Joe Rogan & Ben Shapiro Discuss Marijuana Use

Have your conservative values moved in one way or another? Have they shifted at all? My personal values probably haven't shifted very much, but my political values have shifted libertarian. I mean, so I used to be a proponent of criminalization of marijuana. I'm no longer. I've been in favor of criminalization of pot. What changed that for you? A couple of things. One was just a general sense the government sucks at everything. And the more I see the government try to crack down on things, the more prevalent it becomes. I mean, people were dealing pot on my sixth grade, seventh grade playground in public school. So obviously like that was. What in LA? Yeah, exactly. And then just a general perception, not only the government sucks at everything, but that you got to own your own actions and also examining more of the evidence about the impact of pot on people's lives. And again, there's you ruining your own life through use of drugs. And then there's drugs that legitimately ruin other people's lives. There are drugs that remove your ability to even reason or think. I think there are only two reasons to criminalize drugs in any fashion. One is if there are drugs like, for example, PCP that legitimately make you violent and then you are going out and committing acts of violence against people, then there's a case. Or if you're talking about a drug where it legitimately robs you of your capacity to reason if it were heroin, if you were able to actually crack down on it successfully. But even there, I'm not sure that the proper government solution is criminalization because we've criminalized it and it's still incredibly prevalent. So I agree with you. I agree with you on that. And I agree with you in terms of drugs being extremely detrimental. And the other part is that there's comparable drugs that are legal and comparable drugs, meaning not even really comparable drugs that are far more devastating, like alcohol. Like you could just go to any grocery store and buy a jug of whiskey and kill yourself with it. It's not difficult. We have laws on the books already that prevent externalities. If you drive high, it's the same as driving drunk. So I'm not sure that you need additional laws to do that. And also, I'm not opposed to zoning laws. I don't think a pot shop should open up right next to my house. They're residential zoning. That's fine. Same with liquor stores, though. Right. I don't want a liquor store right next to my house. This is correct. So I've become libertarian in some ways on that sort of stuff. The same thing is true, by the way, when it comes to the issue of same-sex marriage. So on a personal moral level, I'm opposed to same-sex marriage. I'm an Orthodox Jew. And I believe that a man and a woman were made for each other. When it comes to government involvement, I don't think that's anybody's business. I think a lot of things. I think adultery is bad, too. I don't think the government ought to be involved in adultery. I'm so strict, I don't think premarital sex is a good thing, right? I've been very vocal about this. I was a virgin until I was married. My wife was a virgin until she was married. I think that's a good thing. So I think the government has anything to do with any of those things? No, I don't. I don't think it's any of the government's business. It's consensual activity. There are no externalities. So what exactly is the government getting involved in? And when the government gets involved in stuff, then there are externalities, right? Once the government starts to cram down its vision on people, then you start to get unintended externalities. So for example, with the legalization, my view on marriage is that the government should get completely out of the business. I don't think the government should be involved in straight marriage. I don't think it should be involved in gay marriage. I think the government should be out. I agree, 100%. And the reason that I say that is because as a religious person, right, who believes in traditional marriage, I have two marriage certificates. I have the one from the state that I don't give two craps about. It's buried somewhere in my garage. And then I have my religious marriage certificate, which meant, among other things, that I got to shtuk my wife, right? I mean, like, this was the one that mattered to me. And I think that's true for most religious people. The religious ceremony matters a lot more than the state saying a thing. And the state isn't incentivizing marriage. People aren't getting married because they're like, yeah, I need the tax break. So that's a bunch of nonsense. And once the government decides what version of marriage it wants to push, that then comes into conflict with other values. So for example, once the state of California decides that same-sex marriage is on legal par with heterosexual marriage, now I'm worried about the externality of I have a religious day school or I have my synagogue. My synagogue is a religious institution. It doesn't approve of same-sex marriage. Now is the government going to come in and tell my synagogue how it ought to act with regard to same-sex marriage? I don't think that's the government's business. So how about this? How about everybody gets to do basically what they want, associate with whom they want, and it's none of the government's business. This seems like a pretty good, happy medium. I'm so glad you talked about the two things that I wanted to talk to you about that I'm sure we disagree about. One of them being marijuana and the other one being gay people marrying each other. So let's start with the marijuana one. Do you think marijuana ruins people's lives? Is that one of your contentions? I think that it can. And I think in the same way alcohol can. Have you ever had any experience with marijuana? No. I'm just talking about the statistical overuse of marijuana among teenagers does have detrimental brain effects that have some long-term after effects. It's pretty proven. And that's one of the things that I really I'm glad you said that because I wanted to cover that when you were in the middle of a rant when we were joking around about sixth and seventh graders selling pot. Don't smoke pot when you're young. You really should. It's not good for the development of your brain. Same thing with drinking. You know, I didn't smoke a lot of pot when I was a kid. I did it a handful of times until I was 30 years old. But I did drink a bunch of times when I was young and in high school. It's terrible for brain development. Especially before you're 25 and your frontal cortex hasn't even fully formed. Your frontal lobe is like this. It's a developing thing. And there was an article recently that I posted from BBC that was saying that you probably shouldn't be considered an adult until you're 30. Right. They're saying brain development doesn't even stop until you're 26 or 28. This is why when people are saying let's lower the voting age for 16. I'm like, what the? What the fuck are you talking about? In the wild. When I was 16, I was a chimp. You know, I mean, I was a chimp in a high school. Now, the problem that I have with many people's perceptions on marijuana is that it's based on ignorance, meaning no personal experience with it. You know, and. Listen, I'll admit, I have no personal experience in marijuana. I know you don't. I'm not speaking for the students. Probably should get high. That's what I'm trying to say. Man, I've seen the effects on stock prices when people get high in the studio. They jump up, man. They jump down for a little when a bunch of chickens jump off the boat. Then they come right back up. The marijuana thing is, in my opinion, it's another one of those things where people have this this categorized box that they like to put marijuana users in. Like, this is the category. Lazy stoner, stupid, delusional. It's too widespread for that. I mean, there are people I know who are doctors who use marijuana. So. Well, there's the jujitsu community is a big one. There's a giant percentage of the jujitsu community that does jujitsu high. They have competitions. Sounds like a world party. It's not, man. I'm telling you because it's not what people think it is. If you've never smoked marijuana, this is going to be a very difficult thing to grasp. But marijuana enhances jujitsu because it eliminates the rest of the world. When you're rolling, which rolling is like, say, if you and Jamie were going to have a sparring match, that would be rolling like you'd slap hands and then you'd go and you try to choke him and he's trying to get you in an arm bar and you're going after it. When you do that on marijuana, it's like you don't think of anything else other than the movements. And it becomes like this very intense meditation and violence. It's not violent in terms of most of the time you don't really even get hurt. It's like you get to the point. Like one of the beautiful things about jujitsu is you can grab a hold of someone and choke them to the point where they're going to go to sleep and you would kill them if you kept going and they tap your friends again and everybody's cool. And you try to do it to me and I try to do it to you and you really can do it reasonably hard without people getting hurt. And it happens every day all throughout the world. A lot of these people are high and they're doing this jujitsu practice in this almost like trends. It's a transient state. If you can function when you're using marijuana, I don't care. But you can. This is what I'm saying. The perceptions are off. So I mean, I would assume there's a small subset of the population for whom that's not true, right, who are overusing marijuana. Yes. And that's probably the majority, in fact. OK, so so then, you know, but that's the same way with food. I agree. So I don't think there's anything we disagree about here because I'm not talking about criminalizing marijuana use. I think that we should honestly discuss the evidence that for a subset of the population, there is some evidence that marijuana is addicting, but it's a subset. It's not everybody who's on marijuana. The vast majority of people on marijuana are not addicted to marijuana. I think in the same way alcohol is true of alcohol as well. There's people that are going to be addicted to almost anything. And I think there's there's absolutely people that are addicted to sugar. For sure, people that are addicted to nicotine and alcohol and all these things that we let people have. The material addictiveness of marijuana is not comparable to opioids, though, for example. It's not even comparable to alcohol or nicotine. It's it seems to be very rare when people become physically addicted to it. Extremely rare. And what's what's common, though, is abuse. And it's common in everything that human beings consume. It's abuse is common, as we said, with food, certainly common with alcohol. It's certainly common with pills. But this is why I really believe that the way to solve some of these problems is a social fabric problem like parenting problem. It's a social fabric problem. It's a personal choice problem. Yes. That's why virtually every solution I suggest is so funny. I'm constantly conservatives like me who are libertarian leaning are constantly accused of being non compassionate. No, it's just our compassionate solutions don't involve the use of government. Yeah. It's like we're going to encourage people to make better decisions with their lives. And if you choose not to do that, it's a free country. Well, you know, coming from religious background, you have this community that reinforces this kind of behavior and thought. And I think that's one of the major really one of the best benefits of religion is that moral fabric and that community, the sense of community, even silly ones like Mormons, you know, they're the nicest folks, right? They believe something that is fucking patently insane. If you go and read the Joseph Smith text from 1820, he was 14 years old, the shit that he wrote. Like, I try not to get into doctrinal insanity. I wear a funny hat all day. I hear you. Well, I was going to get to that. Yeah. But you know, with that said, I mean, Alexis de Tocqueville talks about this, you know, early on in the American Republic. The idea is that what makes America very different is the idea you don't need a big government when you do have a supportive social fabric where people feel like they're at least oriented toward a common goal. It's one of the problems that I think we have in the country right now. I'm not sure people are oriented toward even a common sense of conversation. I mean, you don't have to agree on everything in order to have a common sense of the important values that unify the country or show us. I always use Sam Harris as sort of my bet noir here because he's obviously a militant atheist. I'm an equally strong believer. And yet when it comes to the things that we would like to see happen in the country, not on government policy level, but on a let's have a conversation level and discuss on evidence level, we're on the same page. There are certain core assumptions you have to make in order for that to happen. My argument about America and the West is that those core assumptions are built on Judeo-Christian foundations. Sam's core argument seems to be that they're built on evolutionary biology. We differ a little bit there. I don't want to let this marijuana thing go just yet. One of the things that I wanted to bring up to you was this idea that if you're a religious person, don't you think that there's certain things that maybe God put here for us to consume, to change your perspective, to allow you to reach new levels of consciousness? Don't you think it's entirely possible that some of these things that are here? And I know you haven't experienced it, but they might literally have been put there by God. And there's some evidence to say that a lot of the text from the Bible that in particular there was I think it was the University of Tel Aviv somewhere in in Jerusalem where these scholars were they were trying to decipher what it meant when Moses encountered the burning bush. Right. And they believe that it may have been the Acacia tree, which is very rich in dimethyltryptamine, which is a psychedelic substance that actually that the brain produces and it's very common in plants. And they think that this might have been when he met God and God was a burning bush, that this might have been some crude translation of them being involved in some sort of a psychedelic experience. Now, it sounds outlandish unless you've had that psychedelic experience. And when you have, you very well could think that you were in a conversation with God. This is on earth. And this is something that may very well have been lost information or this may very well have been rituals that people participated in to bring them closer together and to reinforce that sense of community that you do get from a church and you do get from a group of people that share moral beliefs and values. And there's a there's real good discussion that a lot of these experiences that became these religious doctrines came from psychedelic experiences. Now, as someone who's never experienced that before, I know this is probably a very strange thing to try to even wrap your head around. It's it is entirely alien until you experience it. But it might very well be religious. I mean, I've heard that from other people who have been who have used those kinds of I mean, Sam actually made this argument to me, too, about the use of psychedelics. And I mean, maybe not again, I apples. Well, OK, so this argument, I will say I'm not super fond of the argument that God made something and therefore it's ours to use or I mean, like I keep kosher, right? Like God made pigs. I don't need them. So so I am not a huge fan of the argument that because something is here or because an urge is natural, therefore we ought to imbibe or therefore we ought to participate in a particular activity. You know, one of the things that I that I'm very big on, I'm a rationalist when it comes to religion as much as you can be a rationalist with religion to the extent that I think that it's up to us to use our reasonable faculties to determine the proper use of things. So which is why you shouldn't overuse drugs, even if you're going to use drugs. This is part of the problem of making things illegal. You make things illegal, then you really don't know what it is or how it affects the body or what's the right dose or the wrong dose. And then people get involved in these terrible situations where they're taking things they're just guessing. I mean, there's truth to that. But it's also true that on a social level, I'm not talking about legal, because we totally agree on the legal level. On the social level, there's a couple of things that are true of, for example, the Orthodox Jewish community, low rates of addiction, because people have that social fabric, they don't feel the necessity. Also, as you say, substance use in moderation can actually be quite a good thing. So low rates of alcoholism in the Jewish community. And part of that is the fact that you are given kiddush wine from the time you're a kid, right? I mean, you actually are. It's destigmatized. Yeah, it's destigmatized. And the idea is that in its proper context, this could be a good thing. So I'll admit, I don't know enough about the proper context of marijuana to know when it would be a quote unquote, good thing. And so I can't be a good thing. This is what I'm telling you. And also, I'm, you know, I don't, the truth is I don't enjoy drinking, right? I'm not, I'm not a drinker. I don't enjoy, I like reality. I like living in reality. And I like experiencing it totally sober. So I've never really felt the urge to do any of that stuff. I hear the pitch. I hear the pitch. But I've never really felt the interior desire or need to jump into that. I completely understand that. I think that what we're dealing with, though, is perceptions that have been molded by laws that were shaped by tyrants. That's what I think. I mean, again, that's totally possible and plausible. Yeah. And it's historically accurate. I mean, when it comes to prohibition, prohibition with alcohol didn't work, prohibition with drugs is just making the cartels bigger. And it's causing more problems with organized crime. On a practical level, whether you like drugs or don't like drugs, government interventionism is generally a giant fail. I think our perceptions of what is good for you and is bad for you is also based on laws that the government created ignorantly. The sweeping psychedelic act of 1970, which made virtually everything psychedelic, that they could, they missed a few things, a few things slipped through the crack. But all of the tryptamines and most of them, psilocybin, LSD, all that stuff was made completely illegal by people who really didn't even know what it was. And a lot of that is why we base our ideas of what's good or bad for you. It's based on what is legal and what other people have done with it. On this area, I'll admit not only complete experiential ignorance, but complete evidentiary ignorance. So I haven't examined the evidence. I really don't have strong opinions on any of this stuff. I think it's one of the bridges that we all could use between conservative thought and liberal thought, particularly for people that are dying. It's one of the things that Johns Hopkins found. And there's been other studies done and there's been therapy done on people that are dying of terminal diseases and they give them psilocybin. And when they give them these mushroom trips, they have these beautiful experiences where they completely accept death. And it's almost a universal reaction to it. That like the amount of people who still experience a positive benefit months and months after the experience while they're dying, that they say this was an incredibly moving and powerful moment in my life that allowed me to accept the fact that my time here is done. Listen, if that's something that works for people and that's what it's designed to do, then... I don't know if it's designed. Well, even if it's not designed. It might be designed by God. Like it literally might. That's fine. I think there's also the generalized religious counter-argument that there are no shortcuts to happiness. So let's pose a thought experiment. I don't think it's a shortcut. Well, this is the question, right? I mean, like, let's say that I could guarantee you that tomorrow you're going to be a happier person. All you have to do is take this regimen of drugs that you're going to take every day and it's going to make you a happier person, a more well-rounded person, but it's going to permanently change your brain chemistry. Is that something that you think is good or is it something you think is bad? Because from a religious perspective, there's an argument to be made that this is work you need to do on yourself without outside aid, if possible. If there's cases where you can't, then you can't. Yeah. It's an interesting God experiment. Terrence McGinnah had a line about that. He said that there was a joke about, there was a monk and he met Buddha because Buddha came to town and he said Buddha, he wanted to impress him. He said, I practiced a city of levitation and I have done this for 10 years and now I can walk on water. And the Buddha says, but the ferry's only a nickel. What are you fucking wasting your time? You can aid the progression rapidly with psychedelic drugs. And this is something that, do you know about MAPS and their work with MDMA and soldiers that have had PTSD? Not too much, no. It's phenomenal. By giving these soldiers MDMA therapy, meaning they give them MDMA, which is essentially what people think of as ecstasy, the street name, they give them pure MDMA and then they assist them with, they actually have a psychologist, sit with them, a therapist, and they go over all these details of these traumatic events and they come to peace with everything. And they've had profound benefits for soldiers and for some combat journalists, different people that have been over there and have experienced the horrors of war and just general PTSD, maybe for people who have experienced violence attacks. It is shown to be one of the very best things we've ever discovered for helping people get past something. So here's to me, and I'm thinking about this on the fly because this is stuff I don't think about very much, but there's a complex moral equation to the extent that if you're talking about somebody who has PTSD, somebody has a condition, and the only way to help that condition is to use these drugs, I've never had a problem with any of that stuff, right? I mean, my grandfather was schizophrenic and maybe bipolar, maybe schizophrenic, the diagnosis is not exactly clear, they prescribed him lithium, it made him a lot better. Would he have been better off struggling with the schizophrenia? Of course not, much better that he should have the lithium and then be able to live in his rational mind. So when there's a problem, using drugs to get past it and work with it is a good thing. You do run the risk of the sort of brave new world situation where you have a group of people who have a certain level of erosat's happiness that is not driven by a point of view but more by just the chemicals in their their body. The chemicals affect your point of view. Well, that is 100% true. But are you, Yuval Harari talks about maybe this is the future, right? He talks about the idea that maybe the future is we just drug ourselves until we're happy basically, more that happiness is the drugs. Because if you're a scientific materialist, that's what it is. Happiness is just a bunch of chemicals flowing throughout your body. So if you can bring them in without self change. But I do wonder whether that robs people of a certain level of purpose that the struggle is part of being human. I think we're changing what it is to be human just by carrying around phones and just, I mean, that's, that's true. But I think that that's, again, one of the things that I think makes being a human worthwhile is the idea that you are struggling. Like, I think I think the struggle is actually meaningful. And I think that's why religions tend to set prophylactic rules, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. So for example, I, I'm addicted to my phone. I mean, there's just no question, right? It's in my hand all the time. And but from Friday night to Saturday night, it's off, I can't look at it. I'm forbidden from looking at it. And this breaks the cycle, at least for one day a week. And that's a good thing that makes me better as a human being because a limit I set for myself, and then a limit that I abide by. And if you believe in self mastery, where's the happy medium between self mastery, and I need a little bit of aid. And I think that there there is a happy medium there. But I'm not sure that that, you know, drugs are the answer to I don't think you're suggesting drugs are not suggesting that. And I think there's also a problem with the word drugs, that everything is under that blanket. And that blanket can be entirely negative or extremely positive. But that's a there's a problem. I use it too. I mean, it's not accusing you. But that that term, it's a problem. It's a problem term. Because what these are, are substances that are psychoactive. And some of them can be extremely beneficial. And some of them have short term experiences that last with long term results. And I don't think that there's enough knowledge that I don't think the people that are negative against it have experienced enough of it, or have looked at it in an objective, rational way. Because I think it's something that could be here to aid perspective, to give people a chance to think outside of their normal, conditioned way of thinking that might have been established by their community or by their church or by their neighborhood, whatever it is, sometimes a little bit of a break, a little bit of a mental break from what you're experiencing in the vibration that you exist on almost every day, to separate from that. And to get a look at it from the outside, sometimes it allows you to have a renewed perspective that can enhance your life greatly.