The Hallucinogenic Interview Series—Ray Bradbury

Los Angeles, California December, 2025

Today, we interviewed a passionate soul with a refreshing love of life and words. He is launching a reading resolution or challenge called “ The Bookening.” The author of the Palm Tree Express—A Trip to the Never-Never. A Beach Bum’s Guide to Paradise, Beach Bum’s Guide to Living Incognito, Changing Lanes, and Fear and Fucking in Las Vegas. He is Perry Stone, and I, as always, am Ray Bradbury.

Ray: Hello Perry, welcome to the show.

Perry: Thank you. It is a deep honor to speak with you. Thank you for having me.

Ray: Okay, Perry, I am getting a message in my ear from my production manager. He tells me that you did not write a book called Fear and Fucking in Las Vegas.

Perry: Oops, I thought that was edited out. The info I provided you was created two or three margaritas past sensible. My apologies.

Ray: Perry, what made you believe that a book—a single book—could still punch through all this noise and change a life?

Perry: Well, Ray, that is a big one. Books, like people, have a personality and a persona in a way. I kind of think of books as the first stage robot, because as storytellers, we program how they function entirely.

And like people, books affect everyone differently, so not every book is going to change the lives of everyone. But some do, and the great ones don’t matter when they were written because they cut through the noise no matter what shape it takes.

Many single books have changed my life, so I guess I know by experiencing it.

Ray: Really, name some of these books for our listeners.
Perry: Not in any particular order: The Fountainhead. Where is Joe Merchant? Fahrenheit 451, True at First Light, The Old Man and the Sea, On the Road, and And the Sea Will Tell. I could go on for an hour.

Ray: Do you believe there’s a moral obligation to read stories that challenge our assumptions—or do you just want people to get sunburned with better material?

Perry: No. To each their own. If your gig is to grow fat eating Cheetos and watching repeats of The Price is Right, that is your call. But, for those of us who understand learning is not something that you do exclusively by reading a textbook, life offers an endless array of opportunities. But, as they say, you can ride a horse to water—you can’t make him drink.

Ray: Is The Palm Tree Express a destination, a hallucination, or an act of defiance?

Perry: The Palm Tree Express is my relationship with adventure and humanity. It took me four years to create it. The process was like loving a beautiful woman addicted to heroin. She is going to hurt you and hurt you, but somehow, everything is more important than yourself.

It is very real, and it is an invitation, not an act of defiance. I learned long ago that I can’t change the world, but I can change myself.

Ray:  You talk about escaping the noise. What’s the loudest lie modern life tells us, and how does your work call bullshit on it?

Perry: You know, Ray, I don’t think that is a question with an answer. There are so many important ones. I grew up believing my parents, and you know, in the long run, they proved to be legit. But I also trusted doctors, police officers, and my government.

When I found out that eating fruit can kill you, I lost my fucking mind. When I realized that they tax you when you make a dollar, again when you spend it, and even when you fucking save it, I knew I couldn’t exist in their world

Everything in all my books that offer alternatives to this world is 100% legal, but people have options they don’t understand, I try to whisper a few to them

Ray: You claim paradise isn’t a destination, it’s a decision. Is that bravery, marketing, or denial?

Perry: Haha, I love you, Ray, and I am not just saying that because you are dead and can haunt the fuck out of me. You are like the guy who cleared the paths I now walk, but please. I mean, I believe in marketing, of course I do, fish tacos and prawns encrusted with coconut are not free. Your options don’t offer the real answer; the real answer is that paradise is a decision—it is wisdom.

RAY: Were you running from something when you created this world—or running toward something?

Perry: Again, I must laugh, you are a tricky bugger, but I am burning the candle at both ends, running from and running to.

Ray: What book, if any, changed the trajectory of your life in the way you now claim yours can change others?

Perry:  I find what I am about to say so amazing, so bizarre, and so unexplainably incredible, and don’t hate me, but I find very few female authors do it for me. However, about two years ago, I read about ten pages of a first-time author, a woman, I think I forgot her name on purpose. Her writing was so exquisite, so incredibly, I almost threw up and quit writing. I thought fuck me if she is so brilliant, so young, and I have been placing words in different order for nearly 4 decades, I am a fucking hack.

She was incredible, truly, like a fucking alien. But the book that most profoundly changed my life was Ayn Rand’s, The Fountainhead. So two female writers that got me, and they got me so deep, I am forever in their debt.

Now, I won’t claim I expect those kinds of results in my readers, but it can happen in a very big way.

Ray: You’re asking people to make reading a book their New Year’s resolution. Why that resolution, and why now?

Perry: I don’t know the actual numbers, but there are always bullshit surveys saying one thing or another, contrived from tainted data, contrived from tainted people, but the bottom line is most well-intentioned New Year’s resolutions are never realized.

The Bookening is a highly leveraged catalyst. It doesn’t tell you how to captain your ship; it shows you examples of trimming your rudder. Once you do that, once you point your ship in the right direction, you can and will accomplish all the things you want to. People fail at things mostly because they are not prepared to do what is required. Reading a fucking book is simple, fun, and entertaining; it’s like medicine that tastes good. It is habit-forming, even a healthy addiction if you will.

Ray: Is The Bookening a challenge… or a spiritual dare?

Perry: It is an experiment. I feel very strongly that anyone who participates will benefit significantly, and I hope they pay it forward. We don’t need to be government pawns.

Ray: What exactly is The Bookening—is it a challenge, a ritual, a prank, or something stranger?

Perry: It is orchestrated magic. On the surface, it is simply helping people set a simple goal—to read a book. It is a reminder to put down your fucking phone and think about something more important than gossip, politics, or getting rich. It is a reminder to think about yourself and the road ahead.

It is a time out from bullshit. It is your time.

Ray: You promise that reading this book can lead to real-life paradise. That’s a bold claim. What exactly in this book do you think has the power to make that happen?

Perry: This is exactly what is wrong with the world today. Why the fuck would it be a bold claim that people can live in harmony with nature and humanity in a place they appreciate?

When you put it like this, I guess the short answer would be that the Palm Tree Express ignores all the noise and sets an example.

The Palm Tree Express doesn’t operate from the view that people are inherently bad. Corruption surfaces in two major paths: power and poverty. It occurs in poverty because people get sick of living like beggars, so they alter their views on right and wrong.

It occurs when people attain power because they run unchecked, so they test the voracity of their power by doing bad things, often merely to see how much they can get away with as a way to classify their power.

So how does a book about chasing girls through a forest made of palm trees fix all that? It doesn’t. It shows you that all you really have to fix is yourself.

Ray: You speak of “Fusion” like it’s a religious state. How do we know this isn’t just a sunstroke-induced fantasy masquerading as enlightenment?

Perry: I question your interpretation. Certainly, it is nothing that I have ever said. Fusion would be my interpretation of living in harmony with nature and humanity.

You cannot truly know paradise as a visitor; you must become one of its elements, and if you really seek definition, you do not need to be in a tropical paradise to attain Fusion. There are cool people all over the world, and if you have attained a state of Fusion, you are seriously cool. You make everyone around you feel good. They want to know what you know. Fusion is the goal, paradise is part of the reward.

Ray: Why start with Palm Tree Express? What makes that book the ignition point?

Perry: Let me tell you a secret. After living in a frozen tundra for five or six years, a place that was turning me into a savage, a place where I walked around with no shirt in 15 °C temperatures, I realized I had accepted an intolerable lifestyle.

I bought a plane ticket. After flying all day, I cleared customs and went outside, and it hit me like a young Mike Tyson—the stank of the tropics, the dewy sweet smell and feel of hot humidity.

I was in a standing eight-count using my carry-on bag as a cane. Memories of a past life in the tropics flooded me, and I looked up in the sky, and I saw a row of tall palm trees with fluttering fronds, and I realized I had just traveled on the Palm Tree Express. From snow blowers to sandals.

I am going to make a bold, outrageous claim, sue me if I am wrong, but I am going to estimate that 75% of the people who read the Palm Tree Express will board their own flight, and some of those will stay where it landed forever.

Ray: What makes your beach gospel any different from the thousands of other self-help cults whispering sweet nothingness into desperate ears?

Perry: First off, I am not aware of thousands of other beach gospels whispering into desperate ears. There is Margaritaville, which I have almost but respect for, and there is Paradiste.

Not even Margaritaville has a philosophy that helps people understand paradise; Margaritaville is all about location. Paradiste is about helping people define what paradise is to them, because I believe it is unique to each person.

The other point that I would like to make is I am absolutely not forming a cult, nor do I consider myself a cultist or a cult leader. That is an absurd perversion of my work.

When my words help or inspire someone, that pleases me, but I did not wake up one day and say I am going to change the world. I will never do that. My goal was to share my adventures, tell my stories, and entertain people, give them some joy. If this leads to them changing their lives in a positive way, that is the bonus round, but it will be their actions, their effort, their courage that enabled them to accomplish it.

Ray: You said your story doesn’t have a plot—it has a pulse. Why is that better?

Perry: I do not know what that is all about. Did I say that? But this is what it is. If we sat at a beach café and I told you a few of my stories, they would pretty much sound exactly like my written words. I am a storyteller, sometimes a bullshitter; my goal is to paint a picture the reader can see. Not the picture I see, the picture they imagine. And that is another reason I am not promoting a cult. I am in no way, shape of form telling people what to think. I tell them what I think; the rest is up to them.

Ray: Do you think truth is more powerful when it’s fictionalized?

Perry: I think that often the truth is much more accessible in fiction. Generally, people, for whatever reason, find fact processing laborious and, therefore, sometimes hard to swallow. Tell them a story instead, and the interest level explodes.

Ray: If everyone read your book and followed your plan, what kind of world would we be living in?

Perry: I am advocating one size fits all Moo-Moos. My plan is to inspire people to make their own plan, but if everyone did that, there would be a lot of happy, happy people.

Ray: Perry… is paradise even real—or is it just the story we tell ourselves so we can survive Tuesday?

Perry: Let me tell you a story, Ray. For years, I had a little casa on a public section of the Caribbean. I saw many things, most of which were beautiful and magical. But the children of poverty who walked around the tourists broke my heart.

Then, after a while, I started meeting them, I fed them, bought them cheap toys, and did what I could to bring a little joy into their lives, or so I thought. What I discovered was in spite of poverty, they were the happiest children I had ever known. Almost all of them worked, and I mean from age four, but the work they just made into games.

They mended my broken heart and helped me develop my fusion as prime examples of it. Paradise exists, and you don’t have to be dead or rich to get in

Ray: What does someone look like after completing The Bookening? What changes? What stays behind?

Perry: I am starting to think that you missed your calling in life because you ask tough, imaginative questions. But I think I can answer you. It is kind of like a woman doing the morning after “walk of shame.” A little bit wild, a little bit happy, a little bit naughty, and a little bit wiser. You’ve got a secret, and you are busting to tell.

You don’t lose anything; you gain perspective and gusto. It is an epiphany, you realize if some halfwit like Memphis White can do it, you can totally live the life you want to live. And fuck me, that is as exciting as a giggling woman in a bikini with a pitcher of Mojitos standing in front of you. You’ve got to take it. You are going to take it. Claim your real-life mode” Ignited.

Ray: Last question. Are you building a revolution, or are you just trying to save yourself and hoping the rest of us catch up?

Perry: I guess if I had to put a label on it, I might consider myself an accidental revolutionary.

Ray: Well, thank you, Perry, that was an interesting new look at paradise. Jimmy is here now, but I don’t see him much, though. I hear he spends a lot of his time taking harp lessons.

I wish you the best with all your ventures, especially the Bookening. As you probably know, I am a big fan of reading myself.

Perry: It was wild. All the clouds here are a bit disorienting for me, though. I am leaving you a copy of the Palm Tree Express, and I very much look forward to reading your review.