Welcome to Unconfuse Me.
I’m Bill Gates.
And you have this cannabis lifestyle business
called Houseplant.
Yeah, it’s been amazing.
I always talked about
how much weed I smoked.
Ever since I was young,
I started when I was in my early twenties
writing, acting and producing.
People always really liked
that I was honest about the fact
that I smoked a lot of weed
and that I was a productive,
normal member of society.
A lot of people were that also,
but no one was talking about it,
and no one made them feel like
they could talk about it.
The impression of every stoner
was that they were a lazy loser,
and I was anything but a lazy loser.
I was creating a prolific career at the time,
when all I would do was
smoke weed all day, every day.
Which is all I still do!
It’s great now to be able to
make things for people who smoke weed,
that are nice things
and that have thought put into them,
because if you’re like me
and smoked weed your whole life,
you’ve never bought anything
that was nice and had thought put into it.
It all seemed like it was concocted
in a dorm room at four in the morning.
The idea that there could be nice home goods
and a lifestyle product
for people who smoke weed
that are actually elevated
was fun from a company standpoint,
but also from emotionally connecting
with people who grew up like me
smoking weed and being told
they should feel shame about it.
I think things like Houseplant
make you feel like you don’t need
to feel ashamed of it, you know?
I love music, and I always think it’s fun
to hear from other people
what some of their favorite tunes are,
so I encouraged you
to bring something along.
Did you bring something?
We sure did.
Yeah we did!
Well, speaking of Houseplant,
one of the fun things that we do at Houseplant,
is that we created these mix records.
We created essentially playlists
that went along with different strains of weed.
Oh, cool.
So the sativa playlist is upbeat music,
the indica playlist is really mellow music,
and the hybrid music is right in between.
That’s what these are.
Me and my friends picked all the songs.
It’s a lot of soul music,
it’s a lot of funk and R&B music, stuff like that.
Does this work?
Yeah.
[music – “The Oogum Boogum Song” by Brenton Wood]
This is a hybrid song.
And it’s like a perfect hybrid song.
It is!
Because you want to bob your head,
but you don’t really
want to get up and dance.
It’s not going to put you to sleep.
It’s right in the middle.
If you smoke enough weed,
are there carcinogenic effects?
There’s none that have been definitively proven.
Okay.
I can say, we’ve never
had a doctor tell us to stop smoking weed.
Yeah, we bring it up.
We’ve asked.
We’re very upfront with all of our doctors.
Lauren goes to a neurologist,
she’s part of programs and studies
and no one has been like,
“You should stop smoking weed
for the health of your brain.”
So, that’s been good and nice!
It’s nice that this thing I do
is not antithetical to the other thing I do,
and that potentially
there are therapeutic effects
to the manifestations of dementia.
Things like mood and appetite,
and things like that.
If anything, it could be helpful.
But because it’s not federally legal,
there isn’t money
to fund research into this stuff.
And it’s scheduled in a way
that makes it un-studyable in a lot of ways.
Hmm.
It is federally illegal for labs to have,
it’s incredibly complicated to have it.
It’s scheduled next to like, heroin,
so it’s not federally accessible for study
in the way it could be,
so people actually understood
what it was and was not doing,
which I would love to know.
Yeah, I’ve always wondered
if we started from scratch, and we said,
“Okay society, you can have one drug:
you can either have alcohol, or pot –”
Oh, my God.
Oh, they would have picked weed, for sure.
Well, weed is much less –
Totally.
We go out with our friends
and they drink.
Of course, I’ll have a drink every now and then.
But the amount that people drink
versus the amount that we smoke,
someone the day after a night of drinking,
versus someone
the day after a night of smoking weed –
Oh, yeah.
You’re in a very different condition.
Alcohol is the worst drug.
They did a real marketing thing there.
They took a drug that,
you have fun for 25 minutes,
and then you have a headache,
you’re vomiting,
the whole next day you feel terrible.
You say stupid things.
Yeah, exactly.
And act like a moron.
They’ve done a really good job
of selling it as a good drug,
but it’s one of the worst.
The one complaint I’ve heard about legal pot
is that a lot of us who were smoking it
when it was illegal,
the dosage was actually pretty modest,
so at least as you move into
the legal pot world,
you can be getting really extreme doses,
particularly on the edibles.
Yeah.
I think I know, okay,
if I puff five times what that means,
whereas if you ingest, I have no clue.
Oh, no, an edible can really –
they should study those
and dose those out properly,
because you can really do some bad stuff.
That’s a place where federal regulations
would really help.
It would be really nice
if there was some sort of a standard.
Edibles, I don’t mess with them.
Snoop Dogg doesn’t eat edibles.
Oh, wow.
That’s how wild the variation on edibles is.
You really don’t know what you’re going to get.
Seth’s dad once accidentally ate a brownie,
a whole brownie, an entire brownie,
out of our fridge,
that is the kind of thing that if I’d had,
I would have had one eighth of it.
A little bit, okay.
Yeah.
And he thought he was dying
He literally was like,
take me to the hospital, I’m done.
He was fine.
How old were you
when you first smoked pot?
And I do not recommend this.
I was probably, like, 13 years old.
I’m from Vancouver,
it was a different place and time.
But yeah, when I was in eighth grade
I really wanted to try it.
I was out to try it.
I was seeking it out.
The first time I smoked pot,
I didn’t get stoned at all,
and it took me a lot of time
to actually understand
how to even breathe it in properly.
I was eighteen.
Weed wasn’t really around so much.
I grew up in central Florida.
There wasn’t a ton of weed
in my high school times,
but it did appear a few times.
But I was like, “I will only drink in high school,
and I’m going to wait to smoke until college
because I want to save it.”
But when I arrived at college,
I was like, it’s on, it’s time.
And back at you, Bill.
When was the first time you smoked pot?
My high school, of, say, 105 people in my class,
I think there were three or four
who didn’t smoke marijuana.
Oh, wow.
Because it was kind of, hey, I’m an adult.
Hey, I can break the rules.
But I will say, like you, sometimes it’s like,
I guess I’m doing this to be cool?
It wasn’t so much smoking pot for pot’s sake,
as it was being part of the crowd.
The culture associated with it.
It’s amazing how it’s changed.
When I grew up,
it was just kind of a rebellion.
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