Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1964 - Rick Doblin
Uploaded: 2023-03-31T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1964 - Rick Doblin' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-03-31. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1964 - Rick Doblin' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-03-31. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1964 - Rick Doblin

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Showing by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Hello, Rick. Good to see you again, my friend. How are you?
Yeah, I'm doing great. It was so nice to be with you a couple weeks ago.
Yeah, it was fun to have you at the club. You were there like one of the first
days.
Yeah, I think I saw the first event in the small room.
Yes. Yeah, did you see Dave Chappelle?
I did.
Yeah, that was the first one. Yeah, we had Dave there. He wanted to do that
room.
We opened it specifically for him. That was the first time we did a show there.
It was very exciting.
Yeah, I really liked having the opportunity to talk to him a little bit
afterwards and to listen to him.
It was hilarious.
Yeah, he's a big fan of what you guys are doing, as is everybody.
I think what you guys are doing at MAPS is one of the most important things for
society and culture
and just consciousness in general that's happening today.
I'm very, very happy that you're doing that.
Thank you. Yeah.
Yeah, I'm pretty extremely lucky that 51 years ago when I was 18 in 1972 and I
decided to focus
my life on psychedelics that now I'm 69 all these years later and it still
makes sense.
Well, back then it must have been a big risk because in the 1970s, when you
focused your
life on psychedelics, that was like right after that whole sweeping Schedule I
psychedelics act
was passed, right?
Yeah, that was in 1970. Yeah, things look grim.
Didn't look good.
Yeah, well, I was a draft resister.
I thought that I would serve my country by going to jail, which is kind of a
funny way
to say it.
But I had felt that I'm not a conscientious objector.
In order to do that, you have to be a pacifist.
And so I'm not a pacifist.
I think there are some times you need to fight and defend yourselves.
So the only options for me as I studied how to respond to Vietnam was to, I
didn't want
to pretend I had bone spurs or run away to Canada or anything like that.
And I studied Tolstoy and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance and decided that the
thing that I would
do would be to not register for the draft.
And I was paying taxes.
I had a Social Security number.
I had a driver's license.
I was in high school.
I figured the government knows who I am and knows where I am and knows my age.
And so I assumed that I would go to jail and that that would be a way to drain
the system
of energy and to register my protest that way.
Martin Luther King actually said a great thing.
He said the person that thinks the law is unjust and violates it and is willing
to suffer the consequences as an example to others about the unjust nature of
the law
actually has the highest respect for the law.
He was trying to reframe civil disobedience as patriotism.
And it made sense to me.
And so when I talked to my parents about it, they were like, well, okay, you
know, we don't
think you should go to Vietnam either.
We don't think it's in America's best interest.
But you're never going to be a doctor or lawyer.
My dad was a doctor because you'll be a felon.
And I'm like, that's a price I'll have to pay.
What am I going to do with my life?
I can't have a normal job in a way.
So then when I stumbled on psychedelics, I was like, great, I could be an
underground
psychedelic therapist that doesn't need a license.
Whatever happened?
Did you wind up getting in trouble?
No, it's astonishing.
I think a lot of times we overestimate the efficiency of the government.
And so nothing happened at all.
I mean, I turned 18.
Later was the lottery.
I did have a higher lottery number, but nothing ever happened.
And I just was shocked by that.
And later, what happened was that Jimmy Carter, on his first day in office, he
pardoned all
the draft resistors, and that made me sort of move from my identification as a
counterculture
drug-using criminal to somebody who wasn't quite a criminal in that same way.
What year was that?
This was 76?
Yeah, well, as soon as he got inaugurated, 77, when he did that, the first day
in office.
And I later read there was about 60,000 people that never registered for the
draft.
But enough people were going in that they were able to find enough bodies and
people to send
to Vietnam.
Yeah, it's one of the rare military operations in history that's, like,
universally regarded
as a terrible thing.
Yes.
I mean, nobody today defends the Vietnam War.
There's still some people that think it was a good idea that we got Saddam Hussein
out
of power, despite all the horrible collateral damage and the million people
that are innocent
that wound up dying in Iraq because of that invasion.
But nobody thinks Vietnam was good.
Right.
It was starting to be this imperial overreach.
Yeah.
And we've had a fair amount of that.
Based on a false flag.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which is very scary.
It's very scary that that was just, you know, 1960s.
It just happened.
Yeah.
Well, one of the people also quite interested and supportive of psychedelic
therapy is Daniel
Ellsberg, who was the person that released the Pentagon Papers.
But the false flag began with the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
And so we're told that our ships were being attacked.
And he was, I've gotten to spend some time talking to him.
And he said that he had just started the National Security Administration at
that time, was looking
at some of these cables and realized it didn't make sense.
But he thought somebody above him knew more than he did.
And he didn't feel like he should say anything about it.
And then all these years later, when he released the Pentagon Papers, and
people think of him
as a hero, because he was willing to go to jail for decades and decades,
potentially the
rest of his life, which is what the government was trying to do for him, went
all the way
up to the Supreme Court.
And he won the case, or the New York Times also won the case.
But he thinks of himself, not just as a hero, but that he should have had more
courage early
on.
And if he would have done something early on, maybe more people would have
realized that
this wasn't the way the government was saying it was.
But I do think that there is patriotism in civil disobedience.
Yeah, certainly.
Especially when you feel it's morally wrong to participate in whatever this
thing that
you're being obligated to do.
Yeah, and I think it's really remarkable for me now that because I was not a
pacifist,
and I was not a conscientious objector, I always felt that the freedom that I
had was defended
by our military.
And, you know, in World War II, if we had lost, and I'm Jewish, I probably
would have
been killed, along with others.
So I always felt that the military was essential, and it was protecting my
freedom.
And so now, all these years later, to have so much work to be done with
veterans and in the
veterans' administrations and with, you know, special operators and all sorts
of people
with PTSD, it feels right in a way that a draft resistor should form an
alliance with suffering
veterans.
Yeah, I think that's one of the best aspects, at least publicly, of what you
guys are doing,
is that you are working with all these soldiers, and so you've got a lot of
support from people
that traditionally wouldn't be invested in psychedelics.
Which has really kind of opened up.
It used to be that a lot of people on the right thought of psychedelics as a
way to waste your
life, and you're going to be a hippie and a loser.
But because of the benefits that it's been showing to people with PTSD and
people coming
back from, you know, all these various foreign conflicts, then you're getting,
now you're getting
support from veterans.
You're getting support from the people on the right and people that know
veterans that have
had incredible experiences with psychedelics, where it's completely changed
their life and
sort of reset their mind.
Yeah, just several days ago, I was in Nashville with Sean Ryan, doing his
podcast, and he is
a former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor, and he was just talking about how much
he had benefited
from his experience with Ibogaine in Mexico, and how it's changed his views
about things.
And we've heard this a lot, but he still said that if he were to be attacked,
if America
was to be attacked, he would defend it.
It doesn't turn people again into pacifists, necessarily, in that same way.
And there's something noble and honorable about willing to serve your country
and be willing
to give your life to protect others.
I think it's a problem in some cases when the political leadership makes
terrible choices,
and you know, you've enlisted to do that.
I think the other part, last week, I was in Dallas, and we had an event that
Governor Rick
Perry attended, and Marcus Capone, and Jeff George, who's the chair of the
board of directors
of our MAPS Public Benefit Corp., and then also Amy Emerson, who's the CEO of
that.
And we have Governor Perry's support, because he's heard from so many veterans.
He's also talked about Marcus Luttrell, who lived with him at the State House,
when he
was very emotionally damaged from his time in the military.
And then he saw Marcus get a lot better when he went down to Mexico and got Ibogaine.
And so Governor Perry, there's people that I have never thought that I would
find common
ground with.
And one of the ones that I thought was the most far that I couldn't imagine
building a bridge,
I mean, one of our themes is "Be the Bridge."
But it was with Ted Nugent.
And I thought, you know, how would I, you know, build a bridge with Ted Nugent?
And Rocco Moon, his son, connected us, and Rocco is interested in being a
psychedelic therapist.
And he's been doing a lot of work educating his dad.
And we had a really remarkable conversation.
And Ted actually said that he could be extremely effective for helping us
because he's known
as being so anti-drug.
Yeah.
And yet he can see, even he can see that in a therapeutic setting for veterans,
that's
what he cares about the most, but others, that these things can be helpful.
So this idea of building bridges, there was one point in time, one of the most
important
lessons I learned was actually from a Supreme Court justice where I was sitting
next to him
at Passover Seder and Passover, this is Stephen Breyer.
And I had accepted a donation from Rebecca Mercer.
Now Rebecca Mercer, her father and she, they own Cambridge Analytica, they own
Breitbart.
You know, she's very much a supporter of Republican causes.
And she gave us a million dollars and said that it was restricted to use in
veterans.
And I thought, this is really a good thing to do to take this.
But I've gotten more criticism from taking that donation from Rebecca Mercer
than most
anything I've done in the entire 37 years of MAPS.
And so at this Passover Seder, I was sitting, my wife and I got there late, our
friends were
somewhere else.
There was this old couple sitting next to us and I didn't know who they were.
And I thought, oh, this will be boring, you know.
And so I talked to this guy and I said, well, everybody else was pretty much
scientists.
And I said, are you a scientist?
He said, no, I'm a judge.
And then his wife started talking about how she had written a book about
grieving parents
who have illnesses, that their kids have fatal illnesses, and how to handle
grief.
And so we had this incredible conversation about MDMA therapy and about how it
can be helpful
for grief and all.
And then after hours, Passover Seder steak, hours and hours, I finally realized
that there
was something more going on.
And I thought, this guy is not just a judge.
I think he's Stephen Breyer, the Supreme Court judge.
And I said, are you Stephen Breyer?
Yes.
And I said, well, I have an ethical question to ask you.
You know, I have taken this resources from Rebecca Mercer, and she's very much
supporting
Trump and supporting Bannon and others.
And I said, what do you think about that choice ethically?
Was that a wise idea?
And he said that the essence of democracy is trying to find common ground with
people with
whom you may disagre