I think a lot of it was like, I didn’t really get much of a chance to go to school, you know? Like, yeah, legally I was required to have tutors go on tour with me, but those people are as much teachers as, like, the doctor who gave me my weed prescription in L.A. back in the day is a doctor. It’s like: I’m sure he went to medical school, but at the end of the day, I don’t think I’d want him operating on me.

So it was only really when I encountered Bob that I started to enter into anything like the intellectual world. I mean, I wasn’t gonna get to go to college. That wasn’t in the cards for me. But with Bob, like, I felt like I had someone who not only thought I was smart or who wanted to talk to me about real shit, but like, who sort of took it upon himself to create a program of study for me—a course of learning.

And so that’s why when people jump to conclusions about Bob and what he stands for, it just makes me want to scream, because, like, how can you look at this man and look at his work and not see the total beauty of it? How can you just focus on one thing without even READING the book that contains it? How can you read some fucking ARTICLE and make up your mind about a complex human thinker?

I think hands down, the thing that Bob said that people just can’t get behind is this comment he made about gay people. For most people, like, that’s where it begins and ends with Bob. And I mean, here’s what I know: Bob is not a bigot. I know in the core of my being that Bob loves and accepts all people. I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says—like, I’m not some fucking hype man for Bob Winstock—but the dude is not some fucking hateful person who judges anybody for who they love or what they do with their lives. And it’s really sad for me to see people take him out of context, because like, with the internet and everything, people just jump to conclusions when they’ve heard one little sound bite, and then it’s like, they think they can condemn a person’s entire life, their entire worldview, just from this one little thing. Like, they think that just because all these uber-right-wing, uber-intense dudes think of Bob as like, their intellectual guide or whatever, that must mean that Bob’s ONE of them. And it’s like: People have been interpreting philosophers and thinkers and doing whatever the fuck they want with them forever. This is nothing new. You can’t just nail Bob down to the worst things that people do with his work and then go: Boom! Gotcha!

But okay, since we’re here and since we’re talking about Bob, like, let’s get into it. Let’s see how bad this thing really is.