In this episode, I sit down with my good friend Dennis McKenna to discuss the benefits and dangers of recreational use of psychedelics. We talk about the pros and cons of using psychedelics, how to use them safely and effectively, and how to learn how to be a better user of them. I hope you enjoy, sit down, and have a nice rest of the day :) -Jon Sorrentino is a writer, comedian, podcaster, and podcaster based out of Los Angeles, California. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post, and has been featured in Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and The Daily Beast, among many other publications. His work is widely known and appreciated, and he has been recognized as one of the most influential people in the cannabis and psychedelic community. He is an expert in the field, and one of my favorite people to talk to, so I thought it would be fun to have him on the show to talk about all things cannabis and psychedelics! -Jon and Dennis talk about what it is like to use psychedelics and how they can improve your life, as well as the dangers and benefits of using them, and what to look out for when it comes to taking them in general. - Jon and Dennis discuss how to best use them in your day-to-day life. . . . and how you can make the best use of them in the modern world of course, you can use them judiciously and not become addicted to them in order to improve your day to day life . and much more! . -Jon & Dennis :) Thank you to Dennis for coming on the podcast, Jon, for being on this episode of the podcast and for being kind and being so open and honest about it all. Thank you Dennis for being candid and being open about his experience and being honest about his journey and being unapologetic about his experiences and being vulnerable and open about it. , and for letting us know that he is a little bit about what he s experience, and letting us all know that we can do what s going to do what we need to do the most, not what s he s doing the most to help us do the best we can in this podcast with his knowledge and understanding what s best for us to help the most on the most important thing.
00:00:23.000But if you get too crazy, especially if you get too crazy with edibles, it'll take you and take you away on this wild journey of paranoia and it'll lock you up.
00:00:36.000Some people just need to take a couple weeks off.
00:01:25.000I mean, we're, you know, people get...
00:01:28.000You know, to these places, and they fail to do a reality check on themselves.
00:01:33.000You know, I mean, I get emails from people all the time that say, well, I'm, you know, life's been pretty weird lately.
00:01:39.000I took mushrooms five times last week.
00:01:42.000And, you know, I was, and it's like, dude, how about you lay off for a while and do it?
00:01:48.000Give yourself a chance because, you know, they tell these stories and it's like the idea of, okay, let's find your center, go back to baseline, lay off the sauce, whatever it is you're taking, and just chill out and try and rediscover your center.
00:02:03.000It seems like common sense advice, but people don't do that.
00:02:07.000It does seem like common sense advice, but common sense is not common.
00:02:42.000Basically, these things are reinforcing.
00:02:45.000They activate those pleasure circuits, you know, in the brain, mediated mainly through dopamine and all of these, I mean, the so-called drugs of abuse, which I think is a terrible word, terrible word.
00:02:59.000But the reinforcing drugs, the pleasure drugs, work directly or indirectly through the dopamine circuits, and the dopamine is like your button for pleasure.
00:03:10.000In the same way that serotonin is kind of on the opposite side.
00:03:14.000It's your button for more like euphoria, feeling good, but it doesn't have the punch, I guess, that the...
00:03:23.000Which is why people can get addicted to gambling.
00:04:34.000Respect the medicine in a certain way.
00:04:36.000Use it in a circumstance where you can learn from the medicine rather than have the medicine be sort of an overlay over whatever else you're doing.
00:04:47.000This is something that demands attention, and I think that's the best way to use psychedelics for whatever The spin you put on it.
00:05:31.000They can intervene if you get anxious or if things go on, make sure, you know, nobody comes to the door, that kind of thing.
00:05:39.000But basically it's to facilitate a learning opportunity where you and your teacher, which is the medicine, be it ayahuasca or mushrooms or whatever, can have this intense one-on-one interaction, you know?
00:05:54.000Feel like with psychedelics as well as with all these other things we're talking about any kind of drug I mean even coffee Alcohol whatever and behavior patterns all these different things I think one of the things that happens with human beings is you get so far along in your life in these behavior patterns become so like tight grooves that are carved into your psyche and then as you become an adult you Then you start to learn,
00:06:23.000like, oh, there's got to be a better way to handle this.
00:07:02.000I just don't think that there's anything wrong with any of these things.
00:07:06.000I think there's something wrong with the way we use them, and I think it's one of the inherent problems with things being illegal, is that we can't discuss this.
00:07:14.000We don't have people like you or centers where people can go, where people can become educated on the proper way to use these drugs, medicines, whatever you want to call them, these compounds, and get something out of them that can really be beneficial.
00:07:31.000I mean, I've said this many, many times that, you know, drug education, what they call drug education in this country, is a joke because the whole emphasis is on don't use them.
00:09:29.000So this is really not good, you know, because...
00:09:35.000I'm certainly not an expert on, you know, the sources and all this, but apparently this stuff is being made in China, imported here, and they use it to cut heroin because it's so strong.
00:09:45.000But people are dying left and right, you know, because of carfentanil is far more toxic than heroin or even fentanyl.
00:09:59.000So, you know, we're so, you know, there is so much...
00:10:05.000I don't know, so much confusing and fuzzy thinking about the whole drug issue.
00:10:10.000You know, for example, as long as we're talking about opiates for the moment, which is not really what I came here to talk about, but, you know, you've heard of Kratom, right?
00:10:22.000Now the DEA and the FDA, it's a plant.
00:14:06.000People who want to get off those kind of things, they can't quit cold turkey, but they could go on Kratom and gradually cut down because the withdrawal symptoms for Kratom are much less apparently than for heroin and these things.
00:15:30.000Ibogaine is not itself an opiate, but people use it to get off opiates because the experience is profound, but then it does something that a lot of psychedelics don't do, which is it interrupts that craving for opiates.
00:15:50.000Depending on how it's structured, anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.
00:15:55.000And the thing I think that determines the effectiveness of Ibogaine as a treatment for opiates is if the person has prepared for what happens afterwards, right?
00:16:06.000You've got to prepare for what happens after.
00:16:08.000If you go back to your old neighborhood, your old buddies, your old habits, it's not going to work.
00:16:14.000You're not making a serious commitment to make it work.
00:16:18.000But if you have a plan, going to go to this clinic, get this treatment, get cleaned up, then what?
00:17:31.000Well, there are more than rumors, but...
00:17:35.000Some ibogaine activists are trying to get certain states to provisionally approve the use of ibogaine.
00:17:44.000You know, a special waiver from the federal government, Vermont and I think New York has now applied for this because their problem is so bad.
00:17:53.000It's like basically they're saying to the government, Here's something that may work.
00:17:59.000Just grant permission on a statewide basis to have this medicine.
00:18:05.000We'll see where that goes, you know, as I'm sure you...
00:18:10.000I think we're all in this community acutely aware of now the government is again rumbling about how they're gonna revive the war on drugs.
00:18:20.000I mean, it was a stupid idea then and it's even more stupid now.
00:18:23.000But hey, this government, you know, stupidity are us!
00:18:42.000And if there is too much pushback from that direction, I think he's going to try to avoid that as much as possible.
00:18:47.000When they did a recent survey of the United States of how many people think that marijuana should be legal, like recreationally legal, it's in the 60% now, which is for the first time ever.
00:20:31.000I mean, many, many things bother me about Trump.
00:20:33.000But one of the chief things, one of the major, I guess you could say, flaws in his character among many...
00:20:42.000But you listen to him talk, you listen to his general thing, and you realize this is not a man who's ever had a reflective thought in his life.
00:21:07.000I would like to speak to him alone and find out who he really is.
00:21:11.000I mean, you think when someone's speaking in front of You know, a big group of press or, you know, any time there's a camera on them, it's really hard to figure out who that person is.
00:22:35.000This is something that I've wanted to do for a long time.
00:22:40.000And the backstory is that in 1967, there was a conference that was sponsored, believe it or not, by the Health Education and Welfare, Department of Health Education and Welfare, National Institute of Mental Health,
00:22:56.000U.S. government paid for this symposium held in San Francisco in 1967 called the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs.
00:24:42.000It's kind of much in the spirit of the original conference.
00:24:46.000We're not going to keep it completely closed, you know, because we're not that kind of people.
00:24:52.000There's not a lot of room for people to actually come to the place it's going to be, which is this place called Tiringham Hall.
00:25:01.000It's like, it looks exactly like Downton Abbey.
00:25:05.000I mean, it's an English country house, beautiful place, but not a place set up for a huge conference.
00:25:12.000There'll be maybe 10 guests staying there and a bunch of people staying close by.
00:25:17.000But the point is not so much the people attending.
00:25:20.000It's going to be live streamed on Facebook, which anyone can tune into that.
00:25:26.000And then we're going to publish the symposium volume for 2017 that everyone who presents is going to submit a full paper.
00:25:36.000We're going to publish that as volume two.
00:25:38.000We'll bring them out together as a deluxe edition.
00:25:41.000The first one, which is available for free, it's in the public domain, and then the one from this conference and we'll package them together as a collector's edition and we're pre-selling that now.
00:25:56.000As part of the strategy for getting the money to pay for this thing.
00:27:14.000Mark Plotkin, who runs the Amazon conservation team.
00:27:22.000A number of, you know, those are maybe the two highest profile, but people that are known in the field.
00:27:28.000And there's, you know, you can look at the website, ESPD.com, you can look at the program, and if it appeals to you, get on the, you know, get on the live stream.
00:27:41.000So that, you know, those technologies did not exist in 1967, right?
00:28:10.000It's an awesome use of the technology because there really isn't something like that that people can tune into and watch 18 different people speak.
00:28:18.000And of course, it'll all be documented, right?
00:29:31.000Now, how do you organize the 18 different people that are talking and the subjects so there's no overlap and so that, you know, the message stays vibrant?
00:29:41.000Well, it hasn't really been a problem.
00:29:43.000I mean, for one thing, you know, I pretty much knew who I wanted to come and I know what their specialty is, so I invited these people and they cover a variety of specialties.
00:34:37.000I only did it once and I had this very bizarre out-of-body experience, but I don't think I took enough.
00:34:43.000I had a friend, Ari, who took a lot, who over the course of ten minutes lived, maybe, he believes, in the neighborhood of five to six months.
00:34:53.000In this dimension where he had a life and he had friends and he had a job and relationships and He went through this and came back and you know ten minutes later.
00:35:06.000He's like This is gonna be impossible to describe but I lived a life I had like this alternative reality that I went through for multiple months Those kinds of experiences, believe it or not,
00:35:34.000They were at the Christmas tree celebrating Christmas, opening the presents with a family that this guy had no connection to and had never seen.
00:35:57.000I mean, if you can distort time or actually go into, you know, parallel dimensions or whatever, that's looking into.
00:36:05.000I think it takes more intrepid psychonauts than I am to look into that, but I would encourage people to carefully explore this, you know.
00:36:14.000Years ago, when I first explored DMT, you could get five MEO DMT online.
00:36:20.000There was a chemical company, you could buy it, and I bought like a jug of it, like a container of it, like the size of this stevia container, which is, for people who don't know, enough to get high for the rest of your life.
00:36:35.000I mean, you can do DMT once a month for the rest, and that's all you want to do, by the way, especially 5-MeO.
00:36:42.0005-MeO brings you to some place that feels like the ultimate center of the universe, and there's nothing, and you're a part of the whole...
00:36:53.000It's also no visuals, which is really weird, or if it is visuals, it's like these opaque geometric patterns that exist in this bizarre white...
00:38:49.000Bufotinine is found in most of these toads.
00:38:52.000But Bufo alvarius is the only species known that contains 5-methoxy-DMT. So it's got this, you know, there's probably a single gene mutation that lets it produce this methoxylated compound,
00:39:08.000which is much stronger than bufotanine.
00:39:13.000And by the way, just to caution people, sometimes in the media you hear about people are licking toads.
00:40:41.000You know, there's one school of thought that says, yeah, they're sort of like physiological noise.
00:40:47.000You know, they'll never reach a point where you could actually perceive any effect because the enzymes, you know, any kind of cellular enzyme will just chop up DMT very readily.
00:41:07.000But other people maintain that under some circumstances the DMT can be stored in vesicles and neural vesicles and released on demand or when some stimulus leads to its release like stress some stress of some sort.
00:41:23.000Jamie go out and grab that painting that that young guy sent the guy who has a pineal gland tumor who makes this really crazy tryptamine art Yes, I've heard about this guy.
00:41:35.000This guy sent me one of his pieces, and he has a tumor.
00:43:25.000And apparently, well, he's, at least in some sort of way, anecdotal evidence that it's produced in the pineal gland.
00:43:33.000Of course, the Cottonwood Research Foundation that Dr. Rick Strassman is a part of in his amazing work from DMT, the spirit molecule, of course, the documentary that you and I were in.
00:43:42.000His work has shown that it is produced by the pineal gland in live rats.
00:43:49.000So we know now for a fact that at least in that mammal, it's produced in the pineal gland.
00:43:54.000But that's always been for people that...
00:43:57.000I went to the Vatican last summer, and one of the really cool things was the giant pine cone that they have in the center of one of the...
00:44:59.000What was also fascinating was this guy, although he knew that that was representative of the pineal gland, he did not know that the pineal gland produced DMT. He wasn't even aware of what DMT was.
00:45:17.000And he's writing things down and I'm, you know, writing, telling him about Strassman's work and you and your brother and all these different things to look into.
00:46:14.000He's a pharmacologist and a neurochemist and psychiatrist, but he is the one that's really kind of leading the charge for endogenous functions of DMT and has good evidence, which has been...
00:47:23.000I mean, when you consider the potency of it and the knowledge that's produced in the body and then also the knowledge of the effects of it, which are just astounding.
00:47:59.000And I told him, I mean, I was teasing him, I was saying, you know, I wrote back, you know, that famous phrase Arthur C. Clarke once said, you know, when a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible,
00:48:45.000So if you just look at that, the variability of that, and then also how that can be manipulated with exercise and all these other different things that can raise those levels up.
00:48:54.000What about the other thing, like, in terms of, like, holotropic breathing or all these different shamanic breathing and yogic exercises, kundalini yoga, which...
00:49:04.000I haven't experienced it in Kundalini Yonah, but I did have a very bizarre experience fairly recently on yoga where I went into class on a pretty high dose of cannabis, and I started tripping in the middle of one of the more intense poses.
00:49:19.000It was just something akin to the very beginnings of a DMT trip where I started seeing patterns and seeing things moving and some sort of a...
00:49:30.000It didn't go anywhere, but I don't pursue it in terms of, like, attempting to make that happen.
00:49:37.000But I would imagine that if it's made in the body, and the effects of it are reproducible when you take it, I mean, taking DMT, there's a very few people, there's a very small percentage that don't have an experience when they take it, right?
00:50:05.000Why should there be people who don't have any effect?
00:50:09.000I mean, that's a whole other question about what's strange about their metabolism.
00:50:14.000But it's interesting that you raise this because a lot of these yogic techniques, especially kundalini, is probably about inducing DMT synthesis in the pineal or wherever it occurs.
00:50:26.000There's also a very interesting technology that has come to light, I just found out about it last summer, called the Ajna light.
00:50:42.000This guy who's developed this is a very interesting fellow.
00:50:46.000He's named Guy Harriman, and he used to work for Apple.
00:50:53.000He actually worked very closely with Steve Jobs when Steve Jobs had Next Computing, so he's basically a computer programmer and engineer.
00:51:02.000Worked with Steve Jobs, but then he, for some reason, he decided he had to move to Thailand and become a Zen monk, which he did, but he continued to work with technology, and he developed this thing called the Ajna Light, which he claims induces DMT synthesis in the pineal.
00:51:22.000And I was at a conference last summer, actually, at Tiringham, at this place where this one is going to be, and he was there.
00:51:31.000I tried it a couple of times and by golly, it's a lot like DMT. Really?
00:52:12.000So then, and he claims, you know, it's synthesizing DMT in the pineal, and it is very much like DMT would be if it's released at the site of action, because, you know, DMT, when you smoke it, it brings a big body load with it.
00:52:29.000Do you have to wear that goofy outfit?
00:52:30.000What's with the orange outfit, seriously?
00:53:19.000But then, you know, in me, like, the reductionist, you know, kicks in and says, well, guy, this is interesting.
00:53:27.000How do you know it's really DMT that you're stimulating?
00:53:33.000And we've been going back and forth on that, and how can you test that?
00:53:37.000And there are ways to do it, but most of them involve some fairly drastic procedures that you wouldn't want to do on people because they wouldn't give you permission if they had any sense, but you could do it to rats.
00:53:51.000You could do something called microdialysis.
00:53:55.000You can put a Essentially a microscopic tube that's absorptive next to the pineal and you can collect samples that you can detect.
00:54:07.000This is not something that people would volunteer for.
00:54:13.000Well, I just want to know, does it really induce it or not?
00:54:17.000I am not saying it does, but it's a lot like DMT. What about hovering something like that over a sensory deprivation tank, like being inside of it and having it hover over your head so you have the added experience of outer body with that?
00:54:29.000I would think that would be pretty intense and not hard to recreate.
00:54:34.000What you'd probably want to do with that is to have some kind of goggles, essentially.
00:54:40.000That could be connected to his program by Bluetooth or something.
00:54:46.000So then you're wearing the goggles, you're in the isolation tank.
00:54:49.000But if you just hover it over your head, if you just have an arm, like a computer monitor arm, and just swing it over the head...
00:54:57.000And so you turn it on, close the door of the tank, close your eyes, lay back, and maybe it has like a 30-second window where it lets you settle in and then begins the program.
00:55:46.000Now, with this stuff, did you experience the communication that you get with DMT? Because that, to me, has always been the most profound aspect of it, is this feeling that I'm in the presence of something, and then this sort of telekinetic,
00:56:03.000understanding the words but not hearing the words.
00:56:06.000Honestly, I didn't get that because I think I was not under long enough.
00:56:11.000I didn't have much time, so I was only under...
00:56:14.000Each time I was under maybe 20 minutes, which isn't...
00:56:17.000I think if I'd stayed in that place, if I could settle into it for an hour, I think that probably would manifest, you know?
00:57:59.000I'm very curious about this, because I know that I have a good buddy of mine, my friend Danny, who's done Kundalini for quite a long time, and he can reproduce DMT states.
00:58:10.000He's actually had DMT experiences independently of the Kundalini, and he says it's the same thing.
00:58:15.000He says he can get there, and I believe him.
00:58:21.000Well, I think there's a genetic component, you know?
00:58:24.000I mean, like this gentleman, although he has a tumor, I'm not sure why...
00:58:30.000I mean, he doesn't want medical people poking and prodding him, but he would be a perfect subject to settle a lot of issues if he was willing to...
00:58:42.000I mean, just having a look at his cerebral spinal fluid, which would be the obvious, you know, fluid to sample for this, would be very interesting.
00:58:51.000Yeah, but I can understand his reluctance if he has reluctance.
01:00:13.000I mean, DMT is an interesting molecule because it's two steps from tryptophan, right?
01:00:20.000Tryptophan is an amino acid, an essential amino acid, one of the 20 that goes into proteins.
01:00:26.000So tryptophan is in every living thing on this planet.
01:00:30.000And there are two enzymes that are also pretty much universal in cells that can convert DMT or tryptophan to DMT in two simple steps.
01:00:42.000You know, I don't want to get too into the chemistry, but basically you remove...
01:00:46.000The acid portion of the amino acid, you get tryptamine, and from there you add the methyl groups, and there you are.
01:00:54.000Which is why DMT is very, very common in plants, for example, and animals.
01:01:02.000I tell people nature is drenched in DMT. Drenched is a great way to describe it.
01:01:07.000Drenched in DMT. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of species of plants that contain DMT, for sure.
01:01:16.000You know, I mean, there hasn't been any survey or anything like that, but if you look at the genera that have a lot of DMT, like acacia is a good example, the Australian acacias are some of the strongest sources of DMT. There are 1,700 species of acacia.
01:01:37.000Probably 75% of them contain DMT. And I'm sure you're aware of the Israeli scientists that believe that the story of Moses and the burning bush was the acacia tree.
01:01:52.000And they think that that was the confusion of all the translations and, of course, the oral history past It's down over many, many years, then finally written down.
01:02:01.000But this idea of the burning bush delivering the Word of God was most likely in some way a psychedelic trip induced by DMT, and most likely because of the acacia tree.
01:02:12.000Most likely the acacia tree, because that was in the area.
01:02:17.000You know, I mean, it's an interesting idea, and it's interesting that the, you know, sort of the way that the burning bush presented itself was like DMT presents itself.
01:02:30.000You cannot take your eyes away from it, but at the same time, you cannot look at it.
01:03:30.000But one possible way that they could have used it, because the DMT in the acacias is so high, the leaves, some of these acacias, they're 2% DMT. Wow!
01:03:41.000So if you were to take leaves and throw them on a fire in an enclosed space, like a sweat lodge type space, you could potentially get quite loaded on DMT. There's no indication that they smoked stuff, but they may have fumigated themselves with DMT. Oh,
01:04:00.000that completely makes sense, if you're talking about a burning bush.
01:04:10.000Who knows how anything makes its way anywhere, right?
01:04:11.000I mean, these folk technologies, it's interesting.
01:04:16.000If you look at the New World, you know, in the historical sense— People have remarked, why are there so many more psychedelic plants in the new world than the old world,
01:04:32.000It's something about people's relationship to plants in this very high biodiversity environment.
01:04:40.000People are mucking around with plants, right?
01:04:44.000Like a perpetual question that comes up.
01:04:48.000Is how did they figure out how to combine banisteriopsis and psychotria to get the activity of ayahuasca?
01:04:58.000How out of 80,000 species in the Amazon do they figure out combine these two?
01:05:04.000To the uninitiated why that's important with the monoamine oxidase?
01:05:07.000Yeah, well it's important because banisteriopsis contains these alkaloids called beta-carmelines that are monoamine oxidase inhibitors and monoamine oxidase It's the enzyme in the gut that breaks down DMT. So you can drink tea with DMT in it.
01:05:26.000Nothing's going to happen because this enzyme will inactivate it.
01:05:32.000And that's probably a reflection of an evolutionary process.
01:05:35.000You know, we've adapted to toxins in our environment, basically.
01:05:40.000If you inhibit that with the alkaloids from the banisteriopsis, they're very potent, very selective MAO inhibitors that protects it from degradation in the gut.
01:05:51.000It can cross into the blood and into the blood-brain barrier.
01:05:55.000So that's the basis of the oral activity.
01:05:59.000And people make much about how they sort of stumbled on this combination, right?
01:06:07.000And in fact, one of our presenters at this conference, Manuel Torres, who's an archaeologist, has been looking at this for quite a while.
01:06:36.000But what is interesting to me, in a way, or what I've been thinking about lately, if you look at the archaeology of these things, the snuffs that...
01:06:46.000There are two or three different kinds of snuffs that are used in South America that contain DMT. The Anadenanthera snuffs and the Varola snuffs.
01:06:59.000We have archaeological evidence that puts that back to 10, 11,000 years.
01:07:05.000They are By far, the most ancient psychedelics used in the New World are these snuffs that contain DMT. Nobody is asking the question, what possessed these people to take the seeds, grind them up, and shove them up their nose?
01:09:49.000There are a lot of other activities with beta-carbolines and a lot of attention recently refocused on harmine, which is the main beta-carboline in banisteriopsis.
01:10:02.000Turns out it has all kinds of activities that...
01:10:05.000Have been sort of overlooked until now.
01:10:08.000Not least of all, it stimulates neurogenesis.
01:10:21.000And potentially, it inhibits a kinase, which has to do with...
01:10:29.000Kinase is a protein that phosphorylates things, right?
01:10:33.000Very common, all kinds of kinases around the body.
01:10:37.000But it inhibits this one particular kinase called DYRK1, whatever that means.
01:10:44.000But it is associated with the stimulation of nerve growth from neural stem cells.
01:10:53.000This is all petri plate test tube stuff.
01:10:56.000But it's not unreasonable to think that this is going on in the body.
01:11:01.000So if that plays a part in neurogenesis, that could potentially have some real benefits to people that have things like Parkinson's or nerve disorders or...
01:11:47.000One of the talks that I listened to of your brothers from way back in the day, he was talking about Scientific nomenclature related to harming and that before they when one of the Recent or one of the early explorers to South America when they found this stuff they were calling it telepathine Yes,
01:12:09.000Because it induced these group states of telepathy.
01:12:13.000Because it was rumored to induce them.
01:12:15.000I mean, if you want to get into what you could call the sordid history of the chemistry investigations of ayahuasca, because harming...
01:12:29.000And harmoline and tetrahydroharmoline, these were originally found in Paganum harmola, which is where they got their names, which is Syrian rue, right?
01:12:38.000And a lot of people use that as an alternative MAO when they're making ayahuasca analogs.
01:12:44.000So that's how those alkaloids got their names.
01:12:48.000And then when chemists came along, kind of all through the 19th century, they started looking at banisteriopsis, and they would isolate things, and they didn't know what to call them.
01:12:59.000Sometimes they called them telepathine because of the rumors.
01:13:02.000Sometimes they were called banisterine and yahaine because they didn't really know what the compound was, right?
01:13:12.000And then it turned out, well, it's actually harming, and harming was isolated earlier, so then they got their nomenclature right.
01:13:20.000There was a long period where they never collected voucher specimens, so a lot of this work was in some ways useless because they forgot to collect the actual plants that they did the isolation from.
01:14:41.000So you have to be aware of bad documentation.
01:14:45.000If you're going to collect plants, know what you're collecting so the chemists that might come along and work with that can refer back to it.
01:15:03.000They're trying to isolate something from it.
01:15:05.000But it helps to know what the identity of it is.
01:15:10.000It seems to me that that part of the world, the Amazon jungle, and our really troubling relationship with it currently, is so analogous to the way human beings are kind of interfacing with the world.
01:15:25.000Like, that's a good way to look at it there, because there's so many different powerful things that they're learning about this one area while people are chopping it down left and right and slashing and burning and making room for cattle grazing and all this other crazy shit that's going on down there.
01:15:40.000Well, yeah, and there is, and this is a good illustration of, you know, our sort of penny-wiseness and pound-foolishness about these things.
01:15:54.000There are literally trillions of dollars, if you just want to look at it in terms of Dollars and cents, which is not the best way to look at it, because after all, this ecosystem is, you know, the burning of the rainforest is about 30% of human global greenhouse gas emissions,
01:16:13.000if you could just stop burning down the damn forest.
01:16:21.000But then on the other side of economics, and there have been assessments, what use do you make of the Amazonian biome to maximize its value, right?
01:16:32.000If you do cattle, it's worth so much per hectare.
01:16:44.000But the thing is, in terms of undiscovered, potentially undiscovered blockbuster drugs, there's probably at least a trillion dollars worth of undiscovered drugs in the Amazon, which will,
01:17:00.000of course, never be discovered because we're going to wreck it.
01:17:37.000And all of this, less than 10% of this, not even close to 10% of this incredible molecular and biological diversity has been looked at as potential sources of new medicines.
01:19:01.000Of compounds that make it from discovery to the clinic is very low.
01:19:07.000And when they abandoned natural products about 25 years ago, the frequency of drug discovery, the pharmaceutical discovery pipeline, as they call it, dried up.
01:19:20.000And it took a long time for the pharmaceutical industry to realize, you know, essentially we threw the baby out with the bathwater.
01:19:29.000We need to go back to natural products.
01:19:31.000Because that's where you find the molecular diversity, the scaffolds on which we can build these drugs.
01:19:38.000Think of the complex molecules that you find in nature.
01:19:45.000That may not be what makes it to the clinic.
01:19:48.000It may be a derivative of that or an analog of that, but it's still the plants that give you the ideas for the structure, if you can follow me.
01:19:59.000It's not that you're going to grow this rainforest tree in plantations, but you can go and isolate a compound, determine the structure, and then you can probably synthesize an analog.
01:20:14.000And isn't part of the problem in that isolating one individual compound from a plant that might have multiple compounds that work synergistically?
01:22:01.000But even then, the people that take it for that have said that it's not nearly as effective as just...
01:22:08.000This is a good example of the sort of cognitive dissonance of the FDA and the whole regulatory thing, because for years the FDA has been saying, well, cannabis has no medical use.
01:22:23.000Oh, but there is this one drug that the FDA has approved, Marinol, which has some small amount of the therapeutic use that cannabis does.
01:22:33.000But it's just so incredible with so much information available today that they're making such poor choices in that regard that someone can't step up and logically address this thing and say, look, you're getting a fraction of the benefits of this just because of this bizarre need that human beings have to patent things and to own things.
01:24:56.000It's in someone's interest to keep it illegal.
01:24:59.000Well, that would be my only concern with this patented formula that they've sort of figured out is that other people can't make a formula as well.
01:25:10.000It's like in patenting, do they own the process?
01:25:13.000Like, what if it's a very obvious process?
01:25:15.000Like, you know, like the ayahuasca process.
01:25:20.000The monoamine oxidase inhibitor along with the Plant that contains a DMT, boil it down, everybody knows how to do it.
01:25:26.000If somebody figures out a way how to patent that, does that become a real problem in that they own the rights to something that's been around forever?
01:25:53.000There's no art of innovation, which is what would make it patentable.
01:25:57.000There were attempts to patent ayahuasca a few years ago, and it got...
01:26:03.000You know, it actually was patented, and a delegation of indigenous healers from Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru came to the U.S. Patent Office and petitioned against this and said, we've been using this medicine for thousands of years.
01:26:28.000This was when I was still doing my postdoc at NIH, so this was like...
01:26:33.000Mid-80s, he tried to patent it, and what it turned out was it was a completely specious patent.
01:26:41.000It was a patent on a particular strain of Banisteriopsis that he collected that had an anomalous flower color, I think, and that was the basis of the patent.
01:26:54.000Well, that's absurd because flower color is Highly variable.
01:26:59.000It was a useless patent in every respect.
01:28:54.000It also seems like when everything becomes commercial, it becomes...
01:29:00.000When you look at the idea that pharmaceutical drug companies at all, when you look at a corporation and you think of this idea of infinite growth and this is what they're subscribing to and they're constantly trying to make more and more money, and then you think about compounds and compounds being legal and them trying to figure out a way to market these things,
01:29:23.000It seems to be a big issue that we're relying on that at all.
01:29:26.000It's almost like that tale of the scorpion and the frog, where the frog tells the scorpion, hey, I'll give you a ride across the river, but do me a favor and don't sting me, because if you do, we'll both drown.
01:29:37.000And then halfway through, the scorpion stings him, and the frog goes, what the fuck?
01:29:41.000And the scorpion goes, hey man, it's my nature.
01:29:43.000It seems like right the nature of these corporations is just to make money so relying on them to bring these intense Psychedelic compounds to the market or to even saying the markets terrible word to just bring them to daily use or bring them to making them free to use I think that corporations You know,
01:30:07.000as you say, their main job, as they see it, though they don't say so in public, is basically to make money, you know, to patent these compounds and make money.
01:30:59.000And the revenue model, if there is one with psychedelics, is not that, because they have to be used in a context, you know, set and setting, right?
01:31:10.000The revenue model, if there is one, is to have centers, to have places you can go and take psychedelics in a controlled setting.
01:32:08.000What's real weird is that we give these caveats to religions.
01:32:13.000Like, that's what's going on now with ayahuasca, is that there are some companies that have had an exemption through the Supreme Court, right?
01:32:22.000I shouldn't say companies, but basically that's what they are.
01:34:05.000And this is what some smart lawyers are now addressing with the use of ayahuasca in the more traditional way.
01:34:14.000The churches have essentially taken that, they've appropriated that tradition, and they say, well, we want nothing to do with these indigenous people.
01:34:23.000This is our religion, you know, it's our sacrament.
01:34:26.000They don't even, they get upset if you even call it a drug or a medicine.
01:34:50.000It's almost like with the UDV and these other churches that what they've done is they've used this scaffolding of Christianity as a Trojan horse.
01:34:58.000That's allowing this ayahuasca to get through.
01:35:02.000Strassman was telling me his experience with them, where they were all wearing golf shirts, and they have uniforms, and they're taking these insane doses of super potent ayahuasca.
01:35:16.000And then they're all singing and singing songs about Jesus.
01:35:21.000You know, Strassman is like a really, like, very mellow and easygoing guy, really pleasant guy.
01:35:28.000He was explaining how he sat down with these people in the morning after all this was over.
01:35:32.000He's like, what the fuck are you people doing?
01:36:11.000I just haven't had the opportunity, nor am I particularly interested in going to ceremonies where I am told that I have to dance the whole time.
01:37:10.000But it seems to me, with my experience with DMT, that it's so powerful and so profound that I wonder if that's a way that Christianity works.
01:37:19.000You know, like this idea of Jesus and the saints and heaven and God and all these different manifested deities.
01:37:26.000Like, people thumb their nose at it and say it's ridiculous and preposterous, but everything on DMT is ridiculous and preposterous.
01:37:34.000And I wonder if under the guise of the UDV and their singing and their dancing, If Jesus is real, in a sense that you can actually communicate with a thing that takes the form of Jesus, in that sense, I wonder what they're seeing.
01:37:49.000I mean, I really wonder if they're going...
01:37:51.000The whole idea of psychedelics for the non-initiated is...
01:37:55.000A big part of it is how you're going into the experience.
01:37:58.000Set and setting and also your mindset.
01:38:00.000Also, you know, the state of mind that you approach these things can greatly I think we're good to go.
01:38:37.000Well, I think what you experience You know, is not confined to Christianity.
01:38:42.000What you articulated is just basically kind of the characteristics of a religious experience or spiritual experience without necessarily tying it to Christianity.
01:38:55.000I mean, love, compassion, respect for each other.
01:38:59.000You know, I mean, these are elements of a kind of the...
01:39:07.000These are elements of the religious experience.
01:39:09.000The interesting thing about the UDV and these other churches is that they have actually created a structure where this can happen, whereas most religions, the last thing they want you to do is have an actual religious experience.
01:39:26.000I mean, it's all set up to make sure that doesn't happen, because religious experiences...
01:40:06.000These ideas that are passed on, love thy neighbor, all that stuff, might have been from that very experience.
01:40:12.000It might have been from that experience.
01:40:15.000But the thing is, and this happens, it's not just Christianity, it's like It's like any powerful spiritual technology, anything that is numinous, right?
01:40:28.000I talk a lot about the mysterium tremendum, right?
01:40:31.000The DMT, the psychedelic experience is a mysterium tremendum.
01:40:37.000Something that is mysterious, tremendous, terrifying, spiritually powerful, and must be controlled, right?
01:40:50.000So in these power structure, there's always someone who says, you know, who wants to sort of put a collar around that, put a lasso around that, to seize the reins, if you will.
01:41:05.000There's a temptation to grab it and use it for your own purposes, which is, you know, usually a man.
01:41:12.000Usually, I don't know if any women, women don't seem to be, you know, it's not inbuilt to do the dominance thing, but there's very often a male figure who can take any spiritual technology, co-opt it to their purposes.
01:41:30.000You know, which is often sex or money or power or all of those things.
01:42:03.000So you get this all the time, you know, in any kind of quote-unquote spiritual tradition.
01:42:10.000It happens in the ayahuasca thing, as we know.
01:42:14.000You know, it's not uncommon to have...
01:42:17.000Sexual abuse and that sort of very common lately lately more and more so you hear these stories of these guys My friend Amber Lyon had it happen to her like on one of her first experiences I was groping her and where she was under and she's realizing what's going on and just realized like this is Probably how some of these people sort of like they found this technology and you can call it technology if you want But this this pathway to this incredible experience they provided to people But they're not really much into taking
01:43:42.000They're not really absorbing the lessons that they should be getting from the medicine.
01:43:47.000Others do listen to their medicine and it's not so easy to sort out who's the good ones and who's the bad ones.
01:43:56.000Sort of like what you were talking about, these people that have the simplistic idea that all you have to do is get Donald Trump high on DMT and he's going to see the light.
01:47:44.000He still has to distort it far past, whether it's the numbers that came to the inauguration, whether it's the numbers that he won the electoral college by.
01:47:52.000He lies about all these different things, and it's inherent.
01:47:55.000It's a part of him, this intense lack of satisfaction with any result.
01:48:00.000Any result, even if it's winning by a mile, he must win by a hundred miles.
01:48:10.000But it's that same intense dissatisfaction that's inherently very dangerous in a leader.
01:48:15.000Because it's leading him to make these critical judgments that aren't based entirely on reality, but rather what he wants people to perceive.
01:50:07.000Yeah, those are such a bizarre candy coating of bullshit.
01:50:12.000Alternative facts is the most hilarious candy coating of bullshit ever.
01:50:16.000My hope is that we get through this without nuclear war, and then we realize that we can't have a fucking president.
01:50:22.000And the idea of having one alpha chimp run the entire group of 300-plus million people is insane.
01:50:27.000And it doesn't work when you have technology, when you have this ability to communicate instantaneously, globally, with everybody, constantly.
01:50:36.000It's just an archaic idea that served its time, but needs to be revamped.
01:50:45.000I'm not the guy to be the architect of the future civilization, but I would think that putting as much power as we put into one individual is insanely problematic.
01:50:56.000It's just you're dealing with all these ego issues, decision-making issues, and also the camps, the two separate camps, the right-left camp.
01:51:08.000No, I mean, I think one way to approach it wouldn't have to be such a tremendous shift from what we've got.
01:51:17.000It would be to go to a parliamentary system, like Canada has, for example, where...
01:51:24.000You represent your party and if the other party gets enough, you know, they can vote you out without going through the whole impeachment process.
01:51:37.000The parties can form a coalition and I think there's also an issue with dealing with the real problems of the world in a In a time where the realities of,
01:52:07.000say, Syria and what's going on over there are so horrific and they're so far removed from the realities that we deal with here, you almost need to have someone who has some sort of experience with those people in those lands to understand and put it into perspective.
01:52:23.000And I think we're entirely lacking of that perspective in terms of our culture.
01:52:31.000I don't think we understand what a brutal military dictatorship is like.
01:52:37.000I think we see it on television, and it seems almost too abstract.
01:52:41.000But the president has to deal with that in a very real way.
01:52:46.000And no one person can – but that's what advisors are for.
01:55:05.000In some ways, it's just too eerily parallel to what we're talking about with the rainforest.
01:55:10.000Like, with all this potential in the rainforest, and almost this race.
01:55:16.000The race to see, like, can we get to these incredible new plants that we haven't discovered before we fuck it up by cutting down all the hardwoods and burning all the forests?
01:55:31.000Future, utopia of people being able to read each other's minds, being able to communicate simultaneously all throughout the world, understanding each other regardless of language.
01:55:40.000Can we get to that before we blow ourselves up?
01:55:43.000Before we get into a nuclear war with fucking North Korea or any of this crazy shit with this insane administration that's existing in this sort of chaotic manner alongside Some of the brightest minds and most innovative people that have ever walked the face of the planet that are influencing things in a way today that it's really unparalleled in terms of human history.
01:56:04.000The potential that any new invention or innovation can enact, whether it's understanding new compounds that we discovered in the rainforest or some new technology that's made in Silicon Valley.
01:56:15.000I mean, this is an amazing, amazing parallel.
01:56:29.000Brilliant people, and they're developing, and there are solutions to the problems that face us, right?
01:56:35.000But then on the other side, you have the know-nothings, you know, who are marching into the future, eyes firmly fixed on the rearview mirror.
01:56:43.000It's like, oh yeah, coal technology, that's the greatest thing.
01:57:04.000I mean, these are people who are not living in the present, for one thing, not planning for the future, and they don't really want to know.
01:57:19.000They're not capable of entertaining new ideas, and that's a problem, you know.
01:57:25.000What do you think about the idea, and I've heard this brought up and I've entertained it my own self, that maybe we need some sort of enemy or some sort of thing to resist in order to rise to the full potential of innovation, of ideas,
01:57:40.000that we almost need some sort of mountain to conquer.
01:57:43.000We need some sort of a force to be aware of that really makes people rise up.
01:57:48.000I've seen more More people politically active and politically engaged now, post-election, than I ever did before the election, because they didn't expect Trump to win.
01:59:15.000You know, the good ones are rediscovering it and the re-emergence of investigative journalism.
01:59:21.000And right now I think that's our best hope because I think that these guys, they'll just keep digging.
01:59:30.000There's going to be so much bad stuff come up about Trump and all this collusion with the Russians and, you know, potentially enough to impeach him.
01:59:40.000The question is, will the Republicans find enough spine to, you know, to do that?
02:01:58.000But what you said about journalism, I think it's important to point out that they fucked up just as hard with the left as they did with the right.
02:02:06.000I mean, they let the Clintons get away with a lot of horse shit.
02:02:09.000They let Obama get away with a lot of horse shit.
02:02:24.000And the reason why this guy got into place in this situation right now, it's just as much of a fault of them of not holding the left to the fire as it is to, you know, what's going on right now.
02:02:47.000I would like to think that journalism is finding its voice and finding its function.
02:02:53.000Again, its function is to, you know, as somebody said, I think it was I have stone, you know, the function is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, right?
02:03:02.000And that's essentially the journalistic mandate.
02:03:43.000Then the other side of it is that we can just – You know, the way the Trump administration proceeds with all these things they want to do, they inevitably just get bogged down in litigation, protest, you know, at some point they do have to answer to Congress.
02:04:01.000So I think, you know, I mean, the wheels were already coming off before he even took the oath of office.
02:04:07.000They've continued to come off, and it's just going to get, it's going to just sort of degenerate into litigation, acrimony, inability to get anything passed.
02:04:38.000You know, I'm not entirely confident in that.
02:04:41.000The whole thing to me, when I'm looking at these protests, like what was going on yesterday, where people are just beating the shit out of each other in the streets.
02:05:35.000I continue doing what I'm doing because I think these plant medicines are the single most important catalyst for changing consciousness on a global level.
02:06:11.000I think that globally, I think that ayahuasca is a catalyst for that.
02:06:15.000You know, why has it suddenly gone global in the last 20 years?
02:06:20.000I think, you know, I think that it's a sign that Gaia, if you believe in that concept, that the Earth itself is an intelligent entity, is getting a little bit hysterical and is trying to get our attention.
02:06:37.000And this is the way it's, you know, so ayahuasca is an ambassador from the community of species to what I call the problematic primates, you know, this out-of-control species that needs protection.
02:06:54.000A good talking to, in a certain sense.
02:06:58.000You're wrecking this place, you know, and you don't have to.
02:07:01.000Well, it seems like systems always try to balance themselves out, you know, whether it's through warfare or disease or some new government usurping the old power, or whether it's through predators and prey, and there's always some weird sort of reaction to something gaining too much power.
02:07:22.000Whether it's ideas or ideologies or patterns, they gain too much power and then something shows up that sort of tends to diminish that and erode the very foundation of it.
02:07:34.000That's what I feel about psychedelics, that in many ways what they're doing, and even the sneaky door, like the people that talk about cannabis being some sort of a gateway drug.
02:07:47.000It's not a gateway drug to the bad ones.
02:07:49.000I think, if anything, it's a gateway drug to the ones that are going to change the world.
02:08:13.000Probably chocolate ice cream is a gateway drug.
02:08:15.000We've all taken these things and, you know, look where we are now.
02:08:21.000So gateway drug, it's just the concept is absurd.
02:08:25.000If it was not sold in an environment where there were a choice to have all sorts of other illegal drugs, it wouldn't be a gateway drug, would it?
02:09:19.000Isn't it funny that the word drug, I'm not funny, but isn't it problematic, at the very least, that the word drug is sort of this gigantic blanket that we throw over all these things that perturb consciousness?
02:10:32.000We're biochemical engines that run on drugs, which are neurotransmitters and hormones and enzymes and all of these things in the biochemical system.
02:10:43.000They're involved with signal transduction.
02:10:47.000Organisms are networks of communication.
02:10:49.000They're mediated by neurotransmitters.
02:10:52.000Neurotransmitters, if you isolated them from the brain, Put them into a bottle and sold them, that would be a drug.
02:11:00.000So this idea that, you know, we are inherently biochemical systems, you know, and people don't want to acknowledge that, but that's the truth.
02:11:24.000That's why drugs taken from plants or from the outside have the effects that they have, you know, because they affect these systems that, you know, are big brains.
02:11:36.000This is kind of a consequence of evolution.
02:11:39.000You know, we have these enormous brains, you know, that evolve very quickly.
02:12:45.000In all honesty, though, it's so important that you are saying these things so people can change their perspective when they realize that, oh, yeah, we are really just water balloons of drugs.
02:13:45.000What it is to be that is forbidden somehow.
02:13:49.000And this is partly a reflection of our devaluation of nature, which includes our own nature as well as nature out there.
02:13:59.000Psychedelics are the antidote to this, right?
02:14:02.000They make you re-appreciate your relationship with nature.
02:14:07.000So they can catalyze changes in consciousness.
02:14:11.000That's why I say the most effective thing that I can do as somebody who's concerned with the planet is bring people to situations where they can encounter the medicine and make of it what they will.
02:14:25.000I'm not there to tell them what to make of it.
02:14:27.000I'm there to tell them this will be the most intense personal experience that you'll ever have.
02:14:50.000That's one of the most important things about recognizing someone who's a quote-unquote fake shaman or someone who's using it wrong.
02:14:57.000Someone who's telling you exactly what it is and what you're going to experience.
02:15:02.000One of the most beautiful things that psychedelic drugs do is they dissolve any notion that you might have that anyone has a hold of this thing.
02:16:02.000What is the relationship between cannabinoid receptors in human beings and the actual use of cannabis or the evolutionary use of cannabis?
02:16:11.000Like, over the course of human development.
02:16:14.000Are cannabinoid receptors in place because people have consumed cannabis throughout history, or are they just a natural function of biology?
02:16:23.000No, they're a natural function of biology, like a lot of these things, you know, like opiate receptors, the same thing.
02:17:04.000They are responsive to things that we make in the body, like anandamide, and there's another one which I always forget, but these are endogenous compounds that That bind to cannabinoid receptors.
02:17:31.000But the receptors just happened to bind these plant alkaloids, but that's not why they evolved.
02:17:38.000You know, they have functions in the body related to analgesia and sleep and that sort of thing.
02:17:46.000They evolved not because there were cannabis plants out there, but because the body made these endocannabinoids and they mediated all kinds of functions, like anandamide.
02:18:00.000You know, cannabinoids are a little different than something like DMT or psilocybin, which work kind of very specifically on the serotonin receptors.
02:18:11.000And that's how they mediate their effects.
02:18:14.000The effects of cannabinoids are more widespread, you could say.
02:18:19.000More multivalent is maybe a good word.
02:19:09.000Because we can actually trace the phylogeny of these things.
02:19:14.000We have molecular methods now where we can actually trace the ancestry of receptors.
02:19:22.000For example, we have ways to measure this.
02:19:26.000You know, cannabinoid receptors, you can look at the phylogeny and, you know, they were present in mammals long before we were around, you know, and tryptophan is the same thing.
02:19:41.000Tryptophan, which is the amino acid we were talking about, precursor to many of these psychedelics, right?
02:19:47.000So how old is tryptophan as an amino acid?
02:20:14.000You know, so these things have been around for a long time.
02:20:17.000And, you know, in the most primitive organisms, you know, serotonin is another good example.
02:20:23.000Serotonin is, which most of the psychedelics work on, serotonin is thought to be the oldest neurotransmitter, phylogenetically older than dopamine and norepinephrine.
02:20:37.000Tryptophan, serotonin is, receptors are very old phylogenetically, evolutionarily.
02:20:46.000So how does that correlate with runner's high?
02:20:50.000When people have this runner's high and apparently it has some sort of an effect on cannabinoid receptors, what is going on there?
02:20:59.000And does it actually mimic the high that someone gets from consuming cannabis?
02:21:14.000What we do know is that in states of high stress, you can boost the production of these endogenous compounds, which is why high stress is one way to induce altered states of consciousness on the natch,
02:22:21.000We're in a What we know from memories and associations in the cortex, and they essentially create a model of reality, and that's the reality we're inhabiting.
02:22:35.000And a lot of what the brain does, it receives information, but a lot of the brain's function is to filter stuff out.
02:22:43.000If we received everything from the environment all the time, we'd be nuts.
02:22:50.000So there are these gating mechanisms that's called neural gating.
02:22:54.000And we are genetically programmed to, and through experience as well, to have these gating mechanisms that filters a lot of stuff out so that we can function.
02:23:09.000Otherwise, reality would be a blooming, buzzing confusion all the time.
02:23:13.000We wouldn't be able to focus on anything.
02:24:43.000We perceive our own model, essentially, of reality.
02:24:52.000Different experiences create literally drug trips.
02:24:56.000Also can explain love affairs where people become incredibly addicted to each other and addicted to the experience of being around the person and what that does to you.
02:25:07.000And that literally you are on drugs when you're with someone.
02:26:05.000Well, but people, you know, again, they have these artificial distinctions about, well, you know, my mystical experience is more valuable than yours because you had to have psilocybin and I got there on the natch.
02:26:42.000Suddenly science can study mystical experiences because we have a reliable trigger that will, nine times out of ten, induce a mystical experience in the right circumstances.
02:26:52.000So then we can take somebody, you know, maybe somebody's meditated for 20 years or done yoga or done other things, hoping that they might have a mystical experience.
02:27:04.000But then, you know, you can take me, an ordinary schmuck or somebody like me who hasn't particularly, not particularly spiritually evolved, but I can take psilocybin and yeah, it works.
02:27:18.000That reminds me of a great story that your brother told once.
02:27:21.000About a monk who studied a city of levitation and he did it for like 30 years and then met the Buddha and said, look, I can walk on water.
02:27:34.000I've studied this city of levitation for 30 years and now I can walk across the river.
02:27:38.000And the Buddha said, yeah, but the ferry's only a nickel.
02:27:49.000Speaking of mushrooms, this is something that I get wrong all the time.
02:27:52.000This is one of the other things I wanted to ask you.
02:27:55.000There's some very close relationship that mushrooms have and the absorption of mushrooms have to DMT. What is the chemical differentiation?
02:29:32.000Because what's going on with that, this static diagram, a different molecular model would show, but what's going on is that that nitrogen there, when silicon's in physiological solution,
02:29:49.000The nitrogen is charged, has a positive charge.
02:30:55.000You know, what's really incredible is that people are using psilocybin these days in what they call microdosing, taking very small doses and seeing these profound benefits.
02:31:07.000And one of the things that I'm aware of is kickboxers are using it.
02:31:13.000And kickboxers are using it and a good buddy of mine is using it.
02:31:16.000He says that he can see things happen before they happen.
02:31:19.000It's almost like he's reading people's minds before they're about to do something.
02:31:46.000Because I think that these things let you step out of your box a little bit.
02:31:53.000They let you step out of your usual reference frame and notice things going on in the environment that, again, this gating mechanism we were talking about, we're programmed to filter stuff out.
02:33:00.000You know, it's a lens through which you can look at the world and see aspects of it that are always there, but you've never noticed them before because we're programmed not to.
02:33:10.000For example, you know, Carey Mullis is famous because his discoveries in molecular biology, he attributes to his insights about molecular processes that he got from LSD. That he could get down with the molecules,
02:33:28.000as he put it, and see how all this is working.
02:33:30.000And obviously he invented polymerase chain reaction, which he got the Nobel Prize for.
02:33:54.000Take a walk in the forest with an indigenous person, you know, who in some ways is in this less of this sensory gating in a more open place all the time.
02:34:07.000They will notice things about the environment, you know, that you are completely oblivious to until they point it out, you know, and then they'll say, oh, yes, I never noticed the leafcutter ants are behaving this way or these different things.
02:34:24.000Their sensory sort of experience of an environment like the forest is very different than ours.
02:34:33.000You know, because we're used to, we're just not out in nature the same way.
02:34:38.000And I dare say, I think one of the things that in some ways inserts a barrier between us is literacy.
02:35:44.000The things in the background that you're normally programmed to suppress and ignore because, you know, you have to be ready for the saber-toothed tiger to come across, you know, over the mountain or whatever, you know what I'm saying.
02:36:07.000And I think that's a very useful thing to learn.
02:36:11.000Indigenous people call these psychedelics plant teachers, and they call them teachers for a reason.
02:36:18.000Much of what you experience comes directly from the experience, but much of it also comes from your changed perception, and suddenly you realize there's a different way to be in the world.
02:36:31.000There's a different way to perceive...
02:36:36.000What you experience that normally you don't, you know, we're programmed to filter out.
02:36:42.000I don't know if you've ever read or had Stephen Buhner on your show.
02:36:48.000He writes very intelligently about this stuff.
02:36:51.000He's written a book called Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm.
02:36:56.000And it's all about this, you know, this...
02:37:02.000Essentially, what his rap is, you can learn this, you know, you can learn this way of perceiving.
02:37:09.000Whether you do it with psychedelics or not, you can actually learn it.
02:37:13.000And it's an interesting, it's a better way to relate to nature, or more, an alternative way to relate to nature in any way.
02:37:24.000I feel like we have these pre-assumed definitions of things that we rely upon instead of seeing things for what they really are.
02:37:33.000Yeah, you box them up and you package them and you go, oh, well there's a car.
02:37:37.000And then one day you look at the car and you go, That's a box that has a controlled explosion encased in iron and it rolls on rubber tires.
02:37:47.000That's exactly what I'm talking about.
02:37:49.000There's a different way to look at things if you step out of the box.
02:38:03.000But, I mean, it's interesting in that respect, you know, with psychedelics, because we're verbal people and, you know, we inhabit a world of language as much as the physical world.
02:38:19.000And we're almost compelled to try to put some kind of a linguistic wrapper over everything, which is one reason why.
02:38:29.000If you smoke DMT, right, you have a complete revelation.
02:38:55.000You can't really describe it in language, but boy...
02:39:00.000Is there a desire to somehow tame this thing, which is incomprehensible, totally transcendent, but that doesn't stop you from rapping about it immediately, to try to stuff it into a box because it's too impactful.
02:39:17.000And so on the individual level, this is what people do.
02:39:24.000They try to take something like this and stuff it into a box, because in and of itself, without that wrapping or that linguistic, you know, filter to somehow tame it and, you know,
02:39:40.000nullify, neutralize its power, these things are very dangerous.
02:39:44.000There also seems to be some sort of a physiological component to the DMT trip, where once it's over, you have a very limited amount of time to hang on to those memories.
02:39:58.000And so this is an attempt to entrain that, to grab it, and I think put a linguistic...
02:40:06.000You know, tag on it in a certain way so that as a way to not forget it or try and, you know, both reduce its power but give you something to hang on because, right, the memory of what it actually is is going to fade very rapidly.
02:43:38.000And if you go to that website, then there's a link through to the Facebook page.
02:43:42.000And we'll be live streaming it, you know, on the 6th, 7th, and 8th of June.
02:43:48.000And it'll be archived, so I don't expect people in the States to get up at 3 in the morning, you know, to watch it, although they could if they want to watch it live.
02:44:00.000And will you transfer it over to other more accessible, like people who don't have Facebook, maybe on YouTube or something along those lines, Vimeo?
02:44:08.000We haven't made plans to livestream it on Vimeo.
02:44:38.000You can go to the website and order the book, and the book will come out probably the end of November.
02:44:44.000It's going to take a few months for everybody to get there.
02:44:48.000They have to not only make a presentation, they have to submit a paper for this book.
02:44:54.000And I'm dangling certain rewards out to them to make sure that they do, in fact, submit a full paper in the spirit of the first conference.