Having a mother who has had cancer and fought through it and at times used cannabis to you know fight off nausea and whatnot. I mean it's not really her thing, but there were times when she needed it and the idea that you can't have it because it's an illegal drug, but OxyContin is legal. That's you know that's just insane to a level that I think most people understand.

I would say the only one person I know of who kind of combines the elements that my father brought to the table in terms of affecting the public discourse would be Oliver Stone. His combination of academic brilliance and real life experience and just understanding people I think is what makes him such a great storyteller, but also he cares. He is interested. He meets somebody and he listens to them. He has some questions. He wants to know what they're about. And as a result I think his worldview is much more complex and whole and most of the other.

What's against legalization in a practical sense? A couple of college kids figured out how to take a hemp plant and turn it into newspaper and it was actually a better quality of paper. It was cheaper and if you plant hemp in a field it revitalizes the soil. You can grow food in a dirt lot if you do enough harvest of hemp. I don't pretend to know the specifics of the economics of it to say how much we'll be getting, but there is money to be made there that is not being made because it's illegal.

There's a lot of forces opposed to legalization marijuana, so I don't want to put the cart before the horse. It's looking like it's going the legalization route, which, you know, a lot of people thought it needs to for a long time outside of recreational and medicinal use, just for crime reasons. We're pumping our prisons full of petty weed offenses and it's partially to feed that industry, but it's not good. It's not good for society, people go in there as a minor criminal and come out as a real criminal.

Noam Chomsky is, in some ways, a victim of this new millennium we live in because you can't pull a sound bite from that guy and understand what he is talking about. You have to hear the whole paragraph. You have to hear the whole page. You've got to hear the whole conversation if you really want to understand it and that could change your life.

I was about 20 when my mom got sick with cancer and it was bad. It was very scary and at the time I was doing my first screenplay and I was on deadline and was alone with my father in Massachusetts. I said, "Pop, you know, I don't how I'm going to work. I don't know how I can get this done. You know, I got to hand this script in and I can't think about anything but Mom." He said, "Well, you know, now is the time when you're going to learn what it means to compartmentalize." And those words really had an impact on me.

I think that you know you have experts in fields who spend their life studying one thing. When an event goes on that chances are they're going to want that specific expert who has done it to be on the show talking about it, not a writer or an artist of any sort, which I think is a mistake because you know we don't have... I mean we have them, but there is certainly not you know in strong force public philosophers anymore.