This is the Unregistered Podcast, and I'm Thaddeus Russell.

This is a show about ideas, people, and behaviors that are considered inappropriate, out of bounds, or beyond the pale.

The things you're not supposed to talk about if you're a schoolteacher, a college professor, a businessman, a politician, a parent, a neighbor, or even a podcast host. These are the things you're not supposed to say or even think if you're a good liberal, a good conservative, or a good citizen. Each week, I'll interview a person who has something bad to say.

They might be a journalist or a professor, they might be a porn star or a drug dealer.

They might just be an ordinary person with an ordinary job who doesn't care about the rules of

polite society. I'm not interested in breaking the rules just to be a troublemaker.

I'm interested in people who break the rules of conventional thought

and to expand the scope of what is possible to say in our society.

I'm interested in people who make me think.

Some laws need to be broken, and some stories need to be told.

This is my interview with a cannabis farmer named Joe.

So I'm in Garberville in Humboldt County, California, a legendary place for me and all of my friends growing up in the 70s and 80s and legendary, I think, for the whole country by now as the weed capital of the world.

And we always knew about these hippies with guns in the woods when I was in summer camp up here, but we never encountered any.

I never did until now.

This is the first time I've met an actual old school OG grower from Humboldt. His name is Joe.

We're not going to say his last name. And he's been going legal like a lot of them have over the last few years.

But I really wanted to talk to Joe because of what he said to me on the phone the other day. I said,

do you sure you want to do this? And you said to me, Joe, on the phone, on my car phone,

I was driving down the five from Oregon. He said, I wanted to talk for a long, long time,

but I never could because I was a criminal. But now I want to talk because I'm free. And all I ever did was grow a shit ton of weed.

And that inspired me not only to speak to you, but to speak to other people who have

had a life like yours who have finally, finally have the chance to tell their stories that

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