Joe Rogan - The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing

So let's talk about what we were just talking about. You wrote a book with a guy about drug dealing and he was going to come on wearing a mask. Yeah, he wanted to come on wearing a Barack Obama mask actually. It's actually really funny. The whole story is really funny. I'm writing this book. Oh, I spilled it too. It's called The Business Secrets of Drug Dealing. You can find it at businesssecretsofdrugdealing.com and I'm serializing it. But basically somebody I knew for ages in a completely different capacity sort of came out to me last year and said, you know, I've been a high level drug dealer for a long time, basically my whole life, and wanted to tell a story about sort of the whole progression of his life. What kind of drugs? Only things that grow out of the ground. So he started off, this is an African American guy, he started off, believe it or not, selling mushrooms. He sort of grew up half in the projects and half in an upscale suburb. And in the upscale suburb he sold mushrooms, which he basically got through mail order at a time early in the sort of history of the internet when there were some loopholes about things. You could get spores, right? Yeah, well actually you could get the actual... Really? Yeah. Wow. So he ends up having this whole career and he wanted to sort of explain to me what the rules of the game were and do sort of a book version of the Ten Crack Commandments. And so we sat down and we couldn't quite figure out how to do it at first, but we ended up essentially doing a sort of fictionalized version of his life. And the progression is amazing because he goes from being a dealer in all these different parts of the country and different social spheres. He's in college, he deals to rich white kids, he deals on the street in tough urban neighborhoods, and then ends up sort of in the legal business in this state. As a lawyer? No, no, no, no, no, no. Legal marijuana. Oh, oh, oh. Yeah, yeah. And so he's describing that world, which is not... There are a lot of misconceptions about it. There are some things about it that are not known terribly well, like what do you do when you work at a farm and your crop tests dirty with a contaminant? Well, not everybody just throws it away. A lot of that stuff ends up shipped across country, goes to other markets. And he sort of describes a lot of this... Like what kind of contaminants would that be? Like fungal or pesticides? Yeah, like a fungus, something like that. There are labs that basically have to clear, from what I understand, that have to clear each of the crops. And there are situations where there's a whole bunch of crop and you got workers that have to be paid and what do you do with it? And the legal market isn't big enough to accommodate all the stuff that's grown. And so there's sort of still kind of a black market that goes on. And he describes this. But even before that, it's just a fascinating book about all the different things that he learned in the course of his career about how to do the job and not get caught, how to rig a load to drive cross country, how do you do a dummy car? He tells a story about how basically you want four cars, you want the guy in the front seat to look like a drug dealer, have a terrible record, drive badly, basically to attract the police. And the third car is the load car. The second car is sort of watching to see if there's cops in either direction. And then the fourth car is basically driving up behind the load car to sort of prevent anybody from seeing the license plate and that sort of thing. So he just talks about all this stuff and it's fascinating. And it was a new kind of writing for me because I've never really done anything except straight journalism and we sort of had to do it in narrative form. And so we're putting it out serially online right now, which is really cool. So you did one of those change the names to protect the innocent sort of deal? Exactly. Yeah. Or the guilty. Yeah. But for the most part, based on facts. Yes. Yes. The observations were, let's just say realistic. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And the observations were that he describes are all things that he actually learned. The situations were relatively close to things that actually happened. So yeah. That's interesting. So that's available now? Mm-hmm. Yep. Again, it's businesssecretsofdrugdealing.com. It's kind of a new thing. I grew up a huge fan of serialized detective stories. I was a big fan of Dash El-Hammett and Raymond Chandler. And I loved Black Mask Magazine, which was the big pulp noir magazine in the 20s and 30s. And I grew up reading all those stories. And it was in the back of my mind always that I wanted to try this and write a book on a deadline. So I'm doing this now. It's basically co-written with this anonymous character who can't appear with me on shows like this anywhere because he's still not captured. So are there warrants out for this guy? No. He's never been picked up. Never been arrested? Never been arrested. No. Whoa. Yeah. Sounds like a smart dude. He is a smart dude. He is a smart dude. Some employers would be very surprised to know that he's got a hobby like this. It's funny. Again, I knew him for years and didn't have the faintest clue that this was going on. Did he keep a job in order to avoid suspicion? So the book is actually structured with all these rules. Each chapter has rules in it. One of his most important rules is always have a job. It's for a number of reasons. Number one, he talks about how when he was young he worked at places like Marriott or Applebee's. He's like, if you can serve, have the patience to serve people at an Applebee's and not blow up and scream at people, then you won't screw up a package. In other words, if you can have the self-discipline to actually get through one of these jobs and not blow up and be crazy, then you're going to hand yourself well at a car stop. That's fascinating. So he used it almost like as a discipline exercise. He used it as a discipline exercise. He learned, among other things, like another one of his rules is dress like an off-duty Applebee's waiter. Do not dress ... And he talks about this, about how most dealers, they learn their profession by watching movies. There's no book out there. It's not like this generation is growing up reading the old Iceberg Slim or Donald Goins novels or whatever it is. They're watching The Wire or Blow or Ozark now or whatever it is. Dealers very often dress like dealers. You can spot them. He says that's exactly the opposite of what you have to do. Wear spairy shoes, wear boring clothes, look like you're on your way to your freshman English class or whatever it is. And like a nerdy college kid when the cops pull you over and all this stuff is sort of central to his whole worldview about how to avoid getting caught. Wow, that would be a great book. I mean, it is. It's really fun. And, you know, the fact that the co-author is actually a person who's pulling this off makes it really interesting. And makes it a real challenge to write it too because, you know, I had to kind of simulate his voice and kind of communicate to people what those situations were like and what things look like from his point of view. And obviously I'm white and he's African American and that's tough. But you know, I think it works. It's kind of a cool story. But it must have been a juicy, like when you found the subject and I was like, oh boy, we got something here. Oh yeah. Super juicy. Yeah, no, it's so much fun. I haven't had this much fun, like fun, fun writing anything for a long time because, you know, most criminal memoirs and again, I grew up a junkie in terms of reading this stuff. I love books that are written after the fact by people who were in crime. You know, like Papillon was one of my favorite books growing up. I mean, it's an amazing story about not just crime, but about prison and what's that like. But they're always written by people after they got caught. Right. And so there's never that book by the person who's still out there and talking about what outlaw life is like successfully still on the other side of the law. And that part of it is fascinating. It's just a, it's a completely new thing. And he has all these insights that I would never have thought about. Like he talks about how there's a thing he calls the hood price. Like if you, when you're dealing, selling to in black neighborhoods, even he charges a higher price because there's more, there are more problems that you inevitably run into when you're dealing in those neighborhoods because there's more cops, which means more lawyers, which means more security, which means more attention to detail. When you deal to rich white kids, there's nobody's paying attention. So you just, there's less overhead, you know, in the business, which is fascinating. It's and, you know, he talks all about this and he has, he spent a lifetime kind of just keeping all this stuff in his head, always wanting to put it down. And he just got to be too much. And he just sort of tapped me on the shoulder one day and said, can we have lunch? I just want to talk to you about something. How long did you know him before this? I would say three years, three years, four years. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. It was very cool. We had to trust you. Well, I'm glad we decided to not have him on because he would get busted. Yeah, exactly. I talked to him about that. Yeah. Yeah. Like you can't, like if you were on something and you had a mask on, people go, that's Matt Taieb. You know what I mean? Right. There'd be somebody listening to him. Maybe he doesn't understand that there's millions of people listening. I totally agree with you. Hundreds of those people would go, that's whatever. That's Mike. That's John. Whatever his name is. They would get it. Even the Unabomber got caught and he only talked to like two people.