Transcript
Speaker: Have yourself a dirty little briefing.
Speaker: Wow!
Speaker: Are we ready to get wild and wacky?
Speaker: Because it's officially summertime, and I know you are just chomping at the bit to get yourself outdoors.
Speaker: Maybe you're going to go to a theme park.
Speaker: Maybe you're going to just go to the movies so you can get some air conditioning.
Speaker: or maybe you're like me and you're going to untether yourself from all devices and go crazy at a festival.
Speaker: I love festivals of all kinds.
Speaker: Festivals are the only place where I can be talking to God while the person next to me chugs vodka out of a bottle of sunscreen.
Speaker: It is an
Speaker: Absolutely epic place to let yourself loose.
Speaker: Truly shine light on your soul.
Speaker: Become the best version of yourself.
Speaker: And maybe it's a music festival.
Speaker: Maybe it's a transformational festival.
Speaker: Focus on wellness and healing and who you are at your core.
Speaker: Or maybe it's the Strawberry Festival.
Speaker: The Garlic Festival.
Speaker: The Classic Crystals.
Speaker: car festival.
Speaker: Whatever it is, festivals are a place where you find your tribe.
Speaker: Like-minded individuals who think and are aligned with your beliefs.
Speaker: Your best friend is at your next festival and you don't even know it yet because you haven't met them.
Speaker: Isn't that exciting?
Speaker: isn't it?
Speaker: I want to relate to you a couple of my personal favorite festival stories because I've been to a lot of them over the last decade and some are different than others.
Speaker: I started with one of the biggest music festivals in the world by going to Coachella.
Speaker: That led me to some smaller boutique festivals and eventually Burning Man as well.
Speaker: My very first Coachella, though, I want to tell you a story because I was going to see a band I love, Animal Collective, who are very,
Speaker: Very experimental, weird, psychedelic, will put your brain in an odd groove.
Speaker: So to prepare myself, I ate an eighth of magic mushrooms, which is a pretty decent dose, and proceeded to trip out for the next week.
Speaker: few hours.
Speaker: Now at one point, I'm watching Animal Collective, my brain is straddling the universe, and all of a sudden, I look down, and I see blood all over my leg.
Speaker: my brain starts having convulsions.
Speaker: Like, oh my gosh, do I have to go to the medical tent?
Speaker: Am I this person?
Speaker: Why do I not realize that I'm injured?
Speaker: I push down on my sock and blood squeezes out of my sock, up my leg.
Speaker: And I was like, oh my God, is my foot about to fall off?
Speaker: Am I a leper?
Speaker: I didn't know what was happening, but I still felt no pain whatsoever.
Speaker: And I'm looking at my hands, which are now covered
Speaker: In blood, freaking out internally, wondering what to do.
Speaker: When all of a sudden, my wife looks over at me.
Speaker: She was my girlfriend at the time.
Speaker: She looks over at me and she says, Alex, are you sitting in ketchup?
Speaker: And I stand up and realize that I am on top of about seven ketchup packets that have emptied all over the bottom half of my body.
Speaker: And let me tell you the relief I felt when I realized that it was sugary tomato paste instead of my own blood leaking out of my body.
Speaker: Now,
Speaker: If you're going to do mushrooms in an environment like a festival, when there are lots of people around, you need to make sure that you're in a good headspace.
Speaker: Because one time, I have a very close friend, and she did mushrooms for the first time at Coachella.
Speaker: And she was having a blast.
Speaker: She was flying, watching all of her favorite bands and DJs dancing up a storm, making friends.
Speaker: But suddenly...
Speaker: End of the night comes, we're going to pack up and go home, and we can't find her.
Speaker: Suddenly we got a text that says, hey, I am on my way home, but I started to walk, and now I'm lost.
Speaker: And her phone had 1% battery in the picture she sent us of a location.
Speaker: which by the way, the location was a mile and a half away from the music festival.
Speaker: Somehow in her mind, she was tripping so hard that she just walked out of Coachella and proceeded to try to walk back to the Airbnb that we were staying in.
Speaker: And we were driving, the rest of us now totally sober, trying to find our friend, terrified of,
Speaker: about what the result is.
Speaker: She'd never taken mushrooms before.
Speaker: We don't know what kind of state we're going to find her in.
Speaker: She could be an absolute shell of a human being crying on the side of the road.
Speaker: We drove all around the Palm Springs area, just screaming out the car for her name, calling it again and again and again.
Speaker: And finally,
Speaker: We found her.
Speaker: And for some reason, she was in like the best mood.
Speaker: We thought she would be scared and out of control and not in charge of her own whatever.
Speaker: Yeah, not the case.
Speaker: She was in the best mood ever.
Speaker: And the next day, she went back to the festival and did it even better the second day.
Speaker: Sometimes you just got to know how to handle your shit.
Speaker: Now I will tell you this, here's a lesson I learned very early on when I was going to music festivals because I used to go wearing jeans and a t-shirt like ugh.
Speaker: I was wearing jeans at 100 degree festival days and dancing the entire time.
Speaker: Which led to some very bad chafing.
Speaker: So if you are a man or a woman whose thighs tend to rub together just a little bit, baby powder, everyone.
Speaker: Smother it in between your thighs and just let the white powder slap.
Speaker: Put some white powder in your nose, put some white powder between your legs, and you're going to have a much better festival session because I will tell you this.
Speaker: have chafed myself raw.
Speaker: I have walked out of a festival like I had just gotten off of a bull riding competition, like a penguin on his way to the ocean.
Speaker: I'm just going, it has been brutal healing from some of those.
Speaker: But as soon as I learned about baby powder, bye, all of that pain went away.
Speaker: I will say it also helped that I began wearing leggings and more fun flowing clothing.
Speaker: Festivals are a great opportunity to discover who you are or who you want to be.
Speaker: You can try out different iterations of yourself.
Speaker: They are silliness factories.
Speaker: You can go and do whatever you want.
Speaker: As long as you're not hurting another person, go let your freak flag fly and be a goddamn weirdo.
Speaker: I want to tell you one more story before we wrap it up.
Speaker: Cause obviously you guys know this is a short podcast.
Speaker: We don't have a lot of time.
Speaker: That's kind of the reason you love it.
Speaker: Kind of the reason I love it.
Speaker: It doesn't take a lot of commitments to get this one down the gullet, but at Burning Man 2018, it's four something in the morning.
Speaker: I'm at a dance party and my friend, his backpack is,
Speaker: his water bottle breaks inside his backpack, his camelback, and it starts leaking and water is just filling up his backpack.
Speaker: And he's like, Oh my gosh, I got to go back to camp.
Speaker: And I was like, cool.
Speaker: I'll ride with you.
Speaker: So we jump on our bikes and we start heading back to camp.
Speaker: And all of a sudden I feel this tugging from the back of my, of my whatever pants I was wearing at the time or something, some kind of pants, skirt related item, whatever it was,
Speaker: But I feel this tugging, and all of a sudden my bike just locks, and the chain just locks up completely.
Speaker: And I look down.
Speaker: I've been wearing a tail with lights on it, and the tail, the furry tail, had gotten wrapped in the bike chain and gotten caught itself.
Speaker: And so all of a sudden, here I am, 4.30 in the morning, tripping on acid.
Speaker: I probably should have mentioned that part.
Speaker: I was also tripping on LSD.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: Next thing I know, I am on the dirt trying everything I can through my rainbow brain to get my bike chain out of there.
Speaker: And the whole time, all I was thinking is, this is your own dumb fault, Alex.
Speaker: This is your fault.
Speaker: You should have remembered you were wearing a tail to move it away from the pedals before you start your ride.
Speaker: But no, I did not.
Speaker: But I will tell you this.
Speaker: That was a very important lesson because I did tell myself not to be angry.
Speaker: It was my own fault.
Speaker: But also look at the circumstances.
Speaker: If you can't laugh at that situation, talk about privilege.
Speaker: That is a first world problem if I've ever heard one.
Speaker: My light up tail is caught in the chain of my bike at Burning Man and now I have to fix it while tripping.
Speaker: I mean, if you can't laugh at that, what's wrong with you?
Speaker: What are your festival stories?
Speaker: I want to hear them.
Speaker: If you have a good festival story, please go ahead and DM me or email me, hoopercomedy.com, at Hooper Hairpuff, and tell me what festivals you're hitting this summer or fall.
Speaker: I want to hear what you're excited about.
Speaker: If you are going to a festival, well, maybe you just think about picking yourself up a little Liquid IV.
Speaker: Liquid IV is the category-winning hydration brand fueling your well-being, and their hydration multiplier is the one product you've been missing ever.
Speaker: In just one stick, you get five essential vitamins and two times faster hydration than water alone.
Speaker: Use it first thing in the morning, before a workout, when you feel run down, after a long night out, on long flights.
Speaker: I use electrolytes and liquid IV at every single festival and event that I go to.
Speaker: It keeps going.
Speaker: me feeling great.
Speaker: I love Liquid IV.
Speaker: Their convenient packaging, it makes me feel amazing.
Speaker: They have so many flavors, like strawberry lemonade, lemon lime, my personal favorite, Tropical Punch.
Speaker: Go get it, everyone.
Speaker: And the best part, you will get 20% off when you go to liquidiv.com and use code Hooper at checkout.
Speaker: That's 20% off anything you order when you shop Better Hydration today using promo code Hooper, H-O-O-P-E-R at liquidiv.com.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: Head out to a festival, but grab some liquid IV before you go.
Speaker: More than likely, I'll see you there.
Speaker: And if you forgot your liquid IV, ask me, because I always have extra.
Speaker: That's enough for this week, everyone.
Speaker: We are just about out of time.
Speaker: So please let me know what festivals are we going to this year?
Speaker: I am excited to get silly on a dance floor with you.
Speaker: I will see you next week, everybody.
