Ari Shaffir

The episode opens with a running joke about the guest's travels. He is saved in a phone as "Ari the Wanderer," and the hosts sort out where he was last spotted: not Mexico City, as first reported, but an Oasis concert in São Paulo, Brazil. He says he was gone for "Six. Seven." months but kept working remotely. One project was a podcast with Big Jay and Soder that broke down 21 Jump Street, which started during the pandemic out of boredom.

They chose 21 Jump Street after first picking Sex and the City, then dropping it because a fellow comedian, transcribed as "Ian Fideon," already had a Sex and the City podcast. That leads to a long, crude riff about the comedian's sexuality and a story from an old episode of the guest's earlier podcast, the Skeptic Tank, where the comedian described visiting glory holes while saying he was not gay. The participants admit they don't know the details. One says, "You're asking questions, I don't know," and another concedes, "As an interviewer, I didn't do my job that day." The riff ends with the label "Bisexual."

Back on the remote podcast, the guest describes joining calls from places like Ecuador while drinking from a coconut in front of a palm tree, and admits, "I really milk it." This moves into yerba mate. One participant calls it "literally a jar of hay" and says it tastes like hay. The drink is placed in the gaucho tradition of Argentina, which then spread to Chile and further south.

A comparison to a weed-infused drink linked to Willie Nelson leads to a discussion of dose. One participant says Ron White brought some of the drink to the Mothership, says they don't know its legal status, and puts the dose at roughly five milligrams per glass or per shot, adding: "It's all dose dependent." A full glass, they say, sends you into a state where Earth seems like "a facsimile of Earth."

The core of this section is the era of unregulated edibles, before legal marijuana, when you could get a prescription. One participant recalls products sold as one X, two X or three X, and the guest offers to do his joke about it:

The problem is X didn't equal any number.

A second joke follows the same idea. A seller said to eat just one leg of a gummy bear, which raises the question of why whole bears are sold at all. A half cookie is called the right dose, not a whole one. The broader point is that potency was a guess. One participant compares the old banana bread days to the present, saying today's products are "Not killing people, but like destroying people."

Two stories show what happened when the dose was wrong. In the first, during a Fear Factor shoot on an aircraft carrier in the Bay Area, one participant took a far-too-strong edible and then rode BART under the bay between Oakland and San Francisco. They describe "the longest 20 minutes of my life," spent worrying about whether anyone checks the tube for holes. People looked like two-dimensional cardboard cutouts, though "occasionally I'd see their soul peeking around their shoulder." Both participants say that kind of high is fun in hindsight. As one puts it, "When it's happening, it's terrifying."

In the second story, a jiu-jitsu acquaintance who made his own THC pills advised starting with one. The speaker took two. At a jiu-jitsu tournament, the man seemed deeply strange. About a year later, by the speaker's account, the man was arrested for rape and fled, possibly while out on bail. He was caught after he kept signing up for jiu-jitsu classes in Seattle or somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. The speaker isn't sure of some details ("I think he maybe was out on bail or he was wanted"), but says the news made sense given the "creepy dark energy" they had sensed.

From this comes a claim that drugs let you see people's motives, followed at once by a caveat. Both agree on the perception ("You can see their soul"), but one participant warns it can't be relied on for real decisions, using the example of taking five grams of mushrooms before a meeting to judge whether a defendant is guilty:

But it's not reliable.

A lighter example follows: leaving a blues festival in Ottawa with Big Jay and being able to tell which crowd members were on mushrooms, acid, weed, alcohol or molly.

The conversation turns to a recent development at the White House concerning psychedelics. The guest says he has been away from the news and learned about it piece by piece. He first thought it concerned only ibogaine, which Ed Clay in Nashville had long urged him to try for addiction. His reply had been, "I'm loving what I'm doing right now. I don't want to get off this." He then learned it also covered MDMA and psilocybin.

The other participant explains why those substances were further along. MAPS had already been running MDMA studies with veterans, and MDMA is described as "one of the best therapies" for helping them overcome PTSD. Johns Hopkins had done psilocybin studies. Both were said to be on the way to FDA approval. The obstacle described is political, not scientific: no one wanted to sign off, because a candidate whose opponent can say "he wants drugs legalized" is in trouble.

The Texas case is the main example. The speaker says Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who took a hard line on marijuana, met with Rick Perry and Brian Hubbard, the people behind the Texas ibogaine initiative. After Hubbard explained what ibogaine does, Patrick backed the initiative and $100 million was allocated to it. The speaker credits Patrick with changing his mind and stresses that ibogaine is not a party drug:

It's not recreational at all.

Hopes for the treatment centre on veterans who come home addicted to opiates. The speaker also suggests possible benefits for CTE and blast-related brain injuries, saying it is "neuroregenerative somehow." These are claims made in conversation. The source gives no study details for them. The speaker traces public suspicion of these substances to the Nixon administration, specifically the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, and says people stop questioning it after so long:

But for 56 years, we've been living underneath that.

An Ecuador story backs up the point about changing minds. In a town on the edge of the Amazon, a tourism board member proposed branding it "the ayahuasca city." Colleagues objected that they didn't want "a bunch of fucking hippie backpackers" turning into drug addicts there. He took each member on an ayahuasca trip, and one by one they concluded it wasn't addictive. Someone sums up the effect: "You come once, you don't come back for a year."

There is enthusiasm, but also some caution. One participant says a microdose of mushrooms "would help so many people" and gives "such a reset," and says molly does too. The two disagree about what to call MDMA. The guest says MAPS people ask him to stop calling it molly because the name makes it sound like a party drug. He objects that he does take it at parties, and compares the request to calling whiskey by its alcohol-by-volume figure.

While discussing these studies, one participant adds a caution about cannabis: "it's not for everybody." Some products are "so strong," and some people are already heading toward schizophrenia or have it in their family, for whom it is not good. This is the clearest risk qualification in the segment.

The other participant welcomes what he calls the comeback of lower-potency "Mexican weed," which he puts at about 12% THC. He wants to be "in the clouds right above the city," not "go to Pluto," and describes asking for the cannabis version of a shot or a beer. He says dispensary staff look down on requests for "mids." He recalls an early dispensary, Zen, where he explained that he wanted to smoke while writing without a joint ending his writing session, and was offered Mexican weed. The other participant compares the request to asking a powerlifting gym for yoga classes.

An advertisement for AG1 interrupts the conversation. It describes the drink as supporting immune health, energy and digestion, and possibly replacing multivitamins and probiotics. It promotes a welcome-kit offer worth $111 at drinkag1.com/joerogan. These are sponsor claims, not part of the discussion.

Back on mushrooms, one participant asks why they can't be bought when a jug of whiskey from Costco can be. The guest says that in Edinburgh there is a season when mushrooms grow in the meadows and fields. One remark captures the legal absurdity: if one is "on your shoe, it's fine," and "if it comes off your shoe, It's illegal."

Two more examples follow. Near Asheville, where Duncan used to live, farmers are said to have given cows feed with antifungal properties to stop kids picking mushrooms from cow dung. The speaker wonders, without evidence, what it did to the cows' guts. In Thailand, hippies picked mushrooms from elephant dung at night until the herders worked out why and, the speaker says, started selling them.

This leads to a debate about elephant camps. The guest recalls backpackers in a hostel asking whether a camp was "humane or non-humane," and being told riding counts as inhumane. The other participant describes a camp he visited where, he says, the elephants were rescue animals that came in from the jungle and weren't kept in cages. Visitors washed them, fed them sugar cane and built a relationship before riding with barely a saddle. Because the elephants "could kill you anytime they want to," he says, it is a relationship and they were "not abused at all."

He doesn't fully defend riding, though. He says he made a video telling people he did it but doesn't recommend it and would never do it again, preferring to feed and pet the animals. He says he did it only because his family wanted to. The guest points out the tension: having ridden one, he can now afford to give it up.

On legality, the guest isn't sure about mushrooms in Thailand but believes weed was recently legalized there. He says that before that, bars selling joints paid the police, so customers were effectively safe. The other participant takes the opposite view and says he wouldn't use drugs in another country, citing Brittney Griner as a warning.

Their estimates of her detention shift during the exchange: first "like six months," then "10 months," then "Almost a fucking year in jail in Russia," with a sentence of "Nine years in a penal colony." The transcript renders the item as a "rape cartridge," probably a mistranscription. The guest offers a hedged second-hand account ("Yeah, I think so"). He says he knew someone at her sports management agency, and claims the US government asked people to stay quiet while it worked to free her. In his account, public pressure made her a more valuable bargaining chip and ended with the release of "the merchant of death." He widens this into a criticism that Americans "rush in full bore" on problems they don't understand.

Both participants describe attention as something people can't stop chasing. Once a story is out, influencers "cannot help talk about it" because "It's their currency." Late-night hosts, they argue, knew after Trump won that talking about him helped him, and kept doing it anyway for the money. The other participant applies this to CNN: much of its ratings came from criticizing Trump, which only made him more popular, because the network didn't grasp how much Americans disliked it. As he puts it, viewers reasoned, "oh, he must be good because you guys suck."

The guest raises a theory that terrorism and the US are "symbiotic." On this view, terrorism grows from US domination of other countries, and the US needs terrorists to keep money flowing to weapons. He extends it to Israel, asserting that Netanyahu "famously said they were funding Hamas" and paraphrasing the reasoning as:

When we fund Hamas, we can control the height of the flame.

The other participant agrees that an enemy justifies bigger contracts, asking how "a trillion-dollar military budget" could be justified without terrorism. The guest dismisses some threats as "a 30-person group," and they joke about a Shane Gillis bit mocking terrorist training videos of monkey bars and jumping jacks.

The Afghanistan withdrawal is the last example. The guest asks whether equipment was left behind on purpose for the Taliban to use. He says he sees less and less as accidental, while granting that incompetence also plays a part:

The older I get, the less I think there's accidents.