Name: Robert Greene Shares His Experiences with Psychedelics
Uploaded: 2024-05-20T15:00:41.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Robert Greene Shares His Experiences with Psychedelics' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-05-20. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Robert Greene Shares His Experiences with Psychedelics' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-05-20. Transcript available.

I mean, I mean, I was kind of a loner in high school, kind of as a hippie, had
very long hair, did a lot of drugs.
Yeah, buddy. Oh, there you are right there, Bobby Green. Robert Green right
there.
That's me. That's 19-year-old Robert.
Bro, you look like you were looping right there, gooming on some boomers.
Yeah, we were doing a lot of LSD at that time.
You can see the tie-dyed sofa behind me.
They had a tie-dyed sofa?
Yeah, look at that. Look at that thing.
Yeah, we were, like, getting into the Grateful Dead, if you can believe it.
Oh, yeah. American Beauty, yeah, that album was out, yeah?
Yeah, Working Class Dead was the one that, Working Man's Dead was the one that
came out just at that time.
Who would you take it with, by yourself, or would you take it with friends?
Oh, we took it with friends.
Yeah.
You really want me to go into this?
I mean, the drug that we really, really, really liked at this point, we're
talking about the 70s.
I'm an old dude, man, was peyote.
Wow, I never got to do it.
It was really big because this was in Berkeley, and it was, like, the trendy
thing.
There were these buttons from Cactus from Mexico or Arizona, and if you ate
them, you would, like, be incredibly sick.
So you had to pull out all these little hairs so that you could digest them
without throwing up.
Wow.
Then you had to, and they tasted absolutely horrible.
You had to put them into these tiny little pieces and eat it in, like, peanut
butter or, like, a milkshake so you didn't have to just swallow it.
Man, you'd be tripping like you now can't believe it.
It was just unbelievable.
Yeah.
Totally transcendent.
The most spiritual drug of all.
Really?
Yeah.
How would it get more, like, because spiritual is a unique word to use, because
LSD would get, like, freaky and weird sometimes.
Mushrooms would get more spiritual, I felt like.
Definitely.
So peyote, you felt like, went even more spiritual than that?
I think so.
Wow.
I think so.
I mean, I did it probably maybe about a dozen times when I was younger.
Yeah.
And I've done LSD, and I've done—mushrooms are pretty spiritual.
God, I'm revealing all this crap of my youth, but—
No, I think it's important.
A lot of people do these things, especially psychedelics are coming back more
than ever now.
Well, I must say, I don't do them anymore.
I mean, I've tried little tiny micro-dosing of mushrooms.
Yeah.
I don't do it anymore.
But it had a very positive impact on me.
It opened my mind to things that I will never forget, right?
Experiences that still resonate in my brain that I may not create through drugs,
but I create through other means.
I, like, try to return to spiritual sensations that are very powerful.
So those drugs could be used, could be, I say, for very positive purposes.
They shouldn't be used just for partying and just for forgetting yourself, but
they can be used to open what Aldous Huxley called the doors of perception.
Yeah.
That's a great—yeah, that's the biggest thing is just the perception.
Because perception is how you change everything about your life.
Like, yeah, mushrooms have helped me many times to have perception adjustment,
to realize where I was being, not giving myself enough grace or just being, to
trying to be, control things, to, you know, just to have a little more.
Yeah.
Because mushrooms is like a sponge, you know, just to add a little bit more
space into my, into your, how you view things or see things.
And it could be anything, a relationship.
I mean, there's business situations.
I mean, they can help so much, I feel like.
And they're being used more than ever, it seems like.
Definitely.
You know?
Because, yeah, I've microdosed before.
That just—microdosing, I'll just, like, during the day at one point, I'll
just start—I'll see a mosquito and I'll kind of follow him around the house
for a minute.
Then I'll go back to work, but that's about as, like, weird as it gets, you
know?
That's pretty damn weird.
Yeah, I'm just kind of curious, you know?
Yeah.
Just doing a little air traffic controlling.
Are you seeing the little ant on the ground there?
Yeah, I'll just see where he's going.
Yeah.
I'm like, tell me if you're a scout.
Yeah.
Hey, look, dude, if you're trying to get away from something, blink once, you
know?
So how long did peyote last?
Did it last for, like, a long time?
You mean when you took it?
Yeah.
Well, if it would—like, all those drugs, you would take effect after about 40
minutes or so.
Yeah.
And then it would be very intense for about four or five hours, and then it
would kind of wear off.
It's kind of had the same sort of span as mushrooms.
In a way, it just depended on how many buttons you consumed.
If you consumed, like, a dozen buttons, man, you'd be tripping for, like,
several days.
Yeah.
Well, I don't think we went that far.
Yeah, you're a damn elevator car at that point, dude.
You're going up, bro.
But, I mean, it has an incredible history among Native Americans and Mexicans.
Yeah.
What did they use it for?
Can you bring that up, Nick?
I want to learn, like, if there was a distinctive, like, were they trying to
talk to a god?
Because I can't imagine the first time they took it, it must have blown their
minds.
Well, it was the first time people experimented with all kinds of drugs, you
know.
That fascinates me, how they didn't kill themselves, how they knew that it had
that effect.
In the late 1800s, the modern-day Native American church was formed, a key part
of which is the ingestion of peyote as a religious sacrament during all-night
prayer ceremonies.
In this context, peyote is not viewed as a drug, but rather as a medicine for
healing.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah, that kind of reminds me of, like, how ayahuasca is these days.
It is, very much so.
I've never done it.
I think ayahuasca sounds even more intense.
Yeah, so I don't know, but I think it's similar to that, yeah.
I've had some good experiences with it.
For me, it's been very therapeutic.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
I don't think of it as a drug, and I understand if other people do, that's fine.
I think of it as a medicinal drug, but I don't think of it as a party.
You know, it's very painful to go sit there and you go through the filing
cabinet of who you are and pull out some files and kind of burn them in a way.
I don't know.
I'm a little bit frightened about that myself at my age.
Oh, you could rock in there, I think.
You think so?
Yeah, I find it to be actually not super invasive.
I could get up and go pee or go get a snack in the kitchen and then go sit back
down and drop back into the meditation.
Really?
Yeah, and I felt very okay with that.
Well, I don't consider it.
Yeah.
When I was in college, there's this Englishman.
This is when we were doing a lot of drugs.
And he started telling us about something he did when he was a kid called Lady
Esquire shoe polish.
And basically, you would take this shoe polish and you would put it in a rag,
then you would sniff it.
Yeah.
And your brain would go crazy for like a minute.
Then you felt deathly sick.
But for that minute, you were like, whoa.
And all you had to do was like $1.25 shoe polish.
And he said, you know, he got so excited that we went searching for it.
And we found a bottle of it in San Francisco.
And we did and we sniffed it.
And it was the most awful thing I've ever experienced in my life.
It was like way too intense.
It's like.
Everything was like, it was just awful.
It's the equivalent of gasoline.
Yeah, there you go.
That's your gasoline.
We used to do everything.
Like we heard about like cooking banana peels.
There were always rumors that would go through town of things you could do to
get high.
Nutmeg.
And so we smoked everything in my buddy Jeff's kitchen.
We, I remember one time we had.
Oh, one time I took a bag of mushrooms to a party and people had never taken
them there.
And so given everybody.
And then I was like, we're going to play hide and go seek.
Right.
You guys go hide.
And I'm going to count.
Right.
I'm going to count to like 700.
And they all went and hid.
And I never went and found them.
And then I went home.
Can you imagine that?
Did they know you were giving them psychedelic mushrooms?
Dude, fuck them.
That's how I felt about it.
That's a pretty good trick.
Yeah, that's what it was.
They're basically like Chris.
They're probably still waiting for you.
Oh, dude, somebody's.
There's some guy in a closet still wondering where you are.
Oh, there was things like that I loved.
Like I remember we went camping one time with a Boy Scouts or something.
And I told everybody the day we left that Jay Leno had died.
Right.
So all weekend, everybody is for the Internet.
Everybody's like, God, you hear people talking about it.
So I would just lay in my tent and I would hear dads telling each other, you
know, you
hear that Jay Leno passed away.
And I would be howling in there, like laughing at a, like it was coming out of
the, like the
core of the earth through me.
There was always, I love that element of creating a scenario that nobody knows
if it was real or
not.
You can't do that anymore though.
Right.
Cause the internet killed everything.
It did.
You can't lie.
You should be able to tell a woman you were a lawyer and she's like, you're 11.
And I'll be like, I object.
Don't be such a bitch, man.
I'm trying to meet a cool chick.
Thank you.