Joe Rogan Experience #1964 - Rick Doblin

(drumming music plays) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music plays) Hello, Rick. (laughs)

Good to see you again, my friend. How are you?

Yeah, I'm doing great. It was so nice to be with you a couple weeks ago.

Yeah, it was fun to have you at the club. You were there, like, one of the first days.

Yeah, I think I saw the, um, first event in the small room.

Yes. Yeah, did you see Dave Chappelle?

I did.

Yeah, that, that was the first one. Yeah, we had Dave there. He wanted to do that room. We opened it specifically for him. That was the first time we did a show there. It was very exciting.

Yeah, I really liked having the opportunity to just talk to him a little bit afterwards, and to listen to him. It was, it was hilarious.

Yeah, he's a big fan of what you guys are doing.

Yes. (laughs)

As is, as is everybody, you know? And I think what you guys are doing at Maps is one of the most important things for society and culture, and just consciousness in general, that's, that's happening today, and I'm very, very happy that you're doing that.

Thank you, yeah. Yeah, I'm, I'm pretty e- extremely lucky that, uh, 51 years ago when I was 18, in 1972, and I decided to focus my life on psychedelics, that now I'm 69, all these years later, and it still makes sense. (laughs)

(laughs) Well, back then it must've been a big risk because in the 1970s, when you focused your life on psychedelics, that was like right after that whole sweeping Schedule One Psychedelics Act was passed, right?

Yeah, that was in 1970. Yeah, things looked grim.

Didn't look good.

Yeah. Well, I was a, um, draft resister. I th- I thought that I would, um, serve my country by going to jail, uh, which is kind of a funny way to say it. But I had felt that I'm, I'm not a conscientious, uh, objector. In order to do that, you have to be a pacifist, and so I, I'm not a pacifist. I think there are some times you need to fight and defend yourselves. Um, so the only options for me, as I studied how to respond to, to Vietnam, was to ... I didn't want to pretend I had bone spurs (laughs) or r- run away to Canada, or anything like that. And I studied, uh, Tolstoy and Gandhi and non-violent resistance and decided that, um, the thing that I would do would be to not register for the draft. And I was paying taxes, I had a Social Security number, I had a driver's license, I was in high school. I figured the government knows who I am, and knows where I am, and knows my age, and so I assumed that I would go to jail and that that would be a way to drain the system of energy and to register my protest that way. Martin Luther King actually said a great thing. He said, "The person that thinks a law is unjust and violates it and is willing to suffer the consequences as an example to others about the unjust nature of the law actually has the highest respect for the law."