In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe talks about how video games are actually good for your brain and why you shouldn't be playing them. Also, he talks about a lot of other stuff that's not so cool. This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom and Lumosity, and you get a discount when you enter the referral box at checkout at checkout for more savings. Make sure you enter "Rogan" in the referral boxes at checkout and get $5 off your first purchase when you refer a friend or family member. You can also get a $10 credit when you sign up for a free trial of Lumosity's Lumosity app, which is a game that helps you improve your memory and enhance your brain function. It's like a personalized gym for your mind, but with more fun and a whole lot more fun! And if you don't know what Lumosity is about, you're in for a treat. Just pay the 2.95 postage and you'll get 20% off your entire purchase. Just pay it forward and get 10% off the entire bill plus an additional $5 when you mention it to your friends and family! You'll get $10 off your purchase when they refer you to Lumosity. That's $5 and a FREE trial when you use the discount code: JOERogan. It's $10 and a free shipping when you place an order of $35 or more. Thanks, and a $5 discount when they mention JOE ROGAN. Joespy! We'll send you an ad-free version of the podcast! Thanks for listening, folks! -Jon Rogan. Jon - Jon Rogan: . Jon: , JOB Rogan: , JOB'SZOOD, & JOB SZOLL: JOE'S PODCAST and JOBROGAN: - JOB BOOTY: JOBB'S BECAUSE JOBOB RODAN'S SON: ROBODO AND JOB JOBOSOOD: -- JOB O'S DOGS IS AVAYOOD'S JOB BABY ROBBETTER THAN JOB, JOBO'S MOST IMPORTANT. - ROBBY JOB:
00:00:06.000This episode of The Joe Rogan Experience is brought to you by LegalZoom.
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00:11:42.000It's super easy if you're like a Ray Kurzweil guy and you're super scientific and very technologically in tune and you know what the latest technologies are.
00:11:53.000So if Ray Kurzweil makes a prediction about the future, you've got to take it into consideration.
00:13:12.000And I believe that 2012 was symbolic for an evolution of consciousness that we're going through, that we're finally starting to end this madness as a species and evolve to a more conscious species that's more aware.
00:13:26.000I just know, even since the last time I did your podcast, Joe, just how much awakening Yes.
00:15:16.000A charismatic person who's really good at being slick and bullshitting you knocks on your door and sells you some shit and tries to convince you to buy some shit.
00:15:40.000Yeah, when you're sitting in the living room, you know, just relaxing and then someone knocks on the door telling you everything about your life is wrong and you need instant savings.
00:15:49.000That only happened once in my whole life and it was when I was a little kid and I remember, I think my grandfather was home.
00:15:56.000I think my grandfather was babysitting me and my sister and someone came to the door.
00:16:06.000And they were so insistent, just so foolishly insistent, you know, wanting you to know that if you don't know about this, man, you're going to miss the end of the world.
00:16:15.000They're predicting the end of the world.
00:16:16.000It's just another 2012. It's another...
00:16:19.000You know, when those crazy people in San Diego all put on the Nikes and killed themselves because they thought—the Hale-Bopp comet people, remember that?
00:16:41.000I mean, just based on his looks, he freaked me out, you know?
00:16:44.000Well, he was, you know, I mean, look, if he could, Ram Dass isn't the most normal looking dude either, but, you know, you listen to him and you hear him talk and you realize this guy is about as real as it gets.
00:16:55.000I would love to hear what this Hale-Bopp dude sounded like.
00:17:58.000Have you ever been a part of a story where you absolutely know, when you were working for CNN, was there anything where you're like, I know that that's not how it happened.
00:18:13.000I think that, especially across the media in general, a lot of stories are just dumbed down to the point that you lose the real essence of the story.
00:18:23.000And that happened for me in the situation of Bahrain, I talked about thoroughly on your last show.
00:18:30.000But sometimes I would see them reporting things on air and had watched documentaries that they did.
00:18:36.000And it was a stark contrast, a complete opposite from what I'd seen on the ground.
00:18:41.000What did it feel like the first time you ever saw, like, bullshit?
00:18:45.000The first time you ever knew, like, I'm sure in the beginning, when you first started being a reporter, you're probably very excited about the prospect.
00:18:51.000You're working for CNN. Oh my goodness, you know, this is going to be amazing.
00:18:55.000I'm going to do some hardcore investigative journalism in other countries.
00:18:59.000The first time you saw some bullshit, what was your thought?
00:19:03.000I just was so let down, Joe, because it just was like taking your dreams and just crushing them one story at a time.
00:19:13.000And that's kind of how it happened to me there.
00:19:15.000It wasn't like one big incident happened, but there was a little bit of censorship with each story over and over and over to the point that I realized that the mainstream media was just misleading the people and I was becoming a cog in the machine for And so I'd gotten into journalism to help people and try to change this world.
00:19:34.000But instead, I was actually helping give the station credibility and helping spread what I believe to be lies.
00:19:41.000And that's just a real, just a devastating moment.
00:19:46.000And it caused me a lot of stress over the years, for sure.
00:20:27.000And that's what was happening in the case of CNN. They were taking money from different governments, pro-US governments, worldwide in exchange for producing these documentaries that made the governments look good.
00:21:47.000So much art has been, you know, music, movies, everything has just been dumbed down in order to please these corporations.
00:21:53.000And Molly is really joining, you know, several artists and sticking her neck out there and willing to criticize people through her art and criticize the system.
00:22:02.000Yeah, and sort of expose things that she doesn't like.
00:22:07.000So you write this book, you put the book out, and you did our podcast, and during the podcast we had a conversation about psychedelics.
00:22:17.000I mean, I've had a lot of conversations with people about psychedelics.
00:22:20.000It's a question that people ask all the time, and I'm really fortunate to know A bunch of people know the actual answers to those questions.
00:22:27.000So you and I have this conversation, and you say, okay, let me find out what the fuss is all about.
00:22:34.000And you get on a fucking raft and go down to the jungle.
00:22:47.000The worst I had done, which not even worse because it's medicinal as we know, but it was like smoked a joint of marijuana in college.
00:22:54.000Because I grew up in the Midwest, Joe, and we were fed, talk about propaganda, we were fed propaganda from day one about just say no to drugs.
00:23:02.000And I even remember my grandmother taped this episode of Oprah.
00:23:06.000Where this scientist was on talking about how MDMA eats holes in your brain.
00:23:11.000It's later been debunked and that was proven that the diagrams the scientists showed were just showing cerebral blood flow through the brain and the MDMA isn't actually harmful.
00:23:21.000But I mean, that's the kind of propaganda we were fed constantly.
00:23:24.000And I remember my grandma would tape all these shows on 2020 and all these new shows and bring them over to the house and force me to sit down and watch all this anti-drug propaganda.
00:23:34.000So I associated all drugs as being evil and just bad for you and naughty.
00:23:44.000Yeah, it's funny the way you describe that.
00:23:53.000So now I have to just completely retrain my thought system because I've had 30 years of this propaganda.
00:24:02.000And I've realized, Joe, that we are horribly mistaken in a lot of situations in this country when it comes to labeling things, medicines, drugs.
00:24:10.000And a lot of substances and natural plants that natives have used as medicines for thousands of years, extremely effective medicines, are being called drugs and being labeled as Schedule I substances, and it's just really unfortunate.
00:24:26.000It's unfortunate, and in a lot of ways, the people that have never experienced these things, it's impossible to understand without trying it.
00:24:35.000And I don't blame you for being incredulous.
00:24:38.000I don't blame you for being skeptical, and you should be.
00:24:41.000People who are skeptical are really important because it puts out the debate.
00:24:46.000And whether they're correct or whether they're incorrect, it's always good having a bunch of smart minds looking at it from different directions trying to dissect it.
00:24:54.000And a big part of our dissecting when it comes to our culture is our law system, our legal system.
00:27:15.000This is some medicine that helps human beings evolve.
00:27:19.000And it's been here for thousands of years.
00:27:21.000And it's one of the measures as to how weird we are today.
00:27:25.000One of the reasons why we're so chaotic, why we live on this momentum of this incredibly ignorant past and never stop to analyze it and change it.
00:27:34.000One reason is the lack of these psychedelics.
00:27:37.000It's like we're missing vitamin C and we have scurvy.
00:27:39.000I mean, that's really what our culture is.
00:27:41.000It's mad and loony because it's not looking at itself.
00:27:46.000And I think what's going on is that a lot of us have bottled up trauma throughout our lives, through childhood especially.
00:27:52.000That's when a lot of people get the footprints of trauma on their soul.
00:27:56.000And just through PTSD, car accidents, dangerous situations you're in.
00:28:01.000And you keep this trauma bottled up inside of your body without releasing it.
00:28:05.000And it leads to this collective madness.
00:28:07.000And I think what we're facing as a society is the limbic system of your brain is a part of your brain that deals with emotional processing.
00:28:16.000And that's what psychedelics are fantastic.
00:28:18.000It's actually leading to neurogenesis.
00:28:22.000Restructuring the limbic system, helping people get rid of all of this trauma and really I think that the cause of most of this madness is a collective limbic system malfunction in society right now and I believe that wars, fighting, all of the environmental destruction is just a symptom of this limbic system malfunction and I think if we're able to actually get in to the core of our insanity and all these mental health disorders in society then we'll be able to Really evolve as
00:29:07.000And I think that this weird world that we live in right now where we make these incredibly beneficial things that don't kill anybody illegal, it's starting to come to light now.
00:29:17.000And maybe that's what the 2012 thing was.
00:29:20.000Maybe we just don't realize it because we're a part of it.
00:29:23.000But I think that people are so much more aware of how bizarre and finite this experience is and how many people are running around this experience acting as if everything's normal.
00:30:04.000What you get from being a Christian, what you get from true belief in any god, and true belief in the power of any enlightened, omnipotent being, what you get is...
00:30:20.000This feeling of humility and this feeling of connection to all that is right.
00:30:25.000You know, that's what you get out of the real religious experience.
00:30:29.000And that's what you get from psychedelics.
00:30:55.000It's impossible in psychedelics to escape reality, whereas other drugs, and I think that's, once again, part of the propaganda, whereas other drugs and alcohol make you escape reality, psychedelics actually force you to sit down objectively.
00:31:10.000And analyze your life and solve your problems with a clear, silent mind.
00:31:14.000And for many people, it's the first time in their lives their mind is actually silent, their self-critical part of their brain is silent, and they can sit back and analyze portions of their life and come up with solutions to just make themselves a better person.
00:31:28.000Yeah, that sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?
00:31:32.000Well, I think what's more ridiculous, Joe, is that something that grows on cow poop all over the world and forests all over the world is illegal.
00:31:41.000And something that is manufactured by our own bodies, DMT, is also illegal.
00:31:46.000So you're saying that my pineal gland should be locked up in a cage, huh?
00:32:29.000I don't think anybody can stop you, but if you had a little shot of your own DMT, you would be in possession of a Schedule 1 illegal drug they could put you in a cage for.
00:33:04.000But I did take you seriously that day in the podcast when you told me mushrooms could change the world and it really planted a seed in my head which sprouted this journey that I've been doing around the world investigating these medicines and that never would have happened.
00:33:18.000My life wouldn't be in such the amazing state I feel like it is in now if it hadn't been for you having the gumption to talk about this and start this dialogue as our country because psychedelics have been so taboo especially in the mainstream and I And I think you're really helping to shift that consciousness nationwide.
00:33:49.000I'm shocked that more people don't know about the experiences, and I feel a duty, because I've been there.
00:33:58.000It's just like, if you and your friends were starving to death, and you found some food in the desert, and you're like, Come here, come here, I found the food, I found the food.
00:34:05.000Would you want all this credit for finding that food?
00:34:07.000No, you'd want your friends to have the food.
00:34:54.000We're all a part of this wait what moment.
00:34:55.000You're a big part of this wait what moment.
00:34:57.000You're a big part of it by sticking your neck out about Bahrain and about CNN and about working for a corporation and being honest about it.
00:35:50.000And the wait what moment, the real tipping point is people like you, people like me, people like anybody that's a part of the wait what moment.
00:35:56.000That might be my new t-shirt, the wait what moment.
00:36:56.000Obviously, I'm no economist by any stretch of the imagination, but I agree with his reasoning that any system that doesn't work should be allowed to fail, and there's nothing that's too big to fail.
00:37:06.000But then when we started talking about BP, I think, personally, he was talking about if BP went under, what that would do to everybody, and I said, well, I think what they did is way worse than a company going under.
00:37:19.000What they did was they ruined a part of the ocean, a really big part, for a long time.
00:37:28.000Who knows what kind of devastating effect it had on the marine life, dolphin life.
00:37:33.000If you had to put all the death that was caused, all the destruction that was caused, all the people that were getting sick trying to clean that place up, if you had to really put a number on it, of course they shouldn't be around anymore.
00:37:43.000But his argument was that BP was too big to fail.
00:38:13.000It was so horrific that month of covering that.
00:38:17.000I've even had to, you know, through my psychedelic experiences, I've even processed some of those implicit memories, these horrific memories of that spill that were stuck in the back of my subconscious.
00:38:29.000Yeah, and people could say, oh, she's being melodramatic.
00:38:38.000The dirty water fucked with your brain?
00:38:40.000But it's got to be a weird moment as a reporter, being one of the first few people that's allowed to sort of go out there in boats and experience it and report on it.
00:38:49.000You know, you got a pretty big responsibility.
00:38:52.000You're getting to see some shit that people, most people are not going to go to it.
00:38:57.000Most people in this country that are experiencing it are experiencing it through you or through someone like you that's there reporting on it.
00:39:05.000That and also seeing the destruction man can cause on this earth firsthand was just really, it just gives you that kind of feeling because when you look out and as far as you can see, you just see oil and crap and this beautiful ocean just ruined like that.
00:39:20.000I mean, it just took a matter of days.
00:39:25.000We really do have the capability to completely destroy this planet and it gives you, especially journalistically, an extra sense to make sure to cover more environmental issues and investigate these corporations because when left to their own devices, you see what happens.
00:39:40.000Yeah, you can't allow something that lives off profit to not have oversight.
00:40:04.000I mean, who knows how many people have disappeared over the year through the reasons.
00:40:09.000I mean, there's probably, well, I don't know if there's a running number because there's probably a few of them that just they got away with.
00:40:18.000I mean, if they're doing it for this long, getting rid of people to get in the way of profit, of course people have done that.
00:40:25.000That's the weird thing that people don't want to, you know, a lot of folks, the no-nonsense type folks, I categorize certain types of skeptics and there's some no-nonsense skeptics that they don't even realize that they're sort of almost in a religion and their religion is debunking everything.
00:41:34.000And that's even a situation I had when I was at CNN. A lot of people had known that lies were going on air and that this was happening, but they continued to work there for money.
00:41:47.000Like I said, sometimes money comes first.
00:42:01.000And if money truly does come first, maybe that will be a big part of the shift.
00:42:06.000Maybe the people insisting on their freedom are one part of it, but then along the way, the money people get co-opted as well, because they become addicted to that marijuana money, and they won't let the government shut off the pipe.
00:42:53.000And so I remember you telling me, I had written you after the podcast about mushrooms because I looked up psilocybin and I could not believe all the lies we've been fed about magic mushrooms.
00:43:04.000I mean, psilocybin is single-handedly one of the most Incredible healing chemicals for the brain.
00:43:10.000Some people call it 30 years of therapy in one night.
00:43:13.000And so I looked up psilocybin and then I'd written you and you'd recommended trying ayahuasca.
00:43:19.000And so I kind of kept that in the back of my mind.
00:43:21.000And then when I got to this point in the spring where I felt like I was having so much anxiety, constant butterflies in my stomach, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat.
00:43:32.000It was like I was in an anxiety purgatory.
00:43:36.000And something in my brain, I just remembered that email.
00:43:39.000And I remember reading all this positive research and studies about ayahuasca and other psychedelics helping with anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders.
00:43:49.000And I just knew I had to go down to the jungle.
00:43:55.000I just bought a ticket and went down two days later because I was so out of it at the time that I didn't even have time to pack.
00:44:03.000I remember pulling into Los Angeles International Airport at parking lot C, and I don't even know how I found my way to the airport.
00:44:10.000It was just like this magnet was drawing me to the jungle.
00:44:14.000And because I was so anxious and had so much adrenaline rushing and so many flashbacks happening that it was really hard to even drive.
00:44:24.000And I was sitting in the parking lot seat and I'm in the back of my car and I'm packing this backpack I find in my trunk and I'm finding maybe a dirty sock under the seat and oh wait I'm headed to the jungle I think I need a flashlight so I went into my glove box and I found this like little menu reader that senior citizens get that my grandma ordered for me on QVC. And threw that in my bag and just grabbed this backpack and was standing there waiting for the bus show.
00:44:50.000And I remember looking up at this guy thinking, oh my God, if there's a rock bottom in life, I've hit it.
00:44:58.000And just thinking that there's no way out.
00:45:03.000Ayahuasca, I mean, this is my last hope.
00:45:06.000And so I get on the plane and I'm heading down there and just, you know, looking over the jungle.
00:45:37.000It's like the medicine telling you it can heal you.
00:45:41.000And then we landed and I remember I had my sunglasses on still because I was just a mess.
00:45:51.000And I remember seeing this guy sitting behind me and he kept looking through the airplane seats at me and I was like, what is this creep doing?
00:45:57.000Like, I must look like shit because he will not quit looking at me.
00:46:01.000And right when we get up, he comes up, he's like, are you Amber Lyon?
00:46:09.000Like the only time in my life where I don't want to be recognized, where I want to completely disappear from the world, this guy recognizes me.
00:46:56.000And so we flew into Iquitos, and then it was me and five guys, and they were all going to the same center.
00:47:04.000So I was really relieved because I was like, okay, at least I know these guys, and they seem fairly trustworthy.
00:47:10.000And then we got on a boat and traveled two hours up the Amazon and just entered in this area of forest where you just saw this little hut, and it was the name of this healing center.
00:48:00.000The whole thing from grabbing dirty socks and just throwing them in your bag, whatever you got, flashlight, running, leaving your car behind.
00:48:09.000And then I had to, you know, now that a couple people had recognized me, I had to kind of try to put myself together when I really wanted to just lay back and just be.
00:48:18.000And then at that point I had to, I was like, I can't let these people know, like, why I'm really here.
00:48:24.000You know, I'm just here as a journalist.
00:48:26.000I'm just here to write about these medicines.
00:48:30.000And really, I was putting on this face that everything was all good and I was here journalistically, but really inside I was just torn to shreds and really hoping to God that this medicine was going to work.
00:48:45.000Well, that's where the skeptic would come in and say, well, you have to realize this is a placebo effect.
00:48:51.000The psychosomatic nature of your incident led you to have a very stressful reaction to was essentially just hallucinations.
00:48:59.000And you've connected all this spiritual mumbo jumbo woo woo bullshit to you tripping your balls off.
00:49:06.000Well, I'd say the science disagrees with them, and then thousands and thousands of anecdotes.
00:49:10.000There's not a lot of scientific research, so you have to also go with the anecdotes, which I think are just as powerful.
00:49:15.000But the science actually shows that when you go to these ayahuasca churches in Brazil, like the UDV or Santo Dame Church, the members of these churches who drink ayahuasca regularly actually have...
00:49:26.000Improved levels of serotonin in their brain.
00:49:29.000So a lot of these healers believe it actually restructures your serotonergic system which allows you to part with this depression and anxiety.
00:49:38.000It's also, some shamans I've dealt with say that what the ayahuasca does is it gets in your soul and gets rid of these dark energies and painful events that have been holding you back and that might manifest themselves in anxiety or depression or in bodily pain.
00:49:55.000And so if you look at that research, there are thousands of anecdotes of people saying, including myself, saying that this medicine worked for them.
00:50:24.000So your connections that you've made in your mind, it resets them.
00:50:28.000And then oftentimes that is how we react to things is based on our connections.
00:50:31.000You know, our past can really completely flavor our future because it changes the way you behave and the way you interact with people.
00:50:39.000And when you do that, you change the nature of the interactions that you have with people.
00:50:43.000You change the directions that things are going to go in.
00:50:46.000I mean, many people, if you put them in one situation, no fight takes place.
00:50:51.000But many other people, you put them in the exact same situation and it turns into murder.
00:50:55.000I mean, a lot of it is our connections to what we've made in our life.
00:51:03.000And we don't realize how much those sort of hold us back until a psychedelic experience.
00:51:08.000And to the naysayer people, like, you're very important.
00:51:12.000You know, the skeptical people that say, oh, it's just hallucinations, you're attaching all this shit to it.
00:51:16.000This is what you have to realize, and I've said this so many times, I don't even want to hear myself say it again, but it's really important.
00:51:22.000Whether or not it's a hallucination, whether or not it's all in your imagination, or whether or not you are really having an experience where you're meeting divine wisdom and it's giving you advice and love and showing you a new way.
00:51:34.000Whichever one of those it is, it's the exact same experience.
00:51:39.000You're having the exact same experience.
00:51:41.000So it doesn't matter if you choose to look at it one way that it's a hallucination, it's a product of your imagination, or if you choose to look at it the other way and say, oh my god, I'm meeting the divine wisdom of the universe, and now I'm humbled by this and I'm going to be a better person because of it.
00:52:30.000That's the ego fighting back and resisting entering that dimension whatsoever.
00:52:35.000If you go there and then you think it's nonsense, then we should talk.
00:52:39.000Because I've got to know what your thought process on it is.
00:52:42.000Because everyone that I know that's had, especially the DMT experience, which have you done that yet?
00:52:48.000No, but I had an ayahuasca experience that was very similar to what people have described having when they smoked DMT. I'd been fasting for five days and had this Cambo frog medicine, which really detoxifies you.
00:53:00.000So I was ready just to absorb the DMT and I went where a lot of people have described with smoking DMT on the ayahuasca.
00:53:09.000Well, for folks who don't know, ayahuasca and DMT essentially are the same drug.
00:53:13.000It's just that DMT is not orally active because your body produces something called monoamine oxidase, which breaks down dimethyltryptamine in an oral form.
00:53:23.000So they figured out how to do something where they have the plant.
00:53:27.000One plant has DMT in it, and another plant has harmine, which is a natural MAO inhibitor.
00:53:35.000And they mix the two of them together and break it down.
00:53:38.000No one knows how they figured out how to do this either.
00:53:40.000This has been done for thousands and thousands of years.
00:53:43.000The fact that in the hundred plus thousand plants, they chose these two as the most effective.
00:53:49.000And they use different ones in other cultures too, don't they?
00:53:52.000Different types of plants that have the same sort of ingredients, like different...
00:53:57.000Plants that are very rich in DMT and plants that are very rich in harmin or something similar.
00:54:03.000Yeah, you can mix different types of leaves as long as they have DMT with the ayahuasca because what the ayahuasca does is just help your body absorb that DMT. So particularly where I went, they used chacruna leaves and mixed that with the ayahuasca that they had growing on the ground.
00:54:19.000So we actually got to watch them make it, which was pretty exciting.
00:54:59.000Unless you've actually had a real psychedelic experience and then you know any of them, whether it's a strong mushroom experience or whatever it is, when you realize, like, oh, okay, no one knows what the hell's going on.
00:55:10.000Like, this shit might very well be calling you.
00:56:17.000Because you're under the influence of the ayahuasca.
00:56:21.000Oh, so you were in the middle of tripping and he touched you?
00:56:24.000Yeah, so to tell you the whole story, so this was our first night really doing the medicine.
00:56:30.000The night before, they had just given us just a little bit so we could kind of get used to the creepiness because the whole thing is creepy.
00:56:36.000You're in this yurt in the middle of the jungle laying on these yoga mats.
00:56:40.000You have this huge bucket next to you just to take out.
00:56:43.000I mean, imagine that, Joe, going into that each night.
00:57:06.000So I was kind of in the front of the circle and you see there's about 12 people around this yurt-esque area.
00:57:13.000And with the bucket and the vomiting, they actually call it getting well because you're pulling out all your toxins and all this negative dark energy that Western medicine tends to ignore.
00:57:25.000The ayahuasca is actually getting to the bottom of the core of that.
00:57:28.000So they consider this violent vomiting and some people out the other end to be really healing.
00:59:34.000They had to have armed guards outside and guards watching people because people would go and walk away into the jungle, and you don't want to get lost in that state.
00:59:42.000So that was something that people were really cognizant of, and so that's why a lot of people went into the bathroom that was there.
00:59:50.000But, yeah, it was really powerful, Joe.
01:00:19.000It was almost like the ayahuasca was trying to get to know who I was.
01:00:23.000And so I saw pictures of me pop up on this 3D timeline from when I was 12, 10, then when I was born, and then a photo of my parents before they conceived me.
01:00:32.000And then all of a sudden on this big cement wall, almost like the wall behind you, it spray painted the words anxiety really, really big.
01:00:42.000And right then the medicine was telling me that it had figured out what was wrong with me.
01:01:10.000And the ayahuasca clearly told me, your problem is anxiety.
01:01:14.000And then right then, I laid back and I felt it crawling through my veins and up into my head.
01:01:20.000And it almost felt like a fizzing in my head.
01:01:23.000And at that point, it was telling me, lay back, we're going to take care of this.
01:01:27.000And I felt like there were, and this is a common vision, that there were all of these like thousands and thousands of little beings or elves on my body, and they were literally going through my cells one by one and reshaping them and perfecting them.
01:01:43.000And the medicine, above all, just told me to just lay back and let it work.
01:01:49.000And then I laid there for probably about an hour and then had a really powerful vision after that of this being, this fairy-type thing coming up to me and then sucking out this dark energy.
01:02:06.000And I saw all of this energy flowing out of my body, these dark, I guess you'd call them spirits, Of people who I'd interviewed over the years.
01:02:16.000And what it was telling me was that as a journalist, I'd been absorbing all of this pain and had it just stored in my body.
01:02:24.000And that was one of the things that was manifesting itself in the post-traumatic stress disorder.
01:02:28.000And so it was literally just sucking out all of this dark energy that was shaped in the forms of people I'd interviewed and their faces over the years.
01:02:50.000And I realized too, what it had told me is that like journalistically, some journalists, and this is true with doctors and other people who deal with or are faced with trauma a lot, is that some journalists are able to put up a brick wall and you kind of do your story and then you move on.
01:03:07.000But for me to really understand what I was reporting on, I had to almost become the people I was interviewing to really feel their pain, to understand who was telling the truth, what they were going through.
01:03:19.000And that happened to me so many times using submersion journalism.
01:03:22.000But I didn't realize at the same time I was also absorbing a lot of their pain.
01:03:27.000Especially I'd done a lot of stories on sex trafficking, child sex trafficking, a lot of stories on drug addiction, oxycodone, oxycontin addiction.
01:03:34.000And when I'd sit with these people and watch them shoot up oxycontin pills, I was absorbing that pain because I would sit and intensely watch them to try to feel why are they doing what they're doing.
01:03:46.000And so all of this was just stored in my body and the ayahuasca was taking it out.
01:03:54.000That seems like it would be really beneficial for soldiers.
01:03:58.000Yes, there are soldiers who've gone down.
01:04:01.000Some scientists have actually followed them down into the jungle and all 12 of them that went came back reporting improved symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
01:04:11.000Because what ayahuasca is really good at doing, the way to cure post-traumatic stress disorder is you really need to get into your subconscious where you have these memories locked in there that you don't even remember you remember.
01:04:20.000And you need to be able to process them with a sound mind To detach the fear that's associated with those memories.
01:04:27.000So that next time anything that triggers that memory comes up, you're not flooded with fear.
01:04:32.000So for example, anytime a soldier might hear a loud noise, it reminds them of the time they were shot at in a tank.
01:04:38.000And that's why they face this adrenaline rush or a panic attack.
01:04:53.000And so for me it was just a matter of processing those memories and that's what the ayahuasca is so beautiful at doing.
01:05:00.000I had stuff come up that I didn't even remember I remembered and that had been trapped in there causing me this anxiety for the majority of my life.
01:05:11.000And the ayahuasca was key to helping me access those.
01:06:04.000And the ayahuasca takes control and just starts working its magic on you and really getting in there and healing you, whether you like it or not.
01:06:13.000And for some people, it's terrifying because I've witnessed people screaming and running out into the lawn in a child's pose saying, God, make this stop!
01:06:23.000Because for some people, really getting in there and seeing what they're really about because they've been living...
01:06:28.000This personality, this mask their whole lives, they've not been their true selves as a coping mechanism to deal with society.
01:06:34.000When they're finally faced with the mirror, held up, magnifying your true self, times 40, they can't handle it.
01:06:42.000But for me personally, I found it to be extremely therapeutic because I had so much chaos going on in my head that I couldn't figure out what was even at the root of that.
01:06:51.000And the ayahuasca allowed me to really figure out what was causing my problems.
01:06:57.000Well, the idea that a drug experience could change based on your intent going into it seems for a lot of people preposterous.
01:07:05.000But when you take into account what these drugs are doing, essentially what you're trying to do when you have an ayahuasca experience, It has a big impact on what kind of experience that you actually have.
01:07:19.000Because if you try to fight it in any way, if you try to wrestle with it in any way, if you try to resist and, no, no, that's not what I'm like.
01:08:53.000So I go down there, and after you recommended for me to do ayahuasca, I'm sitting at the table one time, Joe, and people are like, well, why are you down here?
01:09:01.000I'm like, oh, well, a good friend of mine had suggested to go, and I had mentioned your name, and they're like, but Joe, Joe's never done ayahuasca.
01:09:51.000But I do think, too, if you don't actually go down there with an intent for healing, then it may not work, which happened to someone who, one of my roommates in the house, he went down wanting to just see snakes and other things he'd heard about.
01:10:32.000He's smoking, and everybody else gets blown through the center of the universe and sees complex patterns made out of love and understanding that, you know, see through your soul, but they don't experience anything.
01:11:09.000You need to have that mindset of wanting healing and wanting to accept the medicine.
01:11:13.000Or like you said, Joe, things can go pretty wrong.
01:11:17.000I wonder if there's like a pharmacological reason or a biological reason why some people don't, maybe they're missing some sort of expression of a gene or something like that that doesn't allow them to have the experience?
01:11:29.000Or potentially maybe the calcification of pineal glands.
01:11:33.000I don't know if that affects it, but that just has been something I've been reading about, you know, the water tends to cause that and other things.
01:11:40.000I mean, how much real work has been done on that?
01:11:42.000The problem is you go to these websites, then you read, you know, Bigfoot read my mind, and you go, oh, okay, Bigfoot read your mind, and the calcification of the pineal gland.
01:11:51.000For the longest time, it was a massive source of debate, in fact, the debate about whether or not the pineal gland actually even had DMT in it.
01:12:00.000And Rick Strassman, who's a friend of mine and a really, really interesting, cool guy, who wrote the spirit molecule, DMT, the spirit molecule, he did all those studies at the University of New Mexico, and they had only anecdotal evidence that it was produced by the pineal gland.
01:12:16.000They knew it was produced by the liver and the lungs, but the actual The third eye of Eastern mysticism, the pineal gland, which in certain reptiles actually has a retina and a lens.
01:12:25.000It's actually an eyeball in certain reptiles.
01:12:28.000It's really fucking crazy that this gland, like the third eye, there's a reason why it exists in all these ancient depictions of enlightenment.
01:12:37.000That is literally where DMT is processed.
01:12:40.000And so recently, just really recently, Strassman's Cottonwood Research Center...
01:12:46.000They figured out that they could observe it in live rats.
01:12:51.000So now they know for a fact that the pineal gland in live rats produces DMT. So it's very, very, very likely that the same thing is going on with human beings.
01:13:01.000And what happened to you when you smoked DMT? I've mostly stuck to ayahuasca and mushrooms.
01:13:24.000DMT seems to allow you to keep who you are, and DMT allows you to examine the culture from some sort of a new realm of It doesn't take you away from the very world that you live in.
01:18:11.000This pure love without any context at all.
01:18:14.000And just a series of beautiful, fantastic visions that you're trying to grab, you're trying to hold onto, but you can't.
01:18:25.000The way I describe it is like standing in the middle of a river of fish that are going a thousand miles an hour, and you're just trying to grab them, and there's no way.
01:18:34.000But you recognize what you're seeing when you're seeing it, but you can't even hold onto it because a new one's coming.
01:18:39.000And a new one is so much more crazy than the one you just saw, and then boom, a new one's there.
01:18:43.000And they're infinite, and they never end.
01:18:45.000They keep going until the drug wears off.
01:18:47.000And as the drug wears off, there was, you know, like, the love you thing was still going on, but there was also, like, a lot of, we'll see you later.
01:19:37.000You as you, you're not allowed to keep.
01:19:39.000You keep it with DMT. You as you, you don't keep with 5-MEO. You as you goes away and you enter to the center of everything.
01:19:48.000You become a part of the very fiber of the universe.
01:19:51.000You look at the universe from a different perspective.
01:19:54.000The perspective that you're at right now is a multi-celled organism, host to millions and billions, in fact, of other multi-celled organisms.
01:20:02.000You're just getting through life, getting in your car, driving around.
01:20:06.000You look at it through the energy of the cell itself.
01:20:31.000Like, you're seeing the world not through the eyes of a mammal, not through the eyes of a fish, not through the eyes of life, not through the eyes of anything with biology, not through the eyes of anything that has any instincts to stay alive, through the eyes of something that realizes it's a part of everything, and that there's no bottom,
01:21:33.000And then when I had to come back, I had to sort of re-put together my personality.
01:21:38.000Re-put together my position in the world as far as what my responsibilities are, or what is expected of me, or what I'm supposed to be doing on Monday morning.
01:21:46.000I had to re-put that all together because I didn't exist for 15, 20 minutes, whatever it was.
01:21:51.000Probably 15. And then sort of examine how preposterous I am.
01:22:48.000He knows that people love the way he talks, so he's really good at singing a song with his words.
01:22:54.000And to get off that, to try to look at something off that trip, the trip of singing a song with your words, is really hard.
01:23:04.000And DMT makes that song look stupid as fuck.
01:23:08.000Because DMT lets you know, like, I get it, I get it.
01:23:11.000You think that in the context of humanity and civilization and your interpersonal relationships that you have with other beings, that what you're saying is important.
01:23:35.000Whatever you're doing that's causing you anxiety, whatever you're doing that's causing you too much objective thinking, too much interviewing yourself and going over the thoughts and like, why am I doing that?
01:24:51.000One of the healers I work with has been using it for 18 years, and he says, still, every time he does it, it's different, and it completely opens his mind to, he still can't figure it out, and it's been 18 years.
01:25:05.000And I think something else ayahuasca is good for when you look through a therapeutic or medical scope, which is kind of similar to what you had in your DMT experience, is that it does take away a lot of the fear of life and the fear of dying.
01:25:17.000And I think that's something too that I had, and most people do have, a fear of death.
01:25:22.000And one time I had ayahuasca and I hadn't eaten in five days, so I was really ready to absorb the medicine.
01:25:30.000And right after drinking it, Joe, I started feeling like I was dying.
01:25:34.000And I started thinking, oh my gosh, has anyone died from ayahuasca?
01:25:37.000Because just in my brain it was telling me, you're dying.
01:25:40.000And I started having trouble breathing.
01:25:42.000And I was remembering that if I didn't remember to breathe, I wouldn't breathe.
01:25:46.000And then the feeling got so intense that I remember looking over at my boyfriend and thinking how sad it was that I'd never see him again.
01:25:54.000And at that point I started seeing sacred geometry.
01:25:58.000And then I literally left my body and became this vibration.
01:26:02.000And I looked back at my body thinking, it's so sad I couldn't hold on to that body.
01:26:07.000You know, what's wrong with me that everyone in this room is able to stay alive and I had to die?
01:26:11.000So how many trips had you gone on before this had happened?
01:26:26.000So I went down to the Amazon, then I've traveled the world the past year researching mushrooms, and then when I was in Indonesia, I was given the opportunity to be included in an ayahuasca experience.
01:26:37.000This was a couple months ago, and this is when this happened.
01:26:41.000I've talked to people that have done ayahuasca with things that have come from the Middle East, different plants that have come from the Middle East.
01:26:50.000They've mixed it, and they've seen very different imagery than the imagery that people report seeing from the jungles of Peru and Brazil.
01:27:01.000McKenna's idea was that It might have been someone else's idea that he had talked about in a speech.
01:27:07.000He believed that when you had a psychedelic experience, you were also participating in all the various trips that everyone else had done with that psychedelic essentially throughout history.
01:27:20.000And that was one of the reasons why fairly recent drugs had an empty feeling.
01:27:25.000He would talk about ketamine, and he said that ketamine would feel like you were in an office building that was new but nobody had moved into yet.
01:27:34.000You know, it'd be, like, walking around, there's no furniture, like, this is bizarre.
01:27:37.000He's like, that was the experience that he had had with ketamine, whereas with psilocybin, he would have these experiences that were just intensely rich with all this sacred imagery that has been You know, observed in artwork and at various cultures, like, they have,
01:27:53.000like, this interchangeable imagery that may have, like, very similar psychedelic consumptions.
01:27:57.000And that's what you're seeing, you know, when you're seeing jaguars and black people and snakes when you do the ayahuasca and where you do the ayahuasca from the South American ayahuasca.
01:28:08.000But when you would do the ayahuasca that was made with similar ingredients on the other parts of the world, you have different visions.
01:28:35.000Sometimes ayahuasca is more of a ladder to bring you to this higher intelligence to feed you knowledge.
01:28:42.000And so I wasn't having any animalistic visions or really sacred geometry.
01:28:48.000I just became, flew out of my body and became this vibration.
01:28:51.000And it told me clearly, like you said, I don't know if it was a voice or writing or what, but this huge intense power told me that death doesn't exist.
01:29:23.000Like, how ridiculous it is that man thinks you actually die.
01:29:28.000And then I was just taken through the universe and I just was flying down this vortex and I saw Earth and I saw all the fighting and wars and all the negativity that I'd focused on for all these years.
01:29:40.000And I saw how petty that was compared to this huge, massive force that was communicating with me, whether it be God or intelligent beings or just something made up in my head.
01:29:56.000And I compared that to all the fighting and the negativity, and it just left a permanent footprint on my brain that I need to, you know, whatever this force, this message is so much more important than what I've been focusing on on Earth, especially in my career.
01:30:12.000And it started giving me this message of love and healing, and that we really need to get in We're good to go.
01:30:39.000It just was, I was shown DNA, and I was shown that it was DNA mixing.
01:30:44.000And I had not read any theories or anything else on this, but I was shown DNA taken from other areas of the universe mixed with DNA on Earth, and then that's how man was created as part of...
01:32:11.000I mean, isn't an asteroid a spaceship?
01:32:12.000It's a spaceship that carries something from, like, if some DNA from something came here on an asteroid and collided with something else and then created a person, why is that so weird?
01:32:53.000But the real being me, my soul, will continue on.
01:32:57.000And that's just been a recurring theme even, especially on the mushrooms.
01:33:01.000They constantly try to tell me that lesson because I think a lot of my anxiety came from a fear of death.
01:33:07.000Well, it's kind of weird because in order to do what we do, in order to be a person, in order to have a job, in order to write your name down when you sign, Amber Lyon, this is what represents me.
01:34:05.000If you look at the John Hopkins studies, they found that 61% of people who were given psilocybin considered it to be the single most spiritual event of their life.
01:34:14.000Also, you even look at Bill Wilson, who founded Alcoholics Anonymous.
01:34:19.000He believed that a lot of people don't know this, but he used LSD to cure chronic depression.
01:34:24.000He believed that LSD could actually, should be one of the 12 steps and could lead people to that spiritual awakening, which would then allow them to acknowledge a greater power and continue in their healing.
01:34:40.000And it's so sad, Joe, because the more I've been researching this, the more I realize how much amazing research is out there showing how effective psychedelics are for curing anxiety, depression, addiction, all these things so many people are suffering from.
01:34:52.000And we've known since the 1950s that LSD had a 45% success rate at curing alcoholism.
01:34:59.000I mean, if you look at AA... There's a study showing there are not even any studies to show how effective LSD is.
01:35:06.000Some people say AA is in curing alcoholism.
01:35:10.000Some people say it's maybe 5% effective.
01:35:12.000So you have these substances out there that we've known for decades that are extremely healing.
01:36:03.000And especially with the OxyContin addiction, which is just consuming our nation.
01:36:09.000I think one of my last stories I did at CNN are on babies now being born addicted to OxyContin and painkillers, which was really my, holy shit, what has happened to us as a society moment.
01:36:21.000So they're sick like right out of the bat?
01:36:24.000Yeah, they're going through withdrawal once they're born because the mom can't quit using the oxycodone while she's pregnant because the baby could die in utero from withdrawal.
01:36:34.000Then these babies, I was standing in a NICU at East Tennessee Children's Hospital.
01:36:39.000In a NICU, they've literally, half the babies there are being born addicted to these painkillers.
01:36:44.000This is something our society is not discussing.
01:36:47.000And I watched as they brought this baby in, and this poor baby was, its skin was marbled, and it was just shaking and screaming and crying in intense pain, just like a grown-up would, because this baby was going through opioid withdrawal,
01:37:02.000and they had to instantly give the baby morphine, and it takes sometimes 30 days for them to overcome the painful symptoms.
01:37:09.000We had a doctor on Dr. Carl Hart yesterday who is a drug and addictions expert, a guy who's worked for over 20 years on various tests and various substance and abuse substances and analyzing what the root of all these experiences are.
01:37:28.000The way he explained it was really fascinating.
01:37:30.000He was saying that even when you have a hangover, that what the hangover is, is an alcohol withdrawal.
01:37:38.000It's not just dehydration, not just your body, like, being sick.
01:37:41.000It's the compensatory mechanisms that are present in your mind to counteract the alcohol.
01:37:46.000When the alcohol's gone, it's a withdrawal.
01:37:50.000Like, you go into, like, that's what a hangover is.
01:37:52.000And that whenever someone has an addiction, whether it's an addiction to opiates or whatever it is, that's what they're experiencing.
01:38:00.000It's the compensatory mechanisms fire up in order to process the opiates.
01:38:04.000And then when they're gone, then you're sick.
01:38:08.000But the way he was describing it was really fascinating.
01:38:11.000He was saying that it's really like, I'm sure it's way worse for a fucking baby, obviously, but for a person, it's essentially like having a bad flu.
01:38:18.000And if you've gone through the flu, you've gone through what it feels like to have withdrawal to heroin.
01:38:24.000Which I thought was really fascinating.
01:38:25.000It's like a lot of it is misconceptions, misconceptions and disinformation when it comes to withdrawals from drugs and how difficult they are to withdraw from.
01:38:46.000And I think that's why ibogaine is so effective.
01:38:48.000I think some people think it's maybe around 90% effective success rate because they don't experience withdrawal symptoms.
01:38:55.000I think that's why so many people are scared, or addicts I've spoken to, especially who are addicted to these prescription pills, is they're so scared to go through those withdrawal symptoms.
01:39:04.000And what even the young man who discovered ibogaine, he actually went to try it because he thought he could get stoned.
01:39:31.000You're in that trip for about 36 hours for some time.
01:39:34.000He realized he no longer craved the heroin.
01:39:37.000So then he went and got all of his other junkie friends and started giving them ibogaine and then it just spread across the world.
01:39:44.000Now we're seeing centers open up in Mexico and unfortunately it's still illegal in the United States even though we have a horrific pill addiction, but you can access ibogaine centers in Canada and Mexico, even the Bahamas.
01:40:30.000Instant, like, recognition of the patterns.
01:40:33.000And then an instant calling to be involved in this and to help other people and to find friends that he knew that had similar issues and say, listen, you've got to trust me on this.
01:40:44.000Once you've seen the truth of how powerful psychedelics are, and you're able to dispel all the propaganda with this truth that doesn't have a shelf life that's going to come out, just like, you know, now marijuana, everyone's finally realizing how medicinal it is.
01:40:57.000Now it's just starting to happen again with psychedelics.
01:41:00.000And when you've personally realized this truth, and this is something I'm going through now, And you see so many people around the country suffering, whether it be from depression, anxiety, or from post-traumatic stress disorder.
01:41:13.00022 soldiers a day in the United States kill themselves from it.
01:41:33.000One of the things that we were talking about earlier, that we are in some sort of a new era, is that the information is being spread virally on things like this.
01:41:44.000These discussions are happening right now during lunchtime at schools, during...
01:41:52.000People are talking about these sort of things that they're realizing, and they're talking about things that they heard, talking about things that they've read or videos that they've watched or what have you, and it's spreading now, and it's spreading in a way that just really never did before.
01:42:43.000So the more information you have access to, for me personally, because I'm just waking up to all of this within the past year or so, the more you realize just how ridiculous the whole system is and it's just not in the favor of healing and the people.
01:42:57.000Yeah, most people don't realize way more people die from alcohol than do from even prescription drugs.
01:43:25.000Stephen King actually said that when he quit smoking, it affected that.
01:43:29.000Yeah, I used to smoke occasionally when I'd write.
01:43:32.000Does the ayahuasca, when he's blowing the tobacco smoke on you, what is the role that the nicotine and the tobacco smoke has on the ayahuasca trip?
01:44:12.000I wonder if they're really blowing out bad spirits or they're just tricking you, you know, like tricking your mind to think it's blowing out bad spirits so it eliminates the fear.
01:44:28.000Yeah, so I went down, and unfortunately now, new organizations are starting to really help rate ayahuasca centers, and this is why I'm starting the website I'm starting as well, because there's not a lot out there when it comes to advising you where to go as far as picking a center.
01:44:45.000I think now there's a new site called ayahadvisor.org, like TripAdvisor.
01:44:51.000So I went down to this center, and I didn't know that the shaman who I had gone to I had other accusations against him.
01:45:00.000During the ceremony, while I was deep in this really spiritual, amazing trip, I noticed him coming up to me and blowing the Agua Florida on me, which is normal.
01:45:11.000It's like the holy water for the shamans.
01:45:25.000And then kept just rubbing back and forth.
01:45:27.000And I thought that, okay, maybe is that part of healing the bad spirits?
01:45:32.000Did he rub your actual breasts or around your breasts?
01:45:35.000He rubbed like he was clearly touching.
01:45:38.000I mean, he made it try to seem like he was going around the outside, but he was clearly pushing down on my breasts to the point I'm in the middle taking the most intense psychedelic on earth, and I kind of was like, whoa!
01:47:07.000Well, either way, whatever happened, it's weird because people tend to say that the spirits of the jungle kind of take care of anything that comes in and tries to use the medicine the wrong way.
01:47:17.000And oddly enough, he died around Christmas time.
01:47:21.000He fell off the third floor of his home he'd built in the jungle and hit his head and passed away.
01:47:27.000And when I heard that, because I had heard other stories of shamans who've misused the medicine and they've kind of had weird fates as well, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if the spirits kind of just...
01:47:39.000Or maybe some dude whose dick he grabbed threw him off the fucking window.
01:47:46.000That's the sad thing with the medicines is they're some of the most profound compounds on earth for healing.
01:47:50.000But I think something I've noticed too in traveling the world, Joe, is that some people have taken advantage of them and claimed to be healers.
01:48:00.000The only healer, the main healer, is the actual psychedelic.
01:48:03.000All you need to do is take that psychedelic, go be with yourself, and it will do the healing.
01:48:08.000You don't need a healer, per se, and you just have to be very cautious because people coming in with the wrong intentions, maybe just to make money, are opening up centers.
01:48:19.000Yeah, I've talked to quite a few people that claim to be a healer, and I just think that the idea is so preposterous.
01:48:27.000A, it's a very preposterous idea that someone was gifted with these magic powers.
01:48:32.000And B, thinking that you are is so fucking delusional that it is absolutely contrary to the spirit of psychedelic exploration in the first place.
01:48:43.000Thinking you're the one person that has this unique gift and you can heal people...
01:49:00.000And then in a sort of a discreet conversation, he revealed to me that if he convinces people that they're healing, that that does in fact start the healing.
01:49:37.000The power is in the psychedelic medicine.
01:49:39.000And the most amazing healer I met along the way was this man in Oaxaca, Mexico.
01:49:44.000I went there to investigate how the Mazatecs have been using mushrooms medicinally for thousands of years because it kind of contradicts everything we've been told about magic mushrooms, that they're actually a medicine there.
01:49:54.000And the healer, actually what he would do, would just bring people in.
01:49:59.000He would make the tea Give you the mushrooms and then say, okay, here's my property.
01:50:03.000Go sit wherever you want and be one with the mushrooms and the mushrooms will do the healing.
01:50:09.000And to me that was so profound because we had run into on this journey so many phonies who wanted $400 for a ceremony or, you know, their hands are the hands of God with these psychedelics.
01:50:26.000You don't need someone else to bring you there.
01:50:29.000Well, it seems like, and it's becoming more and more popular over the last few years, the demand for it is so high, there's got to be a lot of unscrupulous people that are sort of capitalizing on that demand.
01:50:39.000And people who never were shamans, they just figure out the recipe, cook it up, start serving people and squeezing tits.
01:50:46.000They're like, this is the best job ever!
01:51:13.000But I mean, it's almost more important than being a PhD.
01:51:17.000I mean, the ability to accurately describe what happens in those dimensions to someone who has an experience that is impossible.
01:51:26.000The idea behind what you're experiencing is so fantastic that...
01:51:31.000Any words to describe it are going to fall short.
01:51:34.000So the guy who could administer that, the function of that person in your society, in your culture, is uniquely important in a really intense way.
01:51:42.000Just as important as someone who's a doctor.
01:51:44.000Just as important as someone who's a teacher.
01:51:47.000Just as important as any important aspect of our community that we consider to be a cornerstone, whether it's medical or legal or any of those things.
01:51:54.000Having someone who can give you that experience is a huge, that's a huge role.
01:52:07.000I had lost faith almost, Joe, and then I met some incredible, real ayahuasqueros, an ayahuasquera, a woman.
01:52:16.000Who's been doing it for years and they were so profoundly helped me heal and understand the medicine that there is a lot of good but it's a yin and yang and that's why I just warn people because I think oh well this she went down there alone in the jungle and it's like no it wasn't all rainbows and butterflies like I had some things to have to overcome there because I did chose to kind of go down there so quickly.
01:52:41.000Well, I think it's like everything in life.
01:52:43.000There's going to be good versions of it and bad versions of it, and we should seek to find the ideal version of it.
01:52:48.000And I think also that yin and yang balance of the universe seems inescapable.
01:52:55.000It seems like it's In everything, like really terrible relationships, they make you appreciate really good relationships.
01:53:01.000Bad friends make you appreciate good friends.
01:53:03.000Bad jobs make you appreciate good jobs.
01:53:06.000Traffic makes you appreciate the mountains even more.
01:53:08.000I mean, all those things factor in together.
01:53:39.000People involved in the dark have to recognize they're leaning one way more than they are the other and try to correct.
01:53:45.000Hopefully, somehow or another, they're going to have an experience that gives them that sort of understanding, but you're not going to fix them.
01:53:57.000And for some folks, they just never quite get there.
01:54:00.000And I don't know what their role is, but their role may very well be for someone like you or someone like me to see the error of their ways and learn from it.
01:54:08.000I mean, that might be their place in this giant machine.
01:54:11.000Their place might truly be to enlighten the others around them as to the wrong way.
01:54:16.000And maybe when they come back, they'll come back with the knowledge of whatever they fucked up in the past life in some sort of inherent form, and they'll move incrementally closer and closer to some form of enlightenment.
01:54:28.000And it really helped me journalistically because I'm not only trying to use these psychedelics for healing, but also to really understand the history.
01:54:35.000And for some reason, after that first experience, I just had my bullshit meter on times 4,000.
01:54:42.000So right away I could weed through the bullshit and just get to the healers who could teach me the most Yeah.
01:55:04.000These mushrooms that I have such a profound love for mushrooms now, Joe.
01:55:10.000And I understand why, when I was on your show, you were saying that if everyone could do mushrooms, it would just transform the world.
01:55:16.000And I'm a firm believer psilocybin is, hands down, the most incredible chemical known to the brain just through my experiences.
01:55:24.000Well, it's really close to human neurochemistry, too.
01:55:27.000I mean, it literally has NN-dimethyltryptamine in it, as far as, like, what it is before it is that.
01:56:00.000When I first had my first mushroom experience, I really realized, wow, how deep the propaganda went.
01:56:06.000And we've just been fed so many lies about these substances, especially psilocybin.
01:56:15.000The industry has a lot of fear of psilocybin because it can't be patented and it is so effective.
01:56:21.000One study at the University of Southern Florida found out, scientists believe after the study that it may even lead to neurogenesis, which is a regrowth of brain cells.
01:56:32.000And in that study they gave rats, they played this loud noise and then they'd shock the hell out of these rats.
01:56:39.000And then they gave some of the rats psilocybin.
01:56:42.000And then later on they played that noise again and the rats that had psilocybin were less likely to face the fear of that sound.
01:56:48.000And they believe that that was because potentially it had led to the regrowth of brain cells and the reparation of the serotonergic system.
01:57:09.000And look at all of these studies coming out showing that psilocybin has potential to cure anxiety and PTSD. And so it's really, it's just really disturbing, but I recommend anyone out there facing, you know, who has a type of illness or PTSD,
01:57:27.000depression, anxiety, and they haven't found any hope in anything else, and they're feeling hopeless, to just research psilocybin.
01:57:33.000Because it gives me so much hope, and I think it's one of the greatest human rights tragedies of our generation that this isn't available to everyone who needs it.
01:58:18.000And I also think that when you go deep into the idea that psilocybin may have been responsible for the very evolution of the human mind itself, it gets really compelling.
01:58:32.000We had Dennis McKenna on the podcast, and we're doing some emails back and forth right now.
01:58:37.000I'll have him on hopefully in April again.
01:58:41.000But he explained in a very scientific manner We're good to go.
01:59:23.000And these animals, these monkeys, would come along and flip the shits over and find bugs and mushrooms would grow in the shits.
01:59:29.000So they would experiment with these mushrooms.
01:59:31.000And he had all these direct correlations between experimenting with mushrooms and the improvement of various aspects of life which would make it...
01:59:42.000It's probable that these people, these animals, these human-like things, experimented with these mushrooms, including eating of psilocybin at low-level doses increases visual acuity.
01:59:59.000It would make you a more effective hunter.
02:00:00.000It makes you more sensitive to your environment.
02:00:02.000It would make you hornier, so you would have more sex.
02:00:05.000And of course, then at higher doses, you would get this sort of unifying experience that would bond the tribe together.
02:00:12.000It would create a tighter group of people, a tighter group of monkey-like people, whatever the fuck they were.
02:00:18.000And he used that as a direct reason for one of the biggest reasons Mysteries in the entire fossil record, which is the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years.
02:00:29.000It's a really fascinating mystery that no one has ever solved.
02:00:33.000There's a lot of theories, there's a lot of competing theories as to what caused the human brain size to double, but it's an unprecedented event in biology.
02:00:41.000The way McKenna described it, he's like, if it was like the liver of an otter, it would be a spectacular find that a liver of an otter doubled over a period of two million years.
02:00:50.000I mean, it would be really perplexing, like, why is this?
02:00:53.000When you have the greatest transformation of any known biological creature over a period of two million years like this, and that's the same organ that created the theory of evolution in the first place, that's when shit gets really weird.
02:01:08.000The human mind is the thing that's figuring this all out, and the human mind is the thing that's doubling over the period of this one period of time.
02:01:25.000And then with his brother Dennis, who's like a hardcore scientist, explaining the actual connections between eating psilocybin and the possible creation of language, and of course the exponential effect that creating language would have on these animals, and how it would force their mind to expand.
02:01:41.000It would force, along with the psychedelic experiences, their boundaries to shift.
02:01:47.000It's pretty incredible, too, if you think on that theory, to think, now what are we losing?
02:01:51.000Because we don't have access as species now.
02:01:59.000And he also, McKenna was really into the, well, he had a couple of freak ideas, too.
02:02:04.000One of them was this longing for this orgiastic, non-monogamous culture of the past.
02:02:11.000Yeah, dudes always find a way to work that in.
02:02:15.000Even the most spiritual guys find a way to work out this non-monogamous concept.
02:02:20.000Is this just to make sense to his girlfriends about his behavior?
02:02:24.000Well, in a sense he's right as far as the male programming, but it's fascinating.
02:02:30.000It's fascinating, the concept behind it, that these...
02:02:34.000At one point in time, these cultures supposedly all engaged in this non-miogamous life.
02:02:40.000And Chris Ryan has very interesting thoughts on that as well.
02:02:42.000The guy who wrote Sex at Dawn, a brilliant guy who I do a podcast with once a month.
02:02:48.000Him and Duncan Trussell and I do a podcast.
02:02:51.000And these ideas were that at one point in time, there was no sense of paternity.
02:02:57.000That no one knew that Amber Lyon's baby came from Jamie.
02:03:00.000You know, you guys didn't know because everybody was having sex with everybody and there was no DNA test.
02:03:06.000So if you were having sex with five different friends at the same time and all of a sudden you got pregnant, everybody would raise the baby together.
02:03:13.000And that would be the idea is that people would grow accustomed to that sort of a culture.
02:03:17.000The culture that makes love together and has sex with more than one partner, they like each other more.
02:03:22.000And one of the things that he uses to sort of highlight that is wife swapping amongst fighter pilots apparently is very high.
02:03:36.000You know that it's very likely you're going to die out there and you love your wife and you don't want your wife to be with someone who doesn't love her.
02:03:42.000And so by sharing her with all your friends, you leave behind someone who loves your wife as equally as you do.
02:03:50.000And then it's that intense of a shift in the way you view the world, you know?
02:03:56.000I think that we're just real stuck in the idea that the way we live right now, this is the pattern that we're all supposed to follow.
02:04:03.000And this pattern may very well be a pattern that's separate from what created it in the first place, which might be psychedelic drugs.
02:04:14.000I mean, even like mainstream Jerusalem scholars now are saying that they believe that Moses finding the Ten Commandments from a burning bush was most likely...
02:04:24.000Some sort of a description of a psychedelic experience.
02:04:28.000And that the bush that's burning may very well have been the acacia bush, which is incredibly rich in DMT. It's one of the most DMT-rich plants in the entire region.
02:04:38.000So if that is the burning bush, if that's the...
02:04:44.000You know, Moses sees the burning bush.
02:04:47.000Because we're getting it from ancient Hebrew, we're getting it from Aramaic, translated to Latin, translated to Greek.
02:04:53.000Are you sure that's what they're saying?
02:04:54.000Because what they might be saying is they smoked some fucking DNP and talked to God, and God gave them some rules that really made sense as to how we should live our life.
02:05:02.000And if you look at the Good Friday experiment, I don't know if you're familiar with that, that took place in Harvard when they were studying psilocybin.
02:05:09.000They gave theology students high doses of psilocybin, and they all reported having similar religious experiences as to those described in the Bible.
02:05:19.000And so you kind of have to look back now that I've been investigating psychedelics a lot because I've had my own religious experience where I felt like I've been given messages from God or a higher being and they tend to be similar to those passed down throughout history.
02:05:36.000So you kind of wonder how much did psychedelics play a role in our creation of religion?
02:05:43.000Next time you come in, or if you can get it, if you can find it, you've got to pick up John Marco Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.
02:06:27.000This guy deciphered The Dead Sea Scrolls for over 14 years.
02:06:30.000This guy, John Marco Allegro, and wrote a book.
02:06:33.000On his interpretations of what the language that he had read, and he said that he was the only one that was an ordained minister, but he was also agnostic.
02:06:42.000He was the only one on the Dead Sea Scrolls that was an agnostic, that was in the committee for deciphering it.
02:06:46.000And his interpretation of the Bible, after 14 years of studying the Dead Sea Scrolls, was that the entire religion was a massive misunderstanding.
02:06:54.000And what it was really originally about was fertility rituals and the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and that these allegories and these stories and all these different parables, they were designed to hide The true nature of the knowledge that they didn't want passed on to the Romans when they were conquered.
02:07:18.000And that this is what the apple of Adam and Eve was about.
02:07:21.000And this was this rebirth of the understanding of the universe that would exist if you had taken mushrooms, if you had taken psychedelic mushrooms, was what they were describing in all these various stories and all these different events.
02:07:35.000They were essentially trying to document the knowledge that they had received from having these psychedelic trips.
02:07:42.000And it's unbelievably intense when you read that and then put it into play and then start thinking, like, oh, wait a minute, I get it.
02:07:51.000These fucking ancient people who knew nothing just stumbled upon this shit that literally made them who they were, created them, and then all of a sudden they realized it was going away.
02:08:02.000Whether it was going away because of additional climate change, which they started losing mushrooms and they started preserving them in honey.
02:08:11.000And preserving them in honey also started creating fermented honey, which became mead, which is alcohol, which led to a more alcohol-based society.
02:08:19.000And as they move slowly away from mushrooms and slowly away from psychedelic drugs, they move to like almost an anti-psychedelic in alcohol.
02:08:48.000But they would call it the work of the devil, and that's what I ran into with the Mazatecs who I was working with up in Oaxaca, is that they had to, when the Spaniards came, they had to flee...
02:09:15.000So they actually worship the mushrooms.
02:09:17.000They've kind of mixed, I guess to survive, they mixed Catholicism in with their worship of these mushrooms.
02:09:22.000And it's pretty trippy, per se, to see it painted on these churches.
02:09:27.000That's actually a big part of really ancient religious artwork, period.
02:09:30.000If you look up, do some research on the connection between mushrooms and even the Catholic Church, there's mushroom iconography all over the place.
02:09:40.000And really ancient descriptions, like one of the earliest depictions of Adam and Eve on some ancient fresco is Adam and Eve with a mushroom tree in between them.
02:11:03.000So it's really fascinating that that's just something that went away.
02:11:07.000It was something that was a part of the doorways, the shape of the doorway being very mushroom-like, and a lot of these, they look like a mushroom cap.
02:11:15.000You know, that's like, they didn't choose that for, you know, it wasn't an accident.
02:11:20.000There was a guy, Jack Herrer, and before he had a stroke, and then he eventually had a heart attack and wound up dying, and he was a very important part of the hemp movement.
02:11:30.000In letting people know he was a Goldwater Republican, and he wrote a book called The Emperor Has No Clothes about marijuana and the real root of the propaganda that allowed marijuana to become an illegal drug.
02:11:43.000And his thing that he was working on before he got sick was all on the connections between psilocybin and religiousness.
02:11:49.000Religious thought, religion's period, the creation of religions, and he had some really amazing old paintings.
02:11:57.000I wish I knew where he had collected these images, but of people lost in like a dance of ecstasy like they were naked.
02:12:06.000And they were covered by this translucent mushroom and it was like a reoccurring theme in like really ancient artwork that was religious artwork that these people were engaging in ritualistic behavior with psychedelics and it was a part of the church.
02:12:23.000Whether it was something that was originally for everybody, and then when it became more scarce, was just controlled by the upper crust of the religious organization, or what happened over how many periods of hundreds, if not thousands of years, which is hard for us to kind of...
02:12:51.000200 years ago, slavery was legal and all those things.
02:12:54.000So just wrap your head around that and then try to move forward to thinking 200 years before that, 200 years before that, and just thinking if at any point in time during that period We're good to go.
02:13:28.000All you have is words describing this connection.
02:13:31.000Boy, it would take on a hollow tone, and then all of our primate behavior and instincts and all the shitty aspects of human beings' control and ego would flourish and rise to the top and even be fed by alcohol, which is the anti-psychedelic And then culture is left with these words,
02:13:49.000these hollow words written on animal skins from back when people were, even then when they wrote these things down, probably grasping to the last remaining fibers of this former existence that they had in symbiosis with the plant knowledge.
02:14:06.000Isn't that the irony and humor in the universe that so many people spend their entire lives searching for this religious experience, thousands and thousands of dollars, and you can get it for free growing on cow shit?
02:14:22.000And isn't it funny that when someone wants to call you on your nonsense, they call you on your bullshit?
02:15:23.000And what an unbelievably rewarding life that would be for someone who instead would be worrying about their physical safety in performing these things.
02:15:30.000They'd have to do that under, you know, secret conditions to hide from people.
02:15:34.000And someone would have to look out the window to make sure the jackbooted thugs don't kick down the door and stop them when they're in the middle of enlightenment.
02:15:40.000You know, and arrest them and go throw them in some rat-infested fucking cage somewhere.
02:15:44.000To not have to worry about that and to be able to To actually give people this experience in a real pure setting would be pretty nice.
02:15:52.000And this is where people go, I get it.
02:16:13.000We tend to be more self-critical than men are, and so that's the prefrontal cortex being overactive, and so that leads to depression and anxiety.
02:16:22.000And what the psilocybin does, they've actually done scans of brains when people are on psilocybin, is it decreases the blood flow to that area of your brain so that for once, and this is what happened for me, is finally everything just went silent.
02:16:35.000And it was so profound, I just burst into tears, and I just could not stop crying because I hadn't had Silence for so long.
02:16:42.000And at that point, because I had that silence, I was able to go back and rewatch my life like a movie and see all these things that had happened over just the span of two years and then slowly realized, okay, that's why I was in the position I was in.
02:16:55.000And I was able to reprocess all of these stored memories.
02:17:03.000One fourth of women in their forties and fifties are on some kind of antidepressant that's just a bandaid on the bullet wound.
02:17:09.000And I felt like the mushrooms actually got into my soul and cured and helped perfect my limbic system, which is what Western medicine is ignoring.
02:17:20.000That is a really strange number, isn't it?
02:17:23.000One quarter of people are on antidepressants over X amount of age.
02:17:27.000I've always wondered why it is women are uniquely drawn to those things after they get to be a certain age.
02:18:34.000And what's so sad is that a lot of times with these medicines, not all of them, but it's actually permanently changing your serotonin levels and depleting them.
02:18:43.000So you are dependent on these medicines just to get back to where you were when you started taking it.
02:18:48.000I think those medicines are really important for some people, though.
02:18:51.000That's where it gets real sketchy because I don't want to write off antidepressants because I know people that have benefited from them.
02:18:57.000The question is, would they have benefited equally well from something else?
02:19:03.000I know some dudes that have actually gotten on them and then helped their life and then they slowly wean themselves off.
02:19:09.000And then I know also people that they benefit from the natural way of doing it by taking 5-HTP and finding that that gave them an elevated mood.
02:19:20.000They've also done studies that show that exercise, rigorous exercise, is equally effective for increasing happiness as antidepressants are in some people.
02:20:28.000That's why I'm trying to talk about my story with psychedelic use and how much it helped me, just so people know when the other options haven't worked.
02:20:36.000Like you said, Joe, I'm not discounting.
02:20:38.000I'm sure a lot of people have been helped from pharmaceuticals.
02:20:41.000But I think some people have tried them, and because it is the only option, they feel like, oh my gosh, this is it.
02:20:49.000And that's why so many of these soldiers who have post-traumatic stress disorder end up taking their own lives.
02:20:55.000And I interviewed one soldier who was at that point.
02:21:01.000He had a panic attack that sent him to the emergency room and almost killed him because his heart rate was so quick.
02:21:09.000And luckily he heard about MDMA and psilocybin and went to a concert and got some and that had profound effects.
02:21:18.000He wasn't able to be in crowds and then within weeks he was able to go back out into society and now he actually takes It's like an underground railroad of psychedelics between soldiers, and he travels around the country dosing his buddies so that they can kind of get out of this rut,
02:21:36.000those that haven't been helped by antidepressants.
02:21:40.000And the MDMA shows, I know you talk with Rick Doblin a lot, it just shows such profound promise that in one study they had people who had treatment-resistant PTSD, so nothing was working.
02:21:52.000And 83% of the people in this study who were given MDMA combined with psychotherapy no longer had the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, whereas 25% of people who just were given psychotherapy were healed.
02:22:15.000You would go to the doctor and they would immediately prescribe it to you.
02:22:17.000And we have 22 soldiers a day killing themselves needlessly, Jo.
02:22:21.000And that weighs on my shoulders now because I was never officially diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, but I do know, especially after talking with a lot of these soldiers, I was having symptoms of it.
02:22:31.000And knowing how profoundly effective the psychedelics were on helping me and curing my anxiety and letting me process those traumatic memories, It's so sad to know that there's so many people out there that haven't been connected with this medicine yet or are being misled.
02:22:48.000And the United States government knows that MDMA, they've been told many times, they've been shown the results of this study, the Pentagon knows that it's effective.
02:23:39.000And I'm a firm believer that nature has created...
02:23:42.000I used to be a skeptic, but now I am a believer that nature has created something to heal all of our ailments.
02:23:48.000And we just need to be connected with that.
02:23:50.000And we need to realize that sometimes it's the more natural route that's more effective versus going the pharmaceutical route.
02:23:57.000And oftentimes the pharmaceutical route is sort of based on something that came from the natural route in the first place.
02:24:03.000I mean, the lessons learned from using natural materials.
02:24:07.000Sometimes, I mean, one thing that they want to do so much in the jungle, they want to extract pharmaceutical drugs out of these jungle plants.
02:24:14.000I mean, that's a big reason why there's so much exploration in the jungle.
02:24:18.000Besides using all the wood, you know, that they're...
02:24:22.000Clear-cutting giant chunks of that forest.
02:24:24.000One of the things that the medical community is really concerned about when they're doing that is that when they're clear-cutting, I mean, they're destroying ecosystems.
02:24:32.000And when they're destroying ecosystems, we know there are hundreds of thousands of different types of plants down there.
02:24:40.000And we have no idea if the cure to cancer is not locked up in some weird fucking berry that no one has ever discovered.
02:26:04.000Throw it in your system and you have erections on demand.
02:26:08.000It's like I was saying, nature has a cure for everything.
02:26:11.000Even there's this one shaman in the Amazon and his entire village was sick and he couldn't cure them.
02:26:17.000And so he thought his entire tribe was going to be wiped out.
02:26:20.000So legend has it, he drank ayahuasca and walked into the jungle and these hands came out and showed him this frog, which is the Cambo frog.
02:26:27.000It's the most poisonous frog in the jungle.
02:26:30.000And showed him how to kind of milk the frog and then apply the poison to the people in the village to cure what was ailing them.
02:26:38.000And he was able to, as legend has it, cure his whole village.
02:26:42.000Well, now this cambo frog venom is used as a vaccination.
02:26:46.000So instead of the traditional vaccinations we give here in the U.S., they use this frog venom to vaccinate the children.
02:26:53.000And also to make the men stronger as they hunt.
02:26:56.000And I actually got it and what they do is they just kind of cauterize your arm and put a little on you and right away you feel like you're being poisoned.
02:27:04.000So your whole body reacts to produce all of these antibodies in an emergency effort to try to save your life and you just feel the blood It's pounding through your head, and it's so intense.
02:27:15.000You feel like it will shoot through your fingertips, and all these frogs are running through you, and your lips start to swell, and you're sitting there thinking, am I really going to die?
02:27:26.000That's what I was thinking at the time.
02:27:28.000And then you just violently vomit after that from the depths of your soul, and all of these toxins leave your body.
02:27:35.000And after going through this for about an hour, you just feel miraculous, like all the toxins have been pulled out of you, and you feel energy for months to come because your body's produced all these antibodies to fight infection.
02:27:47.000And I got it done about three months ago, and I feel great.
02:27:52.000Whether I'd recommend it to everybody, but that's just frog venom, a natural substance in the environment.
02:27:58.000And they say it potentially has promise for HIV patients because of the flood of antibodies and other people facing autoimmune disorders, which I believe it could potentially have that effect.
02:28:11.000It seems like it if it doesn't really poison you, but it fires all your systems on go, like red alert, you know, we're being poisoned.
02:28:19.000And it produces all these, like Dr. Karl Hart was saying, compensatory mechanisms that that might be beneficial to increasing your health.
02:28:59.000And when you talk to the shamans that were legit, like, you know, you had the one guy that likes to grab you, but then you pass that guy and there's this other guy who's like totally legit.
02:29:11.000Did you ever ask him how they figure this stuff out?
02:29:17.000How do they figure out how to, out of all these thousands of plants, brew these two together, and do a really complicated process that takes a long time to get this one thing, and it tastes like shit, and yet they drank it anyway, and then had these experiences.
02:29:31.000How the fuck did they ever figure that out?
02:29:35.000Apparently it was brought to them by the spirits.
02:29:38.000That's the universal story I've heard from every shaman is that somehow they are visited by spirits or beings that then showed them to combine these two, the ayahuasca vine and the chacruna leaves out of I think?
02:30:13.000The ayahuasca, I don't know if you're familiar with epigenetics, but when you have a lot of trauma, it actually changes your DNA and makes you more prone to be depressed or insane.
02:30:23.000And so by some shaman's beliefs, the ayahuasca is actually getting in one man at a time and restructuring our DNA and getting rid of all of this negative epigenetics.
02:30:34.000And it's just Mother Nature's way of fighting back against the insanity.
02:30:38.000So I get different stories from every shaman, but the epigenetics one tends to be the more common denominator that I've heard from several of them, that they believe it is actually Mother Nature fighting back and trying to heal us, heal our limbic systems,
02:30:54.000so we don't have this collective madness anymore, one person at a time.
02:30:58.000Who knows how long that's going to take?
02:31:55.000You are already going to get it, but because the psychedelic might actually make it come on a couple days earlier, or a couple days, a couple years earlier.
02:32:03.000And I was even next to one woman in a ceremony who was having a schizophrenic episode while on the medicine and it was pretty terrifying.
02:32:12.000And so reaffirmed my belief to make sure to mention to people, you know, certain people the medicines aren't made for.
02:32:19.000McKenna had, Terence McKenna had another interesting way of looking at the development of these things, the development of things like ayahuasca, that these people that lived in these indigenous cultures, they didn't have metallurgy, and they did have an advanced social system.
02:32:36.000As they went through hundreds and thousands of years of the same culture evolving, the way they spread out and their knowledge base, it didn't go to architecture.
02:32:46.000It didn't go to the construction of large buildings or airplanes or machines or engines.
02:32:52.000It went instead to plants and their knowledge base and the information they passed down from generations to generations.
02:33:00.000And they're expanding on the ideas that they currently were aware of All involved nature.
02:33:06.000It was really kind of a fascinating way to look at it.
02:33:09.000It's just when, you know, Europeans were going this way, they were going a different way.
02:33:14.000But the same process seems to exist in every human culture.
02:33:18.000That people start at one point, wherever they're at, and then they start advancing.
02:33:23.000They start advancing, figuring things out, adding to their knowledge base.
02:33:27.000But these people, they did it all entirely in a natural setting.
02:34:08.000But I agree that nature has something For every single ailment that we face.
02:34:14.000And what's so sad, too, mentioning that about the indigenous cultures living close to nature, actually connecting with this healing energy, is how much we've come apart from that, especially here in Los Angeles.
02:34:27.000There's this website I was looking on a couple weeks ago, like earthing.com, where people are actually so disconnected from nature that they're buying earthing mats that have a wire connected out to the backyard.
02:34:43.000And if you think about it too, like some people, something I've been trying to do is just go around barefoot, walk through the grass, really try to connect with the earth, you know, to allow that energy and knowledge to go through you.
02:34:53.000But some people might spend years without their feet actually touching the earth.
02:34:59.000And it's just so crazy to think how far we've become removed from nature that we have to buy earthing mats To put in our beds or put under your chair while you're at your computer.
02:35:42.000There's also the feeling that you get when you're in the woods that's a palpable, real feeling of being connected to nature.
02:35:48.000There's a calming effect of walking through the woods.
02:35:51.000Like, you go on a hike through the woods, you're walking, there's all these beautiful trees, and you see everything, and it's like, you feel different.
02:35:57.000You feel different because you're in the vibe of nature.
02:36:00.000You're, like, immersed in this world that really doesn't give a shit about you.
02:36:05.000I mean, you're there or you're not there.
02:37:05.000And even in the areas, the towns we went to that rely on medicinal mushrooms, they don't use antidepressants instead when they're having grief or they're having a traumatic event in their life.
02:37:15.000They eat some mushrooms and go into the mountains.
02:37:19.000And so you look at the rates of happiness in these villages, in these areas, compared to what we're experiencing here in the United States.
02:37:29.000And you have to think to yourself, they must be doing something right.
02:37:32.000We should at least examine what they're using over our system that's not working.
02:38:02.000But I also am not ignorant to the perspective of seven billion people being alien to one individual.
02:38:09.000Seven billion people's problems all lumped up into your fucking head because you went online and stayed on too many websites and read too much shit and watched too many videos.
02:38:18.000That's not how you're supposed to experience the world.
02:38:20.000We're not designed for that interface.
02:38:22.000The interface we're designed for is the interface you experience when you go on a hike through the woods.
02:38:26.000What you encounter is what is real in your own perceptions.
02:38:30.000These are the things that you can affect.
02:38:33.000These are the things that you can change.
02:38:34.000But that's all changed itself by having The ability to communicate and influence all these different people with your story, like what you're telling right here, what you told in your book, what you told when you first came on the podcast about your experience working for a news organization that it seems,
02:38:52.000at least during the time that you were there, to have lost its way.
02:38:56.000And where this created turmoil and your own personal experience.
02:39:00.000By expressing those things, you're literally changing everything around you.
02:39:05.000You're literally affecting everything around you with the experiences that you've had and forcing change.
02:39:14.000And you're forcing it even more right now, whether you realize it or not.
02:39:17.000Probably more so, even tenfold, than the last time you were on.
02:39:21.000Because you're saying some crazy shit.
02:39:23.000You're a mainstream CNN reporter, and now you're some crazy tripper who travels the globe eating mushrooms and...
02:39:31.000Doing peyote buttons and fucking freaking out.
02:39:35.000I just feel like such a duty to deliver this message and I know I'm taking a risk and I know there will be some people who criticize me.
02:40:35.000That was the main treatment I used to overcome this.
02:40:40.000And I just feel like it could help so many women, especially because, like I was saying earlier about them being so self-critical and really just so many people who just haven't taken the time to stand outside of their life And analyze it objectively and make decisions not based on emotion or being self-critical.
02:41:55.000That's when I was coming back from ayahuasca and I wrote you and just thanked you for introducing me and told you how transformative it was.
02:42:02.000And I was reading that email and going, check out this crazy bitch.
02:42:09.000Yeah, but it turns out I actually was right.
02:42:12.000And then after the ayahuasca, I went to Thailand where I was able to access psilocybin mushrooms that grow on elephant and buffalo poop.
02:42:23.000And they're just so amazingly healing.
02:42:25.000And so I wrote you after that, but I took time to actually discuss it because I really needed to try to absorb as much knowledge as I could from the plants and really figure them out journalistically.
02:42:37.000I was on one path of healing and also another path as a journalist.
02:42:41.000And I just wanted to experience the good trips and experience the bad trips and really figure out what these medicines are about before I came forward with my story because I know some people may hear this and then decide to try psychedelics.
02:42:56.000And so I needed to be 100% sure I was on the right path.
02:43:39.000Yeah, one of the most important resources for anybody that is interested in any of the effects of any of these psychedelic experiences, drugs, medicines, whatever you want to call them, compounds.
02:43:54.000They're both fantastic to go and find out about research studies and just read other people's trip reports and experiences.
02:44:04.000And what I'm doing with this site is creating like the Huffington Post of Psychedelic News.
02:44:09.000So we're just going to be focusing on the war on drugs, accurate reporting, independent reporting on these topics.
02:44:17.000We're building the foundation right now, so we want to make it like a virtual city where people can come and sit down and have a cup of coffee and chat with others who've done it to reduce harm reduction, also so people can find accurate information and reviews of different centers and just find we're going to take all these studies that have been around since the 1950s and send them back out to the public so they can get this information.
02:44:42.000And I just think it's really vital right now because when you Google News Alert, which I often do with all these substances, I'll Google News Alert, like ketamine, which has profound effects on depression and psilocybin.
02:44:55.000And the stories that always come up are the ones of the guy getting busted for selling it or the rare festival death.
02:45:02.000Rarely do you actually get news on how these substances are being used medicinally.
02:45:08.000So that's what we're trying to create with this new site.
02:45:34.000I should know that, but I use it more in the, I remember listening to a talk of Terence McKenna's and he said that using DMT and different psychedelics can be like hitting the reset button on your brain, clearing your hard drive of all the trauma.
02:45:48.000And I believe that's what psychedelics did for me.
02:45:51.000I've heard you describe them that way as well.
02:45:53.000And so for people who really need to hit that reset button in life and they've tried other therapies and it hasn't worked, we're going to be providing journalism on these psychedelic therapies and also alternative non-prescription therapies.
02:47:09.000You just announced yourself to the world.
02:47:12.000Look, people that listen to this podcast are not universally cool.
02:47:16.000There's a certain percentage of them that are fucking trolls.
02:47:19.000And they will launch themselves upon you in search of humor with some really fake, profound tales of things happening to them in the jungle.
02:47:30.000And I guarantee you now it's going to be about titty grabbing while you're out cold.
02:47:34.000There's going to be several stories of what the bad ayahuasca did to me.
02:47:46.000There's already people out there who I'm sure you've interacted with, Joe, who have reputable Twitter accounts who've been really passionate about psychedelics who we've recruited to help us in our forums and just help us.
02:47:57.000We also have a section on the site where you can post links to different news stories and stuff that you find interesting.
02:48:01.000So we have these people on board to help us kind of regulate, that being said.