Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1646 - David Holthouse
Uploaded: 2021-05-06T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1646 - David Holthouse' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-05-06. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1646 - David Holthouse' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-05-06. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1646 - David Holthouse

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Thanks for being here, man.
Thanks for having me.
I really enjoyed your three-part docu- what do you call it, docu-series, is
that what you call it?
Yeah, yeah, limited doc-series, yeah.
I watched it last night on Hulu, I binge-watched it, and it's intense.
You know, I've been a fan of marijuana for a long time, so I know a lot of
people who've lived up there and grown up there.
And for people who don't know, the docu-series is called Sasquatch, and you
look at it on Hulu, you go, oh, man, it's a Bigfoot documentary.
Nope.
Not really.
No, it's a lot scarier.
How did this come about?
Like, how did this project fall into your lap?
Well, the genesis of the project really goes back to the fall of 1993.
I was visiting a buddy of mine who was working on a dope farm, and he kind of-
it was harvest season, which is, like, a particularly dangerous time of the
year up there.
But he kind of got me a hall pass with the guy that owned the farm and vouched
for me for me to parachute in for about a week.
And, you know, something that didn't make it in the show is that I went up
there to do, like, a heroic mushroom trip with this guy.
So the day before, the day that the ship went down, okay, we took about an
eighth mushrooms each and went tripping around the redwoods.
Now, that didn't make it in the show, okay?
But that night, as we were coming down, we were in the cabin, the A-frame cabin
that belonged to the guy that owned the farm.
And these two dudes showed up late at night, covered in mud, like, splattered
with mud, soaked, claiming that they'd just been to a nearby dope farm where
they'd seen three bodies that were torn up, like, mutilated.
And these guys were freaking out, okay?
They seemed legitimately traumatized to me.
They seemed—they were exuding this, like, energy of, like, terror and having
just seen, you know, mutilated bodies to the point where I was just trying to
shrink into the couch where I was.
I was, like, really not happy to be in that room at that point.
How old were you at the time?
I was 23 years old.
Yeah.
Okay?
I was just getting going in journalism, you know?
And they—you know, the owner of the farm kind of pulled them off to the side,
and they were having a conversation in the kitchen.
And when they were trying to keep their voices hushed, but these guys, they
were so rattled.
Also, like, I didn't know the signs at the time, but now looking back, I'm like,
they were on crystal.
They were tweaking, right?
Yeah.
And so they were—like, their voices were going up and down in volume, but
they were clearly saying that they'd just, like, seen these three bodies, and
they'd seen, like, Sasquatch footprints at the murder scene.
And they knew it wasn't a ripoff, they were saying, because, you know, it was—all
the weed had been harvested, but it was still there.
Like, some plants had been torn up and thrown around, right?
But the bud was still there.
Like, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of weed, if it was a typical patch.
And, you know, it was—like, at one point, the guy was like, are you sure they're
dead?
They were like, yeah, yeah, what the fuck?
Are you fucking not listening to us?
They were torn to pieces, man.
They're fucking dead, you know?
And a Bigfoot killed these guys.
So, and he kind of, like, got them out of the farm and, like, sat down and was
like, well, that was really fucking weird.
And we, like, had a laugh, you know?
But, obviously, that story stuck with me for the next quarter century.
And it was one that I kind of—I told it around, like, a ghost story around
the campfire kind of thing a few times.
Wow.
But then a friend of mine and a guy I collaborate with, Joshua Fay, who's the
director of the series Sasquatch, he—we were just finishing up another
project together.
And he texted me out of the blue, and he'd become a fan of this podcast Sasquatch
Chronicles, right?
And he texted me, he's like, dude, if we could find some sort of true crime
story wrapped up with a Sasquatch angle, like, we'd really have something.
What is Sasquatch Chronicles?
It's a—I don't even listen to it.
I've never listened to it.
But it's a podcast that's, like, it's basically, like, people's reporting their
Sasquatch encounters, okay?
And so he sent me this text out of the blue, and I hit him right back.
I was like, I might have one.
So he's like, dude, like, can you look into that?
So the next step was to get a hold of—get a hold of Buddy that I was working
on, you know, that was working on the farm up there.
Get a hold of anybody I could find that worked in the dope game up in northern
Mendocino County.
It was near a town called Branscombe that worked in that area at that time in
the dope game.
Be like, did you ever hear a story like this?
Because our thinking was, you know, we can't, like, do a series if it was just
me hearing that story in that cabin that one night.
But it's the kind of story where you think, like, that probably spread beyond
that one cabin, right?
Those guys didn't seem like the type that they were going to keep that to
themselves, okay?
So, you know, after drawing a lot of blanks, we finally, like, hit this one
sort of information ecosystem sub-circle up there, if you will, where people
had heard that story.
And they were like, yes, three guys did get killed, but there's, you know,
there's more to it, right?
They were like, there's a story behind that, and it doesn't really involve a
Sasquatch actually killing these guys.
But, I mean, I don't want to spoil the show for anybody who hasn't seen it, you
know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. For anybody who hasn't seen it, it's well worth the three,
like, 50 minutes or so.
Yeah, yeah.
Something like our TV show length.
Yeah.
It's very intense, and it also brings you to this weird realization that the
war on drugs ruined this sort of utopian community up there.
Yeah. I mean, at that time that I was up there, this was the time of, like, DEA's
Operation Greensweep,
where they had, like, they'd injected a lot of narcs into the scene, so they
had a lot of undercover guys.
They also had, like, these sort of paramilitary squads out there in the woods
looking for patches.
Or if they found one, you know, they'd set up on these guys, like, Rambo-style
for days until somebody came to work the patch and then, you know, nail them.
Yeah.
So there were a lot of shooting.
I mean, it was, like, armored troop carriers, like, parading down the main
streets of these little towns up there.
I mean, it was full on.
I knew some people in the 90s who were growing up there, and it was at the time
where medical marijuana was legal.
So this was a little bit after the fact.
It's like, I think medical marijuana became legal in California.
Was it, like, 94 or some shit?
Like, my friend Todd was one of the first people to go to jail for medical
marijuana and for growing.
And one of the weird things, shout out to Todd McCormick, one of the weird
things is when he went to jail,
they would not let him use the phrase medical marijuana because they arrested
him and they brought him to court.
And in court, federally, medical marijuana is not recognized.
So it was just were you in possession of a Schedule I drug?
Right.
Were you growing and distributing a Schedule I drug?
Right.
What year was it?
96.
Yeah.
So this was late 90s, and, you know, I met quite a few people that were in that
sort of circle of people who were growing.
And it's just like it was this weird sort of gray area where it was kind of
legal but not legal federally so they could get busted.
And then, like, what happened with Todd, they got busted and you literally
couldn't even bring up the phrase medical marijuana in court.
So you're just railroaded through the court system until you're sentenced and
then you're sentenced for possession of a Schedule I substance.
And they just made examples out of everybody.
Yeah, man, people now, they don't know.
They don't know, like, what the deal was back in the 80s and the 90s.
Like, people were going to jail for decade sentences for growing weed.
Yeah.
Like, federal mandatory minimum, like, throwing the book at them for growing
weed.
Well, some of them are still in jail now.
Yep.
That's what's really crazy.
Now that marijuana is legal in California, there's people that are in prison,
in Colorado in particular, that can look out.
They're in prison for marijuana.
They can look out and see grow-ops.
Right.
Yeah.
What?
Yeah.
Like, how crazy is that?
Yeah.
Put in prison for life on kingpin sentencing.
Yeah.
Like, they were drug kingpins.
Yeah.
Well, you know, and isn't some of that part of the 1994 crime bill?
Like, some of that is those people that got three strikes and they got busted
growing three times.
Yeah.
And then they're in jail for the rest of their life.
Well, and the first two could have been possession.
Yeah.
So.
Right.
Yeah.
It's so dark, man.
And when you show these guys who were the cops, and you show them today, and
they're kind of proud of it, and they're talking about how fun it was to bust
these people.
And I guess they just didn't understand what the documentary was going to be
about.
Is that?
Yeah.
You know, we approached them saying, hey, we're doing a documentary about, like,
the federal.
Yeah.
That involves, like, federal law enforcement, anti-marijuana interdiction in
Mendocito.
So, they were happy to talk about them.
These guys, they were like California Highway Patrol guys that a couple
weekends a year would get to go play army up there.
Oh.
It was so sad.
Again, I don't want to give away too much of it, but some of the families that
were, you know, a lot of people don't feel like city life and modern life, and
even modern life back then in the 1970s and 80s or whatever it was, is for them.
They don't want to live like this.
They don't want to be jammed up on top of everybody with everybody stressed out,
and they would rather live close to nature.
And when you had that family on that didn't even have electricity, you know,
their kids went to the school, they had an oil lamp and an outhouse.
Off the grid.
And they were talking about how living like that after a while, it started to
heal them.
Like, they started literally feeling better.
You know, I don't live like that, but I think it's better if you do.
I mean, I think we're in this weird stage as human beings where our bodies are
designed to live the way people lived thousands of years ago.
Because it takes so long for your genes to change.
You know, I think there's like certain reward systems that are built into being
a human being.
Like you take a dog outside.
Dogs go outside, and all of a sudden they perk up.
They start moving around.
They hear things.
They smell things.
They run around.
They become alive, right?
Because dogs are supposed to be outside.
Right.
It's like it's natural for them.
It perks up all of their natural reward systems and all the little bells and
whistles that go off in their little doggy heads.
That's the same thing with people, man.
There's something that happens to people when we go outside.
You know, you smell nature, and you go around, you see butterflies, and you see
trees.
You feel better.
You feel better.
And these people that were living like that, man, part of that film, part of
your series is, you know, I'm watching this, and I'm like, wow, that's cool
that they figured it out.
And then they got together, and they, you know, they really started kind of homesteading.
It was kind of lawless and kind of dangerous, but also there's a lot of freedom
there.
And you see them playing guitar and all that shit, and then the fucking laws
change.
You know, they come down on these people.
And you see these cops.
I don't think those cops are bad people.
I think they're just clueless.
I just don't think they understand.
I just think they were in that cop culture of, like, these are bad people,
these are hippies, these are the other, and the