In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, Joe and Hamilton talk about living in Los Angeles in the dead of winter, living in Brooklyn in the dark, and what it's like to be a homeless person in New York City in the winter. They also talk about what it s like to work in a podcast studio, and Hamilton tells the story of how he went from New York to Los Angeles and how he ended up living in a red tube in the middle of the night in a strange place called the Red Tube. Joe also talks about how he got into podcasting, and why he decided to move to Brooklyn instead of New York. And Hamilton tells a story about how it s really cold in LA, and how the homeless people are camping out in the streets in the cold. This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumberg and Sarah Abdurrahmanova. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast if you like what you listen to, and if you re looking for more of that kind of thing! Thank you so much for listening and supporting the show, and don t forget to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, Like, and Share, and tell a friend about what you think of the podcast! or share it on whatever platform you're listening to it on your favorite streaming platform! It means the podcast is listening to us! Joe Rogans Podcast by Night, All Day All Day, by Night All Day! - by Night all day, by By Night, by All Day by Day, By Night all Day by Night and Day, all day by Night & Day by By Day, All by Night by Day - by Day all day. - By Night by Night By Night All day by Day All day, All day All Day By Day by day, By Day By Night By Day - All Day - By Day All By Day by Night - All By Night by Day and All Day all Day All by Day by Morning, Allday All Day by Morning All Day? By Day and Night, By Morning, By Evening, by Day & Evening, By Anyday, by Any Day by Anyday by Day... , All Day Too Late by Night - By Any Day, Anyday All By Anytime All Day... by Night? by Anytime, By Late, All Night, Any Night, Day, Day By Any Given Day, Evening, Any Day
00:01:04.000Well, number seven or number six, whichever, is right next door.
00:01:09.000And it's gonna be all I've learned from constructing podcast studios.
00:01:16.000This one was very haphazardly constructed last minute because we made the decision to get the fuck out of LA and we had five weeks.
00:01:24.000And my friend Matt Alvarez put this place together in five weeks, set it all up, and then five weeks later we were broadcasting from Texas.
00:02:22.000I mean, this winter, because it's everything that the entire country is facing, but it's the worst for COVID. It's also extremely cold.
00:02:32.000A lot of city services seem to have been Impaired in one way or another.
00:02:37.000The streets are covered in garbage and ice and dog shit.
00:02:42.000Pretty much the only thing that I can do to maintain my sanity is run, but everything, including the outdoor running track, is covered in ice and shit.
00:02:51.000It's just this dystopian, frozen, pandemic landscape where every local business that I loved is closing down.
00:03:06.000I saw a lot of it, but I got out early.
00:03:08.000I saw the writing on the wall, and I was looking to move in May.
00:03:12.000Once the lockdown got extended, once they're like, we're just going to lock down for two weeks to flatten the curve, I was like, that makes sense.
00:03:20.000And then here we are in April, all the way through April.
00:05:05.000I mean, I had one where I was loading my car with...
00:05:10.000Bags at 2 in the morning on a Tuesday, and in the lobby of my building for maybe 15 minutes, somebody just, as soon as I walk around the corner, someone goes and scoops everything up.
00:05:45.000And because it's also cold in New York, it just promotes this prison cell lifestyle where I'm just sitting in my apartment reading and doing push-ups all day.
00:06:02.000There's this kind of tumbling character where things just start to accumulate and then no one shovels the streets and then it gets easier.
00:06:12.000Probably it's harder to pick it up because there's just like mounting layers of garbage everywhere and it just starts to look increasingly disgusting.
00:06:20.000Maybe we'll just get out of this in a couple weeks and everything will be...
00:06:24.000The problem that I don't think the people that shut everything down for a fucking year ever take into consideration is that people don't have the resources to bounce back.
00:06:34.000Things don't bounce back on their own.
00:06:36.000If you want to start a business, it takes money.
00:06:40.000It takes quite a bit of money to get a lease, to stock the shelves, to hire employees.
00:06:46.000And when you've been out of business for a year, you don't have any money.
00:06:50.000So you've probably used up all savings if you had any savings.
00:06:53.000Try getting a loan when you don't have anything.
00:06:57.000There's no real logical path forward for a lot of these businesses.
00:07:03.000In Los Angeles, 75% of the restaurants are gone.
00:07:12.000Because in New York in the wintertime, I mean, they're really trying.
00:07:15.000They're doing things that I would have never, like, truly extraordinary things, like making these little heated space gazebos that are covered in mylar on the inside.
00:07:27.000And ultimately, most people don't even really want to do that.
00:07:30.000So then there's this weird conflict of, is it moral to support these businesses because you want them to stay in business?
00:07:38.000Or are you feeding into a system where people are subjecting themselves to unsafe working conditions?
00:07:43.000And is it actually immoral to go to restaurants?
00:07:46.000And of course, people endlessly argue about that.
00:07:49.000Well, personal choices are not immoral, right?
00:07:52.000So if the people decide that they're willing to work there and they're masked up and they feel safe working there, isn't that better than not having a choice to work there?
00:08:02.000I guess the idea is that instead of people going on unemployment, they feel pressured to put themselves at risk when they really should be at home, not potentially spreading coronavirus and ideally receiving some sort of government assistance.
00:08:22.000Well, it's also like, when does the government assistance run out?
00:08:25.000Because it has run out for a lot of people.
00:08:26.000There is no more unemployment for a lot of folks.
00:08:28.000And then on top of that, the way everything's been mismanaged is so terrible in so many ways.
00:08:46.000Or, you know, like I said, I haven't been on an airplane until I came to see you, but of course I see all these stories in the news that are like...
00:08:53.000This guy went on an airplane and he took off his mask and they had to do an emergency landing and they kicked him off the plane and everyone cheered.
00:09:00.000And if you haven't been on a plane, you just kind of read that and you think, oh yeah, that guy sounds like quite an asshole.
00:09:05.000Good that they kicked him off the plane.
00:09:07.000But then on the plane, I hadn't even considered this.
00:11:59.000You've got to do something to make sure that your immune system is strong.
00:12:03.000Like, here are the steps that you can take.
00:12:05.000Here's what we know about vitamin D. There's multiple studies that show that people in the ICU for COVID, 84% of them have insufficient levels of vitamin D. There's a significant correlation between low levels of vitamin D and weakened immune system.
00:12:20.000They found only 4% of people in the ICU with COVID have sufficient levels of vitamin D. That's just one thing.
00:12:26.000They know about zinc and ionophores like quercetin.
00:12:30.000Quercetin allows zinc to get in the cell much more readily.
00:12:35.000It's much more bioavailable and it protects you against viruses.
00:12:41.000They know that vitamin C is also excellent for your immune system.
00:12:45.000They know that water is excellent for your immune system.
00:12:47.000There's peer-reviewed studies on this stuff.
00:12:50.000But it's really hard to make those claims because even if they do confer some kind of therapeutic benefit, it doesn't seemingly prevent coronavirus infection.
00:13:01.000And I think there has been some emphasis on obesity as a contributing factor.
00:13:05.000It's one of the biggest comorbidity factors.
00:13:18.000There's some interesting stuff on zinc and quercetin that my doctor, Dr. Gordon, who is a specialist on this stuff, has sent me and recognized that there's significant steps that you can take with nutrients to boost your immune system.
00:13:37.000I mean, the pace of medicine is just too slow usually to immediately address things like this in a really meaningful way.
00:13:45.000Also, medicine is divorced from nutrients.
00:13:47.000The thing about medicine is people are looking for a pharmaceutical cure.
00:13:52.000They're looking for, you know, things that we know are going to work.
00:13:56.000Whatever the medication is, whether it's a treatment or whether it's a vaccine or whatever it is, we're looking for some sort of a medicine.
00:14:04.000But there's a lot of things that you can do to strengthen your immune system with nutrients and with exercise and with healthy diet.
00:14:25.000Then I went through the, okay, well, maybe there's some antiviral agent that's in circulation right now, because everyone knew that there was no way that a vaccine would be developed immediately, that it would take a year, which it did.
00:14:39.000And so the only hope at that time was a small molecule antiviral therapy of one kind or another.
00:14:45.000So everyone who knew anything about medicinal chemistry or pharmacology was hoping that we'd find something.
00:14:53.000And that's why there was so much interest in chloroquine.
00:14:56.000You know, it became, like everything today, totally politicized.
00:15:40.000And the problem with remdesivir is it had never been approved by the FDA at that time.
00:15:46.000It's kind of difficult to synthesize, and it was very expensive, and it's administered IV. And so all those things kind of weighed against it just being made in some gray market lab in India or China and being mass distributed as like a potential intervention.
00:16:01.000I remember, you know, when this started happening, the first thing I did was think, okay, I should, you know, start contacting various labs that I know and see if I can get interesting experimental And I remember I was ordering remdesivir early on,
00:16:44.000And I thought, hmm, that's interesting.
00:16:46.000That was the first that I'd heard about it.
00:16:47.000Then there was this huge buzz surrounding it.
00:16:51.000Everyone was talking about chloroquine, and there were a small number of studies that had been published that provided a little bit of support for it potentially being useful.
00:17:02.000But then it became so politicized that people couldn't talk about it rationally anymore.
00:17:19.000He goes, well, I just want to tell you that in the early stages of infection, there's some evidence that hydroxychloroquine has a positive effect.
00:17:26.000He goes, I don't give a fuck about politics.
00:18:04.000It seems odd, and I also think that as of today, the evidence seems to point against it having a therapeutic effect, but there was a lot published.
00:18:13.000It's going to be years before we unpack all of this stuff.
00:18:16.000When I was saying earlier that the pace of medicine isn't suited to all this, it's been remarkable what people have achieved in this short period of time, and I don't mean to say that people haven't been working very hard.
00:18:26.000Of course they have been, but you need meta-analyses.
00:18:28.000You often need Years of work to really begin to understand the intricacies of how these drugs act in a context like this.
00:18:37.000Have you considered moving somewhere other than Brooklyn?
00:18:41.000Well, I was still making my show in Brooklyn, so I couldn't move.
00:18:46.000And now it seems to be there's a light at the end of the tunnel.
00:19:20.000About New York in this very detailed step-by-step analysis of all the things that are wrong that you just can't resolve, that are not going to be resolved very quickly, including the crime, including the number of people that are moving out, including the number of businesses that have failed,
00:20:46.000Well, I mean, making something like that During the pandemic, it was an amazing challenge.
00:20:54.000In retrospect, I am actually grateful because I learned so many things that I wouldn't have learned otherwise.
00:21:03.000Typically, these productions are so compartmentalized where there's somebody that records sound and someone that holds a camera and someone that does color correction.
00:21:10.000And there still was that, but it sort of broke down so that everyone had to do everything and learn each other's roles in order to actually get it done.
00:21:18.000Is this a temporary shift into going back and working for a lab, or do you think that you're going to abandon media?
00:21:25.000Well, this is a really extraordinary time right now.
00:21:29.000And for the last decade or so, when I've done this chemistry work with this brilliant chemist named Jason Wallach, there's been no funding whatsoever for this work.
00:21:38.000The university pays for a little bit of it.
00:21:40.000Tim Ferriss once was really nice and gave me a few thousand dollars to synthesize a radioactive psychedelic for an experiment.
00:21:59.000There's a technique called autoradiography, where you can chart the migration of a molecule and its distribution in tissue by looking at the distribution of the radioactivity.
00:22:10.000And the idea of ever getting money to research psychedelics, it would always have to be sort of distorted into research on schizophrenia, or you couldn't just say, I'm studying psychedelics.
00:22:25.000Well, that might have some legal advantages, but this is just a funding thing.
00:22:30.000And I wasn't, it just didn't seem like it was, I wasn't in it for that reason anyway.
00:22:36.000And, you know, it didn't cost all that money, all that much money to begin with.
00:22:40.000And so I would pay for little bits of things, and you can stretch a few thousand dollars a long way in a chemistry lab.
00:22:45.000But now things are changing, and there's a lot of support for research on psychedelics.
00:22:52.000You know, there's actually a psychedelic program with the UFC. I did not know that.
00:22:56.000Yeah, John Hopkins is doing studies with former fighters and current fighters on CTE. One of the things about psilocybin that we know is that psilocybin actually helps regrow neurons.
00:23:10.000It's one of the few things that really helps fighters with brain damage.
00:23:14.000And so they're conducting some studies right now.
00:23:19.000And they're doing some therapies and I hope to get these guys on soon and talk to them about what they've done and what they're doing.
00:23:25.000But you know lion's mane is good for the brain and there's several other different mushrooms, but psychedelics in general, particularly psilocybin.
00:23:34.000What do you know about psilocybin and the growth of neurons and people with brain damage?
00:23:40.000Yeah, I mean, this is a hot area of research.
00:23:42.000There's someone named David Olson, who's been publishing a lot of papers recently on psychedelic-induced neurogenesis, although most of his papers are oriented toward neurogenesis-inducing psychedelic derivatives that aren't actually psychedelic.
00:24:07.000Yeah, I do wonder because, you know, there have been a number of compounds, one notable one called NSI-189 that are very potent neurogenesis inducing agents that do not have an impressive therapeutic effect that failed in clinical trials.
00:24:24.000So it's Not as simple as just neurogenesis equals good.
00:24:29.000There needs to be something else, it seems.
00:24:35.000I think all these things are in their infancy, and we're just now starting to...
00:24:42.000Realize even a small fraction of their potential.
00:24:46.000And I think that there's an idea, a widely believed idea, that the reason that there's no medical scientific research on psychedelics, or at least there wasn't for a very long time, is because the government shut it all down, right?
00:24:59.000The government said, these are evil drugs, no scientist is allowed to use them.
00:25:08.000There was a group in Maryland called the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, and they were the last group doing psychedelic research up until 1977, and then there was a big gap until Rick Strassman started his DMT studies in the late 80s, early 90s.
00:25:24.000So at the time that they were doing that psychedelic research that ended in 1977, We're good to go.
00:25:54.000Deprivation of funds and lack of public interest and enthusiasm.
00:25:58.000It wasn't like everyone was behind this and then the hammer of the government destroyed it.
00:26:04.000And I think that's a really important thing to remember because pharmaceutical companies are extremely controversial.
00:26:12.000They're pretty much ubiquitously despised by all people.
00:26:15.000But when you think about these times of really fertile, amazing psychedelic research in the 1960s, one reason that there was so much And one reason that there was so much interest is because these were being paid for by pharmaceutical companies and there was hope that they could actually be developed and sold as medicines,
00:26:32.000which is the end goal in our medical system, right?
00:26:37.000And so I think that as controversial as it is, the pharmaceutical interest in these substances is going to provide support that has been entirely absent until recently and is going to really have the potential to push things forward.
00:26:53.000Yeah, I think soldiers, athletes, and anything that's in the public realm where people are really aware of brain damage, aware of PTSD, aware of a lot of different things that psychedelics can be used to help,
00:27:11.000I think that's going to really sort of motivate the public to be more enthusiastic about it or be more open-minded about it.
00:27:20.000Because I think for the longest time, people had this idea of psychedelics as being just people that want to escape reality.
00:27:25.000And if there's more peer-reviewed studies, there's more accredited, whether it's universities or research centers or someone that people respect, that's doing work on these things where you can see it in the New York Times, see it in...
00:27:39.000See it in some newspaper that you respect, see it on CNN, wherever it is, and sort of slowly shift public perception that these things, they're not just for hippies.
00:27:51.000And if they're medicines that work, that's probably the most convincing thing of all.
00:27:55.000Because it doesn't matter how much you hate psychedelics or you hate drugs.
00:27:59.000If you're suffering from cluster headaches and somebody gives you psilocybin and you're free of pain, you will be sold.
00:28:53.000It just was not different from placebo.
00:28:55.000But that is one of those weird, in terms of like the subjective experience of the people that reported, that they didn't find any difference in placebo?
00:29:05.000When they compared the results of the placebo and the results of the microdose, there was no difference between the two.
00:29:11.000There's so many variables when it comes to people and how they view the world, how they interface with society.
00:29:17.000To say there's no difference between one person taking microdose versus another person taking a placebo, it's so hard Yeah.
00:29:45.000And versus what's going on with the other person that's taking the microdose or the other person has taken the placebo.
00:29:49.000There's just so many variables when it comes to human beings.
00:29:52.000It's almost like the only way to do it correctly is to have clones of the same person living the same life and give one of them microdose and give another one placebo.
00:32:03.000Psychedelic in general that have a little bit of that sort of effect that people are looking for with a microdose of LSD, where it's maybe a mild stimulant, maybe produces a small amount of empathy or just a small change of one kind or another.
00:32:18.000I mean, this has even been approved medicinally in the past, both with when Ibogaine was a pharmaceutical product under the name Lamberine in France.
00:32:43.000No, no, you can find there's like French adventure novels that are like, as I ascended the volcano, I took two Lamberine to give myself the strength to reach the summit.
00:32:55.000You know, it was just a stimulant that people took.
00:32:57.000There was no discussion whatsoever of Ibogaine as a psychedelic.
00:33:06.000I think that it is at 20 milligrams, 20 to 25 milligrams, it exerts no psychedelic effect whatsoever and feels almost like a mild stimulant and maybe almost like a mild antidepressant.
00:33:42.000And another one is there used to be an MDMA-type compound called alpha-ethyltryptamine, now a Schedule I-controlled substance in the United States, that was approved in the United States as an antidepressant under the brand name Monase, and it was basically like a microdose of MDMA. This was done pharmaceutically in our country,
00:34:35.000They used a hyacinth as the symbol of Monet's for reasons that are unclear to me.
00:34:40.000I was watching this documentary, and I forget where it is, where they were chopping these trees down, where they were using them to synthesize MDMA. Do you know what I'm talking about?
00:34:52.000It's a Cambodian tree that doesn't have a common English name, and it's a source of saffron, which is a precursor for MDMA. They're just hacking that forest down so people can trip.
00:35:07.000And this is what happens in an unregulated market.
00:35:09.000This is, I think, one of the really unfortunate things about the way people talk about drugs.
00:35:13.000Your drug use is destroying the forest.
00:35:16.000Your drug use is killing people in Latin America.
00:35:20.000And it's not people's drug use, exactly, that's causing those problems.
00:35:25.000It's a totally unregulated market where, because it's all illegal, People can do whatever they want.
00:36:38.000Neil Young had something recently about black pepper I had heard, and I was wondering now that this is a great time to bring it up, that if you're too high, it takes away the paranoia feelings.
00:39:06.000But is there any unusual biodiversity issues, like some weird things about your own chemical, like your chemistry, that would stop THC edibles or marijuana edibles from working on you?
00:39:50.000I mean, it might be some kind of metabolic quirk, obviously, when you consume, as you have talked about many times, when you consume orally.
00:40:00.000But THC itself, of course, is active without conversion to 11-hydroxy, so that wouldn't explain it.
00:40:06.000Maybe you're a rapid metabolizer in terms of producing some kind of inactive form of THC. There's variables in terms of how well people sober up from things, right?
00:40:33.000We're metabolically different organisms, depending on where your ancestors are from, depending on a number of different factors, also depending on the history of things that you've subjected yourself to can upregulate or downregulate certain enzymes.
00:40:47.000Yeah, that's the weirdest thing, is watching someone who has a low tolerance to alcohol just drink a little bit and get blasted, and you're like, what is going on?
00:41:15.000And I feel very sensitive to hangovers.
00:41:20.000And I do think it's kind of a weird, bad drug.
00:41:24.000Not bad drug in the sense that it's a bad drug.
00:41:27.000It should be illegal or it's evil or something like that.
00:41:30.000I just think that, all things considered, there's a lot better things out there, especially compared to cannabis or something, which is, I think, vastly superior.
00:41:37.000Well, that's Dr. Carl Hart's argument as well.
00:41:53.000He's so brave, like the way he talks about things.
00:41:55.000For the guy to be a professor at Columbia and to just be openly stating, I enjoy heroin and it makes me feel good, it makes me compassionate, you know, and he uses pure heroin.
00:42:10.000And I was working on my show for such a long time, and you're doing it in isolation, and then it comes out and you're wondering what people think of it.
00:42:18.000So I was name searching myself and saw some Reddit thread of all these people kind of insulting Karl Hart.
00:42:24.000And I just felt like I think the average person doesn't get it.
00:42:27.000I don't think they understand exactly how brave Karl Hart is.
00:42:30.000Because I have traveled around the world.
00:42:33.000I have interviewed countless academics.
00:42:35.000I've been in academic circles throughout my life.
00:42:38.000Drug use of the sort that he describes is extremely common.
00:43:26.000When they get their 90-day chip or whatever they get, people say, they look at you like you're some sort of a fool because you couldn't handle alcohol.
00:43:35.000They go, oh, he was an alcoholic, but he sobered himself up.
00:44:08.000They take a piece of your patella tendon, a piece of your shin bone, and a piece of your knee, and they open you up and screw them and drill them in place.
00:44:17.000And so while you're lying in bed, my knee is on this thing, and it's going, like, bending and straightening my knee over and over and over again.
00:44:25.000And I'm lying in there, and they give you a drip.
00:44:27.000And anytime you want, just press that button, and you get a little drip of morphine.
00:47:04.000I understand why people are doing this because it remains very controversial and so you want some kind of justification.
00:47:09.000But you should remember at the end of the day that no justification should be required.
00:47:14.000And if you get too lost in the justification, you might forget why you're doing it in the first place.
00:47:20.000Like, an analogy that I've been thinking about for years, like, it's kind of like a long analogy, so it's gonna be like a one-minute analogy, but, like, it would be, it would be like if, um...
00:47:32.000In the 60s, people started listening to music for the first time.
00:47:36.000And they decided that it was associated with the counterculture, anti-war movement.
00:47:43.000Some people were listening to music too loud and causing irreversible damage to their hearing.
00:47:48.000And so medical doctors said, okay, this is clearly a problem.
00:47:50.000This person is deaf as a result of listening to music.
00:47:54.000We've got to prohibit it to protect people because it's a problem.
00:47:57.000And then on top of that, there's an added advantage that because everyone is going to continue listening to music, we can Yeah.
00:48:22.000Some scientists get together and they all say that they've never listened to music before because if they had it would somehow bias their understanding and that would be terrible.
00:48:30.000So they've never listened to music before but they've looked at old pre-prohibition information on music and they've decided scientifically that it is in fact very good and can be used as a medicine.
00:48:39.000And then everyone embraces it as a medicine and says, oh, I just listened to music today.
00:50:10.000A lot of what you get when you have people telling people to not do things is people that don't have any experience in those things telling people not to do them.
00:50:19.000And whether they're drugs or whether they're physical activity or whether they're...
00:50:24.000There's a lot of different things that people do that you could...
00:50:27.000Racing cars, you could deem them detrimental.
00:50:33.000And I don't think there's any all-knowing, all-seeing being that's wiser, that understands the correct way for all human beings to move forward in life and the correct decisions to make.
00:51:17.000It's not like if you die, the entire world suffers some irreversible loss and millions of people starve to death because you decided to run 100 miles.
00:51:27.000It's you and your life Do what you want, whether it's smoking marijuana or running 100 miles or doing whatever the fuck you want.
00:51:37.000And unless we embrace that, we're going to see more of this nanny state nonsense that we've been dealing with since Prohibition in this country.
00:51:58.000And of course, I agree with you completely.
00:52:00.000And I think that the one thing that people have to be very careful about and remember is that it always seems like a good idea to make something illegal.
00:52:45.000Well, it's very hard to undo these things, and it seems like the right thing to do when you do it, but then think of how hard it is to put the toothpaste back in the tube afterwards.
00:52:57.000It doesn't go very well, and people are not good at acknowledging mistakes, at acknowledging when they've done something wrong.
00:53:10.000It takes a while to acknowledge that you make these mistakes.
00:53:15.000And so I think that when we're caught up in a hysteria, this is another thing that I really appreciate about Karl Hart, is when we're caught up in a hysteria, it always seems like the right thing to do to crack down.
00:53:25.000Because of course, of course opioids are bad.
00:53:37.000But that's always been the way that we thought.
00:53:39.000That's what we thought with psychedelics in the 60s.
00:53:42.000That's what we thought with PCP derivatives in the 70s.
00:53:45.000And then we realized that we'd actually made a mistake, that maybe the science was flawed, that maybe we hadn't fully interrogated the therapeutic benefits that these substances have.
00:53:55.000Yeah, but the biggest argument against all that thinking is cigarettes.
00:53:59.000I mean, there's very little benefit other than a cognitive boost that you get from cigarettes.
00:54:06.000Oh yeah, it's the leading preventable cause of death.
00:57:57.000It's a big part of the ceremony for some reason that the shaman dances around you and blows tobacco on you.
00:58:04.000I think he's just taking advantage of the fact that you're out of your fucking mind.
00:58:08.000Well, it has a clarifying effect on the mind, and ayahuasca can be disorienting, especially...
00:58:14.000The beta-carbolines, I think, can have a kind of stoning, unpleasant effect.
00:58:19.000And anything that clarifies the mind, I think, can be very useful in a psychedelic experience to sort of focus the trajectory of your thoughts.
00:58:28.000I'm sure I'm just kidding about that part.
00:58:51.000It's fascinating, but it's also not entirely surprising because life is difficult and it promotes a little bit of joy and a little bit of focus and a little bit of relaxation in a very difficult existence.
01:00:02.000Or you could change the speed of playback.
01:00:11.000Spotify is slowly but surely getting its shit together when it comes to video playback and stuff.
01:00:15.000But yeah, this was a boring section of the podcast and I apologize for anybody that's freaking the fuck out right now screaming in their car.
01:00:23.000You guys were having a really interesting conversation and Rogan, you fucked it up!
01:00:42.000I mean, I remember when I was in high school, I went to a very progressive high school, and at that time, in the early 2000s, there was a magazine called Ad Busters.
01:01:05.000Advertising of junk food and soft drinks causes obesity.
01:01:09.000We need to regulate advertisements so that women don't have a negative self-image and people aren't obese.
01:01:20.000And I remember thinking that it was a complicated scenario because, of course, I do believe that advertisements have these effects on people.
01:01:28.000But I also believe that advertising has become a totally ubiquitous part of our culture that is inescapable.
01:01:37.000And no amount of censorship will ever protect us from the advertising that pervades every dimension of our existence.
01:01:45.000And so it is our responsibility to Protect ourselves as much as possible, because we'll never truly be free.
01:01:54.000You know, so you get rid of Joe Camel, and you regulate the way tobacco can be advertised, and it's probably the right thing to do.
01:04:14.000Vaping at least a regulated product assuming that there isn't some type of heavy metal contamination or vitamin E acetate or something like that in it.
01:04:23.000Versus smoking tobacco, I would bet that vaping is safer.
01:04:35.000But the other thing, and this is something that Karl Hart doesn't talk about very much, and this is maybe one thing that we would disagree on, is I do think that dependence in and of itself is undesirable and is disempowering.
01:05:07.000He's talked about it, but I think what he's trying to do is downplay the effects of withdrawals and a lot of the things that people associate with opioid addiction and a lot of other things.
01:05:43.000I don't want to just say, like, I don't know about that.
01:05:45.000But I certainly have known many, many people.
01:05:48.000I've lived with someone who struggled very severely with opioid addiction, and it's just context-dependent.
01:05:55.000So Carl Hart has a section in his book where he describes Intentionally becoming dependent on opioids, and then almost as a stunt, withdrawing immediately before giving a talk on opioid addiction.
01:06:08.000And I think that's an interesting idea, and I don't doubt that he was able to do that, but there's a big difference between doing something for Three weeks, three months, three years, depends on the dose, depends on the support network,
01:06:24.000depends on pre-existing psychological and medical conditions that may be contributing to the user's choice to use this stuff in the first place.
01:06:35.000You know, for a lot of people, it might start with back pain or something like that, and you start taking the opioid and it helps, you become dependent.
01:06:44.000And then at the time that you have to stop, you haven't done anything to address the root cause of the back pain.
01:06:48.000So if you stop, you have all the back pain that you started with, which may even be worse than it started, and you've got to deal with opioid withdrawal.
01:06:59.000So I do have, you know, a lot of compassion for the people to get mixed up in that.
01:07:03.000That said, and I got into trouble for saying this last time I was on the podcast, I made a point that I felt the way that opioids were discussed, everyone acted like it was a big surprise that they were addictive.
01:07:19.000Like, we found evidence that Purdue knew oxycodone is addictive, and they knew this all along.
01:07:27.000And this is the thing that I find a little bit difficult to stomach.
01:07:33.000People have known that opioids produce dependents of one kind or another for hundreds of years, if not thousands.
01:07:40.000The first medically reported cases of oxycodone addiction that I'm aware of are from 1914. In 1914, there was a medical term for oxycodone addiction called eukedilism, because the brand name for oxycodone at that time was eukedil.
01:07:59.000And this was something that has been known about for over a century.
01:08:03.000Now, I'm not suggesting that every medical doctor has read whatever obscure literature that I'm aware of.
01:08:09.000I know that they haven't, and that's fine.
01:08:10.000But what I find a little bit off-putting is how could I, as a high school student in Massachusetts, have had an intuitive awareness that Percocet was a recreational drug, that Percocet was a drug that if you get a prescription for it, that's going to be fun.
01:10:23.000But they're very similar drugs that are very, very well characterized medically.
01:10:30.000This is not some newfangled thing that no one, this is not some, you know, RNA therapy that just was invented a year ago that no one had ever known about, that no one could have anticipated.
01:10:42.000These are simple derivatives of morphine that have been known about I think?
01:11:05.000And then it's easier for you because you don't have to assume any personal responsibility.
01:11:08.000You don't have to think that your physician was maybe complicit in something that was damaging to your mental and physical health.
01:11:14.000And so it was all Mortimer Sackler cackling and counting his blood money at Purdue Pharmaceuticals.
01:11:22.000You know, I don't buy that narrative as being as simple as it is.
01:11:27.000Yeah, there is an infantilization of our society that we've gone, like, you know, we didn't even know that cigarettes were bad for you.
01:11:37.000People have known cigarettes are bad for you for a long time.
01:11:40.000We didn't even know that this could, like, people don't take responsibility for what they put into their body and they assume that these people that are taking it Had no knowledge whatsoever.
01:11:50.000We don't put any onus on them to do any research, especially today with the internet.
01:11:56.000You know, you can kind of research basically anything while you're waiting to go into the doctor's office.
01:12:00.000Or while you're sitting in the doctor's office.
01:12:02.000You know, Johnny, I'm going to give you Vicodin.
01:13:48.000Well, although that's totally hypocritical for me to say that because I was just talking about how we have to have personal responsibility and not be endlessly seduced by the pervasive advertisements that surround us.
01:13:57.000But I'm conflicted about it because that also seems like a little bit weird because they're medical interventions.
01:14:03.000It could maybe be advertised to doctors, but it's really complicated.
01:14:08.000Here's a good example that is not widely known, that I think is a useful point of contrast between what happened with oxycodone in the United States and what happened in France with a far less known story.
01:14:20.000So in France, there was an antidepressant called amineptine that, unlike most antidepressants, it had a mild stimulant action.
01:14:35.000I believe it's a low-potency dopamine reuptake inhibitor, but it's been a while since I've looked at the literature, and as I'm about to get to, this pharmaceutical company has a history of misrepresenting the pharmacology of the substances that they sell.
01:14:50.000It's well received by people with depression because it produces a little bit of a stimulant effect.
01:14:55.000In the United States, we have a drug called Welbutrin, which is also a stimulant antidepressant, and many people I like that aspect of it, because it doesn't just treat the depression, it gives you a little bit of energy to maybe tackle the tasks before you.
01:15:08.000The problem is that people start using extremely, extremely large doses of emineptine, and they're addicted to it.
01:15:16.000That's maybe a problem in and of itself, arguably, depends on your position on that matter, but it's also hepatotoxic, so they're damaging their liver.
01:15:24.000And it produces this monstrous dermatological toxicity where people have these kind of grotesque lesions on their body, on their genitals and face as a result of taking this antidepressant.
01:16:07.000I even wrote a little article for Playboy years ago about, like, gee whiz, the mind sure is strange that you can have these two antidepressants with opposing pharmacologies that both exert a therapeutic effect.
01:16:21.000The pharmaceutical company, Servier, had not disclosed that T-neptine also was a full agonist at the mu opioid receptor, that it basically shared a pharmacology with morphine and heroin.
01:16:33.000And this was a really important thing, because there were all these people taking this antidepressant, and they were saying, yeah, this stuff works really well, but, you know, I used to use heroin, and, like, I swear, this stuff feels good.
01:17:44.000And he found that it is primarily exerting its effect via the mu opioid receptor, and that the pharmaceutical company had not told people that.
01:17:53.000So all these people taking what they thought was a serotonergic antidepressant were actually taking an opioid.
01:17:57.000This was never approved in the United States.
01:17:59.000But that is an instance, I think, of, you know, really unacceptable pharmaceutical deception.
01:18:06.000Where you're telling someone that a drug does one thing, and in fact it does something entirely different.
01:18:11.000With oxycodone, I feel like it's a little bit harder to make that argument because it had been used for over a hundred years, and because people already knew that it was addictive.
01:18:19.000They were making an argument that it was less addictive because it was a time-release formulation, which is also a complicated thing because in many instances, slow release of a compound does reduce its potential for abuse.
01:19:10.000So not only does it sober you up, it precipitates instantaneous withdrawal.
01:19:13.000So it's actually very uncomfortable for many people that use it because it's not just you take it and you're fine.
01:19:19.000It's you take it and you withdraw and then there's actually a problem that's not talked about very much is sometimes people overdose, receive Narcan, go into withdrawal and then use again because they're in horrible pain from the withdrawal and the half-life of the Narcan can be shorter than some opioids so then by the time it wears off You have the original opioid in your system that caused the overdose in addition to the new opioid that you ingested to reverse the withdrawal that was precipitated
01:20:35.000Does it work as a pain reliever for people?
01:20:38.000No, unless you take extraordinarily high doses.
01:20:42.000Its main effect is on intestinal motility, and so it causes the constipation of an opioid without any of the psychological euphoria-inducing effects.
01:20:52.000It's a beautiful piece of drug design and medicinal chemistry.
01:20:58.000And so that can mitigate the gastrointestinal symptoms of opioid withdrawal.
01:21:02.000There's also a number of sedatives, benzodiazepines, different things that people will take to address this or that concern.
01:21:17.000You're not hopeless if you find yourself in the midst of this.
01:21:20.000There's also, you know, just different opioids, right?
01:21:24.000We talk about opioids as this monolithic entity, like opioids are bad, opioids do this.
01:21:29.000Well, they're a pharmacological class that have, you know, a very diverse potential in all sorts of different directions.
01:21:36.000The same chemist at Columbia was doing research on This antidepressant opioid that I was describing.
01:21:43.000And what was funny about it is that even though the pharmacology was to some extent misrepresented by the pharmaceutical company, it did exert an antidepressant effect.
01:21:54.000And he was even able to show that it had certain spinogenesis-inducing effects as well, so it causes growth of dendritic spines on neurons.
01:22:05.000But when he was trying to get investors interested in some derivatives of TNF-tine that he made, We're good to go.
01:22:31.000It's alright for everyone to use opioids as much as they want, and that's that, which was kind of what happened at the beginning of the so-called opioid crisis, right?
01:22:40.000And then there's a compensatory backswing where you say, wait a second, look, all these people died.
01:22:46.000There are all these problems with dependence.
01:23:04.000Like, I'm sure, I would like to think what I've just said to you right now is a pretty balanced perspective, but I'm sure that there'll be enormous numbers of people that are angry at me about this because they think they're evil or they think that I was too hard on them.
01:23:15.000It's a really polarizing issue, like absolutely everything these days.
01:23:20.000Well, what you just said, this rant, is one of the reasons why you must stay in media.
01:23:24.000You have to, because there's not a lot of people that can articulate the pharmacological effects and just the pros and cons and the negative and positive in a balanced way, like you just did.
01:23:39.000Because you're being very objective about these things, and just fact-based, science-based analysis.
01:23:45.000Of the pros and cons and the realities of the use and the efficacy of these drugs.
01:24:10.000Because these hysterias have never helped anyone, and they've caused incalculable human suffering.
01:24:16.000We can talk about the tragedies of the so-called crack epidemic, but then that's what generated the sentencing disparity.
01:24:23.000And I think it's safe to say that the number of people that have been imprisoned And have had their lives destroyed, have had their families torn apart, have had their employment opportunities dashed to pieces because they had a small nugget of alkaloidal material from a South American plant.
01:24:56.000Charles Innes is the quintessential drug scare story character.
01:25:02.000He's the man who smoked angel dust and tore out both of his eyes and went completely insane.
01:25:10.000He's the poster child for the horrors of PCP. Hunter S. Thompson wrote about Charles Innes in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, talking in a few different sections.
01:29:04.000Without any kind of medical supervision.
01:29:07.000And in his delirious state, he doesn't tear out his own eyes, but he damages his eyes severely enough that he has never recovered his vision.
01:29:50.000They're so good as tools to diminish people, to show that they're weak, that they're bad, that they're of low moral character of one kind or another.
01:29:59.000And the moment that we abandon all those stigmas, the moment they can't be used as a tool against us anymore.
01:31:23.000And there's only two people, two types of people in our culture that we allow to talk about the world in terms of good guys and bad guys, and that's cops and children.
01:31:33.000With children, it's because they're not developed sufficiently to have a complex understanding of human behavior, and so they're bad guys, and the bad guys do bad things, and the good guys save people, and they do good things.
01:31:45.000With comps, it's psychologically necessary for them to have those moral binaries, because...
01:31:52.000If you don't, how would you ever do your job?
01:31:54.000How would you ever arrest someone for stealing an iPad or something like that if you thought, wait a second, this guy has no money.
01:32:06.000This guy grew up in a part of the country with a broken public education system.
01:32:24.000But if you think that, then you would never be able to arrest anyone because you'd only be thinking about the fact that no one I mean, this is like an important philosophical idea that I don't think is discussed enough.
01:32:37.000This is really this good guy, bad guy mentality is permeating our culture.
01:32:41.000And, you know, there's like an interesting Socratic dialogue that isn't talked about all that much called Gorgias.
01:32:49.000And in it, Socrates is just articulating this basic idea that no man knowingly does wrong, that there aren't bad guys There aren't bad guys.
01:33:03.000And I know that that's a slippery slope, because if you go down that road too far, then you never punish anyone for everything, because you understand that every action is justifiable in the mind of the perpetrator, right?
01:33:14.000But I think it is important to remember that when you're talking about these things.
01:33:25.000We had a conversation and he said that he believes that in the future one of the main things that we're going to look back on when we look at this culture and we're going to feel like we made a tremendous mistake is punishing people.
01:33:39.000For things that they've done and that, you know, the concept of determinism like that you really don't have free will and that you're what you think of as free will is your What all the accumulation of experiences and education and genetics and all the different things that have happened to you that led you to this point and the idea that you're responsible for all of them and And especially if you've been abused,
01:34:06.000especially if you've been harmed and damaged and programmed in a terrible way, that he, as a psychologist, as someone who understands the mechanisms of the mind, said that he thinks that that's going...
01:34:20.000Again, if we're going to have a polite society and a safe society, we can't just allow people to run around murdering people and raping people and mugging people, right?
01:35:21.000And it's also, it's like, you know, Bill Cosby had that kind of, like, bootstrapping argument of, like, you know, the real issue is a cultural...
01:36:16.000Or whether it's Detroit or South Side of Chicago, you have these situations that exist in the same state in terms of like constant crime, constant violence, decade after decade after decade with no intervention.
01:36:33.000And this is one of the things that kind of drove me crazy in the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic where they decided that they needed to spend trillions of dollars to relieve businesses.
01:36:46.000Because these businesses have lost a lot of money during the pandemic and to relieve them But what about these really super impoverished communities have been fucked forever?
01:36:55.000Like the idea that these people growing up in these communities that are filled with gangs and violence That they have the same shot at someone who's growing up in the suburbs of Massachusetts like that's nonsense.
01:38:11.000You've got to put massive resources and emphasis into figuring out how you fix these crime-ridden, impoverished communities.
01:38:20.000Until we do that, blaming them the same way you would blame someone who grows up in a two-parent household where everyone's loving and caring, it's a totally different world, totally different programming, totally different environment.
01:38:46.000And I remember the New York Times published this article that I found very annoying, where they said, like, new evidence suggests that...
01:38:54.000Like, one of the early arrests of George Floyd for crack preceding his murder may have been done by a corrupt police officer, and maybe he didn't actually have crack after all.
01:39:04.000And it's like, it doesn't matter whether he had crack or not.
01:40:15.000No one would think that that's ridiculous.
01:40:18.000The bong hits that you get when you get a big, deep bong hit, that's probably a more potent version of what you're going to get if you're just going to take a hit off a joint.
01:41:08.000I mean, you know, public education, teachers' unions, all sorts of things, which I know is a controversial issue, that have created an environment where it's very, very difficult to succeed, and it's very easy to have your life totally derailed by some little...
01:41:24.000Yeah, well, this is why I think you need to stay in media, because I think there's many people that really, truly do not understand the difference between cocaine and crack.
01:41:34.000They really don't understand that there is no difference.
01:41:38.000So when they do hear this from someone like you who clearly understands what he's talking about, and then you realize that there still is this massive disparity in sentencing between having crack and having coke, and then you go, well, why is that?
01:42:03.000That is almost, more than anything, emblematic of a much larger issue, which is that people with money have ways to get every single drug that a poor person uses legally.
01:42:31.000He had cocaine that he would use as a topical anesthetic in some procedures, but also it is sometimes used off-label for treatment of cluster headaches.
01:42:39.000I knew someone that had cluster headaches that had a prescription for cocaine.
01:42:58.000Of course it is hilarious because, you know, 10 years ago, if you'd said, you know, listen, doctor, I'm really, really depressed and I snort ketamine three times a week and it's just amazing.
01:43:35.000I have a friend who is a veteran who was just telling me on the phone yesterday about his use of ketamine, therapeutic use of ketamine through a physician, IV, and how much it benefited him.
01:43:53.000He goes, in the beginning, it's just like alleviating your shitty feelings and depression.
01:44:01.000He's like, that's the initial effects of it.
01:44:05.000He said, but then it gets into this thing where he's sorting out his life.
01:44:10.000And he's like recognizing problems that he has in his life.
01:44:33.000I know quite a few friends who have used ketamine over the last six or seven years or so from doctors.
01:44:42.000Doctors prescribing them ketamine with varied effects.
01:44:45.000Some of them, it really helped them a lot.
01:44:49.000My friend Neil Brennan had a great take on it because he was one of the first person I ever heard do it and he's tried a bunch of different things for depression.
01:44:57.000And he said, you know, I go to the doctor and, you know, he puts me in a chair and gives me an IV drip of ketamine.
01:45:03.000And he's like, and I am fucking tripping balls.
01:45:07.000He goes, I can't even believe this is legal.
01:45:10.000Like, I can't believe this is happening.
01:45:11.000I'm going to a doctor and I'm tripping my fucking brains out.
01:46:09.000I've never taken them for long periods of time.
01:46:12.000I've taken Prozac for maybe three or – you actually have to take it for weeks to exert a therapeutic effect and I wasn't taking it as a treatment for depression.
01:46:21.000I was taking it out of curiosity because I wanted to know what it felt like.
01:47:00.000And we're going to increasingly in the future appreciate that many of these things that we use with one term are probably many very ultimately dissimilar clinical entities.
01:47:12.000If you look at depression, you wonder, well, wait a second, why does this work for some people and not for other people?
01:47:16.000Well, because they're different people, and they probably have different things that we're calling depression.
01:47:20.000Yes, there are different symptoms that we can agree in tandem constitute depression, but that doesn't mean that depression is the same thing, is caused by the same thing, is treated with the same chemicals, which is another reason that I think it's really important to have a wide array of things available,
01:47:37.000because you never know what thing is going to be the thing that helps you.
01:47:50.000Where ketamine has an N-methyl group, PCP has a piperidine ring, and then on the aromatic ring, ketamine has a chlorine atom, and then on the cyclohexane ring, ketamine has a ketone.
01:48:00.000So there's like three points of modification.
01:48:02.000It's modified on every ring, but the major...
01:48:07.000Experiential difference is that ketamine has a shorter duration than PCP. Ketamine is kind of more psychedelic than PCP, arguably.
01:48:15.000It's dose-dependent, so I don't think you can say that absolutely.
01:48:18.000And ketamine has a sedative effect where it becomes very difficult to move.
01:48:25.000You're not inclined to move at high doses at all.
01:48:28.000In fact, you basically can't walk at all at a high dose, which is funny because people talk about it as like a Well, that's the K-hole.
01:48:50.000It feels more or less like you've had a couple of drinks.
01:48:54.000And then as the dose increases, you start to recede into yourself and enter something that's sort of similar to a lucid dream where the imagery becomes increasingly abstract.
01:49:08.000Unlike classical psychedelics, it doesn't tend to have the same sort of There are many archetypal, classical, psychedelic experiences, like you've described, smoking DMT and seeing Buddhas made of electricity.
01:49:24.000Often people will see religious imagery, M.C. Escher-like imagery, geometric imagery, things that feel beautiful, that feel connected to Humanity and nature.
01:49:34.000There's something about the dissociative anesthetics that tends to be a bit more random, a bit weirder.
01:49:40.000It doesn't feel like you're entering a numinous holy realm as much as like a different channel of consciousness that is...
01:50:03.000Everyone has their biases, but his bias was, of course, toward plants, because he saw them as a sort of...
01:50:09.000Well, he also had a perception, and I don't know if you would agree with this or not, this is kind of a crazy thought, it's very unprovable, but he believed that not only are you dealing with the psychoactive effects of these psychedelics,
01:50:25.000but you are also dealing with all of the people's experiences that have ever taken these psychedelics.
01:50:34.000He had this feeling that when you're tripping, you're not just tripping, like you alone tripping, but that you're somehow or another interfacing with all the various trips that all the people have done with whatever these drugs are.
01:50:49.000And that was one of the things that I think he was referring to when he was talking about ketamine, because a relatively small amount of people, at least when he was alive, He had experienced ketamine.
01:50:58.000Of course, Lilly was famous for his love of ketamine.
01:51:02.000And Lilly liked to use ketamine in conjunction with the isolation tank.
01:51:09.000He liked intramuscular ketamine and sensory deprivation tanks.
01:51:14.000Yeah, and like so many things that Terence McKenna said, it's both true and untrue.
01:51:20.000I think it's untrue in a literal sense, but very true in a poetic sense, because the historical, cultural context of a drug is part of what you bring to that drug experience.
01:51:31.000The molecule does not contain information.
01:51:34.000The ketamine molecule does not bring an experience to you.
01:51:38.000That is something that is generated in your brain by your consciousness.
01:51:42.000And So, if you have a new substance that has no cultural associations, then maybe it was like that for him.
01:52:22.000No, no, they don't like the opiophiles.
01:52:25.000So what does the Venom community think?
01:52:28.000They think that this venom has some spiritual component derived from its association with the toad that makes it better than synthetic 5-MeO-DMT. Now, I've analyzed several samples of toad venom before 5-MeO-DMT was made illegal in the United States,
01:52:47.000and in terms of what you find if you inject it into a mass spectrometer, 5-MeO-DMT is the only psychedelic that's present.
01:52:56.000In some samples, there might be trace quantities of another psychedelic called bufotanine, but it's a minuscule amount of a less potent molecule.
01:53:04.000So predominantly, you have 5-ameo-DMT, which is likely the strongest naturally occurring serotonergic psychedelic.
01:53:11.000And for conservation purposes, It's necessary that people stop milking toads because it's become too popular.
01:53:20.000Mike Tyson's talking about it all the time.
01:53:26.000Mike Tyson could have an effect on conservation, but if a celebrity says they like something, that can have a tangible effect on the environment.
01:53:36.000I know people who have toads for that very reason because Mike Tyson talked about those toads.
01:53:42.000Now they have toads and they milk these toads.
01:54:29.000I knew I was experiencing the 5FEO DMT realm or whatever it was, but there was no context in terms of I didn't realize I'm on my couch sitting at home.
01:55:20.000So much of the way I would communicate was not just me trying to get my thoughts across, but me trying to say things in a way that would be impressive, or in a way that would be flowery,
01:55:36.000or try to make it look like I was more intelligent than I was.
01:55:39.000But I remember remembering that really clearly.
01:55:46.000Thinking that, as I was trying to figure out how I was going to describe this experience, I was realizing, as I was thinking, God, I've got to figure out how to describe this.
01:56:52.000Experientially, chemically, it's, you know, psilocin is closer to DMT than 5-Meo-DMT is.
01:56:59.000Mushrooms are closer, chemically speaking.
01:57:02.000And, yeah, I think that it defies description in a different way than other psychedelic experiences do.
01:57:09.000With something like DMT, it's difficult to describe because there is such an abundance of imagery and thoughts and associations that it's extremely difficult to communicate that to someone.
01:57:49.000Because it's just a different drug entirely.
01:57:52.000And I think that DMT can be integrated into a normal life much more easily than 5-Meo DMT. Actually, I credit DMT with like sort of, I talked about the sort of COVID denial that I had at the beginning of the pandemic where I was, you know,
01:58:46.000It just stripped away the denial and I could just say, alright, this is happening.
01:58:52.000So you were just wrestling with the reality of having to shut down?
01:58:56.000Yeah, and I resented some other people on my team who, in retrospect, were behaving in a way that was completely rational, where I was thinking, like, oh, come on, we're not going to go on this shoot, really?
01:59:07.000But they were right, and I was wrong, and I had to stop.
01:59:14.000What is the difference between psilocybin when it's metabolized and DMT? They're very close, right?
01:59:25.000Well, when you take psilocybin, there's a phosphate ester that's metabolically cleaved and that produces psilicin.
01:59:31.000Psilicin is the active metabolite and psilicin is 4-hydroxy-DMT. So very, very similar.
01:59:38.000The hydroxy group confers some protection from the enzyme MAO that degrades DMT, and the duration is obviously much longer, but they're very similar drugs, and experientially speaking, and chemically.
01:59:51.000And the peak of a silicin experience is very similar to DMT as well.
01:59:56.000DMT is almost like isolating the highest point of a mushroom trip and confining it to a very short, 10 to 15 minute period.
02:00:04.000Has anybody ever figured out a way to freebase that?
02:00:07.000The same way you freebase DMT? You can, but it would have the same long duration.
02:00:12.000So it would have a faster onset, but it would still last for two to three hours.
02:00:19.000Because in smoking it, you wouldn't cleave the hydroxy group that confers this resistance to MAO, so it would allow it to enter the bloodstream in the brain more rapidly, but the metabolic degradation wouldn't be accelerated in any way.
02:00:36.000You brought up something earlier that I really want to discuss because I remembered when you were bringing this up that I had to ask you about this.
02:01:51.000But they're not remembering the pressure of knowing that every single word that you speak is going to be dissected by angry people who are going to go out of their way to try to demonstrate that you're an idiot and that you don't know what you're talking about, and that everything that you say will be misinterpreted in order to prove that you're some type of bad person.
02:02:08.000And it stunts people's ability to communicate effectively.
02:02:14.000Without having spoken with Jordan Peterson personally, but I've talked with his daughter about it a couple of times, I can totally understand why you would start using benzodiazepines.
02:02:25.000You're giving talks all the time to enormous audiences.
02:02:38.000And then you have these chemicals, I believe it was Klonopin that he was taking, that will just help you sleep at night at the very least, right?
02:02:46.000And the problem Which is the case with most psychoactive drugs.
02:02:51.000It's sort of the irony of pharmacology, is that you often end up with whatever it was that you were trying to treat worse than when you started out.
02:03:06.000It temporarily relieves the stresses associated with it.
02:03:10.000But then he becomes dependent on it, which is completely understandable because the stresses don't go away.
02:03:14.000And so when you try to stop, you have all those stresses that drove you to use the drug in the first place, plus you have withdrawal, which is exacerbating those stresses, and it becomes very tricky.
02:03:24.000In addition to that, it sounds like he has some pre-existing psychological conditions that he's publicly spoken about.
02:03:30.000So it's very common, and I think benzodiazepines are some of the most insidiously addictive substances that are used in our culture.
02:03:38.000Again, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that we need to ban them or that no one should ever use them or that they don't have medical value.
02:03:44.000But simply that they should be used with tremendous caution because it's very easy to get into trouble with them.
02:03:51.000You know, like I said, I have never been a fan of opioids.
02:04:29.000You're not doomed if you find yourself dependent on benzodiazepines.
02:04:34.000You can, you know, use cannabis for sleep, or you could use something else in the transitional period, and you can taper off.
02:04:41.000And there are Treatment strategies, and I've known lots of people that were dependent on benzodiazepines that now live normal lives, myself included.
02:04:49.000And so it's not a death sentence by any means, but it's something that people should recognize and treat with caution.
02:04:56.000Is there, as you take benzodiazepines, is there a point where you take it for a longer period of time, it's more difficult to get off of it?
02:05:07.000And one thing that people, people often, myself included, are pharmacological reductionists when they talk about this.
02:05:12.000So they say, like, oh, you know, you have some kind of...
02:05:14.000You know, neuronal change or some change in receptor density or something that accounts for this.
02:05:20.000But what also is changing is there's a psychological change where you're not developing healthy coping strategies.
02:05:24.000And if you magnify that over months or years, those are months or years where you haven't figured out how to relax before bed, how to unwind, right?
02:05:36.000You had a pill, and that pill was how you wound before bed.
02:05:40.000And a normal person, and it allows you to cultivate bad habits, right?
02:05:44.000So you can, maybe if you have a prescription for Ambien, it's not a big deal to have a cup of tea with dinner, 9pm, whatever.
02:05:50.000You're going to take an Ambien that night, you'll go to sleep, doesn't matter if you have the tea.
02:05:53.000Well, when you take Ambien out of the equation, you might have to be a little bit more careful about the choices that you make, and you have to have a little bit of additional discipline.
02:06:00.000So long term, you also have, like I said, you have psychological...
02:06:05.000Changes in your coping strategies, and that I think can be very hard for people.
02:06:09.000And I think that when people talk about long-term problems as a result of drug abuse, they often assume that it's because the drug is neurotoxic and it damaged your brain.
02:06:17.000But I think just as much, it can be an issue of not adequately developing certain coping strategies as a result of using that drug use.
02:06:25.000Like, if you always used a benzodiazepine when you were anxious, you may have never learned how to appropriately take a breath and relax and Figure out your anxiety psychologically.
02:06:37.000Now, when he tried to get off these benzodiazepine, colonopin, is that the only thing he took?
02:06:46.000As far as I... Well, his daughter told me that during the detox he was also inhaling xenon gas, which is an interesting...
02:10:20.000And if you distill hundreds or really more like millions of liters of air into...
02:10:28.000You compress it into a liquid under cryogenic conditions, and then you distill off all the different gases, all the nitrogen, all the oxygen.
02:10:35.000You're left with a small fraction of this very heavy gas called xenon.
02:10:38.000It's so heavy that you can almost pour it like a liquid and float a foil boat into it if you pour it into a gutrarium.
02:11:00.000And when you inhale xenon, it produces this amazing, euphoric, anesthetic effect that is considered by some anesthesiologist to make it the perfect drug.
02:11:27.000They'll put people in xenon tents, like oxygen deprivation tents, but then you have the added sort of euphoric, anesthetic properties of the xenon that supposedly allow athletes to work even harder.
02:12:08.000Erythropoietin, also known as EPO, a hormone that encourages the formation of red blood cells.
02:12:14.000Oh, okay, so it works like EPO. I wonder if you take it if you'll test positive for EPO. It's been banned in some places, I think, as a performance-enhancing drug.
02:13:39.000That's why when people make statements like, heroin withdrawal is really, really bad, or heroin withdrawal is just like the flu, it's like, well, they're both true for different people, probably.
02:13:52.000But Klonopin, particularly difficult to get off.
02:13:57.000Benzodiazepines are, I would say, it's not so much that they are very difficult, but I think more than they are difficult, it's that we don't treat them like they're difficult.
02:14:08.000You know, we grow up on Trainspotting, Requiem for a Dream, Permanent Midnight, Christian F., all these movies that dramatize the horrors of opioid addiction and opioid withdrawal.
02:14:18.000It's a part of our cultural diet that we have learned that this is horrible and is to be avoided at all costs.
02:14:26.000The same is not true of benzodiazepines, which are just kind of stuff, right?
02:14:32.000You have rappers talking about Xanax, and it's not about So Xanax is a benzodiazepine as well?
02:15:02.000Most of our complaints revolve around things that are too good.
02:15:18.000Benzodiazepines are Comparatively very safe chemicals.
02:15:24.000That's not to say that they are without danger, but they represent a pretty substantial medical advance, and that's the reason that they're so widely prescribed.
02:15:33.000Like, it's very important to physicians not to prescribe drugs that will accidentally kill people.
02:15:38.000That's another reason that SSRIs are so widely prescribed, is because, you know, Problems aside, they're very bad at causing fatal overdoses.
02:15:59.000Because finally, you could have a drug that treated anxiety that didn't have this horrible risk of killing people that used it.
02:16:06.000You know, this was when Jimi Hendrix died, Marilyn Monroe, these were all barbiturate associated deaths.
02:16:12.000So this was actually considered like a huge boon to science, and their liberal prescribing reflects their relative safety, but there isn't enough of a discussion about the problems associated with cessation and withdrawal for long-term users.
02:17:13.000So when a benzodiazepine binds to the GABA-A receptor, it Promotes the opening of a channel that allows chloride ions to enter the cell.
02:17:21.000The chloride ion carries a negative charge and it reduces the charge of the neuron, making it less likely to fire.
02:17:27.000So that's, in a nutshell, how a benzodiazepine works.
02:17:31.000Now, what is this thing that they talk about when you get off of Xanax in particular?
02:17:35.000They say it has sort of like a slingshot effect.
02:17:39.000And the way they describe this is people that take Xanax.
02:17:42.000They say that it reduces your anxiety, but then when you get off them, it actually increases the amount of anxiety you have as a base level.
02:17:52.000Yeah, because like I was saying earlier, you have both a tolerance effect so that your compensatory mechanisms within the body have adjusted to respond to the To this newfound increased introduction of chloride ions into the cell,
02:18:15.000And so then when you remove this drug, your body has already made adaptations to the presence of the drug that then cause a more severe Excitatory response that can ultimately cause seizures and death in some instances.
02:19:01.000You could take Muscle Relax or Tizanadine that has a different pharmacology, or you could use cannabinoids, or you could use any number of things depending on What treatment is most appropriate for that person?
02:19:15.000I don't want to make any claims that there's a magic bullet that will treat people.
02:19:21.000The main thing that you have to do, I think, is psychological work to try to cultivate habits where you're able to sleep better at night through exercise and you have better strategies for psychologically dealing with stress in your environment.
02:19:35.000Those two things combined will, I think, do a lot more long-term to prevent you from using them again in the future.
02:19:42.000But again, these problems mostly emerge with long-term high-dose use.
02:19:47.000There's a lot of people that can use a benzodiazepine as a one-off thing on an airplane or before some other stressful event, and it doesn't cause those problems.
02:19:55.000There's a big difference between taking something once or twice and taking something every single day for years.
02:20:02.000It's that people get accustomed to the effects, the anxiety-relieving effects, and they start taking it a lot, and then next thing you know, you have a physical issue.
02:20:16.000And that's why I think it's good to be as familiar with these things as possible, and it's good to understand them and their potential, but I also think it's good to try to not...
02:20:29.000I have a habit of using any one of them regularly.
02:20:32.000And I get very alarmed by the ones that I like, even if they're innocuous, like cannabis.
02:20:37.000You know, I remember when I was in my 20s, I would hear all these people saying, oh, yeah, yeah, when I was in my 20s, I loved cannabis.
02:20:43.000But the day I turned 30, I started getting panic attacks every single time I smoked it.
02:21:54.000You look at Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, any of these social media things, they're machines fed on human opinions and rage.
02:22:02.000And people have almost optimized their communication to ensure this kind of Agitated engagement at all times, and it's very psychologically difficult.
02:22:14.000I think people need to try to avoid that kind of behavior as much as they possibly can, because not only are you volunteering your finite time on Earth to feed a social media machine and advertisements with your own misery,
02:22:30.000You are preventing yourself from doing anything nice in the world, which will ultimately make you feel better.
02:22:37.000Like, forget what effect it has on the subject of the bullying.
02:23:36.000And then Facebook, I think, is the least healthy of them because people go on these long rants and then people below those long rants respond to those long rants and they get addicted to it and they're constantly checking it and battling back and forth with people on opinions and issues and politics and religion and social problems.
02:23:55.000It's a piss-poor way of working things out with people, and it's the opposite of a podcast, in my opinion.
02:24:01.000One of the best things about a podcast is the fact that we're locked in.
02:24:05.000Like, when you and I are having this conversation, we're wearing headphones, so I hear your voice at the same volume that I hear my voice, which makes it much harder to talk over people because you're too aware that you're being rude, and you don't hear anything from the outside world,
02:24:21.000and we're looking at each other eye to eye, We're staring at each other across the table.
02:24:46.000And it's a shame because I actually love talking to people.
02:24:48.000Some of the most interesting stories I've ever told, some of the most interesting experiences I've ever had, have come from strangers contacting me.
02:24:57.000And we have the internet, which is the greatest educational tool ever devised by humans.
02:25:01.000And it's being used as a machine for competitively angry remarks.
02:27:54.000What science really is, is a series of thousands and thousands and thousands of short papers.
02:28:00.000When people talk about the body of scientific knowledge, they're talking about these short papers that up until recently have been paywalled.
02:28:06.000So if you wanted to read even a two-page article, you'd have to pay $40 to do it.
02:28:11.000She figured out a system where she could use the electronic resources of every major university to automatically download their entire catalogs of scientific literature and make it freely available to everyone in the world.
02:28:27.000So it doesn't matter if you are in Kenya or Ethiopia or wherever.
02:28:31.000You have access to the full digital resources of Oxford and Harvard and Yale.
02:28:39.000I mean, it already has changed the world.
02:28:41.000And, like, I guarantee 20 years from now, there will be people winning Nobel Prizes who will attribute the knowledge that they have to that website.
02:29:01.000And, like, we're in the presence of this extraordinary creation, and then people are just, like, spending their entire life insulting Trump on Twitter or whatever.
02:29:12.000Like, it's just, like, we have to recognize what an amazing time it is, even though there are, of course, horrible, horrible things happening all around us.
02:29:20.000Like, there are things like that that are so incredibly useful.
02:29:32.000And I don't even know if it's, you know, I think it's worth talking about publicly because I think more people, I think even there are some scientists even that don't know about it.
02:29:40.000But yeah, it's in danger because there was money to be made.
02:29:43.000But it's really unfortunate because scientists aren't paid to write scientific articles.
02:29:49.000So, if you write a peer-reviewed scientific article, that's something that you do, you send it off to the publisher, and then no one can read it unless they are also a scientist with either academic or institutional affiliations that allow them to access that journal.
02:30:45.000The major publishers like Elsevier have come out against the creator, and I think she may even be in hiding as a result of that, because, yeah, I'm sure they would throw the book at her if they could.
02:31:07.000There's definitely some good stuff out there.
02:31:09.000To go back to benzodiazepines, you were explaining the xenon gas.
02:31:15.000What is the psychoactive effect of it?
02:31:19.000What does it do to you that would help you get off of benzodiazepines?
02:31:23.000Why would Jordan Peterson use that as a therapy?
02:31:27.000Oh, I just heard that was one of many things that he was trying.
02:31:29.000I mean, I think that he was in a somewhat, you know, I think he was, you know, really, really seriously struggling and was trying a lot of different things to see what would stick.
02:31:38.000And what xenon does when you inhale it is you exit reality and enter a state of pure bliss.
02:31:50.000It's like nitrous oxide, if you've ever tried that, but nitrous oxide actually has some associated toxicity, kind of unusual toxicity, where it interferes with the metabolism of vitamin B12. None of that is present with xenon.
02:32:04.000So, if you inhale nitrous oxide continuously for a long period of time, eventually it will actually kill you.
02:32:46.000Behavioral modulatory effects of xenon are probably related to its generalized action on excitatory inhibitory balance within the central nervous system.
02:33:03.000Our data suggests that sub-anesthetic short-term exposure to xenon Have beneficial effect on several behavioral modalities and deserves further investigation.
02:33:15.000So, yeah, I'm not making any kind of medical claims about xenon being, you know, the cure for benzodiazepine addiction.
02:33:23.000I actually just made a documentary for my new season about xenon, and I think it's really interesting because this is, you know, another one of these things that I don't think can ever be regulated.
02:33:49.000I mean, nitrous oxide, I didn't even know this until I started working on this piece.
02:33:54.000I always assumed that nitrous oxide was a purely synthetic chemical.
02:33:58.000And I always thought it was weird that nitrous oxide interacts with B12. It just seemed random to me, but it's one of these things you read in a textbook and you just think, all right, nitrous oxide interferes with B12 metabolism.
02:34:12.000And then I started thinking, like, but wait a second, why?
02:34:14.000Why would nitrous oxide, of all things, not oxygen, not hydroxide, not some other oxidizing agent that would potentially be stronger in vivo, why nitrous oxide?
02:34:24.000Why would that interact with vitamin B12? And then I realized that both nitrous oxide and B12 are produced by bacteria, and that there's probably ancient bacterial interactions, and this has been researched a little bit as well, that these might be part of ancient bacterial signaling cascades that you can We're good to
02:35:18.000Like, he's saying that that was the only place that we could do a medical rehabilitation or detoxification.
02:35:26.000Well, I mean, again, I think that like using Jordan Peterson as an example of like a typical benzodiazepine dependent person is probably not the right way to think about it because, you know, I don't know what social factors he was facing as well.
02:35:41.000Like the last thing you want if you're So the withdrawal is going to increase anxiety.
02:35:46.000The last thing you want is to be in a clinic surrounded by people that know who you are, that are like, oh, you're Jordan Peterson.
02:35:53.000You're that alt-right men's activist guy.
02:36:40.000I would be somewhat hesitant to make any sort of recommendations, but there are other drugs like pregabalin and gabapentin that also exert some kind of mild anxiolytic effect that some people consider less habituating than benzodiazepines.
02:36:55.000It seems that they are, in fact, better tolerated, but it's not the same.
02:36:59.000It's like saying, oh, you could use cannabis, but cannabis isn't the same.
02:37:03.000Now, Ibogaine has some sort of a corrective effect on addiction, right?
02:37:14.000Would that be effective in the withdrawal of benzodiazepine?
02:37:19.000I don't think that it would be effective specifically for the GABAergic mechanism of benzodiazepine withdrawal, but I think that it may be psychologically effective, because that's a big component of iboga and ibogaine.
02:37:34.000I actually, for the first time, went to an iboga ceremony in Gabon in December of 2019, and it was incredible.
02:37:43.000It was one of the most amazing experiences of my entire life, and I felt like I fully Not fully, not even close to fully, but I began to understand iboga in a way that I certainly didn't when I last spoke to you.
02:37:57.000And a big part of those ceremonies, you know, we, again, we often talk about these things in pharmacologically reductionist terms, which is fine.
02:38:05.000But a big part of the ceremony is fasting.
02:38:11.000Sleep deprivation, various feats of endurance, dancing for 12 straight hours, continuous, extremely loud music, continuous socializing.
02:38:22.000And so if you're somebody that is struggling with an addiction of some kind, suddenly you're surrounded by people who are watching you all the time, right?
02:38:31.000They have a sort of I hate to call it a dungeon, but it had a dungeon-like character, where the people who are struggling with addiction all lay side by side, and it's like laying down and withdrawing in the middle of the loudest imaginable party.
02:38:49.000On one hand, it sounds kind of horrible, but they're also surrounded by a supportive community that genuinely cares about them, and they're giving them iboga to anesthetize them.
02:39:01.000Because iboga is also, like ketamine and like xenon, an NMDA antagonist.
02:39:06.000At very high doses, it produces a pseudo-anesthetic effect.
02:39:11.000And they even, at very high doses, will prick you with a thorn to make sure you're still responsive.
02:39:15.000And if you don't respond to the prick, then they realize that you've had enough and it's time to let you come down a little bit.
02:39:53.000It's the most amazing celebration you could possibly imagine.
02:39:57.000And, again, I'm not going to make any claims about the safety of this, because I don't know, but I certainly met several people who had been doing it since they were an infant, who were college students, who were doing completely fine, who seemed socially functional, and happy to be there.
02:40:11.000And what I learned about Iboga, I think a big part of it, is like, are you familiar with breatharianism?
02:40:45.000But I think whenever there's something like that that seems really stupid superficially, it's useful to think, like, psychologically, why would somebody do that?
02:40:54.000Why would anyone subject themselves to a period of days of fasting and this delusional idea that they don't need food?
02:41:04.000Because it's a tremendously empowering idea that everything that you need is within you, that you don't need anything else, that you can harvest vast sources of energy inside yourself and use that to sustain your every action.
02:41:17.000And people are drawn to that concept, even though it's completely fraudulent.
02:41:22.000And in the aboga ceremony, there is a Component of that where you strip everything away everything that you don't need water you don't need to pee you don't need food You don't need sleep you just keep going because everything that you need is within you and it Emphasizes self-reliance and strength in a way that I think is tremendously beneficial for all people that have any kind of dependence not just opioids and It doesn't matter.
02:41:52.000It's not about a pharmacological class.
02:41:54.000It's about this substance that teaches you a lesson through also this cultural context that you have everything that you need within yourself.
02:42:32.000And then you keep going, and suddenly there's this tremendous exhilaration in realizing that you're not going to die, and that, in fact, there are additional reserves within you, and that you can keep going and keep going.
02:42:43.000And I think that by tapping into that ceremonially, people leave with a sense of strength that empowers them and allows them to live life without the dependencies that they had previously.
02:43:11.000I would say, and it's pharmacologically and chemically quite different from other psychedelics, I would say that it was the most logical I have ever felt in my entire life.
02:43:21.000I truly felt that I was seeing myself like an outside observer without any kind of emotional attachments, and I could understand the way that I had distorted various things, and I could understand frameworks of justifications and delusions in such a way as to Understand my own behavior,
02:43:41.000forgive myself for it, and correct it in the future.
02:43:44.000And in the wake of that experience, I did make changes to my life, and I do feel better as a result of it.
02:44:06.000Kind of the prevailing concept is that you have a subtype of nicotinic acetylcholine receptor called the alpha-3-beta-4 acetylcholine receptor that it acts as an antagonist at.
02:44:17.000And this is a pharmacology that's shared by some other anti-addictive medications like Welbutrin.
02:44:23.000So there's an idea that simply by binding to that receptor, it is exerting a pharmacological anti-addictive effect.
02:44:29.000Then there's an idea that it's working via release of neurotrophic factors like BDNF and GDNF, which is glial-derived neurotrophic factor.
02:44:38.000Then there's an idea that it's working via the NMDA receptor, or that it may be exerting a classical serotonergic effect via the 5-HT2A receptor, or that its metabolite, nor ibogaine, is exerting an opioid effect that lessens withdrawal.
02:44:50.000It has a very complicated pharmacology and binds to a wide variety of different receptors, both of the ibogaine and its metabolite, nor ibogaine.
02:44:58.000And so to pinpoint any one A fact is difficult.
02:45:45.000They're all drives to lessen suffering and increase comfort in one way or another.
02:45:49.000And we gear our life to reduce suffering.
02:45:52.000And the only way that we can live a healthy life is to develop a Mature attitude towards suffering and to find benefit in it.
02:46:03.000I mean, I think that's even—there's a lot of Christian iconography in these ceremonies, even though this is in Central West Africa.
02:46:08.000And part of me thinks, like, why do you want the, like, colonists' imagery in your beautiful tradition?
02:46:14.000Why do I have to bow down to Christ as a part of this?
02:46:17.000But then I realized that— For many cultures, the words of the Bible aren't important.
02:46:24.000What's important is that the image of Christ symbolizes divinity in suffering, that there is strength in suffering, and that you can see that image and find strength in your own suffering.
02:46:37.000And that out of that suffering, you get wisdom and growth.