On this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the comedian and writer Rick Grimes joins the show to talk about his new book, "How to Grow Your Own Pot: The Story of How to Make Your Own Hash," and how he revolutionized the way people make hash in the 1970s and 80s. He also talks about how he got into cannabis, and why he thinks it s the most important plant in the world to make. This episode was produced and edited by Riley Bray. It was edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Our theme song was written and performed by Micah Vellian and our ad music was made by Mark Phillips. The show was mixed and produced by Matthew Boll. Special thanks to our sponsor, Columbia Records. Thanks to everyone who has been a supporter of the show and all the people who have sent in questions, suggestions, or just sent in their thoughts and suggestions. We'll see you next week with a brand new episode of the podcast! Thanks again for listening, and Happy New Year, everyone! -Jon Sorrentino and the crew at JOGAN PODCAST! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Artwork by Jeff Kaale. Thank you to my good friend Kevin McLeod and my band, The Good Fellas. and The Good Ol' Boys for sending in their music, and we hope you enjoy the music, it's a great day! and hope you have a great time! -Jon's Badass Monday Morning Podcast. -Joe Rogan and the Good Morning Podcast! -The Good Olio Podcast, by the Badass Crew. --Jon and the Bad Ass Crew! --Jon's Music is by John Rocha -- Jon's Good Morning Show -- -- The Good Old Days Podcast -- by the Good Ol Nights Podcast -- and The Bad Ol' Day Show -- by The Good Life Project -- by Squeepers -- by -- by Jon's Backyard -- by Jeff's Garage Band -- by Kevin Mclean, by , & the Good Old Towner, , by -- and , and - by John's Place, and . & , "The Good Old Day Podcast, and by The Bad Old Day Show, by .
00:01:04.000Your book was fascinating to me because it was, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but it was the first time that the FDA ever allowed real studies to be done on Schedule I drugs.
00:01:18.000It was the first new American study in 20 years.
00:02:42.000Well, there's different ways to do it.
00:02:44.000Like, in the old country, you get really sweaty, and you just agitate a lot of pot, and the resin accumulates on your skin, and you scrape it off.
00:04:29.000And this is the way that the hash that's smoked by most people around the world, the largest quantity of cannabis that's made anywhere, is made still by this legacy method.
00:04:41.000And the great thing about it is this could really be done anywhere.
00:04:45.000I think about folks in Mexico or Colombia who could take this method and repurpose it and adapt it and be making quite a very nice high quality hash.
00:04:58.000That's a hash salesman if I've ever seen one.
00:05:17.000So I think he's using it in that sort of that little frame, that little case, and then they're packing it in there with that car jack, which is pretty crazy.
00:06:20.000Well, so after that experience, smoking hash, and, you know, my chemistry mind got piqued.
00:06:26.000I thought, you know, like a half hour ago, I was totally normal, and right now I'm just having the weirdest experience of my life, and I wonder how that works chemically.
00:07:37.000Well I get the occasional email from people who have really gone around the bend smoking too much DMT. There's people, I think, that have a tendency towards a type of paranoid schizophrenia that maybe they kind of have it under control or maybe it's mild.
00:07:54.000You know, they just have some weird paranoias about certain things.
00:07:57.000I've seen a few people do too many psychedelics and then now they're in fantasy land.
00:08:05.000Yeah, I kind of wonder about the risk of increased accessibility.
00:08:11.000Yeah, because, you know, you could prepare, you can screen, and still people have adverse effects.
00:08:18.000And in the wild, in the field, I think we're just going to have a revisiting of the problems in the 60s with all of those hospitalizations and things.
00:09:42.000There's a reality port, and then there's a neighboring port where they're getting...
00:09:46.000It's like they can pay their taxes, they can drive their cars, they can answer emails, but they think that there's some crazy mind control experiment at the head of...
00:09:59.000You know, it's just one of those weird ones where people just start believing that the whole world's out to get them and the government's trying to track them down and there's a chip in my brain.
00:10:31.000Yeah, you know, back in the day, it was, you know, radio waves or x-rays that were, you know, beaming down from space and affecting people's minds.
00:11:00.000They think that they've got all the answers and nobody is listening to them and it makes them mad and they end up in prison or in psychiatric hospitals.
00:11:14.000I'm always fascinated with how other human beings' brains work.
00:11:26.000It's so different when, you know, you meditate or you do something like yoga, some mindfulness kind of practice.
00:11:32.000It's like, what are most people experiencing?
00:11:37.000And then, what does it feel like to be mentally ill?
00:11:40.000Like, what is that person experiencing?
00:11:41.000Like, what weird shift in the chemical balance of the mind is causing that?
00:11:48.000And, you know, how much of it is genetic and how much of it is life experience and trauma?
00:11:53.000It's just the way people think and look about things and look at things has always been fascinating to me because I've got to assume that everyone's dealing with different hardware or wetware or whatever you would call the brain.
00:12:10.000Well, I mean, it depends on the mental illness, the disorder.
00:12:18.000Well, one of the reasons I became a psychiatrist, besides my interest in studying psychedelics, was because I was really interested in the mind.
00:12:28.000Schizophrenic patients were just amazing.
00:12:31.000Because other than their crazy ideas and experiences, they're just normal people.
00:12:42.000There's like mild, where someone just kind of like a touch schizophrenic, and there's someone who's like full-blown, you know, the aliens are hiding in my walls and they're out to get me?
00:12:52.000Well, it depends on the kind of schizophrenia.
00:14:59.000What is going on where this substance, it must be gone from your body after two weeks, but somehow or another you're still feeling the effects of it.
00:15:09.000And what does that indicate about states of mind and how pliable they are?
00:15:13.000Well, I mean, I guess the way I would look at it, which might not be the way everybody would, but I think what may have taken place is that because of all the psilocybin that he took, he opened a portal.
00:15:42.000I'm glad you said it that way, because I say it that way too, and I know it sounds ridiculous.
00:15:47.000Particularly to people that don't do psychedelics, opening a portal.
00:15:53.000I thought about that a lot about the DMT experience because it seems so insane and so impossible that I just can't believe that this isn't just another place.
00:16:01.000It seems like it's not just a chemical reaction in my mind.
00:16:07.000It seems like I'm going to another place.
00:16:12.000But what does that mean by when I say that's how it feels?
00:16:14.000Because I don't have any understanding of what I'm experiencing it, what I'm experiencing rather.
00:16:20.000So I must put it in some sort of context where it makes sense to me as a person who lives on Earth, you know, sitting here right now in 2022. You know, there's all those variables that you, everything, when you look at the world, goes through all the filter of your own personal reality.
00:16:37.000The thing about a full-blown psychedelic experience, like the DMT experience, is it doesn't seem like any of that applies anymore.
00:16:44.000You go over there and it's like you're gone.
00:16:46.000So I was wondering about myself, like maybe I'm trying to put it into perspective like it's another place, because places make sense to me.
00:16:57.000And what doesn't make sense to me is just full nothingness, chaos, wild imagery and geometry and things that move to music.
00:17:06.000It's almost like it's so hard for me to wrap my head around that I convince myself it's another dimension, but it's not.
00:17:32.000Well, if you consider the location of the DMT world to be outside of us in objective reality, you'd need to call upon physics, advanced physics,
00:17:48.000dark matter, dark energy, parallel universes.
00:17:52.000So I think if you could get into those spaces with machines, let's say imaging machines or cameras.
00:18:06.000Well, have you seen some of the new, there was some new article that was written about virtual reality being able to give people transcendent experiences, that it's similar to the effects achieved on psychedelics.
00:18:24.000McKenna talked about that a long time ago.
00:18:26.000He said he thinks that one day they'll get to a point where they can create something visually and it'll bring you into that place, that they'll be able to recreate it with sufficient technology.
00:18:36.000Here's, VR is as good as psychedelics at helping people reach transcendence.
00:18:43.000On key metrics, a VR experience elicited a response indistinguishable from subject who took medium doses of LSD or magic mushrooms.
00:19:53.000Okay, he says, I knew that the intensity of the light was related to the extent to which I inhabited my body, he recalls, yet watching it dim didn't frighten him.
00:20:03.000From his new vantage point, Glowacky could see that the light wasn't disappearing, it was transforming, leaking out of his body into the environment around him.
00:20:15.000This realization which he took to signify That his awareness could outlast and transcend his physical form brought a sublime sense of peace.
00:20:29.000So he approached what he thought was death with curiosity.
00:20:41.000So he had some wild near-death experience and he's trying to recreate that with VR. So that's interesting because he's not even talking about a drug experience.
00:20:55.000Yeah, you know, we've been studying, or there's a group at University of Michigan that's been looking at endogenous DMT that's made in the mammalian brain, and it increases during death, and especially it increases in the visual part of the brain.
00:21:14.000When I first met you, there wasn't nearly as much data, and I remember you were talking about how much anecdotal data that points to the idea of the pineal gland being the source of DMT, but there wasn't a mammal model.
00:21:28.000Yeah, the Pioneer DMT story, it sounds pretty obscure, but it's pretty controversial.
00:21:34.000I mean, there are some data supporting the view that the Pioneer makes DMT and other data don't.
00:21:43.000I think you and I met at Starbucks on Ventura in, I think, 2009. I was out there for my high school reunion, and we met at Starbucks on Ventura.
00:21:58.000Yeah, we were talking about DMT. Yeah, I remember that.
00:22:03.000Do you think that DMT is produced all over the body?
00:22:08.000They found it in the lungs, they found it in the liver, right?
00:22:11.000Do you think it's just something that the body produces everywhere?
00:22:15.000You know, when they first discovered DMT in mammals, people were focusing on the lung.
00:22:22.000And they were also interested in DMT being involved in psychosis.
00:22:27.000And there was a joke, or I don't know if you call it a joke, but an idea that schizophrenia was a lung disease because you were producing too much DMT. And they were doing studies to inhibit DMT in schizophrenics or increase it.
00:23:26.000Well, so we found DMT in the rodent pineal in 2013, the group at the University of Michigan.
00:23:33.000So it proved or established the validity of that idea that the pineal makes DMT. But this study in 2019 that I was mentioning where DMT goes up after death in the visual cortex, they looked again for pineal DMT and they couldn't find any.
00:23:51.000And what they believe is that the original paper described the DMT in the brain, which was snagged on the way in and out of the pineal gland.
00:24:02.000But even more interesting, I think, than the pineal making DMT is the brain makes DMT in quite high levels, comparable to even serotonin.
00:25:32.000And certain kinds of spiritual experiences are also felt there.
00:25:37.000And so it was the physical corresponding position of the subjective experience.
00:25:47.000So people thought it must be occurring in the pineal gland.
00:25:50.000You know, I have a friend who's really into Aztec savagery history, and he told me, this is kind of grim, but he told me that the Aztecs used to burn people when they were alive to really, like,
00:26:06.000freak them out, and then take their brains out and eat their brains because of all the hormones and all the things that were going on.
00:27:58.000My uncle Vinny, who's a great guy, used to cook lamb's brains.
00:28:05.000That was like a traditional Italian meal that you would cook.
00:28:10.000Like, when we'd get together and have, like, family gatherings, he had, on more than one occasion, cooked lamb's brains, because I remember having it as a child.
00:30:31.000If you're in transcendence, you've escaped this physical reality and you've gone into the next amazing dimension where there's no deception, it's all love and energy and you're floating together in music and then some dipshit brings you back to life.
00:30:50.000You get sucked backwards, but now you're stuck in a computer.
00:31:26.000But what if that fucking portal's open, you go, you transcend, and then they bring that goddamn brain back to life because you wanted to live forever.
00:31:34.000So they take that thing that they had flask frozen, they kick that sucker back on, and now you're just an embodied brain in a fucking computer attached to a bunch of wires.
00:31:45.000Well, I mean, if you're having experience, though.
00:31:47.000But what kind of experience would you have?
00:31:49.000Maybe you'd just be experiencing the fact that you're stuck in a computer.
00:31:54.000Yeah, I mean, you're kind of describing the Matrix.
00:32:06.000You can't get out of the Matrix if you're just a brain.
00:32:11.000Well, you know, one of the interesting things about endogenous DMT, and especially with its discovery in such high levels in the brain, is that it may be the endomatrix.
00:32:21.000It could be kind of regulating everything all of the time.
00:32:25.000What do you mean by that, regulating everything all the time?
00:32:29.000It could be the way we interact with reality, is through endogenous DMT, which is always at a steady level.
00:32:38.000Well, the way I began wondering about that is because, you know, what is the purpose of endogenous DMT? You know, why does the brain make DMT? Can you do a DMT test on a person's blood level?
00:32:57.000It's like, you know, billionths of a gram per milliliter.
00:33:00.000Okay, so you'd have to measure it in the actual brain itself?
00:33:03.000In the brain or spinal fluid, maybe spinal fluid, but most likely brain.
00:33:07.000When they start doing stuff like Neuralink, where they're going to insert wires into your brain and, you know, you're going to have an app to control your brain, to control your mood.
00:33:18.000I mean, it seems like that would be one of the ways they would do it, right?
00:33:24.000Well, you'd need to find, you know, where in the brain the main source of DMT is and then put an electrode there and keep that going.
00:33:33.000Do you think it's limited to one specific area where it's developed?
00:33:38.000Oh man, they're just beginning to unravel the whole role and location of endogenous DMT. So when they know that it's in the liver and they know that it's in the lungs, the lungs to me sound interesting because of holotropic breathing.
00:34:27.000Yeah, but it's metabolized so quickly that, you know, by the time it gets into the blood that you're drawing, the concentrations are pretty minuscule.
00:34:45.000You know, there's the possibility we have a DMT neurotransmitter system like serotonin or dopamine, in which case, you know, what is it doing?
00:36:11.000But again, when I go back to that disembodied mind thought process of thinking like, what am I thinking when I'm over there?
00:36:20.000Since my body doesn't seem to be there and I'm there and it seems more real than real, is that me just tricking myself into thinking that it's a different place?
00:36:39.000I say, if there was a thing that you could do, like a door you could go through and that door would take you to another dimension where you would communicate with Some entity beyond your wildest imagination that's constantly visually changing and communicating with you telepathically and knows everything about you,
00:37:04.000sees all your bullshit and is trying to impart some ideas that will help you with your life.
00:38:15.000Looking at it like maybe it's just my neurochemistry going bonkers and interacting with my visual cortex could produce this hallucinations.
00:39:49.000You know, when I tripped on DMT the first time, these beings came out of this waterfall and they said, now do you see, now do you see, now do you see.
00:40:50.000It was wild, but it was that simple sort of there's like they'll say simple things to you in a way that you're not really hearing it, but you know what they're saying.
00:41:50.000Well, you talk as openly about psychedelics as Dennis.
00:41:54.000He's the best guy to talk about it, too.
00:41:57.000Because he's got a really interesting way of discussing things, you know, and he's had so many personal experiences and he's so smart.
00:42:05.000And he's got this incredible vocabulary to just draw from.
00:42:08.000And when he describes the actual impact of psilocybin and psychedelic chemicals, particularly in formation of language, He was describing the stoned ape theory.
00:42:19.000It's incredible listening to him say it because the way he describes it, like he actually understands what psilocybin and what all these various molecules are doing to different parts of the brain and why that would facilitate the development of language and compassion and connect the tribe more.
00:42:36.000Well, I mean, do you think it actually is information coming from the brain?
00:42:43.000Or do you think, you know, that the portal is being opened up and the information is coming from above?
00:43:00.000They're getting things from somewhere else almost.
00:43:03.000It's almost like you just got to get out of your own way.
00:43:05.000You got to put enough good juice out there in the world and take enough bad out and see the world from a clear perspective, at least in these brief moments of creativity, and then things come to them.
00:43:25.000Like, where the fuck is all that coming from?
00:43:27.000It seems like people always want to say it's a muse.
00:43:31.000Like, that's the Steven Pressfield analogy.
00:43:33.000He's got a great book about it called The War of Art.
00:43:36.000All about, like, inviting the muse into your life and being disciplined and sitting there at the computer every day and summoning it and treating it like it's an entity.
00:43:49.000People who are disciplined and also creative, that decide, I'm going to write this book, I'm going to sit down, and I'm going to force myself every day.
00:44:00.000Is it possible that the brain really is some sort of an antenna?
00:44:07.000And that wisdom and love and all these different things, they're just all around us.
00:44:11.000We're just confused by our monkey bodies.
00:44:14.000Well, do you think we're getting that information from God?
00:44:18.000If that's what you want to call it, you know, the only problem I have with the word God, and it's not really a problem, but it's a recognition, is that it's a loaded word.
00:45:18.000And there are people who could benefit from psychedelic experiences who might not caught into those ideas and would avoid entheogen, but might take a psychedelic.
00:45:27.000Yeah, I think psychedelic sounds manageable, entheogen sounds like you're joining a cult.
00:45:36.000It seems like whatever anything, you know, really affects people in a lot of ways.
00:45:41.000There's always someone who looks to sort of take the reins and sort of dictate what the experience is and how to do it and what the ritual should be and how you should, you know, manage it.
00:46:07.000Here's a big problem with psychedelics.
00:46:09.000One of the big problems is that we haven't really had a chance to openly discuss it in terms of, like, the effective and ineffective ways to use it, what's detrimental, what's abusive.
00:46:18.000You know, treatment centers, like we could have all had this lined up, right?
00:46:23.000If they didn't pass that sweeping Psychedelics Act, the controlled substances that we, right now, they're still illegal.
00:46:33.000But they've been a part of human history forever.
00:46:36.000If they just opened that up, We would have the ability to tell people how to use them and how not to use them.
00:46:44.000We'd have the ability to monitor them.
00:46:48.000You're going to have some things that go wrong.
00:46:49.000So there's going to have to be some ways to mitigate that, right?
00:46:53.000And if this theory of people that have these psychedelic breaks, if it's a Imagine if you could find out that it really is like some sort of an overload of DMT. Like they have exogenous levels that are too high.
00:47:13.000I think, you know, if we can keep things going with psychedelic research in humans, there's a vast number of options that are going to start opening up.
00:47:20.000For example, like a vaccine against endogenous DMT. I mean, that might be a great antipsychotic.
00:47:31.000Or maybe some sort of technological intervention, like a neural link type thing, where I think they're going to be able to dial things in, which is going to be crazy.
00:47:40.000You're going to be able to dial in horny.
00:47:42.000You're going to be able to dial in happy.
00:47:44.000I mean, 50 years from now, who knows what they're going to be able to do.
00:47:48.000Well, they're breeding these things called knockout mice, which don't produce the gene, which makes X, Y, or Z. And they've developed knockout mice for the enzyme that makes DMT. Oh, wow.
00:48:00.000So there are animals that don't produce any DMT. So you might be able at some point to put genes into people, like CRISPR, and have them stop making their own DMT. That would be a good zombie movie.
00:48:14.000Everybody stops making their own DMT and just...
00:48:16.000Well, you know, there's a lot of good movies I think could kind of spring from DMT. Yeah.
00:48:20.000Well, if all animals are producing DMT, that's where things get really fascinating, right?
00:48:25.000And if many plants produce DMT and at least have some of the compounds of DMT in them, like, what do you think is going on?
00:48:39.000Well, do you remember that language called Esperanto?
00:50:16.000I came up with the idea of studying psychedelics when I was 20. I was doing developmental embryology work at Stanford in the summer between my junior and senior years.
00:50:29.000I was studying the development of the chicken central nervous system.
00:50:38.000We got two papers resulting from the research that I did that year.
00:50:45.000And I wanted to study psychedelics, but I didn't really know how to do it.
00:50:52.000I thought, well, maybe I'll just get some lab experience.
00:50:55.000And I was reading all of the books for the next year's classes, which involved Freud and Buddhism and the new developments in consciousness that were coming out at the time.
00:51:07.000And I was watching the sunset go down one evening and I flashed, I'm going to study psychedelics and combine Freud, Buddhism and psychopharmacology.
00:51:27.000Well, I applied to 21 medical schools, and the 19 that gave me a chance to tell them why I wanted to be a doctor, they just said, forget it.
00:51:44.000Yeah, so the two schools that did admit me, you know, they were either really short interviews or they steered me away from my obsession.
00:51:57.000But I got the idea that talking about psychedelics when you're 20 years old in the early 70s was not really going to fly.
00:52:08.000So I kept my interest to myself, but I wanted to get trained enough to be able to do that kind of work at some point in the future.
00:52:18.000So I went to medical school and I trained in psychiatry and took a job up in Alaska.
00:52:29.000Which was around the time that people were thinking and starting to understand winter depression, which then put emphasis on the pineal gland and melatonin.
00:52:40.000So I thought that was an entryway into studying the pineal gland.
00:52:48.000And the function of melatonin in humans.
00:52:51.000So the pineal gland definitely produces melatonin?
00:52:54.000Yeah, that's been known since the 40s.
00:52:58.000There wasn't a lot known back then in the early 80s.
00:53:02.000So I went back and trained some more in clinical psychopharmacology research.
00:53:09.000To learn how to do drug studies, giving drugs, taking samples, doing questionnaires.
00:53:15.000And so I moved to UNM, University of New Mexico, and ran that melatonin pineal study.
00:53:21.000And I got my chops as a clinical researcher.
00:53:26.000And melatonin was not especially psychoactive, we discovered.
00:56:04.000They're just looking to argue with people all day.
00:56:07.000It's like everyone's mad at everything and there's so little attention spent to your immediate life and you know what's actually going around you.
00:56:17.000Everyone's like freaking out about things that are happening nowhere near them most of the time.
00:56:23.000Yeah well that's one of the things I like about living in Gallup New Mexico is that you watch the wind you know like it's pretty quiet.
00:56:56.000I've heard that expression but I don't know what that means.
01:01:34.000I think you're always going to deal with certain numbers of people that are trying to make enormous profits and doing so at the expense of either the environment or people's lives and they're going to influence politicians and they're going to make laws that benefit these people and they've done this since the beginning of time.
01:01:55.000I mean, Eisenhower warned about it when he was leaving office.
01:01:58.000He warned about the military industrial complex.
01:02:55.000I think most people are good, but I think most people are easily swayed.
01:03:00.000Well, when things go sideways and when people get scared, when people get scared, their anxiety gets ramped up and they look for something to be mad at and it ramps up their anger at that person.
01:03:13.000Yeah, a few years ago, I was pretty sick for years in that Joseph Levy book.
01:03:18.000And as I was recuperating, I was reading concentration camp stories, concentration camp literature.
01:03:26.000Well, I just wanted to see how low you could go and still come out of it.
01:03:31.000And, you know, the concentration camp culture history is pretty...
01:03:37.000It's amazing what kind of evil everyday people can lay on other people.
01:08:02.000They weren't being taught in medical school anymore.
01:08:05.000There was no research going on for 15, 20 years.
01:08:08.000You know, so even after I began my study, the research unit director used to joke that people in the study room were smoking mushrooms.
01:08:19.000So he didn't really know what I was doing.
01:08:21.000He just wanted me to stay out of trouble and succeed.
01:08:24.000How bizarre is it to you knowing that research on the mind never stopped, but research on one of the weirdest things you could do to the mind stopped?
01:08:36.000And it didn't just stop for a little bit.
01:09:06.000Emergency rooms and psychiatric units were being filled up.
01:09:10.000You know, so the government had to do something, you know, from the public health point of view at the very least, which was to make it harder for kids to get their hands on psychedelics.
01:09:19.000I think that notion that there was a desire to quash understanding what the drugs were doing to people, like in a scientific manner, I don't think that was ever the case.
01:09:32.000I think it was more that nobody really wanted to challenge the government and submit a really good study that you can back up with safety mechanisms built into place.
01:09:47.000Once I got my funding and my permits, which was a long process, it took two years, You know, the government was super keen on my studies.
01:09:56.000They were very interested in what we were doing, that we were finding.
01:10:01.000When you say the government, like what branch of the government?
01:10:04.000Mostly the National Institute on Drug Abuse, NIDA, one of the divisions of the National Institutes of Health.
01:12:54.000In the early 90s, when I just got my DMT study off the ground, I met the leader of the UDV, an Anglo fellow, Jeffrey Bronfman from Santa Fe, was the North American representative of the UDV. And he asked me about what their strategy ought to be to be able to drink ayahuasca.
01:13:22.000So I advised, you know, taking care of all your permits, you know, kind of the way I did it.
01:13:28.000Just, you know, fill out the forms and, you know, talk to the regulators.
01:13:31.000And after a while, you know, if you stick with it, chances are good they'll give you permission.
01:13:37.000Or you could wait to be caught and then, you know, take it to court, in which case you would at least be, you know, getting the experiences underway.
01:14:53.000And just, I mean, that tropical environment down there.
01:14:57.000Well, I mean, you'd have to work out the regulatory and the organizational structure, kind of like they're doing in Oregon, which seems like it's kind of halting.
01:15:06.000Are you familiar with what they're doing in Oregon?
01:15:09.000In Oregon, they seem to be decriminalizing basically everything.
01:16:06.000You're going to have to find some county that's going to give you the green light, and that's where people are going to start growing their stuff.
01:16:12.000It's going to come with a lot of problems.
01:16:14.000One of the problems that happened with marijuana was the early days, banks didn't want to get involved.
01:16:22.000They wouldn't allow people to use credit cards, because they didn't want to be connected to that.
01:16:28.000So people had giant wads of cash, and they were hiring these Special Forces guys to take their cash- Smelling from pot.
01:17:56.000Some people have really bad ones, and they freak out, and they don't know what to do, and then they get elevated anxiety, and it sort of cascades.
01:21:01.000But either way, this whole thing of he was having a real problem with it.
01:21:08.000The experience was so profound, he just wanted to recreate it over and over and over and over again.
01:21:15.000You know, when I get emails from people who start sounding like they're just about ready to, like, lose it because they're smoking so much DMT, and, you know, they want my advice and, you know, support and, you know, confirmation of their funny ideas,
01:21:31.000and I just say stop smoking DMT. That's what I'd recommend.
01:22:19.000It was like, if I have to go through life with this elevated level of weirdness and anxiety forever, like this is life now, I'm like, ooh, I don't like this.
01:22:46.000Alex Berenson used to write for the New York Times.
01:22:49.000And he wrote a book making a connection between people smoking too much pot and having these psychotic breaks and these schizophrenic breaks.
01:23:33.000This is a thing that really is unfortunate because they could have studied this and had answers and we could be able to tell people how to do these things.
01:23:41.000Well, I think we should learn from that experience by making sure we're clear about adverse reactions to psychedelics.
01:27:37.000So that's when I opened my eyes and said to my friend, you know, what should I choose?
01:27:42.000I wonder if they gave you like a mixture.
01:27:46.000Has anybody given someone a mixture of 5-MEO and NNDMT? Yeah, yeah, that's pretty, well, I wouldn't say common, but I think it's called Jaguar.
01:29:42.000But the important thing, though, I believe, is that it doesn't make a lot of difference, right now anyway, because we can't really design experiments to determine that.
01:29:52.000The important thing is the information that you're getting out of it.
01:31:48.000Well, so Terrence McKenna and I developed the idea behind the DMT study in the first place, like a couple of years before it actually got approved.
01:34:13.000We'll be right back, ladies and gentlemen, with the answer to that question.
01:34:18.000We left off with how you figured out what dose to give people to have this experience.
01:34:27.000Well, the one person that we gave intramuscular DMT to described it as much slower than the smoked and wasn't as intense.
01:34:37.000So because we wanted to replicate the smoked experience, we then switched to IV. So the standard intramuscular dose is a milligram per kilogram.
01:34:49.000Was there a reason why you didn't just have the people smoke it?
01:36:58.000I mean, people do a lot of extreme things to attain spiritual experience.
01:37:03.000How much have you paid attention to Graham Hancock's work on the Amazon, how they're rediscovering these civilizations, and also the use of, there's a bunch of different researchers using LIDAR down there.
01:37:19.000We're going over the jungle and they're finding grids and the cities that used to exist down there.
01:37:25.000And Graham thinks that there might have been cities with like millions of people in them that existed before the Europeans came through and gave them all smallpox.
01:37:35.000Well, yeah, you know, Graham's been really important in making people aware of the role of psychedelics, you know, across all cultures, across time.
01:38:00.000He was really proud of himself and then he got stoned in your show.
01:38:03.000But then he got stoned and he was just on fire.
01:38:05.000The moment he got stoned, just breaking down how...
01:38:09.000I think essentially we were talking about the dating of civilizations, about how arrogant people are with their initial assertions of what the origins or the timeline of civilization is.
01:38:22.000He's like, the timeline of civilization is still a mystery.
01:38:26.000And they're pushing it further and further back with every discovery.
01:38:30.000And they keep finding stuff that pushes it further back, further back, further back.
01:38:35.000They're finding complex stone structures that are 14,000 years old.
01:38:44.000And they keep finding all this evidence of human beings being older than we thought they were.
01:38:52.000You know, I think that this Younger Dryas impact theory is probably the best theory when it comes to explaining why we're so wacky.
01:39:01.000I think we had once achieved some very high level of sophistication.
01:39:06.000You know, I think that's what explains ancient Egypt.
01:39:08.000That's what explains some spectacular construction methods that were from thousands and thousands of years ago.
01:39:14.000And then we got wiped out almost to the point of extinction and then we rebuilt back again with a bunch of shit that we didn't understand and a bunch of people that came from really smart people but had been living like fucking barbarians for the last couple hundred years.
01:40:57.000Yeah, but, well, you know, these compounds, you know, psychedelics stimulate the growth of new neurons, neurogenesis, and also stimulate the complexity and number of connections among neurons.
01:41:14.000So it could be that there were neuroplastic effects in the monkeys that were using psilocybin.
01:41:21.000That would be an explanation of how there would be an evolution of consciousness which would be passed on and continue.
01:41:35.000You know, one of the big fun theories that people like to talk about when it comes to human beings, people that are like alien enthusiasts, they like to say, well, human beings are the product.
01:42:34.000There was a straight scientist who did this study where they gave people psilocybin and they showed them parallel lines as they were moving off parallel, that the people on psilocybin could see it way quicker.
01:43:30.000Something happened to people because the human brain doubled over a period of a couple million years, which coincides with the timeline that McKenna proposed that these rainforests were starting to recede during that same time period,
01:45:09.000You know, like just tuned into everything.
01:45:11.000Just like animals, like if you snap a twig near a deer and their heads spin around, you know, bear smells you from fucking three football fields away.
01:46:10.000You know, so that's not the case with other senses.
01:46:14.000There's a connection between the olfactory sense and memory, which is the strongest among the senses, which indicates that our sense of smell once was much more important.
01:47:14.000But what it probably is is some kind of a chemical gateway to some either state of mind or some other dimension.
01:47:24.000And if you gave that to some savage proto-hominid that was just living naked, running away from jaguars all the time, and this thing starts tripping and starts figuring out tools and starts figuring out how to make sounds to indicate different animals.
01:48:48.000You know, so look at the major religious institutions, and they're stamping out psychedelic use in the indigenous world.
01:49:03.000If you could stamp out the estates, then you kind of have the hegemony over those states or you can promise them if you pray or if you're good or if you do various things.
01:49:16.000You know, so there's politics involved competing groups, those that used mushrooms probably and those who didn't.
01:49:23.000There would probably be some climactic and environmental ones too that the range of the mushrooms was shrinking.
01:49:30.000Hmm, right like some sort of climate change and they forced out of areas that used to grow them all the time So they stopped using them and they start taking alcohol and other things It's just since we know so much about them today in You know like in comparison to what people knew in the 50s and 60s like publicly know so much more about them So there's so much real scientific data out there.
01:49:55.000There's so many real Real intelligent people who are enthusiasts of them that can kind of explain the benefits of it.
01:50:04.000It's just amazing that it's taken so long to just get one state to make it legal.
01:50:11.000Well, you know, what would you like to see the future of psychedelic use?
01:50:17.000Would you want everybody to be tripping in the best of all possible worlds like Tim Leary, Ken Kesey, just everybody?
01:50:28.000I think those guys, they were so tuned, you know, tune out or drop out.
01:50:34.000They were so culty, you know, and they had a wild bus and they threw wild parties.
01:50:39.000I think a lot of people got freaked out by civilization eroding before their eyes and their kids turning into useless hippies.
01:50:48.000Like, there was a lot of fear that was attached to that.
01:50:51.000I think it would be different today if you talked about psychedelics because way more people have had psychedelic experiences, I think, per capita.
01:50:59.000I know of many, many people who are very happy microdosing psilocybin.
01:51:08.000They just take a little bit, take a little bit here and there, and they really enjoy doing it that way.
01:51:13.000You know, I wonder, I mean, is there some yearning for utopia?
01:51:18.000There is always going to be that, right?
01:51:21.000But there's also going to be an understanding that whatever that stuff does, it seems to encourage you to behave and think in a way that's better for everybody.
01:51:31.000It seems to want to encourage you to think kindly, to be nicer to people, to connect more with the earth.
01:51:40.000It tunes you into a very, for lack of a better term, positive frequency.
01:51:48.000But then again, the Vikings took them and they slaughtered people.
01:52:09.000Yeah, I don't think they should be illegal, for sure.
01:52:15.000I do think that to just randomly give them out to everybody is irresponsible.
01:52:21.000I think there are a lot of people out there that are having a really hard time with regular reality and that something as profound as a psychedelic experience could fucking blow a fuse.
01:52:31.000But I don't want to be the person that can tell a person what they can and can't do.
01:52:35.000I think that's part of the problem with it all.
01:52:37.000Is that they can tell you, you can't try something.
01:52:49.000This is a dumb conversation we're having.
01:52:51.000And you're going to make it so that I can get locked in a cage because I want to do something that you haven't done.
01:52:57.000Well, the chairman of our ethics board at the university, when I presented these studies to him for the informed consent and what you would be doing with people, you know, I bumped into him one day and said, man, I'm so grateful for how open-minded you are about this.
01:53:21.000And he figured people should do what they want to do and just give informed consent, educate people, let them know what they're getting into and let them decide.
01:53:33.000I think it's way more dangerous to have people uneducated about the risks of certain drugs and the importance of understanding the dosage and the purity than it is to tell people not to do drugs.
01:53:46.000I think that telling people to not do drugs and you're gonna arrest them if they do drugs, that's unrealistic.
01:53:51.000People have done drugs since the beginning of time.
01:53:53.000I think the realistic approach is to fucking educate people and to stop all this nonsense about what is and isn't allowed that a grown adult, a person who has never done it, can tell you, don't do that.
01:54:06.000I don't want you to do something that's been around for thousands and thousands of years and has a rich human history of usage, like psilocybin.
01:55:10.000The guy who drove me over this morning as a vet was talking about some of his friends who have done psychedelic therapy and they're like back to normal.
01:55:21.000Yeah, and more than one different type of psychedelic.
01:55:24.000I've also heard guys doing Ibogaine and then 5-MeO.
01:55:29.000I've heard that there's some real success in doing that, but I've talked to people personally that have had psychedelic experiences that have just freed them of so much that they had from combat duty.
01:55:44.000Well, I mean, we need to do more research, right?
01:55:46.000Because once we have more research data, we can say, this helps, and it'll really spread out to, you know, the rest of the country as opposed to just within the research communities.
01:55:57.000My friend Neil Brennan is a very funny stand-up comedian, and he lives in LA, and he's always had real problems with depression.
01:56:04.000And he tried a bunch of different stuff.
01:56:06.000He tried ketamine therapy, magnet therapy, tried a bunch of stuff.
01:56:09.000And then he went and he did ayahuasca, and he did ayahuasca a bunch of times.
01:57:32.000Doesn't it seem like with every medication, and even if you look at psychedelics as being a medication, every medication is going to have side effects?
01:57:40.000It seems like there's no one thing that, I mean, people die from aspirin every year, you know?
01:57:47.000Well, the stronger the effects, the more side effects there are going to be.
01:57:51.000You can't have one without the other, really.
01:57:53.000And that's just because of biological diversity, just because people are different and their bodies react differently to things?
01:58:01.000Well, the intensity of the pharmacological effect If it's really like, you know, chemotherapy.
01:58:06.000I mean, it can end the cancer, but it's just, you know, rife with, you know, toxicity, too.
01:58:14.000I'm not sure why that would be the case.
01:58:16.000I think that's kind of just how things are in pharmacology.
01:58:20.000When you think about psilocybin as like a panacea to all these psychological disorders, what do you think is happening?
01:58:26.000Why do you think it's helping people quit drinking, quit smoking cigarettes, quit doing, you know, gambling?
01:58:32.000There's a lot of different things it seems to be helping people with.
01:58:36.000Well, one possibility is that suggestibility increases on psychedelics.
01:58:52.000So hopefully you got a good person programming you.
01:58:54.000Could you imagine if that's how we can create...
01:58:57.000Well, the Manchurian Candidate story is interesting.
01:59:01.000Because the belief was you could just turn an everyday individual into an assassin.
01:59:08.000But you had to have those tendencies in the first place, either conscious or unconscious.
01:59:12.000If you were a peacenik, like a really peace-loving person, no matter how much LSD they gave you, it's unlikely that you would become an assassin.
01:59:22.000Yeah, they had to figure that out, though.
01:59:23.000And the way they did is just experiment on people.
01:59:51.000It is all about MKUltra and Charles Manson, and it is fucking wild.
01:59:59.000It's a guy who studied this case, the Manson family case, for 20 years.
02:00:04.000He started off writing an article about it, but as he dove deep into the case, it was so nuts that he just, it was so many layers to it that he refused to stop, and he kept going deeper and deeper, and he'd missed his deadline, and,
02:00:20.000like, he had a book deal, and he had to give the money back, like, chaos.
02:00:25.000And at the end of it, he's got, like, very convincing arguments that Charles Manson was a part of MKUltra.
02:00:34.000Charles Manson, that they gave him acid when he was in prison and that they supplied him with acid when he was out there teaching hippies to be fucking hit people.
02:00:44.000Well, I think the case of Charles Manson is an important one.
02:00:47.000It's a case that I try to bring up in every podcast, which is don't forget Charles Manson.
02:00:57.000Because the drugs increase suggestibility, and depending on your environment, you'll be more suggestible to what's around you.
02:01:05.000Right, and if you've got someone who's already a charismatic con man, and you catch him in prison and dose him up with acid, and you run a study, I mean, what better person to run a study on than a charismatic, lifelong criminal, you know, and just dose him up with acid and give him a sense of delusions of grandeur,
02:01:24.000and then also, every time he gets arrested, get him out of jail.
02:01:37.000And so he's taking the angle from the MKUltra connection.
02:01:42.000Yeah, he thinks that that was a part of the project, and that where he used to get his acid from was the same place where the CIA was running the health clinic.
02:01:57.000The Haight-Ashbury clinic was being run by the fucking CIA. They were doing Operation Midnight Climax there, too, where they had brothels, and they would secretly dose the Johns up at the LSD and study them.
02:02:10.000And they were also visiting people like Charles Manson in prison.
02:02:14.000And this is the thing that he makes this argument that they got to Manson in prison and most likely were dosing him up with acid and teaching him how to turn people into your minions.
02:07:06.000One guy described it as being thrown off a boat in the middle of a storm and ending up in the water and just being thrashed about, completely helpless and terrified.
02:07:19.000And the other guy, he just, like, retched.
02:07:27.000Yeah, and he didn't remember much, so we figured that was too much.
02:07:31.000Yeah, so then we settled on a pretty stiff dose.
02:07:34.000It's the biggest dose still in use, or smaller doses are being used now currently.
02:07:42.000So far, nobody has gotten up to the high doses of DMT that we gave.
02:07:48.000And what you were giving them, was the experience uniform that they described?
02:08:18.000Before they figured out telepathine was harming, they would kind of call it telepathine because they had shared group telepathic experiences.
02:10:16.000Every 500 years or so, when things are just dialed in, and it would be what people would be looking for, these people would live 35,000 years because that was the necessary time to attain all of the knowledge that was out there.
02:10:33.000And they would spend all their time otherwise trying to connect on a worldwide level.
02:10:41.000And it was every 500 years, every 1000 years.
02:10:43.000It was a rare event, but everyone would sing and dance in that space.
02:10:47.000What do you think about the possibility of some sort of a technologically inspired or driven Group telepathy like what I would worry about with stuff like that is it being co-opted and someone being able to control it but if somehow or another they released one of these things that you put on your head that allowed everybody to communicate in a universal language with everybody like a language that everybody
02:11:18.000picks up pretty easily because you're getting downloaded information much quicker because you actually have some sort of a weird implant in your brain and I think we would need to be wiser, you know, for it not to go south.
02:13:40.000Well, so Philip K. Dick has written a short novel.
02:13:44.000It's called The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge.
02:13:47.000And it's about the competition between two psychedelic drugs.
02:13:55.000One's from Earth, and one is from another star system.
02:14:02.000And the one from Earth, you know, they're both, you know, these huge corporations that are making, you know, millions of tons of this psychedelic.
02:14:10.000The one that was created on Earth just puts people into the Perky Pat world where things are really fun.
02:14:17.000Like there's this little figure, Perky Pat, and you go into her house and, you know, you wash dishes and you have parties.
02:15:09.000It's going to be interesting to see whether or not they can control it and whether or not the technologists will allow it.
02:15:17.000Ultimately, it's like the people that put it out, whatever it is, they have the ability to control it or not control it, depending upon what stage it's at.
02:15:27.000But I feel like if it keeps going in the same general direction, the general direction is about access to information.
02:15:35.000There's only so much you can do to put a cork on that if it really gets out.
02:15:39.000If it really gets to a universal language thing, the only way they're going to get people It's if they figure out some sort of a digital currency.
02:15:47.000Force people into a centralized digital currency and then attach it to a social credit score system.
02:15:52.000And then, bam, you're living in China.
02:16:03.000And I think if more people had positive, well-guided experiences, and not people with slippery grips on reality as it is, I think you're at least gonna get a sense that a percentage of the population is moving to a better state of mind,
02:16:27.000a better way of coexisting with other humans, not so angry, more in awe and wonder about this whole thing, and with a general attempt to be kinder because of it.
02:16:44.000Well, I think that the outcome of any individual psychedelic experience is obviously the set and the setting.
02:16:52.000Who you are and what you want to get out of it and your environment.
02:16:59.000I think you really need to work on the set and the setting for positive outcomes.
02:17:05.000So I think that's kind of the task now is to work out the best sets and settings.
02:17:14.000You think about how good people always feel in nature.
02:17:17.000Nature is almost like the ultimate set and setting.
02:19:34.000Well, you can see videos of people flopping around on 5-methoxy DMT. See, this is the problem with legalization, right?
02:19:45.000I think it would be irresponsible to just give it away to everybody.
02:19:49.000But I do think that it would be very beneficial to have it in places that are like a really well-established, well-set-up center where people can do these things under professional supervision, by people with experience in them,
02:20:06.000people that know the The purity of the stuff, the right dose, the right thing, and it can be a business.
02:20:30.000If you give people a license to drive a car, Give them a license to do DMT. Like, hey, Todd, like, how do you feel about reality?
02:20:37.000Like, Todd, you know, what shape do you think the Earth is?
02:20:41.000You know, ask them pretty simple questions.
02:20:44.000Yeah, well, I mean, the future of psychedelics, I mean, it looks pretty bright.
02:20:51.000What do you think is pushing it the most?
02:20:53.000Do you think it's these studies they do with PTSD in soldiers?
02:20:58.000I mean, there are just, you know, so many influences out there that want to see psychedelics or, you know, so many interests that want to see more people take more psychedelics.
02:21:07.000You know, there's commercial ones, and there's therapeutic ones, and there's spiritual ones, and there's brain science ones.
02:22:25.000And so would you have to develop some sort of an assessment of the pros and cons and what the negatives could be and how to mitigate some of the negatives, like the people that are losing their mind and overdosing and have access to people that are too young?
02:22:40.000Like, there's a lot of factors in there that you'd have to consider upon legalization.
02:23:04.000You had some experience with one of those churches, because I remember you telling this story about what it was like to go visit them, and they were wearing golf shirts and doing ayahuasca.
02:24:06.000Yeah, there's a lot of information about the effects of participation in the churches in Brazil, and some in the U.S., but especially Brazil, because that's where they both...
02:24:15.000Netflix should get on board with that, you know, because that could be like a whole series.
02:24:54.000It makes sense if you've had experiences yourself and you understand the impact that it could have if you attached it to a structure like religion.
02:25:38.000Their story of the beginning of the church relates to King Solomon.
02:25:44.000So there's, you know, references to King Solomon.
02:25:50.000They do refer to the Bible, I'm thinking about it, as most, you know, Christians do, you know, Protestants anyway are pretty familiar with the Bible.
02:26:00.000But did they come back, like, what are they experiencing?
02:26:04.000Are they experiencing, like, a standard ayahuasca, you know, seeing vines and snakes and jaguars and UFOs?
02:26:13.000Or are they seeing things that are Christian in nature?
02:26:17.000They're mostly seeing things which relate to them, how to be better people.
02:26:25.000So there's a real emphasis on personal growth and evolution and bringing society to a higher level.
02:26:33.000It's quite altruistic, and it's, you know, like as you note, if you have a structure that is essentially good, that you're kind of giving the psychedelics within, you know, the outcomes can be really positive.
02:26:47.000Yeah, I think the structure of, you know, if you look at the best aspects of almost all religions, they're all about trying to unite society in some sort of a way.
02:29:24.000If we did have legitimate psychedelic centers in America, there would have to be some real thought beforehand as to what's the best way to approach it from an education perspective,
02:29:40.000explaining things to people, what to expect.
02:30:15.000Someone could, like, come up with more and more reasons to not give, like, maybe you have the wrong political persuasion, or they've labeled you a terrorist because you don't believe in taxes or whatever.
02:32:22.000In high schools and in colleges, people were more turned on to some of those things, but it wasn't overwhelmingly popular like it was just 20 years before.
02:33:22.000What do you think is going to happen in terms of the way the country opens up, in terms of being able to do therapy on people with PTSD, and then ultimately do you think we're going to see some sort of a recreational usage in our lifetime,
02:35:17.000They're drinking beers with their burgers, and they're drinking wine with their steak, and people are always drinking.
02:35:24.000Well, if there were going to be dispensaries, yeah, there'd need to—well, yeah, I think state to state would be how it goes, you know, kind of like what they're doing in Oregon.
02:35:34.000I mean, it is legalized even though it's a Schedule I drug.
02:35:59.000It's like, I don't like the idea of the government being involved in psychedelics.
02:36:06.000I don't think it should be like a prescription.
02:36:08.000I think there should be some educators that put forth some sort of reasonable recommendations and then society adopts them.
02:36:18.000People really understand what the dosage should be, what's the most important part about setting, and having well-educated, experienced travelers who are also counselors.
02:36:32.000But getting the government involved, get the fuck out of here.
02:36:36.000If they regulate it, they're just going to tax the shit out of it and ruin it.
02:36:40.000They'll just water down the dose or figure out a way to make too much money from it.
02:36:48.000There'll still be underground use though.
02:37:25.000Schedule 1, you know, when my study started giving DMT, I mean DMT Schedule 1, but I was thinking about the scheduling of psychedelics into Schedule 1, which means, you know, there's no known medical use.
02:37:42.000They can't be given safely under medical supervision, and they're highly abusable.
02:37:46.000You know, so this was in the early 90s.
02:37:49.000I began the study, and I wrote to Janet Reno, who was the Attorney General under Bill Clinton at the time.
02:37:55.000And I said, these drugs shouldn't be in Schedule I. And I could say, why not?
02:37:59.000Because I'm doing research, which indicates they can be given safely under medical use.
02:38:05.000And we're gathering important data, which means they have utility under medical supervision.
02:38:12.000So, you know, one of her assistants wrote back and said, very complicated, changing drug laws.
02:38:19.000Yeah, so didn't get much further beyond that.
02:38:42.000Well, you know, at the time I had more important matters at hand, like, you know, running my study, but I think at a certain point it would be worth, you know, a while to reconsider the scheduling of, you know, Schedule I. Well,
02:39:14.000I don't have an experience with ketamine, but my friend Neil that I talked about earlier, one of the things that he had did prior to ayahuasca, he did ketamine in a medical setting.
02:39:24.000And he was like, I can't believe how high I was, like how strong it is.
02:41:46.000It's not just that when you do the float thing, you have these wild visions and this weird way of seeing reality because you're sort of detached from everything else.
02:44:34.000It's so that's like a state of mind and then it's the material and how you deliver it and you know That's part of being quote-unquote professional, right?
02:44:43.000You don't really find your stone when you're doing it that way But there's things that happen when you're stoned that wouldn't have happened when you're sober That's the dilemma because sometimes like when you're stoned you are on a subject and then a new path appears like oh Why don't I go down there?
02:45:01.000And you just start talking about something that you never talked about before, and it turns out to be hilarious.
02:46:49.000Well, I think people take drugs a lot of time to escape.
02:46:53.000When I was working in this little town between Taos and Santa Fe called Española, really serious drug problems.
02:47:01.000And I would ask people, at least early on...
02:47:04.000To distinguish among the effects of the different drugs that they were on, like heroin or methamphetamine or paint or, you know, whatever.
02:47:14.000And they mostly said, it just makes us not feel.
02:47:20.000You know, all the drugs, each of the drugs would have the same effect, even though they're quite distinct pharmacologically, but they just wanted to stop feeling.
02:47:28.000One thing that psychedelics make you think, Is whenever there's some sort of a problem in this world in terms of like a poor neighborhood with another shooting, like Chicago, like South Side of Chicago or Baltimore,
02:47:44.000when you hear about these crazy things like How much money would it cost to fix that?
02:47:50.000And how much money do we just send over to other countries when we're finagling deals and hooking people up and fixing things?
02:48:00.000And I'm not talking even just about Ukraine.
02:48:02.000I'm talking about how much do we spend, period.
02:48:08.000It doesn't seem like it would cost as much as arming other countries.
02:48:12.000It seems like if they had money for that, and they didn't anticipate that, and then they had money for that, why didn't you fix that other stuff?
02:48:19.000Why didn't you fix, if you guys are really competent and you really wanted a better country, wouldn't you want to fix all the places that are fucked up like that?
02:49:02.000Yeah, and you're making a critique of society through what you're doing.
02:49:07.000Well, I'm just saying what I'm seeing and having people on that have all kinds of different perspectives.
02:49:14.000I want to hear how they're looking at it.
02:49:17.000I'm constantly amazed by how many intelligent people there are to talk to.
02:49:22.000There's so many cool people that you can just have conversations with about everything and anything, whether it's you, about All the above about psychedelics, about your research, about having the mind and the courage.
02:49:36.000You're such an important part of the psychedelic history of this country.
02:49:40.000Because what you did is you legitimized a very important thing.
02:49:45.000That everybody had already kind of heard about and some people had experienced it and you legitimized it by doing it in like a real clinical setting with the government's permission.
02:50:05.000You know, it's really important because it opened people's eyes that this is repeatable, that this is understood to be something that has been used by human beings for a long time.
02:50:20.000And just recently we probably have been detached from that.
02:50:47.000You know, when they try to find the history of DMT use, what is the current understanding as far as like how long back they know people were either taking the snuff or doing an ayahuasca or some form of it?
02:51:09.000So have you talked with Dennis McKenna about his thoughts about the evolution of DMT, how far back it goes in the family tree of life?
02:51:20.000I don't remember if I did, but please...
02:51:22.000I haven't looked carefully into his thinking, but as I understand it, he points to it being a very old compound, a very ancient compound that had occurred very early on in evolution.
02:51:36.000But when do they think humans started ingesting it?
02:51:53.000Before smallpox ravaged the Amazon, Before all those people died, and they're still doing research on this, right?
02:52:00.000They don't exactly know what these cities were because that LIDAR stuff, when it lays out this grid, they understand that there were structures there, but they don't know what it was.
02:52:07.000But the big crazy story is that there was millions of people there.
02:52:12.000That's the craziest possibility, and that's the one that Graham subscribes to.
02:52:18.000Do you think that that society perhaps was a psychedelic society and that's why they had that knowledge of how to make that stuff?
02:52:26.000And then the people who survived were the people that were removed from the inner city areas, the people that lived in these tribal areas were the ones that lived and they had the knowledge that these people had run their society with using that stuff.
02:52:40.000If they're able to have these insane structures, like the whole lost city of Z, you know, that it was a feature film, but it was also a book, and it's based on a real explorer who went down there and they were looking for this lost golden city that had been talked about before,
02:52:56.000but most likely what they think happened was those people that went, whether it was 100 years ago or whatever it was, they killed everybody.
02:53:06.000They gave them diseases, and it just ravaged everybody, and the jungle just consumed everything.
02:53:10.000So when they went back to look for it, they couldn't find anything.
02:53:14.000Well, your question about whether it was a...
02:53:44.000So the Mayans used mushrooms and other psychedelics.
02:53:47.000So, yeah, I mean, I don't know how extensive the use pervaded down among the lower strata of society, but you would think that the clergy would be taking them regularly.
02:53:59.000Well, you had to be on mushrooms to build those fucking pyramids.
02:54:03.000Yeah, so the scientists also were taking mushrooms.
02:55:24.000Like, the way they're set up, they're so symmetrical and beautiful, and they have, at the top of it, like, a place where they would put human bodies when they would do sacrifices on them.
02:55:37.000So you've got this, like, kind of creature that has its legs bent and...
02:55:44.000Well, you wonder if they came up with the architecture based on their visions, of the geometric, fractal-like visions, how they may have modeled their buildings on some of those.
02:57:09.000Yeah, people come up with crazy ideas.
02:57:11.000Some conquistadors wrote about Sompantli and its towers, estimating that the rack alone contained 130,000 skulls, but historians and archaeologists knew that the conquistadors were prone to exaggerating the horrors of human sacrifice to demonize the Mexico culture.
02:57:31.000As the centuries passed, scholars began to wonder whether, I don't know how to say that word, Zompantli had ever existed.
02:59:42.000Well, they have real physical evidence because of the vessels.
02:59:46.000They have real physical evidence that there's some lysergic acid and some various ergots, like there's some forms of ergot that they can find residue of inside the wine vessels.
03:00:05.000So these wine vessels weren't just wine, they were throwing in a bunch of psychedelic compounds into the wine, and that's what they did with all wine.
03:00:14.000And now that they have, like, physical evidence of these vessels that has trace elements of this psychedelic compound, they can be sure that this is what was going on.
03:00:24.000And this is why when they would talk about drinking wine and having these visions and...
03:00:49.000Well, you know, were the thoughts new that were induced by the Kaikion, or were they already there, and the Kaikion just magnified them and made them more devoted to those ideas?
03:01:03.000I mean, we'd have to find the origin of all of their ideas because it was such an incredible time period for people thinking things through and communicating and devising ways to live and saying things that to this day people quote as wise words.
03:01:28.000What did you think of those scholars from Israel that were connecting Moses' burning bush to DMT? Yeah, that's an interesting idea.
03:01:39.000Yeah, it's a psychologist, Benny Shanon.
03:01:43.000Yeah, so he proposed that the burning bush was an acacia, and it was emitting fumes of DMT, and that's how Moses experienced, you know, the vision of the angel speaking to him.
03:01:58.000I mean, it could be true, but it doesn't necessarily explain the broader phenomenon of the prophetic state because it was only Moses that one time.
03:02:08.000It doesn't really explain Isaiah or Ezekiel or other prophets.
03:02:29.000There are certain things that stimulate your prophecy, like a good meal and being happy and good music.
03:02:37.000You know, the mana may be, you know, some people have suggested the mana has got a lysergic acid ingredient, and that's why the Hebrews were experiencing their visions in the desert.
03:02:49.000You know, but the only, like, you know, clear-cut, you know, plant and, you know, person epiphany is Moses at the bush.
03:02:57.000Some people believe that the incense in the tabernacle or in the altar had cannabis in it.
03:03:10.000You know, but the whole presence of endogenous DMT kind of makes it moot whether or not people took, you know, plants or substances in the Bible or any of this old spiritual literature because you have endogenous DMT. You've got the means to experience visions without taking anything in.
03:03:29.000Have you ever attempted to achieve visions without the use of the chemical?
03:03:34.000Like, have you ever attempted to do it through kundalini yoga?
03:03:37.000Because that's one way that I have talked to people that have had these experiences.
03:03:41.000They said you can get pretty damn close with yoga.
03:03:45.000Well, and with holotropic breathing, too.
03:04:31.000I mean, you need to make certain that your heart's in good shape and you're not on any medications that might interact badly with being that out of it.
03:05:01.000Well, so we studied runner's high for melatonin levels back in the 1980s and 1990s.
03:05:09.000There was a marathon in the winter on Sandia Crest, which is like 10,000 feet to 10,000 feet.
03:05:16.000And these guys run a marathon along Zendia Crest.
03:05:20.000And I was looking for some way to stimulate melatonin.
03:05:24.000And so I looked at the stress level of those guys and figured if anybody is inducing enough stress on themselves to raise melatonin, naturally it would be them.
03:05:34.000So we did that and we found some increases.
03:05:38.000We tried blocking it with naloxone and those were the kind of studies that I was doing.
03:05:45.000Yeah, and after a certain point, you just switch and you're in this very highly altered state.
03:07:18.000You know, Stan was that Czech psychiatrist who did a lot of LSD research.
03:07:22.000And Stan was at the University of Maryland for a while, working with Bill Richards and those guys.
03:07:28.000And once they stopped, you know, once the compounds, once psychedelics were scheduled and all human research ended, you know, Stan moved on and in the meantime developed this, you know, holotropic breathwork.
03:08:59.000It seems so wild that someone figured out how to combine one thing that has DMT in it and another thing that's an MAO inhibitor so that your body will just absorb it.
03:09:09.000Like, that they figured that out in the jungle.
03:09:13.000One thing that they may have been doing is the vine, the banisteriopsis, has got the beta-carbolines in it, the harmine, harmoline, MAO inhibitors.
03:09:25.000And they use that as like a screening tool.
03:09:31.000If they're on the banisteriopsis, they can taste it.
03:09:36.000Other plants and the essence of what's in that other plant comes through in a way that isn't normally the case.
03:09:44.000So they may have their antennas up, so to speak, by being on the MAO inhibitor beta-carbolines all the while and experimenting with what plants do what.
03:10:22.000Because I know that certain grasses and certain plants will actually change their flavor profile if they think cows are eating them or if deers are eating them.
03:10:33.000The acacia tree, there was a thing they were reading about giraffes who wouldn't eat the leaves.
03:10:40.000Of these trees, and it turns out they were downwind from trees that these giraffes were eating.
03:10:47.000So these giraffes were eating, the wind goes down, it changes the flavor profile of all these other plants.
03:10:55.000So whether it's through the mycelium in the ground, however they're communicating.
03:11:00.000But they've even done it to the point where they've played sounds of like caterpillars chewing on leaves, and that causes the change in the flavor profile to the leaves.
03:12:11.000Well, in the Middle East, in more traditional societies that are really into cot, they chew cot and the city council or the village council gets together, they chew cot and they make their decisions.
03:12:32.000The chewing coca leaves is fascinating, too, because so many people think that there's actually like a health benefit to chewing coca leaves.
03:13:09.000Well, that was a weird time in history, right, where people would go to, like, drugstores or gas stations, rather, and buy what they would call bath salts.
03:15:06.000Well, one study that we did was an attempt to cause tolerance to a closely spaced repeated dosing of DMT. You know, like if you take LSD every day for a few days, you stop responding.
03:15:19.000And there were some studies giving DMT to see if you could develop tolerance, but you couldn't.
03:15:27.000So I thought maybe if you spaced the injections close enough together, that was an issue regarding half-life.
03:15:33.000That's interesting to hear you say that because I had always heard for some reason that if you do TMT next to like a recent TMT trip like 10 minutes ago, do it again in 10 minutes, like you won't be able to do it.
03:15:54.000That's more or less what we found, is that we spaced injections every half hour.
03:16:01.000And there'd be a real progression of the effects over the course of the morning.
03:16:07.000And as a result of those data, a group at Imperial College in London is developing an infusion model to maintain the state for at least a half hour.
03:16:20.000So when you're doing it, you're injecting, and then in 30 minutes you're injecting again?
03:16:26.000Yeah, they'd come down, and we would spend maybe 10-15 minutes processing, and then they'd get ready for the second dose.
03:16:34.000So when you say processing, like explaining what you saw, talking about it?
03:16:38.000Yeah, I would ask them how it was and what came up.
03:16:45.000It was a pretty packed 10-15 minutes too, I'll tell you.
03:16:48.000Dude, you're like cleaning them up and sending them right back into space.
03:17:49.000I mean, if you gave four doses over the course of a morning, You know, stuff will come up, and you'll resolve it more or less by the fourth dose, but it isn't the end of treatment.
03:18:01.000I mean, you would be in treatment already in some form or another, and with the stuff that came up during the DMT sessions, you would have that as Christopher the Mill in your future work.
03:18:12.000What I was getting at was that, like, say if someone is having a bad experience, and say if they're doing this four-dose thing, but they have a really bad experience around dose number three, would you allow them to do dose four, or would you have to have a conversation with them?
03:19:47.000People that know what they're doing, certified, have everything locked down, doing it the right way, do it exactly the way you did to those patients.
03:19:56.000Well, it wouldn't be exactly the same.
03:20:12.000I mean, I think one of the really nice things is that there's a lot of support for it on the right now because they realize the effect that it has on soldiers.
03:21:16.000I was just trying to look at the worst possible version would be you stuck in a computer box, like looking at the world but not able to move or act.
03:21:28.000I just would think that a disassociated brain...
03:21:32.000Imagine if you found out that your thinking wasn't just your brain, that your heart was actually involved, and that all the neurons that are around the heart actually work in conjunction with the brain, but that a brain disassociated from the heart is always a psycho.
03:21:49.000Like so if everybody who did get their brain uploaded somewhere, they just popped out on the other end like a three-quarter human psycho.
03:21:57.000Yeah, well, so you're using the biology to support like this philosophical idea.
03:22:04.000The philosophical idea is the most interesting because I think if people really do freeze their brain and they really do boot that sucker back up and you get drawn from heaven, Back into this, like, earthly realm inside of a fish tank with a bunch of wires attached to you.
03:24:28.000We are, whatever it is, if it's 10 years or if it's 20 years, because 20 years ago, again, nobody cared about VR. If it's 20 years from now, whatever it's going to be, whatever year it is, they're going to have something that replicates reality, like, down to every moment.
03:24:43.000Down to touch, there'll be haptic feedback, there'll be something that, like, hijacks your nervous system and thinks your feet are on the ground.
03:24:51.000You're going to replicate the feel of gravity.
03:24:55.000Yeah, well, you know, I think it's going to kind of detach you from reality, won't it?
03:25:04.000Well, I don't think it's good for us, but I just think it's inevitable.
03:25:07.000I think if we really do come up with a way to live in, like, Avatar land and fly around on dragons and live in some bizarre fake universe...
03:25:54.000That would be probably the first place they implement it.
03:25:56.000Yeah, you know, because they're pretty much living in nature, but they're not very happy, a lot of them.
03:26:02.000You know, they drink and there's unemployment and feuds and things, which never really get very far.
03:26:09.000So you might think the more traditionalists wouldn't go for it, but the kids, you know, the kids, because life is rather bleak.
03:26:17.000Well, those reservations were the places where mixed martial arts first thrived in California.
03:26:23.000It was illegal in the state of California, but they would hold their own, they have their own laws, they have their own rules.
03:26:29.000So they would hold these events at these Native American reservations, and we would go to there.
03:26:36.000That was where that kind of saved a lot of those promotions, the early MMA promotions.
03:26:42.000The fact they could put on some fights and it also gave these guys a chance to develop in a state where MMA was completely illegal.
03:26:50.000So Native American reservations have a history of doing things before anybody else was allowed to do them because they can write their own laws.
03:28:28.000You know, I'm not super familiar with that literature.
03:28:31.000What I've read mostly is the UDV has been studied.
03:28:34.000And it's because of their interest in establishing that the use is safe and effective and helpful.
03:28:41.000Well, it'd be really interesting to see the two of them studied, you know, see the contrast between the singing and dancing and the way the other people would do it like they're in sort of a mainstream Christian church.