Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1854 - Rick Strassman
Uploaded: 2022-08-10T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1854 - Rick Strassman' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-10. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1854 - Rick Strassman' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-10. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1854 - Rick Strassman

Joe Rogan the Joe Rogan experience
Good it's great seeing you it's great seeing you too. It's been a long time
Well, you know, we try to keep this like fist from your face. That's probably
the most great. Yeah. Yeah, there we go
Yeah, I think we first met
Some random person sent me an email probably 2005 2006 and he said oh, you know
Joe Rogan is
Talking about your book and I hadn't heard of you. This is before I did a
podcast
I think it was before the podcast. Yeah, I think you were still doing stand-up.
Yeah
Yeah, and he gave me your number I think and I called you and you were at the
airport
And you said hey man, I'm reading your book. I love it
Yeah, the book was fascinating because your book was you need to adjust cameras
good
your book was fascinating to me because it was I
Mean correct me if I'm wrong, but it was the first time that they ever that the
FDA ever allowed
real studies
To be done on schedule one drugs. It was the first new American study in 20
years on
psychedelics. Yeah, yeah, I'm any human psychedelic research and
How did you first of all? Why did you want to do it? And how did you get the
permission to do it?
Well, I wanted to do it because of my interest in chemistry and my interest in
altered states
You know my own altered states like the first time I smoked marijuana
I was 18 years old and it was a fully psychedelic experience
There were purple clouds coming out of the speakers. I was flying over this
You know the college you know town and I was living in at the time and my
friend was - it was a shared hallucination on
very strong hash
So you felt like you were out of body
No, I was
We were on a carpet and you felt like you could you were so you both saw like a
city below you. Yeah, the floor disappeared
Yeah, it was the first time I smoked marijuana
And I thought wow this is interesting and now hash is the way they create hash
is they take the what is it called the crystals off of
THC is that how they do it they
shake out the resin
From the flower just to just shake it. That's how they do it
I'm well if there's different ways to do it like in the old country you get
really sweaty and you
just agitate a lot of pot and it and the resin accumulates on your skin and
You scrape it off really and that's how they make hash well, you know in that's
so funky. You're getting someone's funk along with the hash
Yeah, yeah, that's called pre-industrial hash
I
Was watching or was looking at something online the other day where
They were talking about repurpose. It was in Morocco
They were reaper. It was Steve D'Angelo. He was talking about how they were repurposing
Machines in Morocco to make hash
I'm gonna how they've been doing it this way and making hash in this part of
the world for you know, who knows how many years
Yeah, that's it here. I wonder what the machines are
Yeah, this is Steve D'Angelo Steve D'Angelo is a hemp activist
Cannabis activist so there it looks like some kind of a press or something like
that. I don't know what that thing is
Yeah, interesting. I think it's like it has something to do with automobiles
here. He's gonna say it right here
Things that can't break down things that don't need electricity
Things that can be improvised and it just so much cleverness has been shown
here today so much ingenuity in
Working with what you have. I mean this press is a great example of it and take
a look here
It's just basically an automobile jack that's been put into a frame
Had a couple of springs put on there and then you know these iron casing boxes
made and
It works it works really well
And this is the way that the hash that's smoked by most people around the world
the largest quantity of cannabis
That's made anywhere is made still by this legacy method and the great thing
about it is
this could really be done anywhere and I think about folks in Mexico or
Colombia who could take this method and repurpose it and adapt it and be making
quite a very nice high-quality hash
Just about anywhere. That's a hash salesman. I've ever seen one. Yeah. Yeah,
that dude's pushing hard
He's like let's everybody get in on this. Come on. Make some hash. I'd like to
buy one
Yeah, well, I wonder if that makes hash or hash oil if it's just being
compressed like that squeezing things out
Well, it looked like he was having bricks of hash, right? Yeah. Yeah
interesting
So I think he's using it in that sort of that little frame that little case
Mm-hmm and then they're packing it in there with that car jack, which is pretty
crazy
Yeah clever is it so the difference between hash and regular marijuana smoking
is in general
What is it just that it's much stronger? It's much stronger. So like that kind
of hallucination?
That's super rare with regular marijuana, right? But with hash it can't happen.
Yeah. Yeah
well, I started college as a chemistry major as a kid I made fireworks and
bombs and
Started you know college as a chemistry major. I wanted to be I didn't want to
become a magnate in making fireworks a fireworks magnate
But everybody discouraged me they said, you know, you're a smart guy. You
should be a doctor
And so that's how they tricked you into it
Well, I got the last laugh right because I'm you know giving people of
psychedelics and they have inner fireworks now, right?
So after that experience smoking hash and you know, my chemistry mind got piqued
I thought
You know like a half hour ago. I was totally normal and right now
I'm just having the weirdest experience of my life and I wonder how that works
chemically. Hmm. So I figured there must be some
Chemical changes in the brain and I was interested in learning what those might
be. So what year was this?
70 70 so okay
So this is like right around the time where everything got made illegal, right?
That was the big schedule one act wasn't that in 1970?
They made a lot of the psychedelics illegal their controlled substances act of
1970
Yeah, so it was right at that year when you were just getting involved you're
like damn it
They took the rug out from under me. It didn't make any difference
Yeah, yeah, the school I went to you had a lot of psychedelics really yeah, and
I went crazy for about two years
And then figured out, you know, I think I've had enough I need to transfer so I
transfer schools actually
I've known more than one person that has lost their marbles
From from doing too many psychedelics. I started getting unraveled
It's not uncommon. Yeah, right don't we do you know people that have kind of
like blown fuse? Oh, yeah, yeah
Well, I get the occasional email from people who have really gone around the
bend smoking too much DMT
There's people I think that have a tendency towards a type of paranoid
schizophrenia
That maybe they kind of have it under control or maybe it's mild
You know, they just have some weird paranoias about certain things. I've seen a
few people
Do too many psychedelics and then now they're in fantasy land
Yeah, I kind of wonder about the risk of increased accessibility
I do yeah because
You know you could prepare you can screen and still people have adverse effects
and then in in the wild in the field
I think we're just gonna have a revisiting of the problems in the 60s with all
of those hospitalizations
And things yeah, I don't think there's any doubt the real question is
How many of those people were on that path already? Like what is that whole
process of someone?
Becoming mentally ill because I've seen it happen, but I'm not exactly sure
what's causing it what makes people I've seen people go down and
They just they just become different people
Well, I think it's a case of people being vulnerable, you know, they've got a
susceptibility
Yeah
In their genes and they just may also be susceptible because of their lives.
They may be doing other drugs
You know drinking a lot in really unstable relationships or they you know, and
they also you know might have a
You know tendency genetically
You know, let's say one of their parents was bipolar schizophrenic
You know, so it's a major trauma. I mean, it's a psychological, you know,
trauma to have a huge trip, right?
Yeah, you know good trauma bad trauma, but it's really a shift and if you're
not equipped
I think it could yeah, it could kind of fracture a thin veneer of normality.
Yeah
It's almost like they're interfacing at the wrong
They're not like quite getting like there's a reality port and then there's
like a neighboring port where they're getting it's like they can pay their
taxes
They can drive their cars they can answer emails
but they think that there's some crazy mind control experiment at the head of
you know
It's just one of those weird ones where people just they did just start
believing that the whole world's out to get them and
The government's trying to track them down and you see there's a chip in my
brain like accelerates
Yeah, yeah, it's extreme the chip is the weird one. I've heard multiple people
tell me they have a chip in their brain
Mm-hmm or at least say it to people like that. I'm communicating to them
through a chip in their brain. Mm-hmm
Well, you know schizophrenics are like that. Yeah, you know paranoid
schizophrenics. Yeah, you know back in the day it was
You know radio waves or
X-rays that were you know beaming down from space and affecting people's minds
That was it was a paranoid schizophrenic
Yeah, it was you know their explanation
Of theirs unusual experiences, you know the kinds of stories I've heard with
people doing too much DMT is a kind of mania
They're really grandiose. They think that they've got all the answers who and
nobody is listening to them
and it makes them mad and they end up in prison or in psychiatric hospitals I
Just I'm always fascinated with how other human beings brains work
Mine as well, right? I'm fascinated by the brain about how it's so different
after exercise. It's so different after rest
It's so different when you know you meditate or you do something like yoga some
mindfulness kind of practice
It's a dear it's like what what are most people experiencing and then what does
it feel like to be mentally ill?
Like what is that person experiencing like what what weird shift in the
chemical balance of the mind?
It's causing that and you know how much of it is genetic and how much of it is
life experience and trauma
It's just the the way people think and look about things and look at things has
always been fascinating to me because I
Got to assume that everyone's dealing with different hardware or wetware or
whatever you would call the brain like they work different
They don't work the same
Right well, I mean it depends on the on the mental illness, you know the
disorder
Well, you know one of the reasons I became a psychiatrist and besides my
interest in studying psychedelics was because I was really interested in the
mind
You know schizophrenic patients were just amazing
You know because other than their crazy ideas and experiences they're just
normal people right yeah, which is wild
And and there's got to be levels to it right are there like like there's like
mild or someone just kind of like a touch
Schizophrenic and there's someone who's like full-blown, you know the aliens
are hiding in my walls, and they're out to get me
Well, it depends on the kind of schizophrenia
there's
What's called chronic undifferentiated which is kind of the burned out types
that just don't move don't talk they just veg they just veg and they're the
paranoid
Schizophrenics who are a lot more active and they're hallucinating and they're
in and they're in your face
Yeah, you know, I really found it easy and fun to talk to psychotic patients
I think that was you know one of the things that kind of was part of the mix of
studying psychedelics
Why was it easy?
Well, I think in my own psychedelic experiences. I might have gone crazy for an
hour or two
One one one time in particular. I had to be you know talked back down
You know so I could empathize you've heard Dennis McKenna's story about being
with Terren