#1114 - Matt Taibbi

Joe Rogan (0:02)

Five, four, three, two. That countdown gives me anxiety. I gotta stop doing the countdown. See, look, I spilled my fucking alpha brain.

God damn it.

Matt Taibbi (0:12)

What is alpha brain?

Joe Rogan (0:13)

It's brain juice. It's like a cognitive enhancing supplement.

Matt Taibbi (0:18)

Really?

Joe Rogan (0:19)

Yeah, you ever fuck with nootropics? You know what nootropics are?

Matt Taibbi (0:21)

No, do you have an extra one?

Joe Rogan (0:22)

Can I try? Yeah, sure, for sure.

Nootropics are essentially the building blocks for human neurotransmitters. They improve your memory, not too radically. Not like you're fucked with modafinil or any of that stuff.

Matt Taibbi (0:35)

No.

Joe Rogan (0:37)

No?

Matt Taibbi (0:37)

No.

Joe Rogan (0:37)

Modafinil is like a Pro Vigil.

It's, they give it to fighter pilots. You know what I'm talking about? It helps keep them awake.

Matt Taibbi (0:45)

My wife's a doctor, so yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:46)

You have a doctor?

Matt Taibbi (0:47)

Yeah, my wife is a doctor.

Joe Rogan (0:48)

Oh, your wife's a doctor. Oh, that's perfect. So she knows about all that jazz. But there was just an article recently about it, improving cognitive performance.

You're gonna probably have to bite into that. You got it?

It's good to meet you, man. I've enjoyed your work.

Matt Taibbi (1:04)

I've been a fan forever, so.

Joe Rogan (1:05)

Thank you, me too.

Matt Taibbi (1:06)

Looking forward.

Joe Rogan (1:07)

I've enjoyed your writing, for sure. And did you get that? You got it there?

Matt Taibbi (1:13)

I don't know. Do I have to bite it? Here we go.

Joe Rogan (1:15)

Oh, you got scissors.

Matt Taibbi (1:17)

Got it.

Joe Rogan (1:17)

Jamie's got scissors for you, if you don't wanna fuck with that.

Matt Taibbi (1:20)

I got it. I got it. There we go.

Joe Rogan (1:22)

So let's talk about what we were just talking about. You wrote a book with a guy about drug dealing and he was gonna come on wearing a mask.

Matt Taibbi (1:31)

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.

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, you know, sort of the whole progression of his life.

Joe Rogan (2:18)

What kind of drugs?

Matt Taibbi (2:21)

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 he, 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.

Joe Rogan (2:53)

You could get spores, right?

Matt Taibbi (2:54)

Yeah, well, actually, you could get the actual.

Really? Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan (2:58)

Wow.

Matt Taibbi (3:00)

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.

Joe Rogan (3:59)

As a lawyer?

Matt Taibbi (4:00)

No, no. Legal marijuana.

Joe Rogan (4:03)

Oh, oh, oh, oh.

Matt Taibbi (4:04)

Yeah, 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?