000 But his thing is that a lot of pain is probably underlying emotional pain being turned into physical pain.

01:27:37.000 And then we deal with that through food, through alcohol, through opiates, whatever it might be.

01:27:41.000 And the reason why we land up getting in such trouble with drugs or with food is because we're trying to address this underlying almost existential pain, not by dealing with what's really causing it, but by trying to feed it things that we think will cover it over.

01:27:55.000 Now, if Sarno's right, and I can't prove he's right, but based upon my own personal experience and my reading and my understanding of what's going on with drugs and food in this country, I think there's a lot there.

01:28:06.000 Well, Sarno's certainly has some really good points, but there are definitely some physical aspects to numbness and bulging discs impeding on nerves and atrophy, like atrophied limbs, which is a big problem with athletes that have nerve issues where bulging discs push down on nerves and it actually cuts the nerve supply to the muscles themselves and cause them to atrophy.

01:28:27.000 That's real. 0.99

01:28:28.000 That's all real shit. 1.00

01:28:29.000 Injuries are real. 0.99

01:28:30.000 I think it's very important, though, that you recognize, and that everybody hearing this recognizes, that there are legitimate injuries that you have where your discs bulge out and impinge on nerves, and you need to get that treated.

01:28:43.000 And there's a bunch of different ways to treat that that don't involve surgery.

01:28:47.000 Yoga's one of them.

01:28:48.000 Yoga's a really good one.

01:28:49.000 Another one is decompression, because I've gone through all this.

01:28:53.000 I've had some serious bulging disc injuries from jujitsu, and I've had MRIs that show this issue, and I've dealt with all of it without surgery.

01:29:02.000 So it can be done, but I think it's important to see.

01:29:05.000 There are people that have legitimate injuries.

01:29:08.000 Yeah, no question about it.

01:29:09.000 I think even Sarno would say there are people who have legitimate injuries.

01:29:12.000 How did you hurt yours?

01:29:13.000 Well, that's the whole thing.

01:29:15.000 See, part of what Sarno points out is that now that we have MRIs and CAT scans being done commonly in our society, that if you take 100 people who are showing that they have herniated discs, right, and you have 100 people who are showing no herniated discs, you'll have the same incidence of back pain.

01:29:32.000 What he'll show is that the evidence that when you see that, that people assume there's a causal relationship between that MRI or CAT scan of the herniated disc and that lower back pain.

01:29:41.000 Now, it could be that you've had a serious injury, right?

01:29:43.000 You've been hit by a car, you've been in a sports injury, where there really is something going on there.

01:29:47.000 But for many people, There's not a serious injury.

01:29:50.000 There's some little thing that kind of triggers it, but then somehow it transforms in this.

01:29:54.000 And then he looks at people who live in other societies where lower back pain and sciatica are not sort of accepted reasons for missing days of work or all this sort of stuff.

01:30:02.000 And he finds much lower incidence of these pain, right?

01:30:05.000 And the same thing, look at the carpal tunnel thing.

01:30:07.000 What's that about?

01:30:08.000 I mean, people have been using typewriters forever and ever and ever.

01:30:11.000 And all of a sudden we have this epidemic of this thing, right?

01:30:13.000 And then somehow that epidemic begins to fade and is replaced by something else.

01:30:17.000 Well, let's hold on a second there, because carpal tunnel is real, and one of the reasons for carpal tunnel is repetitive stress.

01:30:23.000 And repetitive stress causes inflammation, and inflammation locks up.

01:30:26.000 When you're forced to sit at a keyboard in the same position over and over again and repeatedly do the same exercises, you absolutely do put undue stress on your hands and on your wrists.

01:30:35.000 And if you're not prepared for it, if your body's not conditioned and you're not a rigorous person, you can have real issues with it.

01:30:42.000 My mom had to have surgery for carpal tunnel. 1.00

01:30:45.000 I mean, it's legitimate.

01:30:46.000 But then raise the question, we had in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, tens of millions of American, mostly women, who were typing eight hours a day, 12 hours a day.

01:30:55.000 Well, first of all, you couldn't type as fast because there was a whole reason why the QWERTY method was invented to keep the keys from binding up because now we don't need that because you have your fingers just gently touch these things.

01:31:06.000 You can do it really quickly.

01:31:07.000 The other thing is diet.

01:31:09.000 There's a lot of inflammation promoting foods, or foods rather, that cause inflammation.

01:31:15.000 And that's just a fact.

01:31:16.000 Sugar is a big one.

01:31:17.000 Alcohol is a big one.

01:31:18.000 Processed flours, wheats, like things your body has to break down, which breaks down to sugar.

01:31:24.000 Like there's this big thing in this country like gluten free this, gluten free that.

01:31:28.000 What it is, gluten, there are people that have gluten intolerances, celiac diseases, things along those lines.

01:31:35.000 People have wheat intolerances.

01:31:36.000 But I think what a lot of it is, is just sugar.

01:31:39.000 Because if you're eating bread, your body breaks that stuff down, processed flours, directly to sugar. 0.99

01:31:45.000 Bread and pasta, all that white stuff, that shit's not natural. 0.99

01:31:50.000 You're breaking it down. 0.99

01:31:51.000 Your body takes that bleached, processed flour, and it converts it directly to sugar, and sugar causes inflammation.

01:31:57.000 And that's a huge issue with people.

01:31:59.000 Yeah.

01:32:00.000 I'm no expert on all that sort of stuff, Joe, so I don't know.

01:32:02.000 I'll say that my takeaway from going through that pain experience and all the reading I've done on this thing is that when it comes to treating certain forms of chronic pain like this, that the approach that works best is the one that one most believes in.

01:32:16.000 Whether it's chiropractic, whether it's yoga, whether it's Sarno, whether it's surgery, the reason why surgery tends to have the most immediate benefit right away is because surgery is effectively the most powerful placebo there is.

01:32:30.000 But when you see research that's showing that three years after people who have had back surgery are as likely to have a back problem as the people who did not have the surgery, you have to start questioning the evidence around some of that surgery.

01:32:40.000 Well, actually, it's because of lifestyle choices.

01:32:42.000 I mean, if you think about a person who has surgery for a back issue and then three years later they have more issues, most likely they're living their life in the exact same way, which means they're putting the same stresses on their body they were doing before, like sitting at a desk all day or doing something, like you're picking stuff up.

01:32:58.000 Folks that work in the warehouses and things along those lines, you have to pick stuff up all the time and your body's not conditioned for it, so you have repetitive stress in that regard.

01:33:06.000 There's a lot of issues.

01:33:07.000 You know, you may be right, that could be it, and that certainly can trigger the pain, but I'm gonna tell you, having been through the Sarno experience and have met many people since that for whom it worked, I think, and because the Sarno approach, if it works for you, is one where you get to see your body as whole once again and not as vulnerable,

01:33:27.000 and because it pushes you to deal with underlying emotional stuff that may be driving some of this physical pain, I mean, for all those reasons, I think—my view is, when people ask me, and I'll say, read Sarno's book, you know, on back pain, right, or healing back pain, and I'll say, if it doesn't make sense to you,

01:33:42.000 try something else.

01:33:43.000 But the thing about the Sarno thing is, if it does work for you, it's in some respects the most miraculous of all time.

01:33:49.000 Well, I think the Sarno approach is a great approach, don't get me wrong, but I don't think they're mutually exclusive to taking care of your body in a physical sense.

01:33:55.000 I think that most people just don't take care of their body in a physical sense.

01:33:59.000 They don't exercise.

01:34:00.000 I think exercise and especially treating your core as if it is the foundation of your body, something that supports you all day long, your back.

01:34:08.000 You know, there's very few people work out their back in a sense of like long static exercises like yoga where you're holding poses for 30 seconds.

01:34:17.000 You know, and doing one after the other and doing it over a course of like a night.

01:34:20.000 It's not fun, like you said.

01:34:21.000 You can't get into it because you don't find it enjoyable.

01:34:23.000 But the benefits of doing that, man, I'm telling you, I just got into it about less than a year ago.

01:34:29.000 I've been doing it on a weekly basis, like fairly regularly.

01:34:32.000 The benefits are tremendous.

01:34:34.000 I mean, your back just feels way better.

01:34:36.000 It just feels like it's more vigorous.

01:34:40.000 With core exercises.

01:34:41.000 Well, with yoga, with yoga exercises.

01:34:44.000 Yoga, a big part of what yoga works is, you know, what we call our core.

01:34:47.000 I mean, it's literally your spine, you know, from your neck down to your back.

01:34:52.000 And that's a big part of what you're holding these poses and, you know, you have to hold your body like in a straight line.

01:34:59.000 What are you doing?

01:35:00.000 You're supporting everything with your back and with your spine.

01:35:03.000 It's not like lifting weights.

01:35:05.000 It's a different sort of thing where you're Holding your own body weight.

01:35:09.000 Well, I'll tell you something.

01:35:10.000 To return to where our conversation got going, one of the great things about living in Manhattan is we walk.

01:35:16.000 And the result is that there's lower incidence of obesity in much of Manhattan than there is in most of the United States.

01:35:23.000 Makes sense.

01:35:23.000 And that walking is one of the safest, even for people who don't want to take out the time to exercise because walking is the way we get places.

01:35:30.000 It turns out that we end up to live relatively healthy lives in a place like Manhattan, notwithstanding all the craziness.

01:35:35.000 Think about it.

01:35:35.000 I mean, what are you doing when you're walking?

01:35:37.000 What do you weigh, 180 pounds or something like that?

01:35:39.000 You're carrying that 180 pounds around, whereas that amount of energy and that amount of calorie expenditure is lost if you're sitting in the car, driving to work, getting in an elevator, going to your office, sitting in your cubicle.

01:35:52.000 All that's lost.

01:35:53.000 All that's lost.

01:35:54.000 And it's probably thousands of calories a day.

01:35:58.000 You're also making me think about, when I remember my experience with MDMA, you know, how there are some people when they do MDMA and they just like to sit and get in a place.

01:36:09.000 And other people like me just want to move, move around, you know, get the energy going and such, you know.

01:36:14.000 I also found sometimes, you know, we talk about going back to the whole mushroom thing.

01:36:18.000 I remember feeling, especially, sometimes the mushrooms, you take them and they start to come on.

01:36:22.000 And I can find, like, it's like this energy force going into your body.

01:36:25.000 And in some ways, the best way to deal with that stuff is movement.

01:36:29.000 It's running.

01:36:29.000 It's swinging around.

01:36:30.000 It's, you know, moving around.

01:36:32.000 Like, opening up your body to let that powerful energy in.

01:36:34.000 Yeah, I think there's a lot of tension that people carry around their bodies where their bodies just aren't being used correctly or they're bunched up or they're not stretched out and they're confined and bound up and they have poor posture and then the stress of life and bills and all the things that are weighing down on you.

01:36:49.000 I think in that sense Sarno's got an excellent point that pressure and stress and pain and just frustration just causes you to be tense and everything is fucked up and if you can address that and sort of relax a little bit, Just that alone just will alleviate a lot of tension,

01:37:05.000 and that's a lot of what people carry around them.

01:37:07.000 That's also a lot of what people like about pot.

01:37:10.000 Like you said, how we like to smoke pot and stretch out.

01:37:13.000 What's going on there?

01:37:13.000 You're releasing.

01:37:15.000 You're releasing tension.

01:37:16.000 You smoke pot.

01:37:17.000 Man, I love doing that before a show.

01:37:19.000 I like smoking a little weed before a show and stretching out.

01:37:22.000 It's one of my favorite things to do.

01:37:24.000 Just sit in a dressing room before I go on and just stretch.

01:37:27.000 Warm up, loosen up my back, stretch my back out, stretch my body out.

01:37:32.000 It's something that we don't do enough. 1.00

01:37:35.000 Your meat vehicle, move that fucker around. 1.00

01:37:38.000 I know, I know, it's true. 1.00

01:37:39.000 Look, I mean, I work in an office a lot of the time, and it's just so easy.

01:37:42.000 You get in that zone, you're in front of that computer, that's what you're doing, you know, and all of a sudden you realize your shoulders are gone.

01:37:47.000 No, you're exactly right.

01:37:48.000 When you're carrying, especially if you have bad posture, you're carrying it.

01:37:51.000 Like if you're sitting, like when I had my back injury, which was sports related, but when I started getting treatment for it, I realized there's a lot of other underlying issues.

01:38:01.000 And one of them is, if you're sitting in a desk and you have poor posture, the strain, there's been a lot of studies done on this, the strain is in a very specific area.

01:38:10.000 So instead of being straight, where your back Is carrying the weight in an even form through, you know, the top of your head all the way down to your lower back.

01:38:20.000 You're causing this undue spot, this weird spot in the middle by slumping where you get all this pressure in this one area that really shouldn't be there.

01:38:29.000 And over time, like cab drivers that have a thick wallet and they keep it in their back pocket and they sit on there, they develop bulging discs in their back.

01:38:38.000 It's just the slow water that causes the rock to go smooth.

01:38:44.000 I mean, for me, the thing I've learned from so many people, and it's basically the kind of common ingredient in almost all spiritual practices, meditative practice, is just simple deep breathing, right?

01:38:55.000 Because just having to fill your lungs, it just forces you to have to sit up all of a sudden.

01:39:01.000 If you want to fill your lungs, and that breathing, just the slow breathing gets one to focus, To center.

01:39:08.000 I mean, I know that when I'm stressed, oftentimes rather than just grabbing a drug, because I think that's the wrong way to use drugs.

01:39:13.000 Just trying to remember, take a breath.

01:39:16.000 Try to take five breaths, ten breaths, slowly, in and out.

01:39:19.000 And that's one of the best centering things there are.

01:39:22.000 Well, you know, I've been teaching that to my five-year-old.

01:39:25.000 I kind of taught her when she was three.

01:39:27.000 We started talking about it, like she would get upset, like something would happen, like she would, like, stub her toe, or not even like a big deal, like hurt, or something would, something would get her upset, and she would cry, and when she was crying, and then I felt down, and I'd be like, you gotta breathe in and breathe out.

01:39:44.000 Let's do this together.

01:39:45.000 We'll do it together, and I'd do it with her.

01:39:46.000 I'm like, take a breath.

01:39:50.000 It's hard for them because they're they're hyperventilating and but it made me realize like well That's a lot of people that go through that with issues in life You know you have some incredibly stressful issue and it just overwhelms you And you take this shallow panicky breath and you know It's one thing when a three-year-old doesn't know how to deal with you know hurting herself or falling down or whatever what is it made her upset but When an adult,

01:40:15.000 you know, gets to 50 years old and they still don't know how to deal with stress, it's kind of a tragedy.

01:40:21.000 Yeah.

01:40:21.000 It's like either you haven't...

01:40:22.000 Well, we don't really teach that in our society in any way.

01:40:25.000 You know, it's interesting, my niece has just started medical school and I was asking her what she was thinking, specialty she was thinking about, and I was saying to her that I think if I had ever decided to pursue medicine instead of what I did do, I think the single most fascinating area of medicine right now is pain management.

01:40:42.000 It is the most interdisciplinary of all areas because it requires you to understand physical pain, requires you to understand pharmaceuticals and, you know, biochemistry.

01:40:52.000 But it also requires that element of understanding things like breathing and exercise and the body.

01:40:58.000 And it's that area, I mean, the pain is such, physical pain is such an epidemic in America today for all these reasons.

01:41:07.000 You and I are giving different reasons and agreeing on a lot of it.

01:41:09.000 But I think that becoming a more thoughtful and sophisticated society in terms of how we deal with this, how we alleviate it, how we prevent it.

01:41:17.000 And doing so in a way in which the government is playing a positive role as opposed to a destructive role.

01:41:23.000 Because right now, right, the role of the government vis-a-vis physicians who want to properly deal with pain management is intimidating them and scaring them.

01:41:31.000 The way in which the pharmaceutical companies drive what drugs people have means that oftentimes people don't have access to the things they need.

01:41:38.000 Meanwhile, the failure to think about The importance of breathing in our society, of posture, the things you're talking about, exercise, is another element of all this sort of stuff.

01:41:47.000 And on some level, I think, you know, look, a lot of the drug problem has to do with issues of race and class and stuff like that, but a lot of it also has to do with this kind of pervasive sense of pain, physical and emotional pain, that people are trying to treat in all sorts of ways.

01:42:02.000 Yeah, I think you're right.

01:42:03.000 I think it's also the requirements of life are really unnatural.

01:42:08.000 The life that we've set up for ourselves, the requirements of managing bills and dealing with taxes and dealing with the stress of marriage and the nonsense that comes with divorce and the chaos that comes with all sorts of different aspects of our life.

01:42:23.000 It just seems just overwhelming.

01:42:25.000 And then the existential angst of your own mortality. 0.78

01:42:28.000 Compounding every day that the futility of getting up every morning when you want to stay in bed The alarm goes off hit that fucking button you get up and you put your fucking clothes on just like every other day And you drink your coffee and you do your rituals and you go to a job that you find unsatisfying That is the vast majority of Americans and I'm probably of people in the world I think that you live a fulfilling life. 0.88

01:42:51.000 You're doing what you enjoy doing, and I'm very lucky to feel the same way. 0.97

01:42:54.000 But I think that we're in the minority, and I think there's a large amount of people out there that are longing for something better than what they have.

01:43:01.000 Yeah.

01:43:02.000 Whether it's a better relationship, or it's a better connection to their family, or it's a better, some rewarding thing to do with their time.

01:43:08.000 Well, you see, I mean, part of that explains why more and more people are seeking out the church, whether it's evangelical churches or other types of things.

01:43:15.000 Is that true?

01:43:15.000 I think so.

01:43:16.000 I mean, look, you see those numbers growing, these megachurches that are happening, and you see other...

01:43:20.000 But I think that the numbers of people that are involved in organized religion are actually dropping.

01:43:24.000 I think the ones who are going to the conventional churches, the more mainstream churches and synagogues, that's what's dropping.

01:43:30.000 The ones who are being drawn to evangelical ones, the ones where they sort of are more attentive to bringing the spirit and the body into the practice of religion, right?

01:43:39.000 Many of these evangelical churches, you know, you dance, you move, you do all this sort of stuff.

01:43:44.000 I think people doing the same thing in the world that we know of psychedelics and doing these things.

01:43:48.000 People want to link their body, their mind, their spirit, community.

01:43:54.000 Look at millions of people, young people now, going to sort of the whole kind of dance world, the nightlife world, all that stuff.

01:44:01.000 Same thing, that kind of almost collective, quasi-religious, communitarian feeling of letting go in the company of others.

01:44:09.000 I think people are so much want and need that.

01:44:12.000 And it's a good thing for people to do that, to the extent it's not hurting other people or people not getting hurt in the process.

01:44:18.000 And that's another—one thing we started at Drug Policy Alliance is a whole project on trying to keep young people safe as they're in this whole nightlife situation.

01:44:25.000 Dance scene, right?

01:44:26.000 People are taking all these drugs, they're doing things, sometimes they're drinking too much, they're overheating, and people get hurt.

01:44:32.000 And the question is, young people going out and enjoying themselves for hours or days, listening to music, being one another, moving, drinking, and even doing mind-altering drugs can be a perfectly healthy and good and even liberating thing, good for their lives.

01:44:45.000 But we need to make sure it's being done safe.

01:44:48.000 That notion of making the Our society is as safe as possible for people to open up and let go.

01:44:55.000 Whether it's with or without drugs, I think is something we have to evolve towards.

01:44:59.000 I think you're dead right.

01:45:00.000 But I also think that the issue is that we haven't built a foundation of stability in these people up to this point where they're taking these drugs.

01:45:08.000 Exploratory journeys of the mind.

01:45:10.000 I mean their their foundation is fucked up there You know, there's so much going on outside of that they need to take care of before they just dive into the world of psychedelics That's one of the reasons why people have bad trips.

01:45:23.000 I mean what is a bad trip? 0.63

01:45:25.000 You're resisting all the things that these drugs are exposing you put these blinders on gone through this life and whether it's childhood trauma or You know, unfulfilled expectations that are haunting you, whatever it is that is causing the quote unquote bad trip,

01:45:40.000 a lot of what that is is resisting the message that these boundary dissolving experiences are giving you.

01:45:48.000 They're sending you as a message.

01:45:52.000 Inherently unhappily.

01:45:53.000 You're unhappy in almost like a cellular level and that it's not as simple as just like diving in and having a mushroom trip and it's all going to clear out.

01:46:03.000 You've got to deal with the foundation of your own personality.

01:46:06.000 Yeah, I agree.

01:46:08.000 The question is, how do we do that, really?

01:46:10.000 I don't know if we can, across the board.

01:46:12.000 When you look at, you know, now, I mean, look at younger people who are on the internet 24-7.

01:46:17.000 It's constant, you know.

01:46:20.000 Look, just stand on any corner and see the number of people walking around looking at their, you know, little gadget, looking at their Facebook, looking at this or whatever, right?

01:46:29.000 People are interacting with the world in an entirely different way.

01:46:31.000 Right?

01:46:32.000 And then, of course, the way society is evolving so quickly.

01:46:35.000 You know, entrepreneurial folks can thrive, but for huge numbers of people, there's no sense of security about what the economy, the society, is going to be like in the future.

01:46:44.000 I mean, we are kind of hurtling into the future.

01:46:47.000 Artificial intelligence is going all sorts of crazy places.

01:46:50.000 All sorts of jobs are being displaced by robotics and things like that.

01:46:54.000 So, you know, I'm talking with my daughter, who's now about to be 27, and, you know, the world is...

01:47:04.000 The pace of change is so remarkable in this regard, and there's so few guides, and the ability of the parental world to play a constructive role.

01:47:12.000 First of all, many parents aren't that good as parents, or they're not that good at helping young people, you know?

01:47:18.000 But beyond that, they're so disconnected sometimes from what's going on for, you know, kids growing up in a whole different way, right?

01:47:24.000 I think when I was growing up in the 60s, in the early 70s, you know, the pace of change was so much slower then than it is now, right?

01:47:32.000 I don't know what the cure to all that stuff is.

01:47:35.000 Yeah, I think we're gonna have to adapt to this new world where people are getting information at such a staggering rate that you gotta decide how to manage it.

01:47:43.000 And you know, some, like my friend Ari, Ari Shafir, he switched to a flip phone. 0.95

01:47:47.000 He's like, fuck this, I can't do this anymore. 0.95

01:47:49.000 Because he would say, he would tell me that he would get up in the morning and then he would spend like a half an hour going over Facebook and going over all this and that before he ever got anything done. 0.99

01:47:58.000 Now, he just gets up and does stuff. 0.99

01:48:00.000 And if he wants to take care of all his bullshit, he does it on a computer. 0.98

01:48:03.000 So he sits down, he says, okay, now I'm going to answer my emails. 0.99

01:48:07.000 Now I'm going to...

01:48:08.000 Instead of just constantly being attached to social media...

01:48:11.000 I had a weird experience.

01:48:12.000 I accidentally signed up for Facebook two weeks ago.

01:48:16.000 I had this public Facebook account, which my staff managed, but then my phone got lost.

01:48:21.000 I had to reset the whole thing, and I had to reset it.

01:48:25.000 My Spotify account was hooked up to my Facebook thing and password.

01:48:30.000 Next thing you know, bing, bing, bing.

01:48:31.000 All of a sudden, I created my own personal Facebook thing.

01:48:33.000 And so now I'm trying to figure out, what do I do with it?

01:48:35.000 So I friended a few people, a few people I work with, and we're all freaked out that the boss has friended them, you know?

01:48:41.000 And now I'm scrolling through, and I'm going, now I understand what people are looking at.

01:48:45.000 And, you know, you talk about sugar-fat salt?

01:48:48.000 Nothing more addictive than that little gadget there.

01:48:51.000 Yeah, it's very addictive.

01:48:52.000 I've backed off way hard over the last few months.

01:48:57.000 Over the last few months, I very rarely even go on my own message board.

01:49:01.000 I have a message board on my website that I've had since 1998, and I go on there occasionally and check to see what's going on in the news or what people are talking about or debating and this and that.

01:49:11.000 I find it to be, there's a massive requirement of time to check all these different things, to check Facebook and Twitter and then there's social media, there's websites that I visit, there's message boards that I visit, different websites that aggregate news stories and it's just too much.

01:49:30.000 I back way off of it over the last I try to stick with the discipline that there will be at least once or a few times a year where I will go into a total blackout on any communication using that gadget.

01:49:44.000 I did a vacation a few years ago for seven days where I did not pick up my laptop, computer, even my phone, you know, nothing, right?

01:49:54.000 And, you know, for the first day or two, my hand was, like, fidgeting, you know, like it was going through withdrawal from that whole sort of thing.

01:50:00.000 But I have to say, I got to day six, and I had achieved a level of calm that I associated with, like, you know, bodding surfing as a 12-year-old on the beach.

01:50:10.000 I mean, it was so, so good.

01:50:13.000 And I gotta tell you something.

01:50:14.000 I haven't done it since I did it for a few days over Christmas.

01:50:17.000 I am so looking forward to finding some days in the next week or two where I'm going to do that again.

01:50:22.000 Almost brings tears to my eyes when I think about that level of disconnection.

01:50:25.000 I think human beings need to do that.

01:50:29.000 Well, I certainly don't think that we're designed to deal with the influx of information and the opinions of other people thrown at you en masse like we get with social media.

01:50:41.000 I just think it's too much, and I think it's very addictive.

01:50:44.000 Communication is addictive.

01:50:45.000 You always think you're going to miss out on something.

01:50:48.000 There's going to be some new thing that comes out that you're not aware of.

01:50:52.000 And I think that managing that is really critical because we haven't developed to deal with that.

01:51:01.000 This is a completely new thing.

01:51:03.000 And I don't think we're designed, even media, I think just movies and songs.

01:51:08.000 There's a bunch of people running around out there that don't have a realistic view of human beings.

01:51:13.000 Because their view of human beings is based on heroes in movies and songs playing when people talk.

01:51:19.000 Everybody either acts nobly or they act obviously evil.

01:51:23.000 It's like these ideas of human beings are shaped by fiction.

01:51:27.000 And when people are doing that, you're getting, as opposed to reading, reading novels as I did when I was younger but barely do today, you get a much more deeper and nuanced sense of human beings by reading novels than you possibly can by watching a movie or by watching a thing, right?

01:51:41.000 So you're exactly right.

01:51:42.000 Same thing with body shapes, body consciousness, all the ways in which that's so screwed up in our society, once again shaped by the media.

01:51:48.000 I mean, I'm trying to do my few little disciplines, like trying not to look at my phone over the last hour before I go to sleep, because they say you sleep better if you don't do that.

01:51:58.000 You know, just trying to find some space, some time, trying to turn off the ringer, you know, more often.

01:52:04.000 Just some way of carving out that space.

01:52:06.000 Yeah, I think that that's a good thing.

01:52:08.000 It's a good thing to manage what's coming in.

01:52:11.000 It's a very good thing to manage what's coming in because you just can't rely on all these other people to have access and to be able to input into your own mind.

01:52:22.000 It's just too many.

01:52:23.000 There's too many people out there that want to...

01:52:24.000 First of all, how many people just want to bark at you to get attention? 0.99

01:52:28.000 If you were fucking doing your job, pot would already be legal. 1.00

01:52:31.000 And you read that, you're like, what the fuck, man? 1.00

01:52:32.000 I don't even know this guy. 0.99

01:52:33.000 And he's yelling at me that I'm not doing my job.

01:52:35.000 He doesn't know what I'm doing.

01:52:36.000 He doesn't even know me.

01:52:37.000 He doesn't want to know you.

01:52:39.000 What he wants is attention.

01:52:40.000 And he's using this as a vehicle, like a whiny baby, screaming out for attention.

01:52:45.000 And oftentimes that squeaky wheel does get the grease.

01:52:47.000 No, I say, I don't even read a lot of that stuff that shows up on various, you know, public outlets when I, when I speeches go up on YouTube or stuff like that.

01:52:54.000 You can.

01:52:55.000 But it's true.

01:52:56.000 The other thing, of course, there's a power dynamic here, which is that for people who work for somebody, the risk that we're moving into society where your boss or your employer expects you to be accessible.

01:53:08.000 So I let my staff all know at Derrick Halls the Alliance, if they get an email from me on a weekend, which they might because I sometimes work on weekends, there is no obligation and no expectation that they answer that thing until Monday.

01:53:19.000 Just so people know there's a sense of space.

01:53:22.000 I have a friend who goes to work on Monday, and his boss will get pissed at him if he doesn't answer emails from the night before.

01:53:30.000 Like, he'll get an email at night, and he's like, why didn't you respond to that email?

01:53:34.000 And he's like, look, I came home, I want to spend time with my family.

01:53:37.000 He's like, look, there's no excuse.

01:53:39.000 Check your email.

01:53:40.000 He's like, what the fuck kind of a job have I gotten? 0.99

01:53:42.000 That's not the definition of a civilized society. 0.99

01:53:45.000 And isn't that what's going on with drug testing?

01:53:46.000 Because if someone's telling you that you can't smoke a joint after work, what they're telling you is they own your body.

01:53:52.000 They own your body. 0.97

01:53:53.000 Because if you smoke a joint at 9 o'clock at night, and you go to work at 9 o'clock in the morning, guess what?

01:53:58.000 That joint's gone.

01:53:59.000 The effects don't linger.

01:54:02.000 Quite frankly, the employer has a greater basis if you come to work Monday night morning hungover.

01:54:07.000 Because that may affect- Of course.

01:54:09.000 That will.

01:54:09.000 If you've been up all night because you were in pain or having a fight with your wife or your kid was sick, that may affect work performance.

01:54:17.000 But the fact that you smoked a joint on a Saturday or did something else and you're fine on a Monday, none of their damn business. 0.81

01:54:22.000 This is ultimately about sovereignty of our own minds and bodies, right? 0.68

01:54:26.000 I mean, the core principle right here is that we are all sovereign over our own minds and bodies and that my boss, my government has no power to tell me what I do to my own body, you know, or my own mind so long as I am not hurting another soul.

01:54:39.000 That has to be the core principle of a free society.

01:54:42.000 Not only that, it's the same sort of argument in respect to doing crimes when you're on these drugs.

01:54:48.000 Like, the crimes themselves are the issue, and the punishment should be in relation to the crimes.

01:54:54.000 It should have absolutely nothing to do with what substance caused you to do the crimes.

01:54:59.000 Exactly.

01:54:59.000 My view on this thing is that if you use drugs and you don't hurt another soul, that's none of the government's business.

01:55:04.000 If you use drugs and you go out and hurt somebody, well, the fact that you use drugs or that you were addicted, you have to be held just as accountable.

01:55:14.000 Somebody's drug addiction cannot be an excuse that will allow them to do harm to others.

01:55:18.000 That said, and there's a little position in the middle, that if a judge, in his wisdom, or somebody else decides that you hurt this person and it was driven by your drug addiction and decides that you should go to some treatment program instead of jail because that's better for you and better for society, then that might be the reasonable compromise.

01:55:35.000 But ultimately, people need to be held responsible for their actions as it affects other people.

01:55:40.000 Yeah, that's very well put.

01:55:42.000 The reasonable compromise.

01:55:44.000 But it's very difficult to leave that in the hands of the judges, because when you let judges impose their own moral ideas and attach their own...

01:55:52.000 I mean, there's been so many instances just really recently, there was a guy who got in a fight with his girlfriend's ex-boyfriend and beat him up, and the judge told him that if he didn't want to go to jail, he had to marry the girl.

01:56:03.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:56:04.000 Like, who the fuck is this judge? 0.99

01:56:06.000 And here's another one where this young boy, he's 19 years old, he was on this social media application, I think it's called Hot or Not, where someone decides whether or not they think you're hot. 0.99

01:56:17.000 I've heard it, yeah. 0.74

01:56:18.000 So he contacts this girl, she's 17, goes and drives to her house, has sex with her. 0.95

01:56:23.000 Turns out she's 14. So now he's locked up, they put him in this database as a sex offender, I read about this.

01:56:31.000 Yeah, and one of the judge's statements is that sex should be something that people do when they're in love, and that it should be this very important thing, this sacred thing. 0.96

01:56:42.000 And you shouldn't be involved in these social media things where you just go around fucking each other. 1.00

01:56:48.000 Like, who the fuck is he? 0.99

01:56:50.000 I gotta tell you, for Drug Policy Alliance, the problem of drug court judges... 0.99

01:56:54.000 I mean, some of these guys are doing the Lord's work, but so many of them are simply imposing their own moralistic views about drug use.

01:57:00.000 They're telling people, okay, I won't send you to prison as long as you're clean and sober for the rest of your life, for as long as you're under my supervision.

01:57:06.000 And if somebody wants to smoke a joint, that then becomes a basis for taking away their freedom.

01:57:09.000 So there's something fundamentally wrong with assuming that judges who are not trained in these areas, who have their own biases and prejudices, should be determining how people live a life when they haven't done anything to hurt anybody else.

01:57:21.000 Well, it comes down to human beings being put in positions of power over other human beings.

01:57:27.000 And once you can dictate what happens to that person's freedom, that's an intoxicating feeling to a lot of these guys or gals.

01:57:35.000 And they just choose to impose their own viewpoints on that person because they can.

01:57:41.000 Because that's how they get their rocks off.

01:57:44.000 That's how they avoid their own existential angst.

01:57:47.000 That's how they avoid their own depression, by imposing power.

01:57:51.000 Over these other people.

01:57:52.000 That's Judge Judy, right? 0.57

01:57:53.000 I mean, that's that show.

01:57:55.000 It's horrible. 1.00

01:57:55.000 The whole show is she's a cunt and she's allowed to be. 1.00

01:57:58.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:57:58.000 The most venal of all the actors, but we're talking about the role in which money is driving the prison industrial complex and what you're saying about judges. 1.00

01:58:05.000 The worst of all the actors are the prosecutors.

01:58:08.000 Those guys, because it's all about power.

01:58:11.000 It's about interpersonal power.

01:58:13.000 It's about power within the criminal justice system.

01:58:15.000 For many of them, it's about making a name for themselves by beating up people and thereby running for politics.

01:58:21.000 And ultimately, it's not money in many cases.

01:58:24.000 It's about power.

01:58:26.000 Power in showing how effective you've been as a prosecutor.

01:58:30.000 Look at my record.

01:58:31.000 And in that sense, I liken it to sports.

01:58:33.000 I think the real problem with prosecution and even with police is that it becomes a winning and losing thing.

01:58:39.000 If the guy got off, you lost.

01:58:40.000 It's not that the guy was innocent.

01:58:42.000 It's not that you were incorrect in assuming that he had broken the law and should be punished by the laws of our society, by the rules that we've agreed to govern ourselves by.

01:58:50.000 No, no, no.

01:58:51.000 It's a game.

01:58:51.000 It's a game like basketball.

01:58:53.000 It's a point-driven game.

01:58:54.000 We've decided in America that we're going to have an adversarial system of justice, right?

01:58:58.000 Yes, that's a good way of putting it.

01:58:59.000 Right?

01:59:00.000 But what happens, of course, is that most of the power, unless you're rich, is in the hands of the government and the prosecutor.

01:59:06.000 It's why poor people are getting... 0.98

01:59:07.000 Why does America have the highest incarceration rate in the world?

01:59:11.000 Why do we have the highest incarceration rate of any democratic society in history?

01:59:15.000 Why do we lack up more black people at a rate that far exceeds the rates of incarceration in the Soviet gulags of the 30s, 40s, and 50s?

01:59:22.000 In part, it's because we have an adversarial system that's fundamentally broken, and where the cops and the prosecutors drive this thing overwhelmingly, and where if you are the typical person in that system who doesn't have money to hire a good lawyer, stuff like that, you are going to be reamed, and you're going to be caught in a system where you may never escape it.

01:59:40.000 America, we didn't used to be.

01:59:42.000 We had an incarceration rate that was basically at the world average for most of our history. 0.98

01:59:46.000 But in the last 40 years, we went just apeshit in terms of locking people up in this country, especially black people. 1.00

01:59:52.000 That's the thing we have to fight to pull back from. 0.95

01:59:55.000 That's where we have to undermine the power of the money-driven interests, the corporations and the prison guards unions.

02:00:00.000 It's where we have to challenge the abuse of power by judges and especially with prosecutors.

02:00:07.000 They have to be pulled back in a major way.

02:00:09.000 And the sheriffs, I should say.

02:00:11.000 Because in California, you've got the sheriffs who are the ones trying to build new jails and keep marijuana illegal and all this sort of stuff.

02:00:17.000 That gross engorgement of power in the hands of people whose job it is to take away people's freedom is And to use no judgment in the ways they do that, or minimal judgment, and the presumption that if you violate a law, you have to lose your freedom, that's what screwed things up so badly in our society.

02:00:33.000 That's the movement we're trying to build to end.

02:00:36.000 And on that, Joe, I've got to go to my next meeting.

02:00:38.000 Beautiful.

02:00:39.000 You nailed it.

02:00:39.000 Thank you, sir.

02:00:40.000 Really appreciate it.

02:00:41.000 Let's do this again.

02:00:41.000 When are you in town, often?

02:00:43.000 I come to town fairly often.

02:00:44.000 I may be back here in October with a ballot initiative in California coming up in 2016. So I'm here a lot.

02:00:50.000 Let's do it in October, man.

02:00:52.000 Come on back.

02:00:52.000 Let's work on that ballot initiative.

02:00:54.000 Let's get people active.

02:00:55.000 Sounds good, Joe.

02:00:55.000 Thank you, Ethan.

02:00:56.000 Really, really appreciate it, man.

02:00:57.000 Great to meet you.

02:00:58.000 Great to meet you, too.

02:00:59.000 Really appreciate it.

02:00:59.000 Thank you.

02:01:00.000 All right, fuckers. 1.00

02:01:01.000 See you soon. 1.00

02:01:02.000 That was fun.

02:01:03.000 That was great.

The Joe Rogan Experience - August 13, 2015

Joe Rogan Experience #683 - Ethan Nadelmann

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