In this episode, Dennis and Josh talk about the plant medicine, ayahuasca, and how it has impacted their lives and the lives of people around the world. They discuss the benefits of Ayahuasca and the dangers of its use in the modern world, and what they are doing to make sure it is safe to use in places where it is illegal. They also discuss how the plant is being used in ceremonies and ceremonies in South America, and why it should be considered a medicine in the 21st century, not only for indigenous peoples, but also for the general public. This episode is sponsored by the Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting and promoting the use of traditional plant medicines, such as ayahuas, iboga, and iboga. The ETC is located in Los Angeles, California, but they also have offices in many other cities across the country. If you are interested in learning more about the ETC, check out their website here. We are a sponsor of the show, so please be sure to check out our sponsorships as well. Thank you so much for supporting the show. We really appreciate it! and we hope you enjoy this episode and share it with your friends and family! -Dennis and Josh Thanks to our sponsor, the U.S.A. -The Universe! . -Our sponsor, for sponsoring the show and supporting the podcast, and supporting ETC. , for sponsoring this episode. Thanks so much to our sponsors, for making this podcast possible. We are so much more accessible and accessible. . . . Thank you, we can be a better place to listen to this podcast. and for supporting us all of our listeners. ! - Thank you for listening and supporting us. in advance of our next episode, we are looking forward to hearing your feedback. XOXO, we will see you in the next episode! (and we will get back to the next one! in the future, thank you. Love you! -PODCAST -Podcasts by the Universe! -Dani -Jonah - Jonah & Josh -JOSH - -Epsi Thankyou, Jonah , & the Universe -SORRY FOR YOUR SUPPORTING THE PODCAST AND SUPPORTED BY THE ULTIMATE
00:00:54.000Well, the ESC is dedicated to transforming lives through assuring the safety and sustainability of traditional plants.
00:01:01.000So that means transforming people's lives through experiences with plants, but it also means the sustainability of plants and the safety in their use.
00:01:12.000So we're starting with ayahuasca and iboga.
00:01:15.000Yeah, you shouldn't start with, like, ferns.
00:01:21.000It's hard to get eucalyptus, you know, people really don't get fired up about that, but ayahuasca, anything involving tryptamines, for folks who've experienced it, it's something worth saving.
00:01:33.000Do you guys find it odd that in this day and age, in 2014, the average person who you would go up to to try to discuss these issues with would have no idea what you were talking about?
00:01:46.000Actually, I think over the last few years, that's kind of changed.
00:01:51.000Ayahuasca is emerging into mass consciousness, and I think that's a good thing.
00:01:56.000I would say 10 years ago, 15 years ago, if you approached the average person on the street and they said, ayahuasca, they'd look at you like you had a speech impediment or something.
00:02:07.000But chances are people would recognize it now and not necessarily know what it's about, not necessarily have a negative or a positive view of it, but the meme is out there, and I think that's a good thing, ultimately.
00:02:35.000Folks who already have mortgages and families, those are the ones that's very difficult to get them to even consider what you're talking about.
00:02:45.000The ESC has sent out a call for experts and we've been infiltrated by the mainstream people that do evaluation work for the World Bank and USAID. They're interested in ayahuasca.
00:02:57.000People are going down to South America to have these transformative experiences, to sit in ceremony.
00:03:03.000There's a lot of underground activity in the U.S. as well and Europe where it's It's not legal.
00:03:08.000But in South America, in Peru, ayahuasca is protected as national patrimony.
00:03:26.000We're working in countries where ayahuasca has been used for hundreds of years, traditionally.
00:03:32.000And we're looking at increasing the safety of it so that we're creating a kind of self-regulatory model so that we can take that model to places where it's illegal and say, this is a totally safe medicine if you do it right.
00:03:45.000People with certain medical conditions shouldn't take ayahuasca.
00:03:49.000But done with a skilled curandero or shaman, In the right setting, it can be helpful for all sorts of psychological issues or PTSD or depression.
00:04:03.000And just give people a new perspective on their lives.
00:04:07.000I mean, I'm completely joking around, but what I was saying when I was, it's like, That hasn't happened with marijuana.
00:04:13.000Marijuana, they're still fighting it tooth and nail, despite all the evidence that it's not just beneficial, but probably prevents a lot of cancers and does a lot of fantastic work with PTSD and with anxiety and all sorts of issues,
00:04:30.000medical issues, interocular pressure for people with glaucoma and on and on and on, people with AIDS that are having a hard time keeping their appetite up, cancer patients Still, they fight a tooth and claw, and ayahuasca is a completely different barrel of monkeys.
00:04:47.000Ayahuasca's coming at this through the back door.
00:04:50.000I mean, it's interesting that it has gained recognition over time to the extent that it does, and to a certain extent...
00:04:59.000I would say it's, you know, people like Josh and me, we say, we work for the plants, right?
00:05:06.000And ayahuasca's got its own agenda, interestingly.
00:05:10.000And people go down to South America, and they have these experiences that are revelatory and self-transforming.
00:05:17.000But often they come back with an enhanced ecological consciousness, an enhanced awareness of the You know, connection between humanity and nature, the idea that nature is threatened.
00:05:29.000And I think of ayahuasca as sort of a messenger from a community of species that's trying to, you know, tell these monkeys to wake up, you clowns.
00:05:40.000You know, we're coming down to the wire.
00:05:46.000We understand where you fit into nature and do what can be done in the ever-shrinking time that's left.
00:05:54.000So people come back with this renewed sort of awareness of the interconnectedness of life and that we have a role in this, you know, we primates, and we have to re-understand what our role is as stewards of nature rather than exploiters of nature.
00:06:13.000And ayahuasca, you know, That's the message it delivers to many people, and unexpectedly, they may not be going there to experience that, but that's what they come away with.
00:06:24.000From your work and from your brother's work, Terence McKenna, what I got That I never considered before was that psychedelics in various forms may very well be responsible for why we are human beings in the first place and our separation from them might be the whole reason why we're so haywire.
00:06:47.000Why we're missing a crucial ingredient involved in the creation of cognitive thought in the first place.
00:06:53.000The creation of this ability to look at ourselves and communicate our ideas and Really become a human being and then we're separated from the mother and left to our own devices and all of our wild animal instincts sort of take over and our animal instincts sort of don't coexist peacefully in this weird world that we have created as human beings and then we create chaos because of it because we can't see what we're doing.
00:07:27.000Ayahuasca refocuses the whole understanding, I think, of the relationship that we have to nature.
00:07:35.000And I think that's what, you know, if you believe in plant intelligence, I mean, there are different ways of looking at plant intelligence, but it's interesting how often people, you know, They come out with this renewed understanding and I think that's a desperate call on the part of the community of species and ayahuasca has been delegated to be – to kind of lead that conversation.
00:08:01.000Trevor Burrus It's fascinating that ayahuasca is the one that's been – It's easier to extract DMT
00:08:43.000Yeah, I think it's because it's escaped from its home in the Amazon, and that's the area on the planet with the greatest biodiversity and all that.
00:09:23.000But all of these things in indigenous cultures are regarded as plant teachers.
00:09:31.000As you mentioned, a lot of it comes down to tryptamine chemistry, and our brains, for some reason, are evolutionarily primed to react to tryptamines.
00:09:45.000I mean, we have these tryptamine detectors for some reason, and I think it's partly so that we can Receive and interpret what they're trying to tell us.
00:09:57.000And what they're trying to tell us is there's not much time left and we have to really re-understand our relationship to nature.
00:10:05.000We have to realize that we're not separate from nature.
00:10:08.000Well, you're trying to overcome at least 2,000 years of Judeo-Christian history and, you know, those traditions, their whole agenda in a certain sense is to devalue nature.
00:10:23.000You know, nature is something that we own.
00:11:08.000The meme is spreading, the memo is spreading, but I'm not sure it's fast enough.
00:11:13.000Do you think that it's possible that the human race is essentially cramming?
00:11:18.000You know how when you're about to do a test and you put it off to the last minute and then the day before you're like, holy shit, I gotta deal with this.
00:11:27.000And then you go bananas, you take an Adderall, you file through books until your head wants to explode.
00:11:33.000That is a characteristic that's very, very common for people that want to attack a project.
00:12:34.000We're destroying everything we get our greasy little hands on.
00:12:37.000This is the first time in the 500 years of European colonization of the Americas that there's a kind of reverse sort of message coming from the Amazon.
00:12:49.000People are going there not to convert, but to be converted, to learn, to learn the traditions.
00:12:54.000And the indigenous people, 95% of their population was wiped out by viruses or wars or Plagues.
00:13:03.000And now we have this opportunity to come back from the brink and work with ayahuasca that grows in the canopy of the rainforest.
00:13:12.000You can't have ayahuasca without the trees.
00:13:15.000And so it's an alternative to mining and oil exploitation.
00:13:21.000And I think, coming back to cannabis, the reason the dialogue is starting to change is because governments are realizing there's a lot of money to be made.
00:14:48.000And they're spreading out into different cultures and the plant itself is now You know, even if the Amazon is destroyed, which it may well be, ayahuasca is not going to be destroyed.
00:15:02.000But I think, you know, hopefully we can arrest this process.
00:15:07.000But what you're seeing has always been a co-evolutionary relationship where...
00:15:13.000You know, at some points it's more quieter, it's underground, but at some points as the crisis deepens, it's becoming more and more public in a sense.
00:15:25.000And I think that's what you see going on, you know.
00:15:28.000And potentially, I think that ayahuasca You know, we're now discovering that it's good for so many things, you know, therapeutically, for addictions, for depression, for PTSD and that sort of thing.
00:15:46.000But we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking ayahuasca is only for sick people.
00:15:53.000You know, we're all wounded and we all need to understand something about our relationship to nature.
00:16:01.000Potentially, the paradigms that are emerging in ayahuasca tourism or these ayahuasca-centered spiritual communities in the States, potentially this may transform I mean,
00:16:40.000these institutions are not going away, and they're fine.
00:16:43.000They just need to rediscover a moral dimension to The consequences of their action, if that makes any sense.
00:16:51.000You know, our cleverness far exceeds our wisdom, and that's a problem.
00:17:00.000We've got to become wise, and when we couple that with our ingenuity and our cleverness, then we'll be on the way toward saving the planet, saving ourselves.
00:17:12.000I think there's also this growing understanding of all the factors that encompass a healthy person and how many of them have to do with your conception of reality.
00:17:21.000How many of them have to do with the way you think?
00:17:24.000How many of them have to do with how you view your environment?
00:17:27.000If you view your environment as this hostile, stressful, Antagonizing, angry, negative place, you'll get sicker.
00:17:35.000And your body doesn't know what to do.
00:17:38.000It's fighting it constantly, and you're in a battle, and you're all stressed out, and you're susceptible to all sorts of things.
00:17:44.000And in that sense, there's a direct physical connection between psychedelic experiences and improved health.
00:17:53.000And that's something that people really need to understand.
00:17:57.000And I think once that catches root, once people grasp that concept and understand the incredible pressure-alleviating properties.
00:18:08.000I can remember one of the first times I ever did DMT. The day afterwards, I had this completely different view of the world that I had to sort of apply now, all these other...
00:18:23.000and figure out, do all these factors that I've considered as being important, how many of them am I going to throw out?
00:19:34.000So, you know, ultimately this is a process of, you know, personal cleansing, both physically and emotionally and, you know, psychologically in your encounters with these things, but also cultural cleansing.
00:19:50.000You know, I mean, there are Good memes out there, and there are good things going on, but there's, you know, there's so much noise, there's so much bullshit, it's hard to sort out what's worth preserving and what needs to be dispensed with.
00:20:06.000I think we're also kind of trapped in this weird world of our creations as far as technology as well.
00:20:23.000It has a certain self-preservation aspect to it and I think that we're completely connected to the idea of constant innovation and constantly improving technology and that also has completely connected us to materialism because materialism is the real driving force behind constant innovation.
00:20:41.000If we all just looked at our laptops and said, I'm good, are you good?
00:21:41.000These technologies, it's all about how you apply them.
00:21:44.000That's where the moral dimension comes in.
00:21:46.000That's why you can misuse technology, internet technology, to propagate whatever the Kardashians are doing lately over the internet, but you can also change hearts and minds with those tools.
00:22:03.000Like, for example, This live streaming symposium that we're involved with, that our mandate is to plug this thing.
00:23:00.000And if you go to their website, what you're going to see right now, which I had nothing to do with, you're going to see a little trailer for live streaming, and it's actually...
00:23:10.000It looks like a stealth advertisement for my new product coming out, which is the Dennis McKenna bobblehead.
00:23:19.000I'm in this trailer and I look like I have a movement disorder or something.
00:24:46.000It's this weird sort of strange place in the middle of western Massachusetts.
00:24:51.000Western Massachusetts is a strange place in and of itself because you have Boston, And, you know, which is a very, it's a big city, a very educated, more colleges per capita than anywhere else.
00:25:03.000But then as you get out of Massachusetts, you might as well be in Kentucky for about an hour and 20 minutes.
00:25:08.000And then you get to this weird oasis where, like, the woods part, and then, you know, you have this strange place in Amherst, which is really highly educated and open-minded liberal community.
00:25:21.000Well, I'm not sure I've ever been there, but I'm looking forward to this conference.
00:27:10.000Education is so important, and that's kind of the vision of these gentlemen, Brett Green and his colleagues, that, you know, symposia like this are An important component of this because it's a way of getting the information out.
00:27:27.000And the more people it can be gotten out to, the faster the change can be implemented.
00:27:34.000Yeah, to change hearts and minds is an interesting cliche because we've heard it so many times that it's almost like we've heard wolf, wolf, wolf, there's wolves, there's wolves.
00:28:27.000You said earlier, which is a very controversial but oddly fascinating thing, that plants are the reason why we are human beings today, why these plant medicines and these psychedelic compounds.
00:28:45.000I find that to be incredibly amazing when I talk to really intelligent people and I bring that idea up and they dismiss it like almost instantaneously and I don't understand why.
00:28:58.000Because I get it that they're connecting the idea of a drug to a bad thing.
00:29:05.000When you want to talk about powerful influences on cognitive thought, is there any more powerful influences on cognitive thought than a psychedelic drug?
00:29:27.000I mean, if you look at, you know, we as a species, we...
00:29:32.000We evolved in the rainforest initially, and we evolved in an environment of incredible chemical diversity.
00:29:42.000And it's absurd to assume, and the reason there's such chemical diversity in the plant kingdom is that They're great chemists, you know, and they make all these chemicals for whatever purposes.
00:29:54.000That's how plants mediate their relationship with their environment, right?
00:29:59.000They substitute biosynthesis for behavior.
00:30:24.000Our brains are biochemical engines that run on neurotransmitters.
00:30:28.000These plant compounds are our neurotransmitters, essentially.
00:30:32.000I mean, They were in plants a long time before they were in our brains, before there was even complex brains enough to utilize these things.
00:30:41.000In the course of evolution, we internalized these things and adapted them to our own internal signaling processes.
00:30:50.000So now we have the neurological tools, if you will, To talk to the plants.
00:30:57.000You know, they've always been talking to us.
00:30:59.000Now we can actually have a conversation.
00:31:01.000And you get into the conversation and the conversation is, you know, you monkeys need to move to the next level.
00:31:30.000And the plants are the tools to understand this.
00:31:33.000I mean, there's good scientific studies now that show that psilocybin, which is the one that's been studied, can reliably induce a state that you might call a mystical experience.
00:31:47.000I prefer to call it a transcendent experience, but the nugget of the experience that it Can elicit under the right experiences is an understanding of we are all one.
00:32:03.000That's the core of, I think, the mystical insight that psychedelics bring about.
00:32:08.000Why should our brains even have evolved to have that kind of experience if it's not a way of You know, kind of, I don't know, being able to initiate that conversation with the rest of species.
00:32:28.000I mean, they're counting on us, you know, because never before we've, you know, civilization and humanity has impacted nature in adverse ways.
00:32:39.000As long as we've been around, as long as we've had fire, you know, I mean fire back in the Paleolithic and even earlier was a tremendously, not necessarily destructive force, but it was a transformative force on ecosystems.
00:32:52.000We didn't particularly use it in a conscious way.
00:32:56.000We used it in a way that served our Our purposes.
00:33:01.000But now, with 7 billion people on the earth and counting, and technologies that no one ever imagined that we'd have at our fingertips, what we do now really matters, you know, because Before that,
00:33:18.000nature, the homeostatic mechanisms that tended to take nature, keep nature in balance, you know, we could cause tremendous ecological destruction and nature would eventually, you know, that would fade away and nature would come back into balance.
00:33:34.000Now we're actually in danger of permanently screwing up those mechanisms.
00:33:38.000So we actually have to kind of consciously intervene or be conscious of what we're doing because the consequences of what we do are just so much greater.
00:33:52.000I think there's another thing that we need to put into perspective is the relatively short amount of time that human beings have had access to the information that we have today and the terrible effects of propaganda and how long propaganda can stick.
00:34:11.000You know, when we're talking about just the Just Say No era of the 80s, the Nancy Reagan nonsense.
00:34:17.000I had Dr. Carl Hart on recently, who's a brilliant guy, if you're aware of his word.
00:34:23.000Amazing work on addiction and sort of educating people about the actual real reactions that a human body has to drugs.
00:34:32.000But what he's talking about that was really interesting is there has never been a drug-free society, nor would you want one.
00:35:04.000The impact of these things, although in our incredibly small, finite lives, seems like forever, is comparatively just a little tiny blip on the radar where we've had this sort of cultural hiccup, where we've lost the script.
00:35:20.000And the Internet seems to be what's resetting the information.
00:35:25.000And I think that's one of the reasons why marijuana, besides the financial reason, why marijuana has gained so much steam.
00:35:32.000Just the sheer overwhelming avalanche of facts, the lack of deaths, the LD50 rate of 1,500 pounds in 15 minutes, just the sheer absurdity of what it takes to kill you.
00:35:47.000I mean, how many times can you see someone posted the numbers people die by cigarettes, the numbers people die by prescription drugs, the numbers people die by alcohol, the numbers people...
00:35:55.000And you just start looking at that, and then marijuana gets to the bottom zero.
00:36:15.000Even with all that cultural baggage that marijuana is loaded down with, finally...
00:36:22.000The real message is coming through when people are exactly, like you say, beginning to wake up to it and compared to all the other recreational drugs that we accept, this one is benign and beneficial.
00:36:35.000I've said that I think that in the future when people look back on this age where people are being arrested and imprisoned for marijuana, they're going to look back at it the same way they used to look at killing witches.
00:37:10.000You know, our brains run on neurotransmitters, and whether they're endogenously produced, and we know, for example, that DMT is an endogenous neurotransmitter, and that's a whole fascinating area of neuroscience now, potential functions for DMT,
00:38:07.000I think, again, I attribute the internet.
00:38:09.000And some of the work that Rick Strassman has done has been pretty fascinating as well.
00:38:14.000And the most recent work showing that DMT is actually producing the pineal gland of live rats.
00:38:20.000Which was always, for whatever reason, even though everyone knew DMT was an endogenous neurotransmitter and that human beings absolutely produced it in the liver and the lungs and different parts of the body, the pineal gland has always been ultimately incredibly fascinating because it literally is that third eye,
00:39:30.000It is, because that sort of opens up the door to Eastern mysticism, to all that traditional religious art that showed the glowing third eye, and all these peaceful, enlightened beings with lit third eyes.
00:40:44.000And that's partly the effect of the internet and partly the effect of a lot of very smart people obsessing over this, you know, and sharing what they're finding out.
00:40:56.000So again, this is, I think, part of the general raising of consciousness in this area that's going on now.
00:41:04.000Amber Lyon, she was a reporter for CNN and sort of lost her faith in I think?
00:42:03.000And it's people like her and people like you and people like you that are...
00:42:08.000Putting this information out, that's starting this sort of like undeniable tide, this shifting, this undeniable shifting.
00:42:19.000Psychedelics and neurotransmitters aside, because people expect something big when they take these things and people are rightly a little apprehensive.
00:42:28.000I mean, it will change your life if you take these plants.
00:42:31.000If you want to have a transformative experience with plants and you're leery of psychedelics, try going on an all plant-based diet for a little while.
00:42:41.000Change your intestinal bacteria in a way.
00:42:44.000You'll have this sense of levity, lightness.
00:42:48.000It will change the way you think about yourself.
00:42:50.000Not as quickly as a psychedelic plant experience.
00:42:57.000I mean, there are ways to have these transformative experiences without drugs, without plants, but it's just a faster way.
00:43:04.000The only transformative experience that I've ever experienced from dealing with people that have gone on a completely transforming their life in a completely plant-based diet is they can never shut the fuck up about the fact they're on a plant-based diet.
00:43:16.000Well, you can't go out to eat with people.
00:43:25.000And in light of the new information that's been discovered over the past decade or so about the intelligence of plants, about plants' ability to calculate, their ability to recognize...
00:48:33.000So there's a role for us as stewards of the environment.
00:48:38.000These wild boars are, as you say, they're devastating ecosystems.
00:48:42.000I don't know in California, but Hawaii, this is their biggest problem, and it's destroying ecosystems in Hawaii.
00:48:50.000So there is a role for us to step in and say, well, you know, we're going to Kind of exert some control here and control that population because they didn't originate in Hawaii.
00:49:21.000Yeah, it is a weird connection, the connection that we have to life itself.
00:49:31.000Our thoughts, when we talk about Native Americans, almost immediately we think of the spiritual connection that Native Americans had to the land, the deep respect that they had for the animals that they killed and the fact that they would use every single piece of that animal.
00:51:01.000When you were talking about earlier about brains being overrated, one of the things that I've really...
00:51:07.000It's been inescapable for me over the last few years or so is this idea that we are the caterpillars that are giving birth to the moth and that our whole...
00:51:20.000Screwy system and our issues with ego problems and materialism might be because we're just sort of a transitionary stage to this symbiotic relationship that we have with technology and that we're going to give birth to some artificial thing that doesn't carry the burdens of natural selection,
00:51:39.000that doesn't carry the burdens of primitive instincts, the need to survive, all these animal reward systems that were built into us from the time that we were monkeys.
00:52:15.000Hyper-intelligent, artificial life that's capable of living a completely self-sustaining existence where you're totally solar-powered, all garbage or any waste product whatsoever, it's factored immediately into the equation instead of put off nuclear waste where they just dig a fucking hole and,
00:53:01.000Having a completely holistic approach to this thing like, okay, are we going to build this stuff?
00:53:06.000If we are going to build this stuff, what are we going to do about the toxic waste?
00:53:09.000Okay, let's factor that in before we move forward and then spend an extra few decades trying to figure out what to do with that shit and then maybe come up with a solution before you ever move forward.
00:53:25.000Well, companies have quarterly reporting requirements.
00:53:27.000If we just change the financial reporting structure to a one-year or a five-year instead of this short-term thinking, solar panels are cheaper than diesel now, at least.
00:53:38.000This is what has to be factored into corporate planning, as you say, because the corporations have gotten a free ride for too long because they never pay the environmental consequences of what they do.
00:53:52.000And we have to change that where they have to be held accountable and responsible for the environmental impact.
00:53:59.000It's not just that you pay $200 for an iPhone.
00:54:03.000You pay $200 for an iPhone, but it costs $2,000 to deal with the environmental impact of the fact that you have that iPhone.
00:54:11.000The people that are getting cancer from the toxic waste.
00:54:15.000That economic equation has got to change.
00:54:20.000That's one of the biggest challenges because it's a huge challenge to capitalism.
00:54:25.000It's laying down the gauntlet and saying, look guys, okay, you can make money, but let's look at the bottom line in the realistic way.
00:54:33.000You're making all this profit, but what are you costing the taxpayers and the rest of society for your profit-making activities?
00:55:02.000And nature is just another commodity, as they see it, to be owned and exploited.
00:55:08.000And that's the perception that's got to change.
00:55:11.000And maybe one way to do it is to, you know, I think, speaking of hearts and minds, I think if you can get, you know, there are ethical capitalists out there.
00:56:27.000You've got, what is it, 95% of the wealth concentrated in the 1% and the rest of us are, you know, the rest of us is quickly devolving into a third world situation and that is economic slavery in a sense.
00:56:45.000I mean, people do what they have to do because they don't have a choice.
00:56:49.000They're, you know, they're Economic activity, their priorities are dictated by corporations.
00:56:55.000This idea that profit is the only thing that a corporation should be concerned with, we've got to evolve beyond that.
00:57:10.000Helping people's lives be better is more important than profits.
00:57:15.000I mean sure, profits, but that should be down several notches, I think, on the totem pole in terms of what they I think it should be like food.
00:57:27.000I think profit should be like food in that you can't eat poison.
00:57:32.000And that if you're eating something, and look, we have all these calories.
00:57:36.000Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's fucking killing you.
00:57:38.000Do you understand that you can't eat this?
00:58:31.000Until the shareholders start demanding that they actually act responsibly.
00:58:36.000So that's – I don't know how that works, but if the shareholders – There was a NASA funded study looking at collapse of civilizations and one of the major factors is the discrepancy in wealth,
00:58:55.000that the wealthy people are using up the resources and they're insulated from the effects.
00:59:00.000And then it gets to a point where the people making decisions haven't been thinking about the consequences and the alternatives.
00:59:35.000We have to figure this out before we hit this wall.
00:59:38.000When I was an undergrad, I was in business school until I took five grams of psilocybin mushrooms that I grew in my dormitory closet at the urging of Terence McKenna's books.
00:59:50.000The old Osaneric method, how to undermine civilization one jar at a time.
00:59:58.000But I realized that I was fighting a losing battle if I wasn't speaking the same language of making some profit, of appealing to people's business interests.
01:01:14.000The last six years I've been working with the global sustainability standards like the Forest Stewardship Council and the Marine Stewardship Council and the ESC is modeled on these organizations that you talk with enough stakeholders and you build consensus through dialogue and you have a transparent process that It appeals to companies.
01:01:40.000They realized that they were catching too much fish from the ocean and it wasn't sustainable.
01:01:45.000So now all McDonald's fish sandwiches are Marine Stewardship Council certified, which means they can sell McFish sandwiches into eternity as long as the oceans are viable for life.
01:01:57.000Or Kimberly Clark was cutting down the rainforests and cutting down the arboreal forests in Canada.
01:02:03.000Now all of their paper products are going to be FSC certified.
01:02:06.000And FSC certifies 15% of the standing forests of the world, which means that people have a fair share.
01:02:13.000This notion of stewardship, I think, is really important.
01:02:43.000And I think that is really important to get that message out.
01:02:47.000And that's what people like Josh are trying to do.
01:02:50.000And I think psychedelics have a role to play, absolutely, in educating.
01:02:56.000You know, I mean, it's interesting the, you know, It's going to be a while, I think, before ayahuasca gets integrated in this country in a way, for example,
01:03:12.000in therapy and in biomedicine, it's not going to happen.
01:03:16.000But what you do see happening are these centers that are growing up.
01:03:20.000And right now, it's in South America and Josh and The Botanical Stewardship Council are trying to develop standards for these organizations so that, you know, they're committed to a certain ethical set of standards,
01:03:37.000safety, and quality of their brew and so on.
01:03:42.000But I can envision a time not too far in the future where if a person...
01:03:48.000You know, you can go to South America and if you have issues, if you have sickness, addiction or whatever, you can get treatment.
01:03:57.000But even more importantly, you can just get an education.
01:04:03.000You can go there for purposes of spiritual discovery and self-discovery and all that.
01:04:09.000Once you have that infrastructure, which is growing, then it partly becomes we need to get people in positions of power.
01:04:27.000I mean, you can't hold them in a headlock and force them to drink ayahuasca, although I'd like to a lot of times.
01:04:50.000People have a negative reaction to that, and I know this personally firsthand because I have a business, Onnit.com is a company we sell exercise equipment and supplements and healthy foods.
01:05:06.000One of the ways that Onnit was created was my partner Aubrey and I talking about it, and Aubrey going to South America, doing ayahuasca, and then having these visions about his business.
01:05:18.000And when he talked about that, he was met with so much criticism.
01:07:10.000The word ethical company, or the expression ethical company, I think is a big one.
01:07:19.000And I think that this idea of the psychedelic experience for those who haven't experienced it, or for those who, oh, I dropped acid in college, but I'm past that now.
01:07:31.000I've got a 401k and a mortgage and college bills for my kids, and I have a lot of things to come.
01:07:48.000If you're a human being and you have, I mean, you're a constant sort of soup of chemicals, neurotransmitters, adrenaline, hormones, all these different things are going on.
01:07:58.000You're trying to maintain balances and keep everything aligned and then keep the pattern of thought in a good place so that it maintains everything as well.
01:08:07.000I think that to these people that are perpetrating a lot of the issues that we have, whether it's the head of BP or take some guy who wants to frack and say, before you do that, do this first.
01:08:26.000You should show that before you start fracking...
01:08:30.000You should show that you have a degree, that you understand the actual physical process of removing these chemicals.
01:08:37.000You should understand, you know, whatever energy extraction degrees you have to have and whatever sciences that pertain to that.
01:08:45.000But you should also have psychedelic trips under your belt.
01:08:47.000Like, you could say, well, you know, here, I've seen your documentation, you've gone through your five grams, and what did you get out of that?
01:09:43.000Or people in the Department of Defense or the Veterans Affairs that are dealing with all these soldiers with PTSD. Another important aspect of this symposia conference is a new organization called VET. It's Veterans for Entheogenic Therapy.
01:10:01.000Participated in the MAPS PTSD study with MDMA and they came away feeling so much better and they want to open this up to other veterans and others suffering from PTSD. So a portion of the proceeds from the Amherst conference and the online live participation will go to this organization and to the ESC. That's spectacular.
01:10:22.000I'm a huge, huge fan of MAPS. I've had Rick Doblin on the podcast before, who's just a fantastic guy.
01:10:28.000They just tweeted me something, and I retweeted it.
01:10:31.000They did a new study on autism, adult autism, MDMA-assisted therapy for social anxiety in autistic adults.
01:11:18.000H-E-F-F-T-E-R. Not Hefter, but Hefter.
01:11:23.000And it's a non-profit, and basically we're committed to developing clinical protocols with psychedelics and have kind of staked out psilocybin in some ways, in the same way that MDMA is MAPS's thing,
01:11:39.000psilocybin is our thing, and we've got several really interesting protocols.
01:11:46.000FDA approved clinical studies right now for end of life, existential anxiety at the end of life.
01:13:36.000The psilocybin connection to dimethyltryptamine, dimethyltryptamine being an endogenous chemical and neurotransmitter, and psilocybin being very close.
01:13:51.000Dimethyltryptamine is simply dimethyltryptamine.
01:13:56.000Psilocin, which is the active principle of psilocybin, psilocybin is converted to psilocin in the body.
01:14:04.000So it's what pharmacologists call a pro-drug.
01:14:07.000It's converted by a very simple chemical reaction to psilicin.
01:14:12.000That's the one that actually interacts with the receptors.
01:14:14.000So psilicin is chemically 4-hydroxydimethyltryptamine.
01:14:20.000So it differs with one trivial substitution on the indole ring.
01:14:26.000That oxygen, that alcohol group at the top of the indole ring It's what makes it psilocin and not DMT. But it makes all the difference pharmacologically because psilocin is orally active and it doesn't require an MAO inhibitor and DMT does.
01:14:57.000So you have to take it parentally by smoking it or indigenous people make snuff out of it and so on.
01:15:03.000They get around that whole detoxification mechanism.
01:15:08.000Your gut is full of MAO, monoamine oxidase.
01:15:14.000And the reason it's full of monoamine oxidase, it's a...
01:15:17.000The consequences of our evolution is omnivores because plants are full of amines.
01:15:24.000Most of them are toxic, and you don't want those.
01:15:27.000So you have the detoxification mechanism, but that also works for DMT. And for that matter, we can't be dining on DMT-containing plants all the time and wandering around.
01:15:38.000I mean, you do need to be able to function in the world.
01:16:28.000So that's the form it's stored in in the mushroom, and it can be quite stable for a long time.
01:16:33.000As soon as you convert it to psilocin, it's very unstable and it's ephemeral, which is one reason why it's so easily metabolized by human metabolism.
01:16:44.000It's very compatible with human metabolism, which is a reason why it's so stable.
01:17:29.000And the content, which I guess not everybody...
01:17:34.000It has this feeling of this science fiction-ish cast to the experience, but many people do, and they're not all Terence McKenna fans.
01:17:43.000I mean, if you follow the Terence McKenna recipe and eat five grams in the absolute darkness, you'll be utterly convinced that they've landed.
01:17:55.000And whether that's just an impression or whether it's...
01:18:00.000Again, I think this is possibly something...
01:18:04.000You know, built into the structure of our nervous system.
01:18:09.000And it may be, I mean, we've always had this fascination with space, with the external, you know, with this sort of longing to Maybe return to space.
01:18:31.000But certainly in this evolutionary process of cognition, which we credit the plants for if we want to buy into that idea, we credit the plants for bringing about cognition, the ability to wonder,
01:19:27.000The fact that spores are one of the hardest substances in nature and they can survive for eternity in space.
01:19:32.000They can survive in hard vacuum and radiation-dense environments and they're not affected by it.
01:19:39.000The other thing that your brother had mentioned was that it was so different than other life forms on Earth because of its chemical makeup that he thought that the 4-hydroxy or 4-phosphoryl Yeah,
01:19:55.000the 4-hydroxy, 4-phosphoryl biosynthetic pathway is really only found in this group of mushrooms, you know, actually and related species.
01:20:25.000I think if you want to make that hypothesis, you have to go further back and you have to say, well, Maybe a supercivilization seeded our ecology at some point, not with the genes to make psilocin,
01:21:06.000But two trivial steps away from tryptophan, two trivial enzymatic modifications away from tryptophan, you've got DMT. You know, you remove the carboxyl group, you stick a couple methyl groups on tryptophan, and there you are.
01:21:22.000You've got DMT. And I've often thought, wow, maybe this is a sort of subtext, sub-message of nature saying...
01:21:31.000Just around the corner from tryptophan is this compound that opens the door to other dimensions.
01:22:32.000And I think that as we get further along in our understanding of the universe, I think we're going to realize that everything is kind of fractal.
01:22:39.000And there really is no separation between this planet and other planets.
01:22:48.000You know, any prebiotic environment, I mean, we don't know that much about exactly how life evolved, but we know that in certain situations, you've got a buildup of organic compounds and under the right circumstances,
01:23:05.000it just seems to be a property of matter, you know?
01:23:10.000Atoms, molecules fall together in such a way that before you know it, you've got living systems.
01:23:15.000You've brought this up twice, and I can't ignore it, because you brought it up in the last podcast as well.
01:23:19.000You are fascinated by the idea of life being seeded here by some intelligent force.
01:23:26.000Amber Lyon, who I just discussed earlier...
01:23:30.000She had a vision of that actually happening on ayahuasca, and many other people have as well.
01:23:38.000Do you think that that's something that is a real possibility?
01:25:03.000I think that life is probably widespread in the universe, but I think intelligence is rare.
01:25:10.000And the fact that we find ourselves in that existential situation, you know, maybe we need to take another look at this and say, well, maybe this is not such a crazy idea, you know?
01:25:23.000I mean, I do think that intelligence, you know, we're not the only ones, and I think, you know, I don't know if I'm degenerating into incoherence here, but I think that intelligence can have an influence on the evolution of even the universe.
01:25:41.000It's a force in the universe, and I think that mind is probably as primary a feature of reality as the quantum foam.
01:25:54.000I mean, it may not even be separate from it.
01:26:52.000So get off your high horse and Be a little more humble and be open to learning.
01:26:59.000And it's all right in front of us if we go back and look at what we know about human history and what they knew and how we laugh at what they knew then.
01:27:08.000If you go back to the time when they thought the world was flat, back to the time where they were killing Bruno because he thought that the universe was infinite.
01:27:19.000There's all these different things that people had a consensus on.
01:27:44.000It's also one of those things, too, when you're discussing aliens and you're discussing the possibility of an alien life form, we want to think it's preposterous, but we're preposterous.
01:27:55.000If we didn't exist, oh my god, we would be the most ridiculous thing ever.
01:28:30.000And then this woman, Rosa Parks, she got arrested because she had too much melanin in her skin to sit in a certain spot on a moving piece of transportation, and then she was celebrated as a hero.
01:28:46.000Just the fact that we exist at all, why would we deny the idea that something else far more advanced than us exists somewhere else?
01:28:53.000No different than us looking at, you know, when we find primates using tools, evidence of using tools without any human intervention, like they just figured out how to do it on their own, like to get ants out of anthills and things like that.
01:29:24.000Yeah, we're an experiment of some sort.
01:29:27.000And whether, you know, we're, you know, some civilization, some super civilization has genetically engineered this whole ecosystem and created tryptophan and then...
01:29:40.000Seeded it into the ecosystem, knowing that over the course of evolutionary time, it was going to develop things like psilocybin and serotonin.
01:29:48.000It's almost as though the civilization, this hypothetical civilization, wanted somebody to talk to.
01:29:55.000And in order to do that, it had to invent...
01:29:58.000Us primates, you know, and it had to get us talking first to our plants and maybe eventually we'll get a chance to talk to them, whoever they are, you know, or maybe they're already here.
01:30:09.000I mean, there are a lot of people who say they're already here, you know, and I... Yeah, I don't...
01:30:25.000I had this sci-fi show, and we stopped doing it, and they wanted to keep doing it, but I didn't want to do it anymore because I got tired of talking to liars.
01:30:38.000We interviewed Bigfoot people and UFO people, and some of them are well-intentioned folks, but there was a lot of liars.
01:30:44.000There was a psychological issue, and I could clearly see it.
01:30:49.000Because when you have a podcast with someone and you sit down with someone for three hours, you can bullshit someone for a seven-minute interview on a news show.
01:30:57.000But you can't bullshit someone for three hours.
01:31:00.000After three hours, weird things start to show up.
01:32:02.000And all this theoretical conversation is nice about whether we have the imprints of other civilizations in our ecosystem.
01:32:12.000The fact is we have an ecosystem and maybe we delude ourselves that we have some control over its evolution or stewardship of it, but we certainly have this opportunity to...
01:32:25.000To either destroy the planet or preserve it.
01:32:27.000Well, we certainly have an effect, and we're certainly conscious in some way, shape, or form of that effect.
01:32:33.000And when you extrapolate that to 100,000, a million years from now, if this civilization or something similar survives, well, you've got to think that it's going to be something like an alien invasion.
01:32:44.000We really will be like that thing that wants to see the universe.
01:35:30.000Well, that's the feeling that you get on dimethyltryptamine is that you've entered into a new area, a new space, and that the space is somehow or another inhabited with something that's communicating in some nonverbal form that reaches you as intent.
01:36:50.000Games with the mushrooms, you know, when he would take them at these high doses alone and say, well, how do I know that what you're telling me is real?
01:36:59.000Tell me something I cannot possibly know, you know?
01:37:03.000And they would never cough it up because it was like, you know, but it was like, all right, I want the blueprints to the starship now!
01:37:48.000If you absorb some sort of a psychedelic compound and have this intense moment where you do pass into another dimension and you meet with pure love and the very wiring of the universe is exposed to you and you get to see the fractal nature of reality in some incredibly profound form and that is what you're actually experiencing.
01:38:12.000Or if it's just your imagination and you go there and it's all in your mind Yeah.
01:38:40.000But I'm here to tell you, it's all hallucination.
01:39:19.000But we're getting signals through this sensory-neural interface, and then the brain is basically a processing device that takes that information, combines it with internal associations and everything, and generates the hallucination that you and I and everybody else are living in at this very moment.
01:39:40.000We're all part of this constructed reality.
01:39:44.000So people dismiss it as psychedelic experience as hallucination.
01:39:49.000I would say no, it is, but it's just another hallucination and it's all hallucination.
01:39:56.000It's all … Trevor Burrus Or at least interpretation of something, personal interpretation.
01:40:02.000I mean the world, physics, we know enough through physics about this supposedly external reality to know that it doesn't look anything like what we're experiencing.
01:40:43.000This is the reality-generating machine that you get to look at When you strip away, when you take the cover off and look at the way the diagram is wired, then you get some insights into it.
01:40:58.000So then that's a useful thing because then you can go back and you can say, well, none of this is real.
01:41:04.000Let's not get carried away that this is any more real than anything else.
01:41:09.000Yeah, that seems to be like the information that's coming from folks that study subatomic particles.
01:41:15.000That information is one of the most undeniable pieces of information that the universe is not what you think it is.
01:41:50.000I had Dr. Amit Goswami, he's a theoretical physicist, he tried to explain superposition to me, and I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
01:41:58.000It's moving, and it's still, at the same time.
01:42:07.000So here you have physics, you know, the absolute sort of cutting-edge science, the one that we've charged with explaining the fundamental nature of reality.
01:42:17.000And you talk to these people, and it sounds like the ravings of schizophrenia.
01:42:22.000It sounds like someone who's on drugs.
01:42:58.000Yeah, that is fascinating because the...
01:43:04.000The explanations of reality by these physicists are, in fact, more bizarre than the experiences that are relayed by people who take ayahuasca.
01:43:41.000It's just not necessarily the absolute reality, and I don't know if there is an absolute reality.
01:43:46.000I agree with you, and I think that's also one of the transformative parts of the psychedelic experience, that the experience itself is transformative because you're experiencing it.
01:45:09.000Or you sit in a field and, you know, you take LSD and you're Steve Jobs and you have all these fantasies, except then you actually make it happen.
01:45:18.000You create the Apple computer or whatever.
01:45:21.000And that was a psychedelic vision and was at the time and remains so.
01:45:25.000And, you know, this thing here, I mean, this is the little psychedelic toy of the future.
01:45:34.000When you ask it questions, and it goes online, and it gives you the answers to the entire volume of human understanding on that subject, the consensus.
01:45:44.000This is, you know, like you were just explaining what the chemical definition of silicin is, or the description of it.
01:47:43.000The tipping point of technology and our connectivity.
01:47:49.000That's kind of where, whether it's 2008 or 2012, when you're looking at a thousand years from now, when they talk about the Renaissance, when they talk about whatever great periods of human history, very gigantic periods of change.
01:48:07.000This is going to be one of the biggest ever.
01:48:09.000And it really will boil down to these decades or at least these few years.
01:48:16.000So his error, I thought, I was kind of a critic of the time wave for exactly this.
01:48:23.000For folks who don't know, explain what that means.
01:48:25.000Well, his idea that he created a mathematical model based on the I Ching that he claimed...
01:48:34.000I mean, he postulated that time had a structure and time had an end, or at least history had an end, and that that end was December 21, 2012. And there's linkages to the Mayan calendar, which...
01:48:53.000It was a mistake to link it to a particular day, I think.
01:48:58.000That's not the way that novelty—the idea was that this wave described the way that novelty ingressed into the continuum.
01:49:06.000Well, I think that novelty ingresses in the continuum.
01:49:10.000I mean, every day there's something new under the sun.
01:49:13.000There's something that never happened before.
01:49:15.000In the history of the universe, it happens.
01:49:17.000But it doesn't explode into the continuum.
01:49:20.000It's more like it seeps into the continuum.
01:49:25.000And we're going through a period of tremendous change, but it's not linked to a particular day.
01:49:34.000He was wrong as far as the particulars were concerned.
01:49:37.000It wasn't December 21st, 2012. But he was totally right in terms of the idea that novelty does increase and it has increased and it's increasing and it's accelerating and all you have to do is look around.
01:49:58.000I mean, if you look at where we are now, even from where we were now, 10 years ago and even 20 years – can any of us even remember what it was like 20 years ago?
01:50:07.000I mean the world has completely transformed.
01:50:10.000So he was correct in that sense that things are changing.
01:50:18.000Well, maybe in just putting a date to it and giving people something to focus on, he made the idea more tangible for some.
01:50:26.000It made it more tangible, but I think it wasn't – I think it was – Not necessarily a good strategy because people were giving in to the temptation of focusing on that date.
01:50:41.000And it was either on that date, either everything's going to collapse or we'll cross the threshold and everything will be great.
01:50:49.000And it was kind of a, you know, consciousness will be transformed and we'll be in this golden state.
01:50:53.000And I thought it was kind of a, for many people, it was an excuse for not Taking responsibility.
01:51:01.000I mean, and just all we have to do is wait and it'll all work out.
01:51:07.000No, you know, that's not taking responsibility.
01:51:41.000They're not tremendous—with obvious exceptions, like global asteroid impact.
01:51:48.000I mean, hey, that's abrupt, and it's transforming, no doubt, but that only happens once every few million years.
01:51:56.000Events normally don't explode into history that way.
01:51:59.000I mean Terence used to talk about the first explosion of the atomic bomb.
01:52:07.000Well, that was an abrupt event but not really.
01:52:10.000I mean when did the actual novelty – Was it when Einstein developed the equations that described nuclear fusion, or was it the fission rather, or was it the point where, you know, we achieved the first sustained nuclear reaction?
01:52:28.000I mean, these were not things that anybody noticed at the time, but those were the transformative events that made it possible to, a couple decades later, drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima.
01:52:41.000And that's the one that got the headlines, but that wasn't really the roots of the novelty, if you know what I'm saying.
01:52:47.000No, I totally know what you're saying.
01:52:48.000And it seems that they all pile on to each other as well.
01:52:51.000They pile on to each other, and they're cumulative.
01:53:35.000Those are the two, you know, like very distinctly different, but...
01:53:41.000But those exemplify the limits of our power.
01:53:44.000Yeah, we have the power to completely, you know, disrupt the whole shooting match and just it all turns into radioactive slag or we escape some way.
01:53:55.000And I think, you know, I think it's wonderful that we can send robots to Mars and all this, but space is so vast...
01:54:04.000It's never really going to become accessible to us unless we can figure out this hyper-light thing.
01:54:11.000And I don't know if it's traveling faster than light or figuring out how to open up a portal.
01:54:18.000I mean, this idea that there's Newtonian space separated by these vast distances, I don't buy it.
01:54:25.000I think there's a way to Get from one place to another without going through, you know, hyperspace is a real thing.
01:57:20.000And you take DMT or something like it that has such a profound impact, I mean, you probably noticed it in yourself.
01:57:29.000You're not even down from the experience before you're trying to box it into some kind of a linguistic box that's, you know, and you're reaching out and you're babbling and you say, that's it, that's it, or my God, my God, or, you know,
01:57:44.000but you're trying to put it into some kind of a linguistic box because it's incomprehensible by nature.
01:59:06.000You know how we were talking about how the brain takes experience and puts it all together into some kind of more or less comprehensible model and extrudes it out as your reality,
01:59:22.000your movie, the movie that your producer, director and star of.
01:59:28.000DMT gives you a chance to kind of arrest that process And again, as I said, step back from it and look at the raw data, look at the circuitry underneath, free of interpretation, and say, oh, okay,
01:59:44.000this is the machinery, this is the machinery that's generating reality.
01:59:50.000But again, by even saying that, I don't do it justice.
02:00:24.000Well, I'm thinking of my first mushroom experience.
02:00:27.000My first DMT experience was, I mean, it sounds trivial, but it was sort of like some sort of gingerbread or Play-Doh that was alive and talking to me.
02:00:39.000And just sort of one aspect of the Godhead.
02:03:21.000It was different for me because it didn't give me the sort of comfort that DMT did, that it was sort of talking to me and communicating with me.
02:03:31.000It was completely absent of any context.
02:03:53.000Somewhere, somewhere, there's a place where all conscious entities arose from and go back to, and I was in the center of this galactic cloud of...
02:04:07.000I mean, I sort of had a dim awareness of my existence as a separate entity, but mostly I was part of this soul cloud and is the best I can describe it.
02:04:21.000And by the time I came back, that was all completely faded as it tended to.
02:04:47.000Whereas the NN dimethyltryptamine was different every time, and it seemed like it was a communication, like something was talking to me, like there was a lot going on.
02:04:57.000The visual aspect of it was way more compelling.
02:05:00.000There's very little visual aspect with 5-methoxy.
02:06:43.000My friend Duncan took it, and he took a huge dose because he didn't believe it was any—he had never done any DMT before, and he had done acid.
02:06:49.000And I had never done acid before, and I was telling him about DMT. He's like, pfft, you've never even done acid.
02:06:54.000So he takes DMT in a big dose, and he calls me up.
02:08:12.000I find it very disturbing and not particularly enjoyable and actually just bizarro.
02:08:21.000But again, these are areas of consciousness.
02:08:24.000These pharmacological tools are exploratory probes into these realms of consciousness.
02:08:34.000And just because you're familiar with the psychedelic experience, which is mainly the tryptamine-mediated serotonin dimension, there are all those other dimensions out there, and there are aspects of consciousness, too.
02:08:47.000Salvia divinorin happens to be the kappa-opiate.
02:08:59.000Going to those places, you know, heroin, morphine, those sorts of things, they're euphoric, gentle, you know, almost sedated states of mind.
02:09:08.000Kappa opiate, which is, you know, one of the three opiate receptors that happens to be the one that salvia divinora exists, it's a whole other ballgame, you know.
02:09:49.000You know, they have a long history of use, obviously, and they seem to be – if you look into the use of Toei in South America, Toei Bregmanzia, or you look at Datura and other nightshades in Europe,
02:10:06.000this is the – Realm of wraiths and ghosts and that sort of thing.
02:10:14.000Detura is a very interesting one, too, because of the reality-dissolving properties of it, where people think that they're somewhere that they're not, and they have huge issues with memory.
02:10:25.000Do you think that's the disruption of acetylcholine?
02:13:14.000And so I'm in the bedroom, and one of the weird things, I guess people who take detour should be forewarned, one of the things it does is dilate your eyes, right?
02:13:23.000I mean, it's used medically to dilate your eyes.
02:13:27.000Atropine is what they put in your eyes to do an eye exam.
02:13:30.000What that means is your eyes are dilated, so you can't see the Very well.
02:13:36.000And so any modeled surface, anything with a texture, like a tablecloth or wallpaper, anything you look at, starts to swarm.
02:13:47.000And the next thing you know, there are bugs everywhere.
02:13:52.000For me, so it was like the bug experience.
02:14:59.000Apparently there's techniques that you can learn how to successfully lucid dream on the natch, as it were.
02:15:06.000But if you take acetylcholine before you go to bed, like a couple hours before you go to bed, you have lucid dreams whether you like it or not.
02:15:13.000It seems like your dreams are more durable.
02:15:17.000Me personally, when I'm aware of my dreams normally, they fade away.
02:15:21.000Like, oh, I'm dreaming, and then it's gone.
02:15:42.000The technical term is anticholinergic.
02:15:45.000They block acetylcholine from binding to its receptor.
02:15:49.000So that's the basis of the altered state of consciousness.
02:15:53.000And interestingly enough, the detourous state of mind resembles It resembles profound sleep deprivation.
02:16:04.000If you keep yourself awake for five days, you will have experiences and hallucinations that are almost indistinguishable from a state of deter intoxication.
02:16:23.000Or if you do deter, have somebody there who's looking after you because you really can't Distinguish reality and you do silly things.
02:16:32.000You know, I had a friend who took Deturo one time and he spent the whole time dismantling his motorcycle engine on his kitchen floor, taking it apart and cleaning it and putting it back together.
02:18:44.000A lot of the research now on Alzheimer's and other dementias are finding things that either have this cholinergic agonist effect, like nicotine, or they block acetylcholine from being broken down.
02:19:00.000There are acetylcholine esterase inhibitors.
02:19:03.000Acetylcholine esterase is the enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine.
02:19:09.000I don't smoke cigarettes, but I found it absolutely fascinating in reading Stephen King's book on writing, where he talked about when he stopped smoking cigarettes, it really affected his writing process.
02:20:19.000We're kind of setting the table for indigenous groups and people that run retreat centers.
02:20:26.000People that are selling ayahuasca online, etc.
02:20:28.000All the people that are involved in the kind of value chain of ayahuasca to come together and determine, well, what does sustainability at the site level look like, like ecotourism?
02:20:39.000How are you giving back to the community, to the biodiversity of the place where you have your site?
02:20:44.000How are you making sure the people in the ceremony are safe, that they're screened psychologically or for heart conditions, they're not taking antidepressants, they have People babysitting or watching so people don't wander off into the jungle.
02:20:57.000The antidepressants one is an interesting one.
02:21:01.000Well, the issue with antidepressants and ayahuasca is because ayahuasca involves MAO inhibitors, right?
02:21:12.000And so It prevents the breakdown of DMT and so there's a lot of DMT and it's a serotonergic agonist and so are the antidepressants.
02:21:30.000So you are essentially piling on One serotonergic agonist on another because you're inhibiting the breakdown process.
02:21:38.000MAO is involved in breaking down both DMT and serotonin.
02:21:43.000So safety-wise, the issue is that it could lead to what's called a serotonin syndrome.
02:21:50.000And the serotonin syndrome is something that happens when you've got too much serotonin, too much...
02:21:58.000Pushing the serotonin button a little bit too hard and it could lead to hyperthermia and cardiac irregularities and ultimately death if it's really bad.
02:22:10.000You want to avoid the serotonin syndrome if possible.
02:22:13.000That's fascinating because that's also an issue that people have if they take SSRIs and they want to consume tryptophan or 5-HTP. Exactly, exactly.
02:22:48.000With ayahuasca, it's really only an issue if you're taking SSRIs or if you're taking MAO inhibitors, which most people, they're not used clinically anymore.
02:23:01.000There's a whole older generation of antidepressants that are MAO inhibitors.
02:23:06.000You shouldn't combine those with ayahuasca and you shouldn't combine SSRIs with ayahuasca.
02:23:15.000I mean it may be a theoretical hazard.
02:23:17.000I haven't seen a lot of reports of serotonin syndrome happening with ayahuasca.
02:23:28.000I'm sure there are people taking serotonin uptake inhibitors that are taking ayahuasca and There's no problem, but they're probably taking lower doses.
02:23:38.000It's just a good idea to get off those things before you take ayahuasca.
02:23:45.000Is it a good idea to get off those things, period?
02:25:43.000Whether that's actual psychotherapy or shamanism or some combination of those things, these are drugs that have to be used in context.
02:25:52.000The take two and call me in the morning model doesn't work for these.
02:25:57.000These have to be used in a very highly controlled set and setting.
02:26:02.000So I think where the business model comes in is you have places where people can go and get this kind of therapy.
02:26:10.000So it shifts from The drug itself, the emphasis is on – our whole biomedical industrial complex is set up to encourage Band-Aid solutions.
02:27:31.000But DMT is found in so many plants that, you know, they can't really make all those plants illegal.
02:27:42.000Because, you know, I mean, they can, but they're not going to be able to enforce it.
02:27:47.000You're not going to be able to have salad.
02:27:49.000Literally, you're not going to be able to have salad.
02:27:51.000I mean, I'm, you know, Harkening back to what we were saying about how close DMT is to tryptophan, two steps away.
02:27:59.000I'll bet you, I mean, I wish somebody would do this, there's no funding for this, but I'll bet you if you had sufficiently sensitive instruments, you could find DMT in all plants.
02:28:11.000You could just start randomly selecting them out of your backyard and run them through the mass spec or whatever.
02:28:18.000You could pick up DMT. Not in usable amounts, but it's universally just, you know, nature is drenched in DMT. Why do you think that is?
02:32:05.000The whole 60s baggage that psychedelics have been marginalized with for so long, that's going away and a new, more positive perception is appearing as some of these therapeutic uses are becoming...
02:32:21.000You know, more aware in general consciousness.
02:32:24.000Oh, PTSD can be treated with MDMA. We've got veterans out there who need that.
02:32:50.000These positive messages are being heard more and more and there's less and less sort of, you know, partly because a lot of people from the 60s are dying off or whatever they don't remember.
02:33:03.000But the knee-jerk negative message about psychedelics is not...
02:33:10.000Yeah, they're much harder to distinguish now.
02:35:35.000It's the best online source of information about psychoactive drugs of all kinds, not just psychedelics.
02:35:43.000It's the go-to place on the web if you want real, solid information, not bullshit, not put out by the propagandists, put out by people whose commitment is to accurate information.
02:36:00.000There are trip reports, there are safety reports, the chemistry, the, you know, the entheal botany, the part of it, the shamanic traditions, it's all represented there.
02:36:40.000And I think, again, I think this symposium conference is going to be great, but it's also exemplary of what needs to happen.
02:36:50.000And I'm really impressed that young people, like the folks that are organizing this conference, are stepping up to the plate and saying, we want to We want to make this a part of an educational dialogue.
02:37:06.000We want to have this happen on lots of university campuses, lots of places.
02:37:21.000Before, back in the 60s, 70s, you might not have had no experience with psychedelics and no No way to know.
02:37:33.000How am I going to find out about these things?
02:37:36.000Now it's a click of a mouse and you're there.
02:37:39.000There's no excuse for not educating yourself.
02:37:44.000Another very good site is icers.org, I-C-E-E-R-S. It's the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, and Service based in Europe.
02:37:56.000They have a ton of information about ayahuasca and iboga, the plant-based psychedelics.
02:38:02.000They're also a sort of incubation partner for the ESC, helping ESC get started.
02:38:07.000Yeah, Ibogaine is another fantastic drug for dealing with addiction.
02:38:11.000I have a good friend who had a back injury and got hooked on pain pills and had a real problem and really couldn't kick it.
02:38:18.000Went to Mexico, did Ibogaine, became completely fascinated, Cured and absolutely fascinated by ibogaine and how is this possible that this has escaped Western medicine?
02:38:31.000Started his own ibogaine center down there and now, you know, regularly.
02:38:36.000I mean, he's just a different human being.
02:38:38.000When I talk to him, he's just like so at peace and just a different guy.
02:38:45.000It breaks that physical addiction to opiates instantly.
02:38:49.000The ESC is signing a memorandum of understanding with the Global Ibogaine Therapist Alliance to work on the safety and the sustainability of that traditional plant.
02:39:01.000It's under extreme pressure from the growing global demand.
02:39:05.000It's traditionally from Africa, and it takes seven years for a mature plant to be grown, and then you have to take the root out and kill the plant.
02:39:45.000There were almost clinical studies approved by the FDA and then they stepped back from it because of some supposed neurotoxicity, which I don't think they ever satisfactorily demonstrated.
02:39:59.000You know, the therapeutic community was saying, well, ibogaine is so useful for this addiction therapy that we're just not going to put up with this.
02:40:08.000And so ibogaine is not illegal in It's illegal in the States, but it's not illegal in most of the world.
02:40:14.000So these addiction treatment centers have blossomed all over the world.
02:40:20.000There's Mexico, South America, even Canada.
02:40:23.000There are treatment centers That use ibogaine to treat addiction.
02:40:27.000And they've just said, well, you know, fuck the FDA. We're going to step outside that framework and do it because it's important to get this therapy to people.
02:40:44.000And I would like to see what's going on right now with marijuana in this country slowly start happening with ayahuasca, ibogaine, psilocybin, all these various things.
02:42:08.000Right, you can't fake it, but it's hard for somebody going in to see what kind of an impact a center has on the local community or where they're sourcing the ayahuasca comes from.
02:42:18.000And that's where the ESC is bringing that professional expertise to supplement what the community is doing.
02:42:26.000And certainly we will rely on feedback from visitors.
02:42:30.000That'll be part of the credibility and the transparency that we're building into the way of assuring the sites are sustainable and safe.
02:42:38.000There'll be grievance mechanisms if you have a bad experience.
02:42:41.000Hopefully in five years, that's probably an optimistic time frame, but hopefully in ten years there'll be places you can go.
02:42:50.000And have these experiences where you don't have to leave the country.
02:42:54.000I mean, you can already find them outside the country.
02:42:56.000But it would be nice if there were places in the States where you could get this.
02:43:00.000And it would transform psychiatric medicine if there was.
02:43:07.000Which is, again, threatening to many people with a stake in how it's done now.
02:43:48.000I mean, there's a lot of people that are cynical today and they look at today's culture and they look at the toxification of our environment and the materialism and the nonsense on television.
02:46:10.000And there's still plenty of it to go around.
02:46:12.000But we need to move beyond that and stop listening to a lot of people like our politicians, for example, who seem to make a – Profession of stupidity and they're actually proud of their stupidity and that's distressing.
02:46:48.000Clear thinking, at least, should be criterion if you want to be a politician, not somebody who's buying into some myth from the 14th century.
02:47:00.000I don't necessarily even think most of them are buying into it.
02:47:03.000I think what they've done is realize that there is a market for that.
02:49:48.000There's a Congress that I'm going to next weekend in Mexico, Toluca, bringing together indigenous leaders with iboga, peyote, mushroom, ayahuasca experience, and they need funding to attend to bring more Of the traditional healers to that conference.
02:50:07.000It's called the Second International Congress on Traditional Medicine and Public Health, Sacred Plants, Culture and Human Rights.
02:50:14.000And is this information all available on ethnobotanicalcouncil.org?