In this episode, Dennis and Joe talk about the work of the Institute for Ecotechnics and the Heraclitus, a research vessel that has been exploring the ocean for over 40 years. They talk about its origins, how it got started, and its impact on our understanding of the world. And, of course, they talk about drugs and psychedelics and their impact on the field of ethnobotany. This is a great episode to listen to if you're interested in learning more about these topics, or if you just want to know more about the people behind them, this is the episode for you! If you like the show and want to support it, you can do so by becoming a patron patron patron of the show. Don't forget to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, and we'll give you a shoutout at the end of the episode! Thank you so much for listening and supporting the show! Cheers, Joe and Dennis! See you next Tuesday! Thanks to Dennis for coming on the show, and for being a friend of the podcast! Timestamps: 4:00 - What goes around comes around, comes around 7:30 - The true spirit of discovery 8:20 - The science in discovery 9:15 - How do you know what goes around? 11:10 - Who are you trying to do it? 12:00 13:40 - What are you working on? 15:00- What do you want to do next? 16:50 - Who do you do it better? 17:30- What goes out? 18: How do I do it best? 19:50- What is your favorite part of the story? 21:40- Why do you like it better than the most? 22:00 What does it matter? 25:00 Do you have a problem? 26:00 Is it worth it? 27:00 Can you give me a glass of water? 27:30 28:50 29:40 30: What do I have a cup of coffee? 35:00 How can I do that? 36:30 Can you help me do it more? 31:00 + 35:40) - Can I do something better than this? 33:30 + 36:10 37:40 + 40:30) - What's your answer?
00:00:34.000Further associated with, you know, how do I explain it?
00:00:40.000It was actually a theater company called the Theater of All Possibilities.
00:00:44.000But the Institute for Ecotechnics was started in the early 70s.
00:00:49.000And they built a ship, this Chinese junk, essentially, with a ferro-concrete hull.
00:00:56.000And my connection was they have cruised the world essentially since 1973 looking into different things relevant to global ecology.
00:01:07.000They've done sampling in the Antarctic and in 1981 they decided to go to the Amazon.
00:01:13.000And I was doing my graduate work in Iquitos at that time.
00:01:17.000So that was my connection with the Institute of Ecotechnics.
00:01:21.000And, you know, at the time, I thought these people are nuts.
00:01:28.000I mean, they were kind of nuts and they were very naive about what they were doing as far as doing ethnobotanical work.
00:01:36.000Not that I wasn't naive about it at the time, but I had a better handle on it than they did.
00:01:41.000Anyway, that was the original connection.
00:01:44.000And the same group, years after I had more or less kind of severed—I didn't really sever my relationship, but I kind of distanced myself from them— But then that same group went on in the 80s to build Biosphere 2,
00:02:16.000Explain that to people who don't know what we're talking about.
00:02:18.000Well, Biosphere 2 was the idea of building a terrestrial environment that was completely shut off from everything and that was self-sustaining.
00:06:57.000And because they were theater people, they actually understood, which I didn't at the time, that what they were doing and their whole effort was really a performance experience.
00:07:09.000On a global level, they did all these things kind of realizing that this was the theater of all possibilities.
00:07:16.000And they had a theater in Austin, Texas by that name.
00:10:03.000And this book, or this set, as you know, You know the genesis of it because you had a lot to do with it.
00:10:11.000When I was here last year, the back story is in 1967, the US government, the National Institute of Mental Health, of all people, put together a conference in San Francisco in 1967 called the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs.
00:10:38.000The only thing the public ever got out of it was the symposium proceedings, which is the first book there.
00:10:45.000And I was very heavily influenced by that book because somehow or other it came into my hands at age 17. You know, bored teenager living in Paonia, Colorado, wishing that I was with my brother in Berkeley,
00:11:10.000And about the same time, I discovered the teachings of Don Juan, which my brother gave to me for my 18th birthday.
00:11:18.000And although much in there is probably fiction, Those two books gave me a complementary perspective.
00:11:28.000The teachings of Don Juan was the ethnographic lens through which you could look at the use of psychedelics and which I kind of filled in those spaces.
00:11:40.000Then this book came out and it was like – and I knew who Schultes was.
00:11:45.000I knew who a few of these people were at the time.
00:11:47.000Schultes and Schulgen and Andrew Weil were actually on the original faculty.
00:11:53.000And so when the book fell into my hands at age 17, I was very excited and I read the whole thing.
00:12:01.000And this is what really helped me focus my career.
00:12:05.000It made me aware of That maybe I could make a career out of ethnopharmacology.
00:12:11.000And in my very naive 17-year-old teenage brain, I thought, wow, man, I can get paid to get stoned.
00:12:21.000It was in part that, but there was more to it.
00:12:25.000But that's what led me to pursue that career.
00:16:08.000When this book came along, he said, I have something I'll submit here.
00:16:12.000I don't care if they – it doesn't matter anymore.
00:16:15.000So one of the papers in this second volume is his original 67 paper.
00:16:22.000So the second volume is kind of – because the government didn't step up to the plate like they said they would – There was no follow-up conferences and for a long time I wanted to do a follow-up conference.
00:16:38.000I wanted to do it on the 30th anniversary in 97. It never happened.
00:16:51.000I found a venue in the UK, a beautiful country house that was called Tiringham Hall that was run by One of our friends who shares our perspective, he made that available.
00:18:05.000So it took six months longer than I thought, but now it's out there, and hopefully it'll be a A landmark in the field like the first one was.
00:18:18.000And what we wanted to do to honor the first one was reprint the first one along with the second one.
00:19:26.000I mean, I'm all for it to see this work done.
00:19:30.000I also have, you know, plenty to say about the limitations of that strictly clinical, you know, sort of medical approach.
00:19:43.000You know, organizations like MAPS and HEFTER have to work within the constraints of what's possible.
00:19:51.000But I think in some ways they, you know, they force themselves to, they're forced to put on blinders in a certain way to what else is possible.
00:20:02.000You know, for example, the way that ayahuasca I think it's important to pursue that work,
00:20:18.000but because you can't synthesize ayahuasca like you can psilocybin or MDMA or These things that under clinical trials, it's much more difficult to study within the constraints of a phase one, you know, clinical trial.
00:20:33.000But in fact, ayahuasca is touching, I think, far more lives than, say...
00:20:40.000Well, I can't say about mushrooms because mushrooms are a lot out there.
00:20:45.000But, you know, the potential, the impact that it's having on society is much greater because people are rediscovering this.
00:20:54.000And people are, I think, reaching out for...
00:20:59.000They're reaching out for anything that will work.
00:21:02.000As a society, we are spiritually bereft and I think there's a pervasive sense of despair and a feeling of, what would you call it, spiritual impoverishment or something as we see that all of our institutions are becoming,
00:21:20.000you know, we're seeing behind the curtain and realizing that they're empty.
00:21:27.000They don't really have anything to offer on the spiritual level, especially religions.
00:21:32.000People are rejecting religions as the sort of shell game that it is.
00:23:06.000We need something tangible, something more tangible.
00:23:10.000So I think faith is – I mean that's how religions entice you to believe.
00:23:19.000But I think that in a way it's deceptive.
00:23:23.000Why do you have to believe when you can – In that intensely personal encounter between you and a plant teacher or you and a molecule, you can experience for yourself.
00:23:37.000You can say, I know that this exists and the realms that it opens up for you are real because I've experienced it.
00:23:48.000And I think faith, I think that we, in a way, At least the Abrahamic religions, Christianity and Judaism and Islam, to a certain extent, have poisoned the Western mind and encouraged our separation from nature and basically propagated this idea that we're separated from nature and we own it and we have every right to dominate it.
00:24:16.000And we're seeing the consequences of that.
00:24:19.000We have to rediscover this indigenous perspective that we are part of nature.
00:24:34.000It's all about collaborating together.
00:24:36.000with the global community of species to advance consciousness not just of our species but of the whole community of sentient species.
00:24:46.000This is what the psychedelics can do and I think this is what the psychedelics are desperately reaching out to our species And anybody who watches my podcast or listens to me is, this is my rap.
00:25:24.000And then once you wake up to the fact that, you know, we're in a participatory, collaborative role with the community of species, then we have to change a whole lot of things that we're not doing right now because we're certainly not,
00:25:41.000you know, developing sustainable ways to live on a global scale.
00:25:46.000And we're seeing the consequences of this now.
00:25:50.000What's dismaying, besides the fact that it's happening, is that there is so much denial, so much refusal to recognize this on the part of the people that supposedly are running the show, and they're willfully ignorant,
00:26:15.000A lot of people who listen to this show will agree with me when I say, I've pretty much given up on politics.
00:26:22.000Politics seems to me irrevocably broken.
00:26:26.000Many other institutions are dysfunctional, if not broken.
00:26:30.000I mean, science is corrupt and government is corrupt.
00:26:35.000Corporatism is, you know, these are all flawed systems because they're not...
00:26:43.000They don't have a base of compassion and recognition of the interrelatedness of all things.
00:26:51.000And psychedelics are a catalyst for waking up.
00:26:55.000And so once people have that experience, then their perspective is changed.
00:27:01.000And if they're influential, they can go out and make change on a global scale.
00:27:07.000I think it's so important that Michael Pollan put out that book because the guy who's a mainstream straight-laced guy who's written about architecture and agriculture and all these different things where people really respect his opinions and his work, that this guy has not just written this book but has also gone out on a limb and had a bunch of different psychedelic experiences in controlled settings and talks about them and the profound impact that it had on his,
00:28:07.000Well, so far he hasn't really emphasized or said much about—he sort of writes it from the perspective that all of this started with the discovery of LSD in 1943, and then that was the psychedelic era.
00:28:23.000They're indigenous traditions, thousands of years old.
00:28:47.000Seriously, I'm not sure why he did that, if that was a conscious decision, but I'm kind of disappointed because I think I have a perspective that, you know, I have some things to say that so far haven't been said in this book and things that Michael Pollan would completely relate to.
00:29:08.000You know, he's the one that brought up the idea that, you know, with respect to like plant domestication and our relationship with our food plants, you know, we think we're growing, we're cultivating plants.
00:29:51.000I mean, this will be influential to a small number of people.
00:29:55.000Pollan's book is going to bring it to the attention of millions.
00:29:59.000Yeah, it's going to open people's eyes and refresh the way people view this whole subject.
00:30:06.000I think when you look at, when you're talking about Ancient cultures and the use of psychedelics going back thousands and thousands of years and then this dip somewhere around 1970 where it almost seems to have gotten down to a very low hum,
00:30:31.000I don't think it's the answer to everything, but I think it's the glue.
00:30:35.000I think there's a thing about the psychedelic experience that forces you to recognize that you have these pre-established ideas of what things are, and that you've kind of put them in these boxes, and you've sort of pushed it away,
00:30:52.000and you're like, well, I've defined what a city is, and I'm just going to put that over there, and now I know what that is.
00:30:57.000I'm not going to think about that anymore.
00:31:28.000But after that it became this weird symptom of what we're doing by erecting these massive structures and cities and that We need this ground in order for us to use these vehicles on.
00:31:42.000But in the process of doing that, we've sort of marred the landscape with it everywhere.
00:31:48.000Well, psychedelics do give us the chance to rethink a lot of things.
00:31:53.000I think we've talked before about Simon Powell's work.
00:31:59.000He writes about psilocybin, wrote The Psilocybin Solution, and that was his first book and I think his latest book.
00:32:55.000It lets in just enough of the external world that you can relate it to prior experiences, what you think you know, and you construct this artificial model of reality.
00:33:09.000And I've said this many times, maybe worse than pollen, maybe better, but I talk about how we're living in a hallucination, essentially, that's constructed by our brains.
00:33:21.000And in order to just deal with all the information that is available, it has to really restrict it.
00:33:29.000It has to put a choke on it so that what does get in can make sense.
00:33:34.000That's fine for ordinary consciousness, but you are prone to overlook things about reality that are important.
00:33:43.000And psychedelics temporarily give you an opportunity to lower those, lower those mechanisms, that default network or sometimes called neural gating.
00:33:54.000If you're in a safe place where you don't have to worry about your safety, you know, there is no saber-toothed tiger who are going to come get you, you know, and so you don't have to worry about your safety, then you can just relax into it and you can appreciate that.
00:34:32.000Some of these folks admit it and others deny it, but it's true.
00:34:37.000So there are many, many things we can learn from psychedelics.
00:34:41.000That's only one of them, but from a scientist's perspective, that's an important one.
00:34:46.000One of the things I want to do is create a system, a situation where you can bring specialists together in a discipline and Say, mathematics, or quantum physics, or astronomy, or, you know, even whatever art,
00:35:03.000and have these collective sessions together, and then let people share their insight.
00:35:12.000Essentially, creative solving, problem solving, or creative sessions.
00:35:18.000You know, and that's the other thing I think we're looking for, you know, we need to develop a context in which these things can happen.
00:35:29.000And that's one of the, you know, that's one of the restrictions of the strictly clinical approach that I chafe against, you know, because they have to be I think?
00:36:07.000They are learning tools and teaching tools.
00:36:11.000And, you know, you begin to see some of this in the work that Roland Griffith is doing.
00:36:19.000You know, he's been able to get approval for people to take psilocybin for spiritual development, which is not exactly an illness for actual spiritual insight.
00:36:37.000He's got a clinical study going on right now where he's recruiting religious professionals, people who are pastors, priests, rabbis, imams, other types of religious professionals,
00:36:52.000and putting them through his protocol.
00:36:55.000And it's having a tremendous impact on the way they view their profession and the way they view religion.
00:38:19.000It is a beautiful book on every level, and the people that contributed to the second volume.
00:38:27.000I didn't want all the same people that always come to these conferences and always say the same things.
00:38:34.000So some of the people in there are not that well-known, you know, but they were known to me, and I felt that they had important things to say.
00:38:44.000So, you know, some of them are known within the community, and others are pretty obscure.
00:38:50.000But, you know, there's always this, you know, this passionate amateur-type person who maybe they don't have credentials, but they have...
00:39:00.000Incredible knowledge up in their head, and they're completely obsessed with this stuff.
00:39:06.000And there's a few of those people in there, too.
00:39:09.000So it was really satisfying to be able to do it and make it worth people's time.
00:39:18.000I was able to pay for, well, me and my supporters.
00:39:23.000A lot of it came through the Institute of Ecotechnics, actually.
00:39:26.000That Turned out to be a good nonprofit channel through which we could get donations, grants essentially.
00:39:34.000We didn't want it to go through Hefter because it might look like a conflict of interest, silly notion.
00:39:40.000But because of that, we were able to pull this off.
00:42:42.000It is, in fact, the first psychedelic university, if you will, since Eleusis was sacked and burned by the Goths in 396 AD. It's the first...
00:42:55.000Psychedelic University in the Western tradition since then.
00:42:59.000So you're going to have structured courses?
00:43:10.000We're going to have therapeutic programs for people to get treatment and programs for people to...
00:43:18.000You know, learn to use psychedelics for therapists to learn to use them, but that is not the whole program.
00:43:25.000The idea that we're going to have conferences, global impact conferences, along the model of this, this conference was what made me realize this is possible.
00:43:37.000We're going to have impactful conferences that will really have a global reach, and through You know, webinars.
00:43:47.000Through the web, we can share this with thousands of people.
00:43:51.000And it will be a place for, you know, the second part of the title is, so it's the Mechanic Academy of Natural Philosophy.
00:44:05.000Natural philosophy is what science used to be called before it became corrupted, before it became preoccupied with quantitation, before it became reductionist, all of the things that have constricted the scope of science.
00:44:24.000This is going to be a more open thing that doesn't depend on corporate funding and that sort of thing, where First of all, we recognize that scientific knowledge is valuable and we embrace that, but we also recognize that it has inherent limitations just by the nature of the beast.
00:44:44.000It has inherent limitations on certain things Are difficult to investigate within that rigid framework.
00:44:54.000But that doesn't mean they're not worthy of investigation, you know?
00:46:08.000Peter Robinson, Jr.: Especially in this era, tends to transform itself into dogma.
00:46:14.000And then it becomes dismissive of aspects of the world that are worthy of studying, but they don't fit into the scientific pattern, and so we dismiss them.
00:46:26.000I mean, a good example of this is Graham Hancock's work.
00:46:30.000For example, that he talks about and many other people.
00:46:33.000Mainstream archaeology is not open to this idea.
00:46:37.000They're becoming more open to it by force.
00:46:39.000They have to because more and more evidence is showing.
00:46:42.000But look at how long it's taken him to, you know, knocking on the doors, beating these people over the head practically.
00:49:07.000I think people are appreciative of it now that we know that we have gone through that dip where it was outlawed and stigmatized and people were never talking about it.
00:49:16.000Like, you know, just a few years ago, I mean, I want to say early 2000s, you talk about mushrooms or any sort of psychedelics and people would look at you like you were crazy.
00:49:26.000Well, Joe, I mean, to Terrence's credit, he was one who continued to talk about it all through the 70s, the 80s, the 90s.
00:49:37.000I mean, and I give him tremendous credit for that because he was dismissed and he was out there.
00:49:44.000And I think he really had a lot to do with keeping this conversation alive.
00:49:50.000That, along with the fact that, you know, largely through our efforts back in the 70s, but other people contributed, like Stamets and other people.
00:50:01.000But we published this little pamphlet, the Psilocybin Mushroom Magic Growers Guide, which put in the hands of, you know, every nerdy 10th grader, essentially, the tools to grow psilocybin mushrooms.
00:50:16.000And that's how it got out to the world.
00:50:19.000And our motivation when we did that, it was partly mercenaries.
00:50:24.000Yeah, we can grow mushrooms, make a lot of money.
00:50:26.000Well, we grew mushrooms, we made some money.
00:50:29.000But the real motivation is we wanted people to be able to verify our own experiences.
00:50:35.000The stuff that we experienced at La Charrera was like so nuts that we thought either we're completely deluded or there's something going on here.
00:50:44.000So we needed affirmation from a wider community.
00:50:48.000That, hey, there is really weird shit going on here.
00:50:52.000And we put it out, and it's now, you know, mushrooms are probably, I'd say for most people, they're the first psychedelic that they encounter.
00:51:04.000You know, maybe LSD. But chances are, these days, it's mushrooms.
00:51:08.000Well, your brother was such a compelling speaker.
00:51:49.000Although occasionally, you know, I can kind of channel him, but I have stuff to say.
00:51:54.000I don't say it as well as he does, but we were so much on the same wavelength about this.
00:52:00.000So he was the bard of psychedelics throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and I refuse to, you know, when no one else was talking about it, he was talking about it.
00:52:14.000So I give him a lot of credit for having the courage.
00:52:50.000Let's explain what we're talking about in particular.
00:53:07.000Another big psychedelic conference, and the title of my talk was The Experiment at La Chorera, Psychotic Break, Shamanic Initiation, or Alien Encounter?
00:53:26.000But my – sort of the theme of this talk was if you look at the – What you might call it the topology, the typology of alien encounters,
00:53:42.000there are certain patterns that come up again and again.
00:53:46.000And if you tick those off, if you say, you know, for the experiment at La Charrera, they're all present in a certain way.
00:53:55.000There has to be, you know, the typical alien encounter, it's kind of an oxymoron.
00:54:00.000What's typical about an alien encounter?
00:54:03.000But there are certain characteristics, and one of the characteristics is there has to be a calling.
00:54:36.000I was in University of Colorado, but we were both fascinated by DMT. And we were compelled to go look for this orally active form of DMT, ukuhei, Which, when we finally got it, turned out to be not very exciting,
00:55:49.000And then another characteristic is there is – so information is given and gifts are given, you know, and the information that was transmitted – I think?
00:58:04.000ever in the history of the universe and this map was a way to predict the eruption of those things or the ingression of those things, I think, which is a better term.
00:58:15.000And Terence and I used to have, you know, I wouldn't call them arguments.
00:58:20.000I'd call them heated discussions or enthusiastic discussions about how this happened.
00:58:25.000I do not disagree with the principle that there is novelty.
00:58:29.000I'm not sure the time wave really describes it adequately, but it was an attempt to.
00:58:36.000And whatever it was, it was something that was a gift from this teacher, at least the nugget of the idea.
00:58:53.000It was nothing supernatural or anything like that.
00:58:58.000The gift was the spores of the mushroom.
00:59:01.000We took the spores of the mushroom and we took them back with us and then over two or three years we figured out how to grow them and we shared that with the rest of the world.
00:59:12.000And that was really the thing that, and look at the impact that that's had on society.
00:59:19.000And Terence was fond of saying, Terence did say, you know, we are in a symbiotic relationship with something that has disguised itself as an alien invasion in order not to alarm us.
00:59:37.000And before you know it, every nerdy 10-year-old in basements across the country, you know, were growing mushrooms and able to do it because the technique was very simple.
00:59:50.000So it's all about, what's Johnny doing down in the basement, honey?
01:00:41.000But mushrooms as such, we know too much about the phylogeny of mushrooms.
01:00:46.000We know where they fit into the phylogeny of life on Earth.
01:00:51.000And you can't really make the case that they were extraterrestrial because there were mushrooms, you know, they're mushrooms and they're part of, you know, they have a position in the well-defined phylogeny of fungi,
01:01:06.000which are some of the most ancient organisms.
01:01:09.000I mean, some of the most earliest macro species.
01:01:16.000I mean, there were big fungi in terrestrial environments before there was much of anything else.
01:01:25.000But they weren't psilocybin mushrooms, presumably.
01:01:28.000Have you paid attention to this most recent theory that perhaps the ancestors of octopus might have somehow or another gotten here from an asteroid?
01:01:38.000That there's something about their unique ability to alter their RNA, which is unique in the animal kingdom?
01:02:13.000Another interesting, maybe interesting angle on this was, I think it was 2015, I was invited to another private conference actually at Tiringham, and the subject of the conference was DMT entities.
01:02:31.000And, you know, the entities you see on DMT, are they real or not?
01:02:39.000It's a tall order, very difficult to really unpack that.
01:02:44.000For one thing, what do you mean by real?
01:02:53.000But the talk that I presented was called, is DMT a messenger molecule from an extraterrestrial civilization?
01:03:03.000That was the title of my talk, and I actually, in the course of preparing the talk, I had to conclude that probably not, you know, because if you're going to postulate that, what you really have to talk about is...
01:03:19.000The origin of tryptophan, because tryptophan, the amino acid, which is found in everything, it's one of the 20 that goes into protein, tryptophan is the precursor to all these psychedelic tryptamines, and also including serotonin.
01:03:35.000DMT is kind of the archetypal psychedelic, but you've got psilocybin, psilicin, 5-methoxy, bufotanine, and even the beta-carbolines.
01:03:48.000Look back in phylogeny, you know, a billion years, a couple of billion years, eventually you're talking about what they call the tripoperon, which is the cluster of genes that give rise to tryptophan.
01:04:08.000So pretty soon you're not talking about is DMT, It's extraterrestrial in origin.
01:04:13.000You have to say, well, obviously it came from tryptophan.
01:04:16.000So how did the trypoperon arise in phylogeny?
01:04:24.000Even though it's one of the most ancient gene clusters in the evolution of life, you can't really make the case that it's extraterrestrial.
01:04:33.000Because you could say, well, it came from rhodopsin.
01:04:38.000Actually, the genes that the trip operon originated from originally were the genes that – the same genes that code for rhodopsin, which is the pigment in the eye that responds to light.
01:04:52.000So I ended up – I could make the case that DMT is extraterrestrial.
01:04:58.000And – But is that even an interesting case, like whether or not it's from another planet?
01:05:03.000Whatever it is, it doesn't seem like it's here.
01:05:31.000That has been adopted by the community of species to talk to the monkeys and try to talk to our consciousness and maybe even to trigger consciousness.
01:05:44.000So DMT is only two steps from tryptophan, enzymatically and cellular metabolism.
01:05:54.000Not a living thing that we know of that does not contain tryptophan because it's one of the 20 that go into amino acids.
01:06:03.000Two steps from tryptophan, decarboxylation and N-methylation, is all it takes to get DMT. And that's like the prototypal tryptamine psychedelic.
01:06:36.000Sticking methyl groups on nitrogens is maybe less common, but still very common, you know, enzymes that will move, you know, methyl groups around in cells.
01:06:47.000So you can make the case that, and we know this, DMT is extremely common in nature.
01:06:55.000DMT is, I say nature is drenched in DMT, you know.
01:06:59.000From the animal level to the plant level to the fungal level, you find these things everywhere.
01:07:07.000And people say, well, there's about 150 species of plants that contain DMT. That's only because we've only looked at 150 species of plants.
01:07:18.000If you look at these large genera that are famous, known for having tryptamines, like acacias and mimosas and these things, We know of a few species that have DMT, but there's hundreds of species, thousands of species.
01:08:13.000They don't have useful amounts of DMT. But if you took, with sufficient instruments, if you just started randomly sampling plants and analyzing for DMT with a mass spec, I'll bet it would turn up in almost everything.
01:08:28.000Is it phalaris grass that's toxic to sheep because of DMT? Yep, that's the one.
01:08:35.000So the DMT in it, for whatever reason, the way it interacts with the sheep's digestive system, it becomes poison?
01:08:44.000I mean, phalaris grass has DMT. It has 5-methoxy DMT. Other tryptamines, it also has something called gramine, which is like DMT with only one carbon on the side chain.
01:09:25.000So when you see those jaguars eating the leaves and then tripping their balls off, rolling around on their back, what do you think is happening there?
01:09:33.000I mean, you've seen those videos, I'm sure.
01:10:50.000More importantly, it appears that it stimulates neurogenesis, and that's relevant to Alzheimer's and brain development and even Down syndrome.
01:11:00.000It is an inhibitor of this kinase, this regulatory protein called DYRK1, which has got its fingers in lots of different cellular pies.
01:11:24.000It actually stimulates nerve growth in the hippocampus.
01:11:31.000And we're finding out that there are a number of other receptors that it interacts with, including serotonin, dopamine transporters, Even one called the imagilene receptors that are, you know, of undefined functions.
01:11:48.000So, like most natural molecules, it's not a one-trick pony.
01:11:53.000You know, harming has a number of effects, you know, and that's why taking ayahuasca...
01:12:02.000Is a different, you know, that's why it's not a pure DMT experience, because you've got a whole mixture of alkaloids that are contributing to that effect.
01:12:13.000Who were the researchers that, when they discovered harmine, they didn't know what it was, and they tried to label it telepathine, until they realized that it was harmine?
01:12:29.000What you may call the sad and sordid history of ayahuasca in a certain way because in the early days, in the 20s when people are looking at it, A number of independent groups were working on it,
01:12:51.000They weren't aware of other people's work, and so they misnamed these things.
01:12:56.000You know, I mean, I can't tell you exactly.
01:12:59.000I think initially it was Lewis Lewin who discovered harmine, and he called it benisterine.
01:13:08.000Then it turned out, well, another group, years before, had isolated the same molecule from beganum harmilla.
01:13:15.000And telepathine was one of these misnomers, you know, that came out.
01:13:20.000The problem with this was that back in the day, people didn't collect voucher specimens.
01:13:26.000So a lot of this chemical work was done without the benefit of herbarium specimens, which now everybody that wants to do phytochemical work hopefully has the I think?
01:13:59.000The beta-carmiline chemistry of Bansteriopsis didn't really get well-defined until some Chinese scientists, or at least they had a Chinese name, worked on them and discovered harmine, tetrahydroharmine,
01:15:13.000People have group hallucinations, group visions.
01:15:17.000Has anybody ever bothered to independently sequester people, put them into different rooms, have them do ayahuasca, and then have them describe a very similar experience or almost identical experience to prove that these telepathic experiences exist?
01:15:46.000That seems like a worthy study, because I've heard from more than one person.
01:15:52.000In fact, my friend Kyle Kingsbury and his wife had an ayahuasca experience where they both had a visualization of their child, and then when they got back, she was pregnant, and they wound up having this child from their visualization.
01:16:22.000And that sort of points out there is, you know, a realm of experience, a realm of knowing that these things give access to that's normally closed to us.
01:16:34.000I mean, that's kind of a trivial statement, of course.
01:16:38.000But then you get down to questions of how verifiable is that?
01:16:49.000I don't know if the term is hung up, but they can get baffled when you start talking about the reality of, say, the entities you encounter on DMT. Some people I know are obsessed with trying to verify the reality of the entities that you find on DMT. And again,
01:17:12.000it comes down to if you experience them, they're real.
01:17:15.000If anything you experience is real, because you've experienced it, does it have a corresponding...
01:17:30.000You know, we throw around these terms, these epistemological, metaphysical terms, quite carelessly, you know, without really thinking about it.
01:17:40.000What does it mean when you say, I'm in here and you're out there, you know, and then you take a psychedelic and you realize that's an artificial boundary, right?
01:17:53.000It's separated in normal consciousness, though.
01:17:55.000It's separated in normal consciousness.
01:17:57.000But then what is normal consciousness if not a reflection of your neurochemical brain state?
01:18:03.000I mean, everything you experience is an altered state because it's filtered into this brain, processed by the brain.
01:18:12.000And, you know, the brain is a biochemical engine that, you know, as I say often, we're made out of drugs.
01:18:19.000But it seems that our normal consciousness is the best state to propagate biological life and to keep whatever we've created in terms of our community structures and relationships and friendships and the ability to build structures and houses and things like that.
01:18:37.000All these things are done best when you're here and present, whereas when you're in a psychedelic state, I agree with you.
01:18:45.000Well, the way I've always described it is if you had a meeting with God and you went and God gave you all the answers to the world and you experienced undeniable beauty in the most extreme form possible where you couldn't have imagined it and then you came back.
01:19:02.000Whether you hallucinated it or not, it's the exact same experience.
01:19:37.000It doesn't matter where it comes from.
01:19:39.000If it's good information, then it has its own internal validity.
01:19:44.000And whether it came from some part of yourself that is normally obscure to you or it came from the plant teacher or the aliens transmitting it through, it doesn't really matter.
01:23:40.000I mean, I don't know if I accept it, but I get it.
01:23:42.000And then in alternating chapters, Geoffrey comes along and kind of unpacks this and explains where does this fit into sort of the phenomenology of mythology and reasonable explanations.
01:24:11.000I think that these things really happen to him, or he thinks they do.
01:24:16.000And some of the most craziest things, these are not, you know, the media has made...
01:24:23.000Like everything, they dumb it down, you know, and they put it into the box of alien encounters, guys and nutball, you know, and they dismiss it.
01:24:33.000But if you take a closer look, one thing, to Whitley's credit, is he doesn't claim to understand what's happening.
01:24:40.000He doesn't call it an alien encounter.
01:27:30.000When you talk to him or you hear him, I've never talked to him personally, but when you see him in interviews and conversations, there's something off.
01:28:11.000He's having a hard time with normal reality, which would make sense during the dream state, because all these things are happening at night, right?
01:28:20.000And this is the big thing that I've always...
01:28:24.000The big problem I've always had about these UFO abduction experiences, first of all, they all take place when someone is either at night, it's either they're on a dark robe where there's no one around, and they're sleepy, or they're at home in their bed.
01:28:38.000The vast majority of them take place at night or while someone's lying in bed, which is exactly when you're dreaming.
01:28:45.000Now, we don't totally understand the dream state, but there's a connection, at least, an implied connection between psychedelic chemicals that your brain produces endogenously that could be released during the dream state and in different levels with different humans.
01:29:01.000I mean, obviously, some people have problems with producing serotonin and dopamine, and then other people have no problems with it.
01:29:07.000The biology of the human brain varies, right?
01:29:14.000It's not without possibility that there's someone who has a real issue with these chemicals just busting through and flooding their system.
01:29:29.000But then does this contradict what we've already said about psychedelic experiences?
01:29:33.000Like, why would we diminish his endogenous psychedelic experience if that's what he's having?
01:29:38.000I mean, it is entirely possible that you're dealing with someone who maybe perhaps does have some sort of psychotic breaks, but also is experiencing psychedelic experiences due to some endogenous DMT dump or dump of whatever.
01:29:51.000And all these things are taking place at the same time.
01:29:54.000In the dream state during heavy REM sleep, and he's coming back with these uniform stories of alien abduction.
01:31:31.000I mean, natural philosophy, properly approached, should be a way to evaluate these things rigorously, not abandon rigorous thought, but not be so dismissive of it as to say, it doesn't fit into our paradigm,
01:31:47.000it doesn't fit into what we think we know, so we're not going to talk about it.
01:33:18.000But it's unfortunate that, you know...
01:33:24.000In order to save people's careers, in order to have a career in science, you have to make this sacrifice.
01:33:31.000You have to keep to yourself things you know to be true, you know, that you can't really talk about because your colleagues will look askance at you.
01:33:42.000And science is a very medieval institution in that respect.
01:33:49.000When you look at the DMT experience and you look at its effect on the human mind, how much of you subscribes to the idea that we're looking at some sort of a chemical gateway?
01:34:37.000That this is some sort of a pathway to a nearby dimension or to something that's around us all the time but we just don't have access to with normal neurochemistry?
01:34:49.000Is there too many what-ifs or who knows?
01:34:51.000No, I mean, there's so much in what you said where you have to go back and unpack all of these things.
01:35:00.000When we got excited about DMT, Terrence and me, in the late 60s, what led us to go to La Torreira was that it seemed like a completely different order of magnitude than any of the other psychedelics.
01:35:18.000And we came to it really from a childhood that was steeped in science fiction.
01:35:22.000So we carried with us the idea, this really is another dimension.
01:35:28.000And it may be a portal to another dimension.
01:35:32.000And as science fiction nuts, we were totally okay with that.
01:37:00.000We don't know shit, you know, and scientists can forget that, you know.
01:37:04.000But as far as this DMT thing, you know, this is actually – there's controversy about this because – You know, a lot of people who have worked in this area say it's pretty well established that endogenous DMT can produce these states,
01:37:25.000that the pineal can secrete DMT under certain circumstances or under stress.
01:37:33.000The lungs can produce large amounts of DMT that are translocated to the brain.
01:37:40.000But it's not so clear that that goes on.
01:37:43.000I mean, it's clear that it can be produced.
01:37:46.000But David Nichols, who knows a thing or two about pharmacology, founder of the Hefter Institute, world's highest authority when it comes to the chemistry and pharmacology of psychedelics.
01:38:06.000He's taken a reductionist argument on this that's kind of hard to knock down, which is that DMT is produced endogenously, but it's chopped up so quickly that it never reaches the site of action and it never reaches the levels I think I'm going to go.
01:38:47.000But we haven't really measured the levels produced endogenously during, especially these extreme states.
01:39:28.000So it's like, do you want to practice Kundalini for 10 years and bang your head towards the east or just smoke DMT 30 seconds later in the center of the universe?
01:39:38.000But I think the last time I was on your show, we talked about this other thing, this Ajna light we discussed.
01:40:54.000It's just a bunch of, it looks like a floor lamp, you know, with a rectangular mount, a bunch of LEDs underneath it, which he programs with an iPad in different patterns.
01:41:05.000You lie under it, and it stimulates hypnagogic hallucinations that are a lot like...
01:41:12.000That guy looks like an old school freak.
01:41:44.000So you lie under this thing, and the first time I lied under it, I got all these colors, I got all these hypnagogic effects, you know, and nice patterns and all that, like a sub-threshold DMT experience.
01:41:59.000And I said, well, you know, the LEDs are all changing color, right?
01:42:12.000So, it was interesting, and then we got into the conversation, how do you know this is stimulating DMT? How do you know that's the effect?
01:42:21.000Turns out it's not so easy to nail that down.
01:42:26.000Because DMT is so ephemeral in the system, you can't take urine samples or cerebral spinal fluid or anything.
01:42:35.000It would be gone by the time you did it.
01:42:38.000So the only way, well, maybe not the only way, but one way you could do it is you could do something called...
01:42:48.000Essentially, you couldn't do this to a human because you couldn't get an FDA approval for it, but you could put a microcapillary tube right next to the pineal that will absorb things as they're released, and then you could recover that and say,
01:43:37.000Nick Cozy, who's a pharmacologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he was really the first one to show that DMT is endogenously produced.
01:43:49.000It's a sigma-1 agonist as well as a serotonin agonist, which is another...
01:44:07.000To figure this out, I'll send you a paper that Nichols wrote, or I'll link you to a video where he discusses this.
01:44:14.000And it's like, you know, he gave that at the Breaking Convention conference last summer that I was at, and it was like, you know, he was like the big downer of the conference, right?
01:44:26.000Because everybody has this romantic idea, and he comes along and just squashes it, you know?
01:44:33.000And it's like, man, you know, you've disappointed a lot of people today.
01:44:38.000But on the other hand, reality is good.
01:45:53.000He's the mad scientist behind the float lab, which is the most advanced...
01:45:59.000I mean, you saw that contraption that we have back there.
01:46:01.000That is as state-of-the-art as it gets in the world of tanks.
01:46:04.000And he had a concept for developing learning films.
01:46:12.000Films where you would lie down, and in the absence of any physical input, right, or very minimal...
01:46:18.000Meaning that you're floating in that environment.
01:46:20.000He was going to suspend an LCD screen at the lowest possible light emission, so you would not be able to see the edges of the screen, you would just be able to see the images on the screen.
01:46:29.000And they would play instructional videos and things, and you would learn them with the minimal amount of distractions.
01:46:35.000And he think you could achieve, his thought was, you could achieve accelerated learning.
01:46:40.000Yeah, like perhaps you could work on your golf swing or something like that or something that you could get in there or maybe musical instruments that you'd be able to pick up concepts and things with minimal distraction.
01:49:19.000A part of the time I was teaching at the University of Minnesota and then I stepped back from that for a couple of years ago because I just didn't have time and it was an adjunct professor position so the equation between the amount of work and the amount of compensation just didn't make sense after a while.
01:49:37.000I mean I enjoyed it a lot but I I've lived in BC a lot I'm almost three-quarters I mean you know I got my PhD at UBC and My daughter's got dual citizenship, and she's up there now.
01:51:20.000He was a graduate student of Schulte's.
01:51:25.000He's one of the editors on this and very well known as an ethnobotanist and for years he was the explorer in residence for the National Geographic.
01:51:38.000He's the guy that worked out the zombie poison mystery back in the day, you know, in Haiti.
01:52:41.000And if they were lucky, they would – and then they would exhum them like 48 hours later.
01:52:47.000And of course a lot of them did die, but if they were alive, then they would be zombies.
01:52:53.000They'd also give them a mixture of detour and other bad things that would destroy their memory and completely – Discombobulate them and then they would send them off and they would spend their life as, you know, sort of wandering around completely,
01:53:09.000you know, shells of their former self.
01:54:06.000He's an endowed professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, which sounds real stuffy, and it is, but he's not a stuffy guy.
01:55:40.000We're talking to investors who are seriously interested.
01:55:44.000They want to get involved, and they have Thank you.
01:56:06.000You know, and for me personally, what I want to do, part of my problem is I'm running around the world all the time, and I'm going to these conferences, I'm propagating the message, and I can't stop myself.
01:56:20.000I have yes-a-holism, and it takes a lot out of me, and it keeps me distracted.
01:56:28.000So what I want to do If possible, is pull my elbows in a little bit and say, rather than go to your conference in Prague or your conference in, you know, wherever, create this place and make that a place where people can come and have really rich experiences,
01:56:48.000whether or not they involve psychedelics.
01:56:51.000They can have rich learning experiences.
01:56:55.000Want to learn about the Incas, Machu Picchu is right there, it's all there.
01:57:01.000And there's just, I've always liked the idea of platforms, you know, and I want to create a platform, well, a catalytic nexus for global consciousness transformation.
01:57:14.000And do therapeutic programs, retreats, impactful conferences like Michael Pollan-level, Graham Hancock-level, Joe Rogan-level conferences, if I could ever convince you to come down, which maybe will happen.
01:57:39.000Use it as a place where we can try to understand ourselves and our place in nature better, you know, and through plant medicines and clear thinking and creative people and just make it that.
01:58:52.000Doing research and there's all these different studies that are being made through MAPS in particular and various other organizations are trying to push this idea of, especially in the beginning, working with soldiers, people with PTSD, and showing these massive results.
01:59:10.000And to open up people's minds that there's a bunch of different things, MDMA being one of them, psilocybin being another, and then hopefully, eventually, we'll work our way to DMT. Well, this is one of the attractions of creating this platform in the Sacred Valley,
01:59:26.000or in Peru, because the whole regulatory framework is different.
01:59:33.000Peru has declared ayahuasca national patrimony.
02:00:09.000And that's the idea is to not restrict it to ayahuasca, be able to look at all of these plant medicines in a very intelligent way and also bring science and shamanism together.
02:00:22.000You know, work with smart shamans who also want to work with clinicians to develop a really new paradigm.
02:01:17.000There are also a lot of good, there are a lot of smart people in Peru, you know, and smart doctors and so on, smart clinicians.
02:01:25.000So we want to involve local communities, local people as much as possible, and then expand that to all the other things that this relates to, like sustainable agriculture.
02:01:39.000It's a perfect place to look at You know, new paradigms for food production and so on.
02:01:45.000The Sacred Valley is one of the five areas in the world where agriculture originated.
02:01:50.000You know, most of our important food plants came from there originally.
02:01:55.000They have 6,000 varieties of potatoes.
02:02:13.000So there is an incredible genetic repository of these things that have never really been developed on a global scale, and a lot of them are part of the solution to the food crisis that we face.
02:02:29.000And also, what the Incas knew about agriculture was pretty revolutionary.
02:02:57.000I'm also interested in the sort of the pharmacopoeia of other plants that are associated with ayahuasca.
02:03:06.000They're not put into ayahuasca all the time, but sometimes they're used for the dietas.
02:03:12.000There's a whole pharmacopoeia plants, not very well investigated, that I'd like to look more deeply into and maybe even develop formulations of ayahuasca with some of these other plants that could be used.
02:03:29.000For more specific therapeutic purposes.
02:03:32.000So you might have one that's good for, say, PTSD and one that's better for depression.
02:03:38.000And, you know, you could actually tailor these things.
02:03:41.000Bring a little science into it because, you know...
02:04:14.000I mean, you know, a lot of what's in this book is talking about the ayahuasca and peyote and things that we know about, but talking about it in ways that we've never looked at it before.
02:04:29.000And then there is a whole bunch of things out there that really, I mean, there's a great future for discovery of things we've never heard of.
02:04:39.000And that's what ethnopharmacology is about.
02:04:41.000And specifically, it's the ethnopharmacologic search for psychoactive drugs.
02:04:47.000So there's a lot still to be discovered.
02:04:50.000Now, Canada has just recently legalized marijuana.
02:06:39.000For people who don't know what we're talking about, beyond the chrysanthemum means there's this thing that you see when you break through, when you do DMT, this very bizarre geometric pattern that resembles a chrysanthemum.
02:08:17.000This idea that we could go right across the border to Vancouver and experience You know, the host of the psychedelic experiences would be, I mean, that would be fantastic.
02:08:30.000And I think you'll see that very soon.
02:08:37.000And I just hope it would have a positive effect on, you know, our country.
02:08:41.000It doesn't make any sense when you think about how many troops come back over from overseas with these traumatic experiences and PTSD and real issues psychologically and that the number one tool for handling this is not psychotherapy.
02:09:07.000Whether it's MDMA or psilocybin or any of these psychedelic therapies, they have profound effects.
02:09:12.000When it comes to the ability to disconnect from addictive behaviors, particularly drugs, opiates, there's nothing better than these psychedelic experiences, particularly Ibogaine.
02:09:23.000And, you know, you've got to go to Mexico to use Ibogaine.
02:09:27.000I think within five years you're going to see...
02:09:32.000And maybe even centers, you know, along the lines of what we're talking about, you know, doing in the Sacred Valley.
02:09:39.000I mean, once you've done something like this, then you can replicate it in different countries where the regulatory environment is friendly.
02:11:02.000There are people who love kids, and they'll be happy to babysit them.
02:11:06.000But it'll happen when the time is right.
02:11:09.000Well, the positive benefits are so overwhelming, and the evidence is so clear, and so many people have these incredibly powerful experiences that they're relaying to other people.
02:11:20.000And oftentimes, it's people that are...
02:11:24.000Like the people with the closed minds, maybe their loved ones have had these experiences and maybe their loved ones were really far gone and have come back and they can see these results and recognize that, especially when it comes to, in my opinion, veterans.
02:11:38.000We have an overwhelming responsibility to take care of those people that we don't meet.
02:14:19.000See, we have this idea in our minds that when a certain age is reached that a person is just firmly established and there's no more growth.
02:14:27.000You know, you see someone who's a 60-year-old fool, that's a dying fool.
02:14:30.000He's going to be a fool until his last day on this planet.
02:15:08.000I mean, especially now what we're learning, and the other thing that psychedelics do that is kind of a new thing that we're learning is neuroplasticity.
02:15:18.000It actually reorganizes connections in the brain.
02:15:22.000You know, psilocybin does this, and presumably the others do too.
02:15:53.000I said, it's real hard for me to love Trump.
02:15:57.000But I think the point that he's making is that he is – Trump is not the cause of it in some way.
02:16:04.000He's the symptom of what's happening and he's the disruptor.
02:16:10.000But the disruption is happening anyway.
02:16:12.000And so in some ways, maybe we should be grateful to Trump because he's making it so in everybody's face that people are questioning everything.
02:16:24.000And that's a good thing because this system, it can't last.
02:16:30.000So there's going to be a transition that's going to be pretty rough.
02:16:36.000Trump is just part of that, not in any conscious way.
02:16:39.000He's as much the victim of the times as anybody else.
02:17:12.000What he is now is he's exploited this vulnerability in the political system that we essentially have popularity contests to choose our rulers.
02:17:22.000And the idea of that at first was to pick the best one based on public perception.
02:17:39.000Our guy to win now it's our guy and Hillary Hillary Represented the bureaucrats she represented the red tape and the career politicians the one the proven liars the ones who are starting these Clinton foundations and making hundreds of millions of dollars and giving these speeches and making hundreds of thousands of dollars talking to bankers but won't release any of the transcripts and enough we got to drain a swamp and this guy was our guy to drain the swamp for the people who voted for him and And then he
02:18:09.000came on and it turns out he is the swamp.
02:21:19.000Really, no pretense about ignoring what's real, you know, like this whole controversy about the immigration and splitting up families and say, well, we're just enforcing the law.
02:21:32.000But in fact, you know, at the stroke of a pen, he could change that.
02:21:36.000And we didn't enforce that way before.
02:24:07.000And then when Trump won, I just was sitting down going, imagine if we one day someone shuts it off and the lights dim and then they turn back on and you realize, well, the game's over.
02:24:29.000You're in a simulation with artificial memories implanted into your mind.
02:24:34.000Well, the one day that the idea is that there's going to be an artificial reality or a virtual reality that's so good that it's indistinguishable.
02:24:44.000If technology increases at the same rate that it's increasing now, whether it's 50 years from now or 100 years from now, we're going to reach some point in time.
02:24:51.000So the real question is, when we do reach that, how will we know?
02:25:09.000I mean, do we want to be immersed in a virtual reality, even if we could produce one so sophisticated we couldn't tell it from whatever this is?
02:25:21.000Let's assume for the moment that this is reality.
02:25:24.000Do we want to migrate into a virtual reality?
02:25:28.000My concern, my real concern, is that we are the last wave of the biological human.
02:25:35.000I'm concerned about that too, and I'm not sure I think that that's a good thing.
02:25:40.000I don't necessarily think it's a good thing for the biological human, but I feel like if you separate yourself from the idea of good and bad, the inevitability of innovation and progress, If human beings continue to make more and more complex electronics with higher and higher capabilities,
02:25:56.000it's inevitable that we become symbiotic with these things.
02:26:33.000I mean, in some ways, this is sort of...
02:26:38.000You know, this raises the issue about, you know, one of the things that psychedelics put in front of us, front and center, is the fact that we are getting estranged from nature.
02:26:52.000We have to re-understand our relationship and, you know, become a partner in the symbiosis with nature.
02:27:01.000And this projection is the exact opposite of that.
02:27:05.000So is that, you know, so maybe, you know, this raises also one issue that we haven't really touched on, but, you know, technology, which is what this virtual reality stuff is,
02:27:21.000and what any artifact is, psychedelics are technology, molecular biology is technology, cybernetics is technology.
02:27:30.000Technology inherently has no moral dimension.
02:27:37.000The way that they are used by humans, the decisions that humans make in the way that they're going to exploit or deploy these technologies, that's where the moral dimension comes in.
02:27:50.000Morality comes out of the human heart, you know, and we are – one of our problems I feel as a species, we're extremely clever, but we're not wise.
02:28:35.000We can do the Hadron experiment and maybe it'll collapse the space-time continuum, but a very small probability, so let's do it, right?
02:28:46.000And this is something we have to learn.
02:28:49.000I think also the psychedelics are important in that regard.
02:28:52.000They are ways that we can bring our cleverness and our wisdom into sync so that we have the wisdom Not to do something, even though we might be able to.
02:29:06.000We shouldn't do it just because we can do it.
02:29:08.000We really have to, as a species, ask ourselves, is this a good idea?
02:29:13.000And I think, again, the psychedelics are teaching tools for learning this and really propagating the message from the community of species.
02:29:25.000That's for sure going to be a meme with a photo of your face that we are very clever but we're not wise.
02:29:43.000My real concern with this stuff is that this is inevitable.
02:29:47.000This is just like the single-celled organism became the multi-celled organism, and that the thinking, curious monkey who strives for material possessions is designed to create artificial life.
02:29:58.000And this is just what we've said here.
02:30:01.000I've described it as that we are the technological Butterfly that will emerge from the cocoon and right now we're creating this cocoon that we are this caterpillar, this technological caterpillar and we don't know why we're making this cocoon and that we are going to give birth to this artificial life,
02:30:54.000Again, I think, you know, psychedelics are important in giving us a moral compass.
02:31:00.000I mean, wisdom, not a set of You know, rules that come out of the religious perception, a set of rules that come out of the biological perception.
02:31:14.000What is most nourishing for living things?
02:31:18.000Presumably, we don't want to trash this planet.
02:31:21.000You know, we now have the ability to do that.
02:31:24.000You know, the forces that we can manipulate for the first time in history pose a real possibility that we could end life on Earth.
02:31:35.000I think it's hard, but I think we may be able to do it.
02:31:39.000And I, for one, don't want to see that happen.
02:31:42.000I had a bit a few years back in my comedy act about the origins of the universe and that what happens is people get so smart that they develop a big bang machine.
02:31:52.000And that someone's sitting around and some guy who's on the autism spectrum is filled up with SSRIs and antidepressants and drinking Red Bull all day.
02:32:40.000I really do think that maybe that's one of the reasons why we're so crazy and so haywire.
02:32:43.000It just shows there's no logical progression for our culture, that as advanced as we are, as much access to information as we have, we're also as crazy as we've ever been, if not crazier.
02:32:56.000So the age of the curious monkey is coming to a close.
02:32:59.000I wonder how much of a limitation our biology is too.
02:33:02.000I mean, you think about what it took to get to here and all the battles we had to fight and the animals we had to run from and all these human reward systems that are ingrained into our DNA and that now here we are in a place where we hardly need them and yet we still have them just...
02:33:18.000Blowing up and exploding and vomiting all over the place in these weird ways and you have them sort of Manifesting themselves very strange behaviors that aren't aren't good for anybody and this constant need to acquire material possessions and conquer and and And,
02:33:40.000This is not something that makes sense in the long haul, but yet we still go down this illogical road.
02:33:45.000And that this is really just because this is the best way to fuel innovation.
02:33:50.000Our extreme desire for material possessions is the best way to ensure that they're going to keep coming up with newer, better things every year, which will eventually give birth to the electronic butterfly.
02:34:03.000Well, I don't know what to say about that.
02:34:17.000I mean, if our destiny is to actually leave the Earth at some point, if the Earth is an incubator for life and we're destined to leave it and spread out into the galaxy,
02:35:05.000If we do symbiotically merge with technology and electronics, that that might be the form that we take.
02:35:11.000It's just so strange that that one accepted form—and I've heard— I've heard the idea that this image is something when young eyes from a newborn baby sees a doctor and sees a doctor with a mask and the face.
02:35:28.000This is what they see and that this is imprinted in our mind, this traumatic experience of the birth and the bright lights and the operating table.
02:35:36.000This is why so many of these alien abduction experiences do take place in these very That's interesting.
02:36:38.000So that would be the normal – I mean the path would – that would be the natural progression that we would eventually have bigger heads because we have bigger heads than Australopithecus and certainly bigger heads than chimps or bonobos.
02:36:51.000It just keeps going in that same direction.
02:37:31.000Aren't those chemical reactions we have with other beings and natural reward systems that are built in to sort of enhance community and camaraderie so that we stay together so the species survives?
02:37:41.000Like, what if there's something that supplants that?
02:37:43.000What if there's something that far surpasses that in terms of pleasure and connectivity and we realize that emotions are just these These ancient systems that were put into place when there wasn't a better option.
02:37:56.000With these better options, it's much better to get your food from a supermarket than it is to chase down a gazelle for two days until it dies of heat stroke.