Tommy Chong Helped Inspire the Wolf of Wall Street | Joe Rogan

It's also for mental health reasons. Like for me, I need to exercise. Well, like Arnold, you know, when I first came to LA, I first thing I did was join Gold's Gym. Because I read about it, you know, up in Vancouver. And then I met Arnold and all the guys. And they were so healthy. You know, if he took a sip of 7-up, he'd spit it out. Really? Yeah. And he was super, super healthy. But he smoked a joint. He would smoke a joint. That was another thing, pumping iron. That documentary pumping iron. So him, after he won, smoking a joint. Smoking a joint. It made the pot look better. Like, wow, this guy smoked pot? That's right. How the fuck does pot make you a loser if the biggest bodybuilder on the planet? The most successful. Yes. Successful guy. Yeah. Yeah. And I ordered him one time. Like I ordered everybody in. Arnold was walking with Stallone at the time. There's that famous picture? Yeah. They asked. Arnold is numero uno. They asked Arnold. Tommy Chong said that he smoked pot with you. And Stallone jumped in right away. Oh, no, that's a lie. That's a lie. He had never smoked it. And Arnold said, no, no. Yeah, we did smoke pot. We knew how to enjoy ourselves back then. Yeah. Why was Stallone trying to cover it up? Well, he got Stallone and Stallone. Those Rambo movies. I got some good stories on Stallone. But you remember Jordan Belford? Jordan Belford. The Wolf of Wall Street? Yes. Yeah. I was in jail with him. Oh. And I helped him write his book. Really? Yeah. In fact, all I did was insult him and made him write his book. Because I was writing my book. And he was started. He said, what are you doing? I'm writing. Because we shared a cubicle. And I said, I'm writing my book. He says, I'm going to write a book. And so he wrote a couple of pages. He handed it to me like, hey, read this. And I read it. And it was like a copy of Tom Wolf, Bonfires of the Manatees. And I said, you haven't written shit. I handed it back to him. And he said, what do you mean? I said, you haven't written nothing. He said, what should I write? He challenged me. I said, write what you know. I said, write those stories you've been telling me every night. I said, there's one rule that you've got to remember when you're writing or doing anything. It's called the most of. So you don't just get high. You get higher than anybody's ever gotten in their life if you're going to put it on screen. You don't just have a fight. You have a fight that goes on forever. That's the kind of stuff that people are interested in. And so he said, you didn't talk to me for about a month after that. He was mad at you? Yeah. He was just writing. I'll show this guy. And he wrote The Wolf of Wall Street. And then he'd give it to you. And you're like, all right, you got something here. No, no, no, no. The next time I saw him, he pulled in front of my house with his car. We were both on probation, so we couldn't talk to each other. And so he yelled from his car. He goes, hey, I sold the book to Martin Scorsese. So you're allowed to talk to each other by yelling? Yeah. But you couldn't be close? Yeah, you couldn't be. How far away do you have to stay? Well, technically, you're not supposed to talk to each other. But yelling, no one's going to say anything about that. That's hilarious. Yeah. How stupid is that? You violate your probation. They put you back in jail. Because you're associating with felons. That's right. That's so crazy that someone who you're trying to rehabilitate with, you can't talk to them because they also fucked up. There was a Nixon speechwriter that was in with me, and he was so innocent. The government was trying to get stuff on Hamald Marcos, the Philippines. And this lawyer that I was in there was a speechwriter, a Reagan speechwriter. And he wouldn't give up Marcos or a melda. And so they put him in jail for a year. And when he got out on probation, being a straight guy, he was. He went home and took a Valium to help him sleep. And he got drug tested the next day and went back in jail. He went back in jail. So you've got to be very careful when you're dealing with probation people. Because they got you by the balls, man. It's got to be a weird thing dealing with the probation officers because they have that power over you. Do they fuck with you? Not me. I was too much of a celebrity. And I had a lot of nice ladies, and so I'd flirt with them. They're all friends. Yeah, I've flirted with everything. Well, I'm sure like all things, right? There's good people doing it in bad places. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's a job. It's a job. It's a paycheck. The sad thing about when I was in jail in Taft was that it's built over a toxic waste dump. That's where they found oil in Taft in California. And when they found oil back in the day, they never had a way to contain it. They would just dig it and hit it, and they would just spill all over the ground. And so they would dig big trenches out, big pools. And they would fill up with oil. Then they would get the barrels and dip the barrels in, and that's how they filled up the oil barrels. And so after they figured out how to do it right, the ground is all toxic. And so they built a federal prison over top of it. And so everybody that's worked there, and a lot of people that did time there all got in cancer and died. So you think that's probably the root of your cancer? Could be. Could be. Could be, for sure. Yeah, easy, yeah.