Pod Insights Stuff You Should Know The Ballad of High Times Magazine About this episode Whether you’re 20.5 or 50, if you love pot then High Times was the magazine for you. With ton of photos of marijuana, tips for how to grow it yourself, and other illegal stuff, High Times hung in there long enough to go from outlaw to mainstream.
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Transcript 10,766 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:03 Speaker 03 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.
1:13 Josh Clark? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And we're just hanging out, feeling irie here in Stuff You Should Know.
1:23 Speaker 02 Did you ever, I mean, I'm going to ask you two questions. Did you ever read High Times much? And did you ever subscribe?
1:32 Josh Clark? I never subscribed. I was way too paranoid to do something like that. But yes, I read it. I looked at the pictures.
1:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, I, I think for one year in college, I actually subscribed because, and this is High Times Magazine, we're talking about everybody, the, I was going to say notorious, but not really notorious, the infamous weed magazine.
1:53 Josh Clark? Sure.
1:54 Speaker 02 But I subscribed for, I think, a year because it just seemed like, you know, I wanted to have that house, like that had that on the coffee table with our address on it. I just thought it was like the cool thing to do, you know?
2:06 Josh Clark? Yeah, I mean, it was legitimately cool during a certain period of life.
2:12 Speaker 02 Yeah.
2:13 Josh Clark? Like, if you were 50 doing that, it's kind of sad. But if you're like 20, or 19, or 21, or 20 and a half, let's say, then, yeah, I get it.
2:23 Speaker 02 Watch what you say, though. I've learned from recent emails, there may be a 50-year-old out there that thinks High Times is cool, that's gonna be very upset.
2:29 Josh Clark? Yeah, it's true. But I mean, do they have it on their coffee table?
2:33 Speaker 02 I don't know.
2:34 Josh Clark? I think that's the thing that's getting me.
2:36 Speaker 02 Even when I did read it occasionally, I, even at the time, was like, this is, the articles, the way they were written, there were so many puns, it was so kind of corny.
2:44 Josh Clark? Yeah.
2:45 Speaker 02 Uh, and so it never felt like as good as I think they might have thought it was. Does that make sense?
2:51 Josh Clark? Yeah, and also, one of the other things, too, um, I was gonna say you could sense it, but no, it was just really overt, was they had an agenda in every single one of their articles. There was a way they wanted you to think, which is their position on it, and they would like mock the other position on it, typically the government's position on like legalization or something like that.
3:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, good point.
3:15 Josh Clark? Over time, though, I mean, it became, it's an iconic magazine, like, pretty much everybody's heard of High Times. If you've never even picked one up, there's a good chance you've heard of High Times, or somebody referencing High Times. It's like, it insinuated itself into American pop culture, and the reason why it became iconic is it survived all sorts of drug culture transitions. Like, like throughout all these different like ways of thinking and looking at drugs and different drugs people were doing, High Times managed to just keep plodding along and stay relevant, I guess, is the best way to put it. I didn't think I was gonna say that out loud, but here we are.
3:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. From the, uh, yeah, let's just get into it then.
4:00 Josh Clark? Okay.
4:01 Speaker 02 No more needs to be added.
4:02 Josh Clark? I agree, I agree. Um, so High Times was founded by a guy named Thomas King Forsad.
4:10 Josh Clark? And I just realized I didn't look up any videos of people pronouncing his name, but I'm pretty sure that's how it's spelled.
4:16 Speaker 02 I was so ready to roll with Forkade.
4:19 Josh Clark? Well, I've seen the little, um, the little French version of the umlaut, the little devil's tail coming off of the bottom of the sea.
4:26 Speaker 02 Oh, okay.
4:27 Josh Clark? And that indicates a sound. If my high school French doesn't fail me. So I think his name was Thomas King Fassad.
4:35 Speaker 02 All right, uh, great. He looks like, if you look up this guy, you know, when I went to look up, I'd never seen a picture of him. I expected, I didn't expect to see someone so cool looking. I mean, he looks like he stepped right out of the Allman Brothers band or something.
4:48 Josh Clark? I was gonna say, he looks like the Allman Brothers' satanic advisor.
4:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. Um, and if you're thinking like, what do you mean? It was like a pot magazine. Why didn't you think he'd be cool? It's because I usually expect them to look sort of like wavy gravy. Any like weed activists to be just decked out in tie dye and kind of just wearing some sort of wacky handmade hat. And this guy, like, he looked like he could jump off of a chopper and like hit the stage or something, you know?
5:17 Josh Clark? Yeah, and you know that same 50-year-old who's upset because I said something about High Times on his coffee table? He's pretty much a wavy gravy look-alike, too.
5:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, he's wearing his own handmade mid hat.
5:32 Josh Clark? So this guy, Thomas King Fassad, it's a pretty cool name. And if it sounds made up, it is made up. His real name was Gary Goodson. And it's not because his name was Gary Goodson that he ditched that name in favor of Thomas King Fassad. He was actually a big, big time pot dealer. Like, not only did he sell literal tons of pot in like the, I think, starting in the late 60s and going well into past the time he was, um, had started publishing High Times. He smuggled it himself. He flew planes and he went to Mexico, he went to Jamaica,
6:13 Josh Clark? and he smuggled pot, tons of pot at a time, into the United States. There was a quote I found of his that, he said, there's two types of pot dealers, those who need a forklift and those who don't. I need a forklift. And like, he wasn't, he wasn't joking. Like, he really dealt that much pot.
6:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, so I mean, regardless of how you feel about that, or him, or any of it, he wasn't just some guy saying like, hey, let's try and make a little dough off of this marijuana people are smoking. Like, he was knee-deep in the business.
6:46 Josh Clark? Right.
6:48 Speaker 02 This was after coming out of, seemingly to avoid the Vietnam draft, a short stint in the Air Guard, where he was discharged after convincing them that he had schizophrenia. And at that point, he went back to Arizona in Phoenix, changed that name, which was his mother's, I'm sorry, grandmother's maiden name, and, you know, got into the underground zine scene. You know, that was a big thing back in the late 60s because of the ubiquity of like, being able to print your own stuff in an office, or I don't know if they had Kinko's back then, but he got into those and founded his own first underground magazine called Orpheus, which had some politics to it, but it was kind of just a little groovy psychedelic thing
7:32 Speaker 02 that covered like music and pot and stuff.
7:34 Josh Clark? Tell them about the issue with the peace sign and the bullet hole.
7:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, there was a peace sign on the cover that actually had a real bullet hole. So instead of just drawing a bullet hole, he shot them up.
7:48 Josh Clark? Yeah, he shot bundles, the stacks wrapped together with a Colt 45 handgun, to really kind of drive the point home.
7:57 Speaker 02 I mean, it's creative.
7:58 Josh Clark? That is an underground zine right there. If it has a bullet hole in it that the publisher put there, that's really something.
8:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's like with real blood.
8:05 Josh Clark? Right. You said something that I think is really worth pointing out, because there's a whole camp of people who tell this origin story of high times and Thomas King Fersad that is like just some money-making scheme, or just a lark, or something like that. This guy in actuality was a dedicated First Amendment warrior, like dedicated. And also, he was very committed to the counterculture, not just because he sold tons of weed, but he genuinely believed in legalizing marijuana, that that was a crucial thing to do in the United States.
8:43 Josh Clark? And he put his money where his mouth is. And like you said, he started with Underground Zines. And then he took up, I saw that he joined, or he founded, I couldn't tell which one was correct. Um, well, it's basically like an Associated Press for Underground magazines. It was called the Underground Press Syndicate. And I think it changed its name to something else, right?
9:05 Speaker 02 Uh, I'm not sure. I always saw it called UPS.
9:09 Josh Clark? Well, we'll just call it that. But it was, like I said, the AP where you could, you could like, get all sorts of news about drug busts, or about, you know, some spectacular pot harvest, or something to do with underground culture. And, um, you could just print it in your, your local mag. And the people in Phoenix are reading the same thing as the people in Denver, but they don't know that. They just think it's like part of your magazine.
9:33 Speaker 02 Yeah. And he eventually worked his way up to national coordinator for the Underground Press Syndicate. And that's where he learned how to run a magazine, basically. That's how he learned about ad deals, um, distribution, uh, printing, like efficient printing, real printing, uh, for a little while. And I, I figure we should probably do something on Abby Hoffman and the yippies at some point.
9:56 Josh Clark? All right.
9:59 Speaker 02 You don't want to highlight boomers, do you?
10:01 Josh Clark? No, it's not that. I just think that guy's gotten more than enough of his spotlight. But yes, it's.
10:07 Speaker 02 All right. You know what, then? Forget it.
10:08 Josh Clark? Okay. Wow. I didn't think I was going to talk you out of that one.
10:12 Speaker 02 Hey, if you want to learn about Abby Hoffman, you're not going to learn about it here, everybody.
10:15 Josh Clark? Go, go steal his book.
10:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, or read. Very nice. I got that one. Uh, so he did join up with Hoffman, though, and his yippies. Again, if you want to read about them, they were a group that did a lot of like, kind of social pranks and media grab, um, you know, activist stuff, uh, for their radical causes. Uh, in 1970, uh, Forsayed, Forsad, you said?
10:41 Josh Clark? Yeah. Because if you take out the O.
10:45 Josh Clark? And change, or no, if you change the O to an A and take out the R, you've got facade, like the front of a building. So I'm making an educated guess here.
10:54 Speaker 02 I think you're probably right, but I'm just, I've been saying it wrong all day. So in my head, so it's gonna take a minute.
10:58 Josh Clark? That's okay. I was reading the High Times archives and I guess they had some like sixth grade trained AI scan and alter or turn all of their magazine photos into text. And boy, they came up with some creative ways of spelling that guy's name.
11:15 Speaker 02 Wow. You also sent me a lot of fun ads for cocaine paraphernalia.
11:19 Josh Clark? Dude.
11:20 Speaker 02 That was crazy.
11:21 Josh Clark? There's few things that are funner and but also more shocking than looking at vintage cocaine paraphernalia ads that appeared in the likes of High Times and other magazines.
11:31 Speaker 02 Yeah.
11:32 Josh Clark? And there was one that I pointed out to you that was just
11:36 Josh Clark? like this thing should be in the Smithsonian. It was a metal, probably like a gold plated Coke tube. So you put one end in the Coke and you put the other end up your nose and you sniff, right? Just in case you didn't know how to ingest cocaine.
11:49 Speaker 02 How'd that work?
11:51 Josh Clark? It's shaped like an old school vacuum cleaner. And so the Coke goes into the bottom of the vacuum cleaner and comes out the handle, which is up in your nose. They call it the Hoover instead of Hoover. Like whoever, whoever came up with this is just, that's dedication right there. Cause that's the kind of idea you'd just be like, man, we should totally make this. But then the person actually went and made it and sold it.
12:13 Speaker 02 Yeah. And then McDonald's hired them to develop their Happy Meal prizes. They're like, this guy's really good at these tiny little bubbles.
12:20 Josh Clark? Exactly. And if you knew what you were doing, you could clip the ends off of all those prizes and use them as Coke straws.
12:28 Speaker 02 All right. So in 1970, that's where we were. Forsyth testified before Nixon's Presidential Commission on obscenity and pornography. And this is when he got a real chance to, you know, take the national stage and talked about, well, the quote was the only obscenity is censorship. And it's the first, and I feel like we talked about this in our pie in the face episode.
12:54 Josh Clark? Head to it.
12:54 Speaker 02 But it's the first incident that we know of where a protest pie in the face happened when he pulled out a cream pie and face pied Dr. Larson, Dr. Otto Larson.
13:10 Josh Clark? Yeah, who was the chairman of that committee on obscenity and pornography, right?
13:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, and that must be the first one. I mean, it's cited as the first time,
13:18 Josh Clark? Yeah.
13:19 Speaker 02 you know, not in a Marx Brothers movie, somebody's like, let me make a point with this.
13:22 Josh Clark? Yeah, it was a form of protest that picked up really quick. I mean, there's few things you can do to somebody publicly that is more disrespectful and humiliating, but also noninjurious than
13:33 Speaker 02 Pying them in the face.
13:35 Josh Clark? But he did that.
13:35 Speaker 02 It doesn't happen anymore.
13:36 Josh Clark? He was called to testify, and not only did he say that censorship is the true obscenity, he said, he said, "F censorship and F you." And then he pied the guy in the face. And a congressional hearing, this is what he did. This is just the kind of person he was. Like, he wasn't somebody who just talked a big game. Like, this guy followed through on the stuff that he really believed in.
14:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, and he also let that pie sit out the day before in Phoenix, so it was rotten green.
14:08 Josh Clark? Yuck.
14:09 Speaker 02 Should we take a break?
14:10 Josh Clark? Um, sure.
14:13 Speaker 02 All right, let's take a break and we'll talk about the beginnings of the magazine right after this.
14:21 Speaker 04 Stuff you should know. Josh and Chuck.
14:29 Speaker 04 Stuff you should know.
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18:21 Speaker 02 All right, so we've introduced our protagonist, I guess, in the first act. We can't, and you know, Dave helped us put together this article. And he points out that if you tried to get, I mean, you could do a whole article on this guy and talk about all the wacky things he did over the years, like concert festival promotion. He snuck allegedly pipe bombs into the 72 Republican convention.
18:46 Josh Clark? Later on, he followed the Sex Pistols around and co-produced a documentary on them called DOA.
18:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, so he was a busy guy doing a lot of stuff, but this is about High Times. So the origin story officially for High Times Magazine is that he thought of it with his friends while he was huffing nitrous oxide. Other people say it might have been an acid trip, but either way, the early idea was, hey, how about a magazine? Like a marijuana-themed magazine. They've got Playboy, and some people say like the initial idea was just a one-off kind of spoof of Playboy, but everyone that worked there said, no, no, no. The idea was always to have like a real magazine that was cheeky and fun, but also like real
19:34 Speaker 02 journalism and tackle real topics about activism and marijuana and growing it and all that stuff.
19:39 Josh Clark? Right, exactly. Michael Kennedy, who was Fersad's personal attorney and then came on as High Times legal counsel from like the beginning until, I think, 2016 when he died.
19:51 Josh Clark? He explained it that high times was meant to be a way to use free speech to teach people how to grow pot and that like they basically had found a loophole. Thanks to the first amendment that they could disseminate all of this information as far and as wide as they possibly could. And in teaching people to grow their own pot, that would eventually change attitudes about pot and potentially lead to legalization. And as we'll see that they were successful in that quest that they started back in 1974.
20:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's right. And I think, I mean, I think it absolutely did that. I think one of the missions was, hey, let's really convince people, not convince, but let's really show people what the truth is, which is that this is a plant that can be grown, like plant versus, you know, illicit drug, you know?
20:49 Josh Clark? Right. Or illicit drug versus illicit drug. Like, at the time,
20:53 Speaker 02 Well, true.
20:54 Josh Clark? The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 had just been passed, thanks to Richard Nixon. And marijuana, which by the way, I read is not at all racist. There was a Latino, I think, historian who researched it and he's like, that's actually myth. So, good for him. That it was a schedule one, which I think it still was until like this year, which means that it has, according to the government, no medicinal value whatsoever and a high potential for abuse. And both of those are just absolute lies. They're just not correct. They're not true. They knew this back in 1970. And that this, this Controlled Substances Act kicked off
21:40 Josh Clark? the war on drugs, which in retrospect, most people now agree was misguided and a huge waste of money and killed a lot of people. And this was the era that
21:51 Speaker 02 And incarcerated.
21:52 Josh Clark? Yes, incarcerated. It's a big one, too. But it was in this era, the beginning of this era, that high times started to kind of Become not just an idea, but an actuality. So they wanted to fight that, which was part of the reason they were willing to like, use mockery or just all of their articles had a slant to it because they felt like they were taking on liars. And that's a legitimate way to respond to liars is through mockery or really kind of pushing your agenda against them. But that was a huge, I think, impetus for creating High Times, for sure.
22:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, absolutely. So that very first issue came out summer of 74 is when it debuted. It had a 10,000 copy print run and it didn't really light the world on fire, I guess, no pun intended, at first. It was, it had like an excerpt from a Timothy Leary novel. Of course, articles about hemp and marijuana and how great they thought it was. There were some interviews and very importantly, they had a, something that would, you know, stay in the magazine, which was a feature called the Trans High Market Quotation, which is a, a listing of like, hey, in Chicago, this is how much a dime bag costs. This is how much it costs in New York. This is what an ounce of weed costs in Phoenix.
23:13 Speaker 02 You know, what they, I guess they still call it street value, which I always thought was really funny.
23:16 Josh Clark? Yeah.
23:17 Speaker 02 But that's, that's what it was and it, and it stayed in there for a long time, even though, as we'll talk about later, it changed a little bit over the years. But this first issue, like I said, was not, I mean, they did eventually sell out of that 10,000, but it wasn't through, it was through a lot of hustling. It wasn't like, hey, it's on your newsstand.
23:35 Josh Clark? Right.
23:36 Speaker 02 Forsyth said, here, let me get it into head shops. Let me send them to record stores. Apparently drug dealers bought copies and gave them away to people. So it eventually did sell out the two printings, but it was the second issue is when it really, really took off because of their, you know, kind of ingenious promotion.
23:55 Josh Clark? Well, yeah, they threw a launch party at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York and invited like a bunch of media and just got them messed up. Like, like, like straight button down. Media types, journalists, some like TV news people showed up and were like giving brownies and like here, try nitrous oxide and have you ever had cocaine? And I read a quote from Michael Kennedy, the legal counsel for High Times. He said that he remembers three or four lawsuits being brought against High Times from people who got so wasted for the first time in their lives that they they decided to sue the magazine for it.
24:35 Speaker 02 I could see that. Apparently it was also, if not the first, one of the first times like live television showed people doing drugs. There was one of the local news stations, according to Rolling Stone, showed people on camera on the news, snorting cocaine. And I'm sure people at home are watching this just going like, what is going on? But it was huge publicity and they sold out their 50, this time 50,000 copy run in four weeks. And it became like a genuine sensation. That's when also the second issue is when they started, also as an homage to Playboy magazine, their centerfold. But of course, their centerfold was always these these big beautifully photographed pictures of buds, marijuana buds.
25:19 Josh Clark? The first one, I would, I would take issue with the idea that it was beautiful. It was a 20-pound brick of schwag, just brown and compressed and ugly. But at the time, it was like their premier weed, Colombian. And just another aside, I'm sorry about this, but I want, so I've always wondered in Hey 19, the Steely Dan song, when he says the cuervo gold and the fine Colombian, is he talking about cocaine or is he talking about pot? And I went and researched this and I stumbled into like a longstanding argument.
25:53 Speaker 02 Oh, really?
25:54 Josh Clark? Yeah, I read an explanation from one person and it sounded pretty legit. They said it's 100% pot that they were talking about. That's what you called really good pot. Back in the 70s, it was Colombian and it wouldn't have referred to cocaine in the first place because at that time, most of the cocaine came from Peru. Colombian farmers hadn't really taken up coca production. And so, most people, if you were aware of cocaine, you were like, this is some fine Peruvian. You wouldn't say this is some fine Colombian. So it seems like that guy settled it, at least in my mind.
26:30 Speaker 02 Hey, that could have been the original lyric. You never know. It depends on the day, probably.
26:33 Josh Clark? I guess it does, sure.
26:35 Speaker 02 Have you seen the Yacht Rock documentary yet on Max?
26:39 Josh Clark? No.
26:40 Speaker 02 It's pretty good.
26:41 Josh Clark? Like about the people who came up with Yacht Rock?
26:44 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, the people who came up with the term yacht rocker featured in it, but it's about the genre of music.
26:51 Josh Clark? Oh, okay. So like, it goes back to the 70s and 80s?
26:55 Speaker 02 Yeah. What else would it be about?
26:57 Josh Clark? Well, there's a, there's a band called Yacht Rock that kicked it all off, and I don't know.
27:02 Speaker 02 Oh, you mean like the Yacht Rock Review?
27:04 Josh Clark? Yes.
27:05 Speaker 02 No, no, no, no.
27:06 Josh Clark? Could have been going on tour with them.
27:09 Speaker 02 The term yacht rock was, came about in the early 2000s from a web comedy series.
27:14 Josh Clark? Okay.
27:14 Speaker 02 Which I never knew until I saw this documentary. But no, it's about just the, you know, Christopher Cross and Michael McDonald and
27:20 Josh Clark? Yeah.
27:21 Speaker 02 Seals and Croft, all the great people. You'd enjoy it, I think.
27:25 Josh Clark? Have you seen the limited series Black Doves with
27:29 Speaker 02 No, I have not. What's that?
27:30 Josh Clark? It's a British spy thriller, like eight or 10 episode
27:35 Speaker 02 Say no more.
27:35 Josh Clark? Show. It's really good.
27:38 Speaker 02 I mean, you can say more, but I just mean I'm into that kind of thing.
27:40 Josh Clark? No, I'm with you. Just, just go watch it. I recommend it.
27:44 Speaker 02 Well, see, I always say these things when we're recording, and then I don't remember afterward.
27:48 Josh Clark? Just text me and be like, what was the thing with the thing? I don't know what you're talking about.
27:51 Speaker 02 Why don't you text me right now while I talk, Black Doves?
27:54 Josh Clark? I don't have my phone on me. It's in the charger. I'm sorry.
27:59 Speaker 02 That's right. So mid 70s, when High Times rolls out, those very first years, the magazine was doing really well, but as a, you know, sort of a new magazine. But Foursad was not. He was on the FBI surveillance list. He was very paranoid because of the massive amounts of drugs that he was taking.
28:19 Josh Clark? Well, but also rightfully so. The FBI and possibly even the CIA was infiltrating the counterculture and planting informants. And there was a time where he was like, there's an informant here of the High Times staff, and I don't know which one of you it is.
28:31 Speaker 02 There may have been.
28:32 Josh Clark? Yeah, it's possible. Like, he had reason to be paranoid, at the very least, but it was definitely fueled to extremes. Through his drug use, for sure.
28:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, absolutely. The magazine itself was doing well. Like I said, the staff, I mean, it was just, I mean, if you think like The Lampoon and Mad Magazine was kind of crazy in their office, like, everybody in the High Times office was huffing nitrous and smoking weed and snorting blow, like, as they were working. But it was, you know, it was creating like some really relevant journalism. They were exposing, you know, government activities as far as the drug war goes.
29:08 Josh Clark? Mm-hmm.
29:08 Speaker 02 Like, when putting paraquat, which I cannot help but think of Big Lebowski when I hear that word.
29:16 Josh Clark? I don't remember that part.
29:17 Speaker 02 It's when Jeff, when the dude called the real Lebowski a human paraquat.
29:25 Speaker 02 When he was mad. I think he said human even, human paraquat.
29:29 Josh Clark? Yeah.
29:29 Speaker 02 But paraquat was the pesticide that was in marijuana fields under orders from the US. And that, this article helped promote a congressional investigation. They interviewed the Dalai Lama about drugs. There was Hunter S. Thompson and, of course, William S. Burroughs doing writing. There was, Truman Capote did a guest interview with Andy Warhol. Bob Marley was in it. Like, it was really the heyday of that magazine as far as being like a real, like, they achieved what they wanted to achieve in the first few years.
30:02 Josh Clark? Yeah. I mean, that's like some heavyweight underground stuff right there that they got into their pages, for sure. And yeah, I think the latest thing you mentioned was 1978 with Truman Capote and Andy Warhol. So this is all in like the first four years that they're cramming all this stuff in there. So, yeah, right out of the gate, it was, it was very successful, in part, Chuck, because there was nothing like this in existence before, I mean, aside from some underground zines that 50 people read before High Times. It became a national magazine, a national magazine about pot and people who love pot and love drugs and want to see them legalized.
30:43 Josh Clark? And here's how you do it, and here's how you grow this stuff. And today, it seems like it's not a really big thing to talk about pot or to find an article about people smoking pot in Newsweek or whatever.
30:54 Speaker 02 Right.
30:55 Josh Clark? And that is because High Times existed and laid the groundwork for it.
31:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, they, by year four, they had a subscribership that was about the same as Rolling Stone magazine.
31:06 Josh Clark? Yeah, it's crazy.
31:07 Speaker 02 Which is, yeah, it's just nuts. In 1978, Forsyth had previous attempts at suicide, but he succeeded in November of 1978, very sadly, when he was just 33 years old. I saw different things that he, you know, it was after the death of a friend that had him really upset, and like I said, there were previous attempts, so he was a troubled guy, to say the least, but they held his memorial atop the World Trade Center at the Windows of the World Restaurant, and as legend has it, smoked, I think Keith Richards snorted his dad's ashes supposedly, but they rolled up some of Forsyth's ashes in joints and smoked them as a staff.
31:53 Josh Clark? That always reminds me of that episode from Six Feet Under where the daughter finds some actors who are snorting like their co, their co-stars' ashes.
32:04 Speaker 02 I don't know where that one.
32:05 Josh Clark? Cocaine or something like that and died, and I can't remember the daughter's name from Six Feet Under, but she finds them doing this and just, Claire, she just goes bonkers on them, like, what is wrong with you? It's really good, it's very satisfying.
32:19 Speaker 02 It's weird for Claire to be judgy like that.
32:21 Josh Clark? She was so morally offended by what she was seeing that she just unleashed on them. It was weird for her, but it fit the moment.
32:33 Speaker 02 I wonder if she was upset about her art class at the time?
32:35 Josh Clark? I don't think she was there yet, I think she was younger, yeah.
32:40 Speaker 02 So, High Times, this is before, as far as the magazine itself, before Forsyth died, they did start to sort of stray from their mission statement a little bit, as far as coverage of harder drugs, they started writing a lot about cocaine, like, in a big, big way, they even started including cocaine and, and meth and LSD in that trans high market quotation, as far as how much it should cost in different cities. And it was sort of like, I think- The adherents of the magazine even were a little bit like, hey, this is not what I signed up for. Like, this was a weed magazine. So they kind of got back to the weed thing more in the eighties. Cocaine, you know, the reputation started to get a little bit more like, hey, wait a minute.
33:25 Speaker 02 This stuff is like really dangerous and there's a lot of violence attached to it.
33:28 Josh Clark? Yeah.
33:29 Speaker 02 And in the trade. And so they really got back to the pot thing again in a big way. And they were just getting going again in the eighties, back to their mission statement, when the DEA launched something called Operation Green Merchant, in which they really wanted to target marijuana growth and not the growth of marijuana, like growing marijuana plants. And advertisements for this equipment that was sort of thinly veiled is like, oh, no, this, uh, these lights just help you grow your,
34:01 Josh Clark? lettuce.
34:01 Speaker 02 Your oregano at home or whatever, or your lettuce. And so Operation Green Merchant was to target those ads and the publications that sort of taught you step by step how to do this.
34:13 Josh Clark? Right. And so the, I mean, the DEA had tried to take down High Times many times. This is the one they almost got them with because it took out their advertisers. Their advertisers went to jail or were run out of business. And all of a sudden, a huge amount of High Times regular advertising dollars just vanished, like overnight because of Operation Green Merchant.
34:38 Speaker 02 Nothing smoked?
34:39 Josh Clark? It went up and smoked, that's right.
34:41 Speaker 02 Sorry.
34:41 Josh Clark? No, it was worth it for sure. And they, I read a quote there, they were saying like, at this point, High Times was on the verge of bankruptcy. The DEA almost got them, but they managed to kind of slowly climb their way back and get back into it in the nineties. This is when I started reading High Times. It was saved by hip hop.
35:03 Speaker 02 Yeah.
35:04 Josh Clark? Because before Dr. Dre's The Chronic album came out, pot was just viewed as like, you know, people who listen to like, hippies or burnouts, like Judas Priest fans, stuff like that.
35:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
35:17 Josh Clark? That's who, that's who smoked pot. And they were just as likely to sniff glue at the same time, right?
35:23 Speaker 02 Right.
35:24 Josh Clark? Then The Chronic came along and it was, it just exploded, like overnight. Pot was totally in fashion again and a whole new generation just got into it like really quickly.
35:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, and High Times Magazine, I mean, they rolled right with it. I mean, right into the 90s, all of a sudden, it's like, oh, well, now we can put Ice Cube on the cover and, you know, write about this other sort of, I mean, I guess you call it a subculture that, you know, we hadn't been highlighting in the past. And, you know, beyond making it relevant again, I think they, they found out they were missing out on an entire, like, readership that they had never targeted before.
36:03 Josh Clark? Right, for sure. And the one other impact that it had too is they helped instruct people how to set up your home grow system. So it was like hydroponic systems started kind of going from a thing you had to put together by going to 50 different stores.
36:22 Speaker 02 Right.
36:23 Josh Clark? To like, you can buy this entire hydroponic system through the pages of High Times. They helped people learn how to do that along the way. And as a result, pot just started, at the same time when it became fashionable again in the early 90s, it got exponentially better than it had been leading up to that. It was like somebody threw a switch and all of a sudden pot was what you see or think of it now, like just sticky buds and gorgeous, like beautiful flowers and all that stuff. Like, that really was much more potent. Like, that happened at about the exact same time as, like, The Chronic and Snoop Dogg coming out and all that. Like, 92, 93 is when it really changed.
37:07 Speaker 02 I was talking to my friend Clay the other day, because he is who introduced us to The Chronic when we would, I think I've said this before, but we went over to his house and played like the Nintendo, whatever the system was. What was the one back then?
37:21 Josh Clark? It wasn't the 64, was it? Super Nintendo?
37:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, the 64.
37:25 Josh Clark? Was it 64?
37:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, so we'd go over there and play Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, and Clay one day was like, dude, listen to this.
37:32 Josh Clark? Yeah.
37:33 Speaker 02 Puts on The Chronic, and Snoop Dogg's voice came out of the speaker. And we were all into hip-hop at the time, but Snoop Dogg, he didn't sound like anybody else at the time.
37:41 Josh Clark? No.
37:41 Speaker 02 So when his voice came out, we were like, who is this guy?
37:45 Josh Clark? Yeah.
37:45 Speaker 02 It's like, oh, my God. And like, how funny. And I was talking to him the other day, I was like, how funny, back then, like, would you ever think that now Snoop Dogg is like this? I mean, one of the most famous people in the world.
37:58 Josh Clark? I know, the mascot of USA Olympics.
38:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, working with Martha Stewart, it's like, I don't think anybody saw that coming.
38:05 Josh Clark? Oh, that was a good documentary too, by the way.
38:07 Speaker 02 Oh, I haven't seen that one yet. Is it good?
38:11 Speaker 02 Hey, I don't know if everyone knows this. Jerry's been to Martha Stewart's house.
38:14 Josh Clark? I didn't know that, did I?
38:16 Speaker 02 Yeah, she told us a while ago. At one point, she was doing something with the company. I don't know if whatever happened with that, but Jerry like went to her house. And she said it was a real mess.
38:28 Josh Clark? That's crazy. I believe it, though. There's probably like felt scraps everywhere and like half-deboned chicken and things like that just sitting around.
38:37 Speaker 02 Hodgepodge bottles just spilled all over the place. No, it was perfect. So, High Times, back to High Times. From 88 to 2013, there was an editor in chief named Stephen Hager that ran the joint and he was, god, man, I'm not even meaning to. I swear I'm not. He ran High Times Magazine. This is when they, I mean, they had always talked about legalization, but this is when they really, really got into writing and beating that drum about, about not decriminalizing, but like legalizing weed for everybody.
39:13 Josh Clark? Yeah, like they moved the Overton window and made just the concept of legal weed, something, they took it from something like a dorm room conversation to this is how you would do it. Here's a path to legalization in the states, you know?
39:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
39:30 Josh Clark? And they just made it like a potential thing, like a real concept. They brought it into existence and helped push it along. I should say they covered the people who were out there like
39:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
39:42 Josh Clark? coming into or bringing it into existence or really thinking about it. But through covering them and exposing them to millions of people every month, that kind of got the whole idea out there.
39:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, the normal N O R M L, that was it, right?
39:57 Josh Clark? Yeah, Thomas Forsyth helped bankroll them in their early days. The National Organization for the Rethinking of Marijuana Legislation? Reform of Marijuana Legislation.
40:10 Speaker 02 Realization? Reform?
40:12 Josh Clark? Yeah, reform.
40:13 Speaker 02 I went to one of the, uh, the Atlanta Piedmont Park used to have in the 90s, the, uh, the Normal Pot Rally concerts.
40:20 Josh Clark? You went to that?
40:21 Speaker 02 I went to one of them one year when the Black Crows played and it was a lot of fun. It was a great show. I liked them for a little while back then and it was really good.
40:30 Josh Clark? You were sitting amid a sea of brass bowls with like the tie dye little plastic middles that you would hold on to?
40:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, nobody was smoking weed. It was really weird.
40:38 Josh Clark? That's a little weird. That's so Atlanta.
40:41 Speaker 02 So, yeah, they were advocating it such that, uh, there was an article in 2013 in The Nation that said, "High Times Magazine may be the most influential publication of our era." So it wasn't just, you know, cheeky, uh, articles and, and pictures of beautiful buds. It was like they were doing real, real work toward, uh, sea change and it worked.
41:02 Josh Clark? Yes, and yet at the same time, especially in like the magazine industry, they're just dismissed as, you know, they're just stoners. They're potheads, right? And they don't care. They don't seem to, to, they don't go after awards. They don't like submit their, their, um, their writers work for awards and stuff like that. They genuinely don't seem to care about that kind of stuff because they're off doing like their own thing and they're actually doing it. But I saw a citation of how popular culture thinks of High Times, um, from, they cited a Saturday Night Live skit featuring Jack Black and he played High Times' top reporter and he was like, um, I think at a press conference or whatever, and he would stand up to ask a question and then he would forget what he was gonna say every time.
41:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, of course.
41:48 Josh Clark? Oh, I thought it was hilarious. I didn't even see it.
41:50 Speaker 02 No, no, it's funny. I'm not saying it wasn't. I'm just saying like, yeah, that's gotta be the sketch is that he, he has no memory.
41:57 Josh Clark? Right, but I could not find it anywhere and, um, it's, uh, I just read about it. Like all the other stuff I'm talking about. I, I didn't experience it firsthand. I've just read about it.
42:07 Speaker 02 I feel like I saw it back then, but I do remember that one of the issues I had, and this had to be from the 2000s, was, uh, Tenacious D was on the cover.
42:16 Josh Clark? Yeah, and I think Jack Black himself was as well.
42:20 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, he is one half of Tenacious D.
42:22 Josh Clark? But I mean-
42:23 Speaker 02 You mean just without Kyle? He's like, let me do one without that guy.
42:25 Josh Clark? Yes.
42:28 Speaker 02 All right, we have been remiss in not taking a second break. So we're gonna do that now and we're gonna talk about what has happened, uh, over the last decade or 20 years or so, right after this.
42:43 Speaker 04 Stuff you should know. Josh and Chuck.
42:51 Speaker 04 Stuff you should know.
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46:51 Josh Clark? Okay Chuck, so we were talking about how Steven Hager guided High Times through like a really prolific era. This is like in the 90s, I feel like, and I don't, maybe I'm just talking because that was the time I came in contact with it. It feels like that's when it really transitioned into like an iconic thing that was never really gonna go away, even if it went away. You know what I'm saying?
47:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, agreed.
47:14 Josh Clark? So in 2004, as I understand it, I believe Hager retired in 2003, and so the replacement they brought in for editor in chief, as far as I know, I think we've both seen conflicting stuff, right?
47:28 Speaker 02 Yeah, I might have said 2013 too, which was, it was probably 2003.
47:33 Josh Clark? Oh, gotcha. Okay, so Richard Stratton came in as the editor in chief, and he had bona fides. He served eight years in federal prison for dealing pot.
47:41 Speaker 02 Oh, I thought you were gonna talk about editor in chief bona fides.
47:46 Josh Clark? No, he didn't have those. That was the other thing. He was a journalist. He'd reinvented himself as a journalist. He, I think he had some books under his belt. He wasn't like a bad pick. He made a bad pick. He was very good friends with Norman Mailer, and in fact, one of the reasons he went to prison is he refused to implicate Norman Mailer in his pot dealing activities. And when he became editor in chief of High Times, he hired Norman Mailer's son, John Buffalo Mailer, who was 25 at the time, hired him as executive editor. And yeah, I like his name. John Buffalo Mailer had zero publishing experience whatsoever.
48:28 Josh Clark? And the whole thing, it was just, this is a bad time for High Times.
48:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, it was ill conceived. I think they didn't quite know where to go after the, sort of, it's not like the hip hop era ended any, you know, mention of weed or anything like that. But it was, it was sort of past that. You know, everything changes from decade to decade culturally, and they didn't quite know what to do, I think. So they said, hey, why don't we do this? Why don't we try and sort of change the image of the magazine and become just more of a sort of a a cultural magazine? Like essentially, let's stop writing about weed exclusively and let's really stop writing about weed almost altogether. And that lasted for about a year. They they did not like that. The readership was like, what are you doing?
49:17 Speaker 02 The whole point of this magazine is that it's High Times. And it's not, you know, about freedom. It's about freedom to smoke weed specifically and grow it specifically. And like I said, about a year later, in fact, it was one year later. I think they were like, we really screwed up here. And so they went back in 2005 with a big cover that said, The Buds are back. And 30 pages of pot picks on the inside. And everyone was like, oh, thank God. And it was one of their bestselling issues of all time.
49:48 Josh Clark? Yeah, and they brought Steve Hager back in to kind of right the ship again.
49:52 Speaker 02 Ah, OK.
49:53 Josh Clark? And he did. Like this, High Times started the idea that we should legalize marijuana, worked at it ceaselessly for decades, and finally was still around when the that change started happening. And states started talking about actually legalizing pot, not decriminalizing, but legalizing pot, like you said, not just for medicinal purposes, but hey, if you're an adult and you want to smoke pot, go ahead and smoke pot. You're not going to get in trouble because we don't have any laws against it anymore. Like, this was starting to happen and High Times was right there, totally poised to just
50:32 Josh Clark? just step up and accept its kudos and its huge like rise to prominence as this new changed culture around pot was about to just explode. And around this time. Private equity got involved and everything went down the toilet.
50:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, that's the irony of this whole thing is right when they achieved all that is when they they they tanked because of what's called the green gold rush. Wall Street, of course, anytime they're like, oh, wait a minute. Somebody's making money over there doing something? A lot of money? Well, how can we get involved? And that's exactly what happened. They started investors started throwing money in money at every cannabis startup you could think of as states were rolling out legalization and making tons and tons of money. And so they realized, hey, this High Times magazine is just sitting there. It's a very recognizable brand. The magazine's OK. Their website's all right, but they make like 80% of their dough from what's called the cannabis cup, which is, I think it started out as a smaller thing in Amsterdam, but
51:34 Speaker 02 then became like the official High Times Cannabis Cup in the United States in 2010, which is a, you know, a weed growing competition. So like bring in your new strains of like exotic crossbreeds and and and like high potency buds and you can win the cannabis cup and it's a big deal. It received a lot of coverage. There were they did concerts, they did festivals, they did trade shows. And it was, you know, a big moneymaker. So I think they were like, hey, we can invest in High Times. We can open up a casino in Vegas, maybe we can. They bought up a dozen dispensaries and made them High Times smoke shops. They talked about delivery services and all they talked about an IPO for a while, which never happened.
52:19 Josh Clark? Yeah.
52:19 Speaker 02 But all of this stuff, a lot of these big deals never came to fruition. And so they found themselves eventually $100 million in debt as these deals fell apart after going through just a string of CEOs, which is never, it's always a bad sign for a company, you know, when you have that kind of CEO turnover.
52:39 Josh Clark? Yeah.
52:40 Speaker 02 And a lot of those dispensaries closed and in the middle of the boom of the real marijuana industry, High Times was struggling and basically dead.
52:51 Josh Clark? Again, because private equity got involved.
52:54 Speaker 02 That's right.
52:55 Josh Clark? There's a really good Politico article called "The Long Fall of High Times" by Ben Schreckinger.
53:00 Speaker 02 Yeah.
53:01 Josh Clark? And it's really worth reading. It's very long, but it's good. And that article puts the blame on Adam Levin, who ran Oreva Capital. He's the one who came in as the private equity guy and made all of these terrible decisions, did shady stuff like the announcements for, you know, some of these business ventures. Like, they would announce them publicly, and then the other company involved would have to come out publicly and be like, "They haven't even approached us about this. What they just said is not true." So that's not a good thing to do.
53:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
53:34 Josh Clark? That IPO was a big deal, too, because if you have investors, they want you to go public and then they can really start making money off the company. He just couldn't get it together to get the IPO out the door, yet that didn't keep them from selling pre-sale shares at $11 apiece to high-times readers, promising them they were getting in on the bottom floor before the IPO even happened. Just shady stuff. And so this lasted for just a couple of years before the magazine, the whole brand, went into receivership, meaning that there was a corner-pointed, like, person who was in charge of their assets, who would try to figure out how to help them get out of bankruptcy, or how to help them get out of a hole
54:16 Josh Clark? without going into bankruptcy, while at the same time paying off their creditors. And I guess it didn't really work, because in, I guess, May of last year, the receiver said, "Hey, we're gonna have a fire sale. Everybody step up, get out your checkbooks. Let's do this thing."
54:32 Speaker 02 Yeah. Seven million bucks will get you the magazine, the cannabis cup.
54:38 Speaker 02 The dispensaries that we still have open? Nobody came forward, which is shocking. I think the most shocking thing to me, and I'm gonna say this publicly, I'm gonna call out publicly even, why hasn't Snoop Dogg?
54:54 Speaker 02 And freaking Martha Stewart, they would miss $7 million. They wouldn't even know it's gone. Why have they not bought this brand? Because that sort of public like purchase with those two names? Or even if it's just a Snoop Dogg, but Martha Stewart would add a funny sort of cachet to it.
55:10 Josh Clark? Yeah.
55:11 Speaker 02 Like it would all of a sudden be a relevant thing again. And I don't know, it's just, it's shocking that nobody came forward to buy it.
55:18 Josh Clark? I hope that that ends up being like your Sharknado thing, or like the Jared from Subway thing, or like your Hugh Jackman Greatest Showman thing. I hope that comes true, thanks to you.
55:29 Speaker 02 Maybe somebody who knows Snoop hears this and they're like, hey, Snoop, he may not even know it's for sale, you know?
55:35 Josh Clark? It's possible. He's, he's been on the cover a bunch, but he might not be paying attention, you know?
55:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, they could say, Snoop, High Times is for sale. You should buy it. And he would say, for schnizzle.
55:45 Josh Clark? Right.
55:47 Josh Clark? So I read a great quote from Pot Culture Magazine. So High Times has just stopped. They, they put out their last published issue in 2024. And the fact that they were still putting out a print magazine actually says how strong the brand was at one point. Because they went right through that time where magazines were just folding, print, anything was just folding left and right. And yet they still had the print magazine and they had a pretty heavyweight website too, hightimes.com. Had their whole archive, all the magazines on it. And yet the website hasn't been updated since June 2024.
56:27 Josh Clark? The last issue was September 2024. If you go onto the site, none of the images work. They're all grayed out rectangles.
56:35 Speaker 02 So sad.
56:35 Josh Clark? Very disappointing. And Pot Culture Magazine put it that the once mighty hightimes.com is gone. Reduced to an error message that is reminiscent of finding your favorite uncle dead on the floor.
56:49 Speaker 02 I saw that quote.
56:50 Josh Clark? I don't think anybody could have put it better than that.
56:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. I also just realized as the ultimate 50 something year old white guy, I think it would probably be for schizzle and not for schnizzle. Cause for sure would be for schizzle, right?
57:05 Josh Clark? Sure, it would be for sure. But I think that the things have evolved so much that, that you're fine.
57:11 Speaker 02 Okay.
57:12 Josh Clark? Okay.
57:13 Speaker 02 Good.
57:14 Josh Clark? Um, so yeah, Snoop, Martha, please do buy High Times because the, it's such an ignominious end. Is that the right word? Or was I just deletrious to my own vocabulary?
57:25 Speaker 02 Ignominious? Ignominous? Ignoramus, I think, is what you meant.
57:29 Josh Clark? No. Uh, such a, um, unclassy end.
57:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
57:34 Josh Clark? It's just, like, that magazine deserves better than that.
57:37 Speaker 02 Yeah. Maybe Jack Black, he's not gonna miss seven million bucks.
57:40 Josh Clark? Maybe. Maybe.
57:42 Speaker 02 I mean, he might miss it for the afternoon, but then he would say, but I've got this magazine now.
57:46 Josh Clark? No, I'm with you. I think Martha Stewart has that much laying under, in piles under her hodgepodge bottles that you were talking about, you know?
57:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, you're probably right.
57:55 Josh Clark? Uh, okay. Well, that's it about High Times. Uh, if you want to know more about, there's tons of tribute articles all over the web to read. They're kind of fun. Uh, and while you're doing that, it's time for listener mail.
58:08 Speaker 02 Uh, yeah, this is from Rosalie, and it's, uh, it's just a very kind, sort of gentle reminder, which is always nice to hear.
58:14 Josh Clark? Mm-hmm.
58:15 Speaker 02 Uh, hey, guys, it's taken me a while to get this into words, and I hope it comes across with care. It does.
58:20 Josh Clark? But why do you suck so much?
58:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. As a woman in science who does, uh, science every day, I just want to point out that technicians are still scientists. In your episode on chemistry sets, you rightly pointed out all the sexism in the past and, uh, and present in how science is presented to girls versus boys. Uh, but you also feed into it a little bit when you said that girls were funneled into technician jobs instead of being the scientist. There are a lot of ways to be a scientist, and technician is definitely one of them. Uh, that's like saying that nurses aren't healers like doctors are. Uh, a more accurate description is that women were and are funneled into technician and now communication jobs in the sciences and men to the professors and principal investigators. Uh, it is better than it has ever been, I have to say, but academia still hasn't figured it out, among other things. And that, uh,
59:07 Speaker 02 I'm glad to know that, Rosalie. And that's from Rosalie, uh, Malte.
59:10 Josh Clark? That was a great reminder. We love, love, love being reminded or when it's pointed out to us that
59:16 Speaker 02 Yes.
59:16 Josh Clark? we fed into something that we were just totally unaware of, especially if it's unjust, you know?
59:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, technicians are scientists. Of course they are.
59:24 Josh Clark? That's right. That should be a T-shirt.
59:27 Speaker 02 Maybe it will be.
59:28 Josh Clark? Well, thanks a lot, Rosalie. We appreciate that big time. And if you want to be like Rosalie and send us an email like that, you can send it off to [email protected] .
59:39 Speaker 03 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
59:55 Josh Clark? Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability, and it starts with a great deal on an off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. And they're built on a reputation for quality and reliability, which is why Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.
1:00:26 Speaker 05 Breathe in and reset with Lincoln Rejuvenate, an available multi-sensory feature in the 2027 Lincoln Navigator SUV. Experience the luxurious massage, visuals, and sense to help you relax in the driver's seat. It's your time for a reset. Visit lincoln.com to learn more. Lincoln Rejuvenate does not operate unless the vehicle is in park. When the vehicle is off or if any doors open, do not use the feature in a closed garage or in other enclosed areas. See owner's manual for important operating instructions. Lincoln and Navigator trademarks of Ford or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
1:00:56 Speaker 00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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