The Joe Rogan Experience - May 24, 2018


Joe Rogan Experience #1121 - Michael Pollan

Topics
psychedelics psychedelic experiences drug risks and experiences psilocybin hunting psilocybin experience and plant consciousness psychedelics and consciousness exploration Greek psychedelic rituals and wine drugs psilocybin experiences ketamine for depression psychedelics psilocybin and cultural evolution
Hosted by
Joe Rogan
Guests
Michael Pollan
Mentioned
Terrence McKenna Michael Pollan Greeks Karl Ruck Timothy Leary Gordon Wasson Paul Stamets Jamie Vernon Schedule Hopkins Stephen Colbert Albert Hoffman Stanislav Grof Rebecca Mercer Carlo Rovelli Marco Allegro William James Aldous Huxley Jeff Sessions Steve Bannon and 19 more
JRE MMA Show #27 with Robin Black Joe Rogan Experience - Fight Companion - May 27, 2018

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 24 minutes

Words per minute

172.63

Word count

14,668

Sentence count

1,308

Harmful content

Misogyny

7

sentences flagged

Toxicity

52

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Dr. Michael Pollan joins me to talk about his new book, M.O.A.D.T.E. (People Who Dope With LSD) and why he s writing a book on psychedelics. We talk about how he got into psychedelics, how he came up with the idea for the book, and what it s like being a journalist writing about psychedelics in the late 80s and early 90s. We also talk about what it was like growing up in a house full of hippies in the 60s and 70s, and how psychedelics changed the way he looked at the world. And we talk about why he thinks psychedelics should be legalized in the United States. This episode was produced and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser and Alex Blumberg. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Our ad music is by Haley Shaw. We mixed this episode with music from Fugue, and our theme song was written and performed by Ian Dorsch. Additional music was produced by Mark Phillips. If you like what you hear here, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and/or wherever else you get your music recommendations. Please be sure to tell us what you think about it in the comments section below! and we'll be looking out for the next week for a new episode on the next episode. . Thank you so much for your support of the podcast! Timestrocks in the podcast and on SoundCloud Thanks so much for the cover art & thank you by , and , is at thanks so much, - if you like the podcast so you can be a friend of the show, and we really appreciate it, and it really helps us out. and so much so much more it really means a lot, it means so much to us this is a lot of people are listening to the podcast, we really mean it. Thank you for all the love you can do it we really really well, so much of it. - Thank you, thank you, Thank you really much, really really really deeply to you, really means it, really, really appreciative it, it really does mean it, you're a lot a lot.

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Joe Rogan Experience" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:02.000 That quickly?
00:00:03.000 Two?
00:00:04.000 One?
00:00:06.000 Boom.
00:00:07.000 And we're live.
00:00:07.000 Mr. Pollan, how are you?
00:00:08.000 Hey, good.
00:00:09.000 Good to be here.
00:00:11.000 What's happening, man?
00:00:12.000 How are you?
00:00:13.000 Good.
00:00:13.000 Good to be in LA. Good to have you here.
00:00:16.000 I've been a fan of your work for a long time, man.
00:00:18.000 And I got really excited when I found out that you were writing a book on psychedelics.
00:00:23.000 And I'm just, I think it's an amazing subject, and I'm glad someone who's respected, like yourself, is getting it.
00:00:30.000 It's a crackpot subject, right?
00:00:32.000 It's one of those subjects where you're like, oh no, Michael Pollan found drugs.
00:00:35.000 Like, what's he doing?
00:00:37.000 He's having a crisis.
00:00:38.000 He's out there doing mushrooms.
00:00:40.000 It is a bit of a departure, I think, that there are people who are expecting another book on food or agriculture, and we're a little surprised.
00:00:46.000 Yeah.
00:00:47.000 But so far, people have been following me who cared about food and ag, and there's more overlap than I ever would have guessed.
00:00:54.000 I think you caught the perfect wave.
00:00:55.000 I think your book is coming out right when John Hopkins Research Center is starting to put out these studies on it.
00:01:02.000 People are starting to recognize that MDMA has amazing results for post-traumatic stress disorder from veterans, and marijuana is becoming legal in more and more states.
00:01:11.000 It's like you're catching this wave.
00:01:13.000 Yeah, and I didn't know that.
00:01:15.000 You know, you never know where the culture is going to be because you start a book years before.
00:01:18.000 How long did you start it?
00:01:20.000 Well, I started the research in 2014. I wrote a piece for The New Yorker called The Trip Treatment, which is online.
00:01:27.000 And it was my first foray into this work.
00:01:30.000 I went down to Hopkins and spent a lot of time at NYU. And at the time, they were doing this really interesting trial where they were giving psilocybin to people with cancer diagnoses, many of whom were terminal.
00:01:42.000 And that seemed like such a weird idea to me that I was curious to explore it.
00:01:46.000 And I spent a lot of time talking to patients, many of whom were dying.
00:01:50.000 About how this single high-dose psilocybin experience, a guided psilocybin experience, and we should talk a little bit about how the guided changes things.
00:02:00.000 The image people have is popping some mushrooms in your mouth and maybe going to a concert or going to the beach, but this is a very controlled internal experience.
00:02:09.000 Completely reset these people's attitude toward death and allowed them to die with equanimity and when these results were published just last year they found that in 80% of the people who had the session they had statistically significant reductions in standard measures of depression and anxiety.
00:02:32.000 It was one of the most effective psychiatric interventions that these psychiatrists had ever seen.
00:02:38.000 Which is amazing.
00:02:39.000 A single experience.
00:02:41.000 And that a molecule could change the contents of your head to the extent that you would rethink your mortality.
00:02:48.000 And so as I began talking to these people and hearing their stories, many of which were just remarkable, I realized, you know, this is not just an article.
00:02:57.000 There's a book here.
00:02:58.000 And there's so much, you know...
00:03:00.000 There are two kinds of articles you write as a journalist.
00:03:02.000 One is, you're sick of the topic by the time you finish and you can't wait to be done.
00:03:07.000 And the other is, God, I just scratched the surface.
00:03:10.000 And this was one of those.
00:03:11.000 Did you have any experiences personally with psychedelics before you wrote this book?
00:03:16.000 Very limited.
00:03:17.000 I, for some peculiar reason, never did psychedelics in college.
00:03:21.000 They just weren't around.
00:03:23.000 They weren't around?
00:03:24.000 No, I went to the wrong school.
00:03:25.000 What school did you go to?
00:03:26.000 And it was like a very kind of progressive hippie school.
00:03:29.000 I went to Bennington College in Vermont.
00:03:31.000 And there was LSD there before me and there was LSD after me, but I was in this little wrinkle in time where there was only alcohol.
00:03:39.000 I need a cup.
00:03:40.000 There you go.
00:03:40.000 Thanks, Jamie.
00:03:41.000 That's crazy.
00:03:42.000 Only alcohol in college.
00:03:44.000 So I had no experience of psychedelics until I was in my late 20s, and then it was pretty mild.
00:03:52.000 I had a couple mushroom experiences that I now describe as aesthetic experiences, right?
00:03:58.000 Small doses?
00:04:00.000 Yeah, I never even measured it.
00:04:01.000 It was probably one gram.
00:04:03.000 So I'd never had a big trip.
00:04:05.000 And there was another reason.
00:04:07.000 I didn't feel psychologically sturdy enough.
00:04:10.000 And I came of age just when the scare stories about psychedelics were everywhere in the culture.
00:04:16.000 You know, they would scramble your chromosomes. 0.95
00:04:18.000 You'd stare at the sun until you went blind.
00:04:22.000 You know, the person who took all the orange sunshine and thought he was an orange for the rest of his life.
00:04:27.000 You know, these stories were out there.
00:04:28.000 And I was afraid to.
00:04:30.000 I was just afraid.
00:04:31.000 Yeah.
00:04:32.000 Well, it's not an unfounded fear.
00:04:36.000 Oh, no.
00:04:37.000 People can really get into psychological trouble.
00:04:40.000 I think it's really important that people understand that it's a profound, powerful, destabilizing experience.
00:04:48.000 And depending on your mindset and the situation in which you take it, set and setting, it can be ecstatic or horrific.
00:04:58.000 And, you know, there are many people who had a series of very good trips and then they have that one bad trip.
00:05:04.000 And so, yeah, I had heard enough stories about that to stay away.
00:05:11.000 So discovering this kind of later in life, you know, I was certainly not something I planned on or expected.
00:05:19.000 It's a great tragedy, in my opinion, that our culture has demonized these substances and put them in this category of forbidden fruit to the point where you're so nervous about doing them.
00:05:33.000 You have to get them from some shady character.
00:05:35.000 And you don't know what you're getting.
00:05:36.000 Yeah, you have to do them in secrecy.
00:05:40.000 You have to be really careful.
00:05:41.000 But we also at the same time are aware of all these incredibly positive benefits from them.
00:05:46.000 And then if we just had professional places where we could go to...
00:05:50.000 I mean, we have these rehab facilities that are available for people trying to kick opiates and people trying to get their life together.
00:05:56.000 But if we had something similar, like a psychedelic facility with...
00:06:01.000 Registered professionals who understand this and who could evaluate you psychologically.
00:06:07.000 Understand if you were perhaps taking medication that would adversely affect your trip.
00:06:12.000 Try to find out who you are, like what state you're at in your life.
00:06:15.000 Have you had any experiences before?
00:06:17.000 Maybe we should put you on a low-dose THC. Let's ramp it up slowly.
00:06:22.000 Let's try something small and see how you react to it.
00:06:26.000 And then I think, I don't think people like myself or pot smokers or people who have done psychedelics, I don't think we do it any favors either, because we're always trying to pretend that there is no adverse effects.
00:06:37.000 And that there's like, you know, people, when they get into something, they want everybody to do it.
00:06:42.000 And I've been guilty of this myself.
00:06:44.000 There's an occupational hazard of irrational exuberance.
00:06:49.000 This is what happened to Timothy Leary, right?
00:06:51.000 People have an amazing experience and the first thing they think is, everybody's got to do this.
00:06:56.000 But it isn't for everybody.
00:06:58.000 And I think you're absolutely right.
00:06:59.000 I think that...
00:07:01.000 Look, there are risks, but these are not drugs of abuse.
00:07:04.000 They're non-addictive.
00:07:05.000 They're anti-addictive.
00:07:06.000 The first thought after having a big psychedelic trip is not, when can I do this again?
00:07:11.000 Right.
00:07:11.000 It's woe.
00:07:12.000 It's woe.
00:07:13.000 The last one I had, I was like, I don't know if I could do that again.
00:07:15.000 I felt that way every time.
00:07:17.000 It's like childbirth, or how we hear childbirth is.
00:07:20.000 You can't imagine doing it again, and eventually you do do it again.
00:07:24.000 So, I do think that we have to find the proper context in which to do it, and I think your point is really important.
00:07:31.000 We need trained guides.
00:07:34.000 The experience is completely different when it's guided.
00:07:37.000 Yeah.
00:07:39.000 You have a sense of safety.
00:07:41.000 There's someone looking out for your body while your mind is traveling.
00:07:44.000 And this allows you to essentially surrender to the experience.
00:07:48.000 And most bad trips, in my experience, are the result of people resisting what is happening.
00:07:54.000 Their ego is dissolving, and it's scary.
00:07:57.000 It feels like a death, and they try to stop it.
00:08:00.000 And that can make you very anxious.
00:08:02.000 And so all the guides I worked with and interviewed, they were all like, relax your mind and float downstream.
00:08:08.000 If you see a door, open it.
00:08:10.000 If you see a staircase, go down it.
00:08:14.000 Surrender.
00:08:15.000 Trust and let go.
00:08:16.000 And this kind of advice changes everything.
00:08:19.000 And the chances of a bad trip, I think, in a guided situation are substantially less because they know how to help you deal with it and what to tell you when it's happening.
00:08:29.000 So I do think that by forcing these drugs underground and into this very kind of unregulated use, reports of bad trips were much fewer before the moral panic about LSD in 1965. And when it was still legal,
00:08:49.000 you didn't hear about bad trips.
00:08:52.000 You started hearing about it when the culture did this 180 and turned against LSD. We're good to go.
00:09:30.000 Yeah, or episodes of paranoia.
00:09:33.000 That's common, too.
00:09:35.000 But a good guide can work you through this.
00:09:37.000 And actually, they don't even like the term bad trip.
00:09:39.000 They call it a challenging trip, because often very interesting material comes up that you then can work on later.
00:09:45.000 It's like having a nightmare and analyzing it with your shrink.
00:09:48.000 It actually may be very productive.
00:09:52.000 So, you know, I was kind of a nervous nelly going into this, and I really looked at the whole risk profile.
00:09:58.000 And on the physiological side, your body, the risks are remarkably low.
00:10:03.000 And I'm speaking here of the classic psychedelics.
00:10:06.000 I'm not talking about MDMA or even pot.
00:10:09.000 I'm talking about LSD psilocybin, which is magic mushrooms.
00:10:15.000 DMT, mescaline, they are much less toxic than many of the over-the-counter drugs you have in your medicine cabinet.
00:10:23.000 There is no lethal dose, which is remarkable.
00:10:27.000 There was one elephant that was killed with LSD once.
00:10:29.000 They wanted to see what it would take, and they gave it a massive dose, but to get it To the point where they could administer it, they had to give it a massive dose of tranquilizer.
00:10:38.000 So it isn't actually clear that the LSD killed it.
00:10:41.000 It may have been the benzos or whatever they were giving it.
00:10:44.000 I know.
00:10:44.000 What a horrible thing, right?
00:10:45.000 Go online and look up the elephant who died from LSD. What a crazy idea.
00:10:50.000 Yeah.
00:10:51.000 Animal cruelty.
00:10:52.000 I wonder what was going through the elephant's mind before it died.
00:10:54.000 Well, animals don't like psychedelics that much.
00:10:57.000 You know that classic setup that drug abuse researchers use where they put a rat in a cage and there's a lever and they can administer cocaine or heroin or they can have lunch and they'll press the cocaine lever until they die.
00:11:10.000 Right.
00:11:11.000 You put LSD in that setup, they press it once and never again.
00:11:17.000 Well, that setup is always screwy, right?
00:11:19.000 Because they really shouldn't be in that situation.
00:11:21.000 It's not a natural setup.
00:11:23.000 That's been criticized.
00:11:24.000 That's right.
00:11:25.000 And somebody in Vancouver did these really cool rat park experiments.
00:11:29.000 Yes.
00:11:29.000 Yeah.
00:11:29.000 That's what you're referencing.
00:11:31.000 And basically, they thought that this was inevitably what happens.
00:11:34.000 But in fact, if you give a rat a beautiful cage with some things to play with, some other rats to hang out with, some nature, some shrubs and things, it will not take the cocaine.
00:11:45.000 Yeah.
00:11:46.000 Isn't that interesting?
00:11:46.000 It tells us that environment has a lot to do with drug addiction.
00:11:50.000 I think for sure with human beings, too.
00:11:52.000 Oh, absolutely.
00:11:53.000 Human beings in these really fruitless lives that are very, very frustrating. 1.00
00:11:56.000 Or think about the people who came back from Vietnam.
00:11:59.000 I mean, I don't know if I should say most, but a very high percentage of the troops in Vietnam were on heroin when they were there.
00:12:06.000 They were seemingly addicted.
00:12:07.000 They were using it all the time.
00:12:09.000 And they got back and only 10% had a problem.
00:12:12.000 The others were able to kick it really easily.
00:12:14.000 It's very contextual.
00:12:15.000 It's not all biology.
00:12:18.000 It's about environment.
00:12:19.000 Now, when you were researching this book, did you start doing your own personal experimentation?
00:12:30.000 Yeah, I had a series of trips for the book.
00:12:33.000 I had become, for a couple reasons, I had become very curious about the people I was interviewing, trying to make sense of how they could have these transformative trips on a drug, which seemed implausible to me.
00:12:46.000 And I also kind of got jealous of the experiences they were having.
00:12:50.000 They were having these big spiritual experiences.
00:12:52.000 And I swear, I don't think I've ever had a spiritual experience. 0.66
00:12:54.000 I'm kind of spiritually retarded, actually. 0.73
00:12:56.000 Or was.
00:12:58.000 And so I realized at a certain point I had to see the experience from inside to describe it in a book.
00:13:06.000 It's also kind of my brand as a writer.
00:13:08.000 When I wrote about the cattle industry, I bought a steer.
00:13:11.000 When I wrote about architecture, I built a house.
00:13:13.000 I like to get my hands dirty and see things from inside.
00:13:16.000 There's a quality of wonder you can capture doing something for the first time.
00:13:20.000 So in a way, the fact I was psychedelically naive, I saw as a positive.
00:13:25.000 Because people who really know the territory are not going to have quite the same first experience that I was going to have.
00:13:31.000 So that was really helpful.
00:13:32.000 So I did a few things.
00:13:35.000 I went mushroom hunting with Paul Stamets.
00:13:39.000 Has he been on the show?
00:13:40.000 I saw you had his books out there.
00:13:42.000 Yeah, he's a very cool guy.
00:13:43.000 He's crazy. 0.98
00:13:44.000 He's totally crazy. 0.98
00:13:45.000 And he took me to a spot where you can find the strongest psilocybin known to man.
00:13:51.000 The Pacific Northwest?
00:13:52.000 Yeah, it's near the mouth of the Columbia River.
00:13:55.000 I can't be more specific than that.
00:13:57.000 Don't.
00:13:59.000 You know, people with their mushroom spots.
00:14:01.000 Yeah.
00:14:01.000 So we went hunting.
00:14:03.000 It was like this, you know, forlorn December weather.
00:14:07.000 And he took me to this place.
00:14:09.000 And we spent a couple days outside looking for these mushrooms.
00:14:13.000 And we found Psilocybe azurescens, which he found for the first time and named after his son, Azurius.
00:14:20.000 Oh, wow.
00:14:21.000 Who in turn is named after the color of mushrooms when they're bruised.
00:14:25.000 Azur.
00:14:26.000 So there's kind of an interesting...
00:14:27.000 That's a dude who's committed to fungus.
00:14:31.000 He's all in.
00:14:32.000 He is all in with fungus.
00:14:34.000 And I was very excited when we found a couple.
00:14:36.000 And they're hard.
00:14:37.000 I mean, I would not recommend do-it-yourself with psilocybin, just because it's not like looking for chanterelles or morels.
00:14:45.000 Right.
00:14:46.000 There are mushrooms that look exactly like psilocybin that can give you just an agonizing death.
00:14:52.000 But when you're with Paul Stamets, you feel pretty confident.
00:14:55.000 And so we found these, and he said to me after we'd found them, we were sitting around the campfire, we were cooking some dinner outside our yurt, and he said, yes, these are almost too strong for me.
00:15:07.000 I said, really, why?
00:15:08.000 He says, well, they have a side effect that bothers some people.
00:15:11.000 I said, what's that?
00:15:13.000 Temporary paralysis.
00:15:15.000 Oh, I don't know why that would bother anybody.
00:15:17.000 So weird.
00:15:19.000 Yeah, I know.
00:15:20.000 I know.
00:15:21.000 Picky, picky. 0.95
00:15:21.000 Oh, my God. 0.95
00:15:22.000 So, I was a little reluctant to take them.
00:15:25.000 So, I did.
00:15:26.000 I had my first stilocybin experience since my 20s was – and at the time, I was like 60 or approaching 60. Actually, I have to be very vague on when all these things happen.
00:15:36.000 Right.
00:15:39.000 And I had a kind of...
00:15:41.000 I didn't take a lot of them.
00:15:42.000 I made a tea and I had a really powerful experience.
00:15:45.000 It was very much about being in nature.
00:15:47.000 I was at our house.
00:15:49.000 We have a house in New England that we've had for many years.
00:15:51.000 And I was in my garden.
00:15:52.000 And, you know, I've written a lot about plants and I've written about plant intelligence and plant consciousness and things like that.
00:15:58.000 And I've always believed intellectually that plants, domesticated plants, are acting on us.
00:16:05.000 It's not just...
00:16:06.000 It's a two-way street.
00:16:08.000 We change plants.
00:16:09.000 They change us.
00:16:09.000 We have been in the same way that, say, the apple tree or the flower is manipulating the bee, making it come pay attention to it, offering it nectar in exchange for it picking up pollen on its legs,
00:16:26.000 and doesn't even realize what it's really doing is being tricked by the plant into pollinating it and carrying its genes down the street or around the world.
00:16:34.000 That's happening to us, too.
00:16:36.000 And plants work on us. 0.61
00:16:38.000 And it's a slightly trippy idea, but it's just co-evolution.
00:16:42.000 That's how co-evolution works.
00:16:44.000 So during this experience, I felt that in a way I never had.
00:16:49.000 That idea became flesh.
00:16:51.000 And I felt that these plants were kind of looking back at me...
00:16:57.000 And that they were very benign.
00:16:59.000 They had only good intentions.
00:17:01.000 But that there were more subjectivities in my garden than I thought.
00:17:07.000 You know, we go through the world thinking we're the only thinking subject.
00:17:09.000 Everything else is an object.
00:17:11.000 One of the things that happens on psychedelics is everything has life in it, has consciousness in it.
00:17:17.000 And that was a powerful and beautiful experience.
00:17:19.000 And so that was my dipping my toes in.
00:17:22.000 And then after that, I sought...
00:17:25.000 A guide.
00:17:26.000 Because I was trying to simulate the experience I was hearing about at Hopkins and NYU, where they were doing these studies.
00:17:33.000 Not just with the dying, they were doing it with smokers and alcoholics and meditators, all these different groups.
00:17:38.000 But I didn't qualify to enter into those, so I had to go underground.
00:17:42.000 And one of the things I learned is that there is this thriving network of underground guides all over the country.
00:17:48.000 I don't know how many there are, but they're very professional people.
00:17:53.000 They're not drug dealers.
00:17:55.000 They're therapists.
00:17:56.000 And some of them are trained psychologists or MDs in some cases, actually.
00:18:01.000 And they're so convinced of the healing value of these medicines that they're willing to risk their freedom and their livelihood to work underground.
00:18:10.000 So I found my way into this community and interviewed a bunch of people.
00:18:17.000 And some of them were not the kind of people you want to trust your mind to.
00:18:21.000 And no doubt there are lots of charlatans.
00:18:23.000 Everyone I interview is pretty professional.
00:18:27.000 But some of them were just a little too casual about something I was kind of, you know, worried about.
00:18:33.000 There was one guy, I remember this Romanian psychonaut therapist in his 70s who I said, well, what happens if something bad happens?
00:18:43.000 You know, what if somebody dies, you know, while they're with you getting this trip?
00:18:47.000 And he said, you bury them with all the other people.
00:18:51.000 And that kind of casualness really troubled me, so I didn't work with him.
00:18:55.000 But eventually I found people that I trusted and I had a bond with, and I had some very powerful experiences with them.
00:19:05.000 And that did change me in ways that I'm still kind of, you know, digesting.
00:19:11.000 Now, I'd like to take you back to the garden thing when you're having this experience with these plants.
00:19:17.000 I had a experience once on a very high dose of marijuana edibles.
00:19:23.000 I went into a grow room that this local dispensary had set up.
00:19:29.000 It's this big room filled with plants and It was the first time when I walked in.
00:19:36.000 It was the first time I've ever been around pot plants where I felt like they were aware that I was there.
00:19:40.000 It was very strange.
00:19:42.000 And you had this weird feeling of them having much more sensitivity than you imagined.
00:19:50.000 That they're aware of you, but as you said, they're benign, and they're just sort of sitting there.
00:19:55.000 But it was almost like they were saying hello to me.
00:19:57.000 They recognized that I could tune into them because I was so barbecued that I was on their wavelength.
00:20:04.000 When you're out there with those plants and you said that you felt consciousness from them, now, as an intelligent, rational person, did you start pondering whether or not you were just perceiving this because it was convenient and you were hallucinating and adding all this contextual weirdness to this situation?
00:20:24.000 You know, I'm sure I was projecting things onto them, but I've looked at this question and the science of it pretty closely.
00:20:31.000 Right.
00:20:33.000 How you define consciousness matters here, but plants are conscious in the sense of they're aware of their environment, they have senses.
00:20:41.000 They're not like our senses, but they're picking up on chemicals in the air and in the soil and light in very specific ways, and they're reacting, not just instinctually, but appropriately.
00:20:53.000 There are experiments that show that plants can learn in some primitive way.
00:20:57.000 So we have to understand that we have one kind of consciousness, And other animals and even plants have another kind of consciousness.
00:21:04.000 So it's real.
00:21:05.000 It's a real thing.
00:21:06.000 The idea that they're looking back at me, I'm being metaphorical, but that they're aware of me in the way that...
00:21:14.000 The plant is aware that the bee is nearby and does certain things, sometimes to trap the bee and hold it there for a longer amount of time to load it up with pollen.
00:21:28.000 The world as we perceive it is dependent on the particular senses we have.
00:21:34.000 We've got the big five senses that you always hear about, and there's some other littler ones.
00:21:38.000 You know, how we locate ourselves in space.
00:21:40.000 We're pretty good at that, too.
00:21:43.000 But other creatures have a different set of senses, and therefore they live in a different world.
00:21:48.000 So the bee, for example, can see ultraviolet light we can't see.
00:21:53.000 So if you could get inside a bee's head, the world would look very different.
00:21:58.000 And you'd see patterns like landing markings on flowers in ultraviolet colors that they can see that you've never seen before.
00:22:07.000 Ditto, they also can experience electromagnetic radiation.
00:22:10.000 We can't.
00:22:11.000 It's all around us, but we don't feel it.
00:22:13.000 They feel it.
00:22:14.000 And the reason they do is a plant that has a strong electromagnetic field hasn't been visited recently by another bee, so they know you're going to get a lot of nectar here.
00:22:25.000 And whereas if you're flying by a flower and it's got a soft feel, doesn't have a big feel, it's probably just been visited by someone else, so skip it.
00:22:35.000 So they're living in a world where they're perceiving cell phone radiation and all the kinds of crap we're putting into the electromagnetic spectrum.
00:22:44.000 So...
00:22:45.000 So we have to realize that this is a very specific world that we're perceiving in our normal consciousness that is the one that we need to perceive, that's good for us, that we're designed for, reflecting our bodies and our upright stance, everything about us.
00:23:00.000 But other creatures are seeing a different world.
00:23:02.000 And one of the interesting things about psychedelics is...
00:23:05.000 You get some insight into that.
00:23:08.000 You sort of feel it.
00:23:09.000 And it's real, I think, in the sense of...
00:23:14.000 Sure, you're imagining...
00:23:16.000 There's still a leap of imagination to understand bee world or octopus world.
00:23:20.000 That's a really weird world.
00:23:21.000 Their brains are distributed over eight arms, right? 0.81
00:23:25.000 Have you seen that recent paper that was just put out?
00:23:29.000 See if you can find it.
00:23:30.000 They're hypothesizing that octopus...
00:23:33.000 They might have come here from another planet, literally.
00:23:36.000 Did not see that.
00:23:36.000 It might have been seeded by another planet.
00:23:38.000 It's very controversial, but it's from a legit scientist.
00:23:40.000 And what they're trying to think of is if it's possible that the eggs of these things traveled in comets and somehow they came here hundreds of millions of years ago.
00:23:49.000 And the reason being is that they can alter their RNA and that this is very specific to octopi or octopuses.
00:23:58.000 Yeah, here it is.
00:23:59.000 Octopuses came to Earth from space as frozen eggs millions of years ago.
00:24:03.000 I don't know if they would put it that way, but it's just a theory, but it's a theory that's being bandied about by legitimate scientists.
00:24:10.000 That's fascinating.
00:24:11.000 Because they can do so many things that no other animal can do, like instantaneously change their outside.
00:24:16.000 Yes, to blend into their area.
00:24:19.000 Also, each arm can make its own decisions without referring to headquarters.
00:24:23.000 Really?
00:24:23.000 Yeah, they have this distributed intelligence.
00:24:25.000 Wow.
00:24:26.000 And regenerate as well.
00:24:28.000 Yes. 0.98
00:24:28.000 No, they're really crazy. 0.98
00:24:32.000 So this idea that there's something relative about our everyday normal consciousness, that there are other ways to experience the world, is something that psychedelics put you in touch with.
00:24:43.000 I was just reading this interview with this physicist named Carlo Rovelli.
00:24:47.000 He's a theoretical physicist from Italy.
00:24:49.000 He wrote this book a couple years ago called Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.
00:24:52.000 Very prominent guy.
00:24:53.000 And he was telling this interviewer in The Guardian that he got turned on to physics during an LSD trip he had when he was 15. And the interviewer asked him, why was that?
00:25:05.000 And he said, well, I saw for the first time that there could be another way to think about time instead of past, present, and future, that it might all be simultaneous.
00:25:16.000 And that's how it appeared to him during this LSD trip.
00:25:19.000 And when he was back to baseline, he said, you know, I was asking myself, why am I so sure this is the real world?
00:25:29.000 And that wasn't the real world.
00:25:31.000 And it was just a hallucination.
00:25:33.000 And he said, the world as it presents itself to us right now here...
00:25:39.000 Actually, physics tells us is not the real world.
00:25:42.000 That space and time are curved, that particles don't exist until they're perceived by a consciousness.
00:25:49.000 All these crazy ideas of theoretical physics.
00:25:51.000 He said, it suddenly seemed like worth exploring.
00:25:54.000 That the world as it presents itself to us is not the only world.
00:25:58.000 Or necessarily the accurate world.
00:26:00.000 And I was very interested that a scientist...
00:26:04.000 Could develop that idea of a beyond in the way you would think of a religious person developing the idea of a beyond.
00:26:11.000 That there's a scientific beyond and there's a religious beyond.
00:26:15.000 And psychedelics at least gives us a hint that those worlds exist.
00:26:20.000 And that was a very powerful, powerful idea for me.
00:26:24.000 Have you looked into any of the connections between ancient religions and psychedelics?
00:26:30.000 Like any of the John Marco Allegro stuff?
00:26:32.000 Yeah, I did.
00:26:33.000 I didn't go that deep into it.
00:26:35.000 I went in deep enough to know that there are a lot of very serious scholars, and Allegro is one, and Karl Ruck is another, and Gordon Wasson, the guy who kind of brought psilocybin to the West, who I write about at some length in the book, Really believe that it was experience of psychedelics,
00:26:54.000 which has been in culture for thousands of years, we know, whether you're talking about the Amazon or Africa, and that these experiences may have nurtured the religious impulse.
00:27:09.000 You know, where do you get the idea of a beyond?
00:27:11.000 Where do you get the idea of a heaven or a hell if not from some altered state of consciousness?
00:27:17.000 You know, people talked about visiting the underworld in Homer's time.
00:27:21.000 So, how did they do that?
00:27:23.000 Was it dreams?
00:27:25.000 Dreams don't have the authority that psychedelic experience has.
00:27:29.000 There's something about psychedelic experience that has this...
00:27:34.000 It's not just an opinion.
00:27:36.000 It's not a fantasy.
00:27:37.000 It's something real.
00:27:38.000 It's objective truth.
00:27:40.000 William James called it the noetic quality of the mystical experience.
00:27:44.000 And that certitude comes from psychedelics.
00:27:49.000 And so it seems totally plausible to me that at the very earliest stages of humanity, if people were indeed taking psychedelics, this might explain how they came up with these ideas.
00:28:03.000 There are other alternative theories, and it's not provable.
00:28:07.000 I just don't know how we would begin to prove it.
00:28:09.000 But it seems plausible.
00:28:11.000 And, you know, the ancient Greeks had a psychedelic that they used, we think, they called it the Kikion, K-Y-K-E-O-N. And they had an annual ritual ceremony.
00:28:22.000 And it was the only time in the year where you could use this drug.
00:28:25.000 And it was a ritual for demeter and harvest or planting time.
00:28:31.000 And everybody in Greek society did this.
00:28:34.000 And people, it was secret.
00:28:36.000 It was called the mysteries, the Eleusinian mysteries.
00:28:39.000 And you weren't supposed to talk about it.
00:28:41.000 But there's a few accounts around.
00:28:42.000 And people talked about visiting the underworld, making contact with the dead.
00:28:46.000 And Karl Ruck, who's a classicist at BU, says that was a psychedelic potion.
00:28:53.000 We don't know what they were using, whether it was mushrooms or something else.
00:28:56.000 The Greek use of drugs is very obscure.
00:29:00.000 They only talked about wine.
00:29:02.000 But the way they describe what wine did to you, there was clearly something added to it.
00:29:07.000 That they were adding other plant drugs to their wine.
00:29:10.000 Because they would have these tiny little glasses and they'd take these big trips.
00:29:13.000 So we don't know what it was.
00:29:14.000 Yeah.
00:29:15.000 Tiny glasses of wine.
00:29:16.000 Tiny glasses.
00:29:17.000 And they were very careful about when you used it.
00:29:19.000 And, you know, people would completely lose control.
00:29:22.000 And it was just like, no, this isn't wine.
00:29:25.000 This is something else.
00:29:26.000 Yeah, it is.
00:29:26.000 Some sort of a psychedelic from grapes?
00:29:29.000 Or added to it?
00:29:30.000 Well, I mean...
00:29:31.000 We don't know.
00:29:32.000 Some people, Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD or invented LSD, he thought it was ergot, that they'd figured out a way.
00:29:39.000 Ergot is a fungus that grows on grain, and it was the precursor chemical to LSD comes from ergot.
00:29:50.000 And ergot is responsible for episodes of mass delirium in European history.
00:29:55.000 You get a really wet year, the ergot grows on the rye, people eat bread made from it, and they go crazy.
00:30:00.000 Some people think the Salem Witch Trials came after a wet year and people had absorbed – these women had eaten ergot and were having visions and things like that, which was interpreted as witchcraft, which to them was a very – I thought they were saying that the men had absorbed it and thought they were under spells.
00:30:17.000 Oh, maybe.
00:30:17.000 Maybe that, too.
00:30:19.000 Probably everybody's tripping.
00:30:20.000 Yeah.
00:30:21.000 So, anyway, so the thinking is, if you just eat ergot, you're not going to be.
00:30:27.000 You could get gangrene.
00:30:28.000 It's not a clean chemical.
00:30:32.000 But the thinking of Gordon Wasson and Karl Ruck, and they were collaborators on this theory, was that the Greeks perhaps had figured out a way to derive a pure chemical from ergot that could be made into something very much like LSD. But again,
00:30:50.000 nobody has succeeded, and they've tried for the last 20 or 30 years to take ergot and make something, you know, through simple processes that the Greeks could have mastered.
00:30:59.000 So it may have been a mushroom.
00:31:01.000 You know, there's a lot of psychedelic plants out there.
00:31:03.000 It's one of the mysteries of evolution that, you know, DMT is like coursing through the plant world.
00:31:09.000 Yeah, thousands of plants.
00:31:10.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:31:11.000 So I do find it plausible that there's some links between psychedelics.
00:31:16.000 I think psychedelics have influenced cultural history at various points along the way.
00:31:23.000 And one of those may have been to kind of nurture this religious impulse.
00:31:27.000 But again, I can't prove it.
00:31:29.000 The Greeks spent, some of the great Greek scholars spent a lot of time in Egypt as well.
00:31:34.000 Don't know anything about that.
00:31:35.000 Really?
00:31:36.000 Yeah, I was trying to figure out what psychedelics, if any, the Egyptians took, and they never really figured it out. 0.92
00:31:46.000 They made some connections to DMT that are sort of loosely connected to their worship of the pineal gland.
00:31:51.000 Yeah, right, where we found DMT in rats.
00:31:55.000 Yeah, the Cottonwood Research Foundation.
00:31:57.000 Yeah, so you did that film about DMT, right?
00:32:00.000 Yeah, that's really interesting stuff.
00:32:02.000 There's been very little follow-up on that.
00:32:04.000 I mean, this idea that there might be an endogenous psychedelic like DMT, as far as I know, we've only found it in the rat.
00:32:11.000 It's hard to look for it, and the amounts are really tiny.
00:32:14.000 Well, they found DMT in people, but they haven't found it in the pineal gland.
00:32:17.000 They haven't?
00:32:18.000 Oh, is that right?
00:32:18.000 Yeah, they found it in the liver and the lungs.
00:32:20.000 And that it's being produced there?
00:32:22.000 Yeah.
00:32:22.000 They know that humans produce it, and it's endogenous, but they don't know whether or not the pineal gland does.
00:32:27.000 Obviously, the pineal gland represents the third eye of Eastern mysticism, and that was what also they think.
00:32:33.000 What is it?
00:32:33.000 Is the eye of Horus that they connected to the pineal gland?
00:32:37.000 Have you ever seen those comparisons?
00:32:38.000 Pull out the comparison between the eye of Horus and the pineal gland.
00:32:43.000 It's essentially shaped like a cross-section of the pineal gland.
00:32:48.000 And in the Temple in Man, see if you look at it up there?
00:32:53.000 And they think, somehow or another, that this is the connection between these two.
00:32:57.000 A bunch of different things have been written on this connection because this appears in so many different Egyptian hieroglyphs and they think it might have some sort of a connection between the portal to the afterlife that they think the DMT experience is.
00:33:12.000 But how would they...
00:33:15.000 How would they know?
00:33:17.000 What did they know about brains?
00:33:19.000 Well, I don't know.
00:33:21.000 How did they know how to build pyramids?
00:33:22.000 How did they know a lot of things? 1.00
00:33:23.000 They did some pretty incredible shit. 0.99
00:33:25.000 We don't know. 0.99
00:33:26.000 Because of the burning of the Library of Alexandria, we lost almost everything.
00:33:30.000 We don't really know what they knew or how they knew it, but we do know that scholars from around the world would go to Egypt to learn.
00:33:39.000 Well, in general, you know, I have a more open mind about many things since I've had these experiences than I did before.
00:33:45.000 I was a kind of staunch materialist.
00:33:47.000 It's normal.
00:33:48.000 I mean, most people who see silliness and hippies and, you know, all these people that are out there doing drugs trying to, air quote, find themselves. 0.96
00:33:56.000 It just seems like a foolish venture. 0.83
00:33:58.000 And then you do it and you go, okay, there's something there. 1.00
00:34:03.000 It's just being done by morons. 1.00
00:34:06.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:34:06.000 We're being described by morons. 1.00
00:34:08.000 Yes. 1.00
00:34:08.000 Because it's hard to describe. 1.00
00:34:10.000 Well, it's also illegal.
00:34:11.000 So people shy away from it.
00:34:12.000 You don't want to lose your family and get locked up in jail and all these different things that people are terrified of.
00:34:16.000 So you're like, look, I'm not going to – I'll have a glass of whiskey with dinner.
00:34:19.000 That's about it.
00:34:20.000 And also, you know, there's a kind of embarrassment.
00:34:22.000 I mean, one of the really striking things – I've been on the road now for – this is my second week out talking about this book.
00:34:29.000 And I have been struck by how many people have had powerful psychedelic experiences they don't talk to anybody about.
00:34:35.000 Right.
00:34:36.000 And I come along as a kind of, I don't know, credible person who's interested.
00:34:41.000 And this is journalists, too.
00:34:44.000 They turn off the tape recorder and they say, can I tell you a story?
00:34:47.000 And something happened to them, might have been in their 20s or 30s or earlier, that changed the course of their life.
00:34:53.000 And either because there was a stigma attached to it, or it was kind of...
00:34:58.000 I had this 60s kind of woo-woo thing about it.
00:35:01.000 Or there were kids around.
00:35:02.000 They didn't feel comfortable.
00:35:04.000 So they kept it in this box labeled weird drug experience.
00:35:08.000 But it's not just a drug experience.
00:35:10.000 This is your mind.
00:35:11.000 The drug may have started the process, but everything you see in this experience, those are real psychological facts.
00:35:20.000 They're from your unconscious or from your interpretation of your environment.
00:35:24.000 And, you know, it's not the molecule that foreordained this experience.
00:35:31.000 As Stanislav Grof, who's one of the pioneering psychedelic psychiatrists in the 60s, said that LSD is an unspecific amplifier of mental activity.
00:35:41.000 There's nothing packaged with the drug.
00:35:44.000 And that's important to understand.
00:35:45.000 So you have this big experience, and you put it in this box, saying, weird drug experience.
00:35:51.000 But when you take it out, sometimes you find that there's real gold there. 0.94
00:35:55.000 There's fool's gold, too.
00:35:56.000 It's an interesting quote, that quote you just said, because in actual studies of the human mind under the influence of psilocybin, it's actually been shown to shut off parts of the brain.
00:36:07.000 And so the question is, are we blocking off these constant The frequencies that are around us, or this experience that's around us, it is our own ego, or our own mortality, or our own desire to stay alive and protect ourselves,
00:36:25.000 or whatever the various blockades that we put up, are those diminished by psilocybin that allows this ever-present experience to manifest itself?
00:36:34.000 It's exactly right.
00:36:35.000 The most interesting scientific finding Of this current generation of research is that when they image the brains of people on psilocybin or LSD or ayahuasca, they expected to see fireworks, right?
00:36:49.000 Lots of activity because the experience has lots of fireworks.
00:36:52.000 But they found something that they didn't expect, which was a diminishment of activity in a very important brain network called the default mode network.
00:37:01.000 This is in the midline and it connects parts of your cortex, which is the evolutionarily most recent part, to older, deeper sources of emotion and memory.
00:37:10.000 And it's a hub in the brain.
00:37:12.000 And the brain is a hierarchical system.
00:37:14.000 And this is the orchestra conductor, as one of the neuroscientists put it.
00:37:18.000 It's a regulator.
00:37:20.000 So what happens in the default mode network normally?
00:37:22.000 Well, it's very involved in self-reflection, self-criticism, worry.
00:37:28.000 It's where your mind goes to wander.
00:37:30.000 It's involved in time travel, thinking about the future or the past.
00:37:34.000 It's involved in something scientists call theory of mind, the ability to imagine that another person has mental states and is not just a rock.
00:37:42.000 It is involved in what's called the experiential or autobiographical self.
00:37:47.000 The way we kind of take what's happening to us and connect it to the story we tell ourselves about who we are based on the past and the future.
00:37:55.000 So it's you know if the ego has an address it's in the default mode network.
00:38:00.000 And what does the ego do for you?
00:38:18.000 And it's a defense.
00:38:20.000 It's a set of defenses.
00:38:21.000 And psychedelics appear to turn this off to one degree or another.
00:38:26.000 Take the default mode network offline.
00:38:28.000 When that happens, to go back to your metaphor, whatever is blocking the valve that's blocking lots of information from coming in from outside or up from below in your subconscious...
00:38:42.000 That's allowed to flow.
00:38:44.000 And so you are getting more information than you might otherwise.
00:38:49.000 And this is a metaphor that Aldous Huxley used in Doors of Perception that consciousness is eliminating more than it's creating.
00:38:58.000 Consciousness is reducing our experience to that thin trickle of information we need to get ahead, to survive.
00:39:08.000 And that you open the doors of perception on these drugs by turning off this network and lots more information comes in, which can be overwhelming, but also extraordinary.
00:39:20.000 I mean, that's wonder.
00:39:22.000 Is there apprehension in writing a book like this and describing these things? 0.87
00:39:26.000 As you're writing it and you're thinking about all these other people that are sort of cynical, straight-laced, non-drug-using folks who might admire your previous work on agriculture, architecture, whatever, and you're sitting there going, how do I get this through without looking like a guy who's losing his fucking mind or who's going super woo-woo Deepak Chopra on people? 0.70
00:39:49.000 Right? 0.78
00:39:51.000 Like, how do you do this and maintain your position as a serious journalist?
00:39:56.000 Yeah.
00:39:56.000 Well, I mean, I was nervous about undertaking this project, but I also came to think it was really important and that there was something here.
00:40:05.000 And that, you know, when I started this process, Stan Groff, the guy I made reference to earlier, he had said in the 60s something I thought was really outrageous.
00:40:13.000 He said that psychedelics would be for the study of the mind what the microscope was for biology or the telescope for astronomy.
00:40:22.000 This is a really outrageous claim to make.
00:40:26.000 But as time's gone on, that idea seems less crazy to me, that we are learning things about the mind and that these drugs are teaching it in a scientific context and in an individual context.
00:40:40.000 So just because some people think it's embarrassing or woo-woo is not a reason not to do it.
00:40:46.000 I have to find a way to describe it.
00:40:48.000 And, you know, I'm being a little speculative with you talking about origins of religion and stuff, but the book stays pretty close to here's what we really know and here's what I experienced.
00:41:00.000 I'm a science journalist, you know, and so I try to draw the line between now I'm speculating and now here's something we really know with some certitude.
00:41:09.000 But without question, I had some misgivings about describing psychedelic experience, their legal issues there, and that, yeah, I have a readership.
00:41:19.000 I have a big readership that, you know, is happy if I just keep writing books on food.
00:41:23.000 But I had found something too interesting to pass up.
00:41:27.000 And I've been gratified that I've been talking about this book on, like, network television.
00:41:34.000 I didn't think I would be talking to Stephen Colbert about ego dissolution.
00:41:37.000 Yeah.
00:41:38.000 And here we are.
00:41:40.000 And he actually got the best line off on that whole appearance.
00:41:43.000 What did he say?
00:41:45.000 He said, well, maybe the ego should be a controlled substance.
00:41:50.000 I thought that was pretty good.
00:41:51.000 That is a great line.
00:41:52.000 The man is fast.
00:41:52.000 He's a clever boy.
00:41:53.000 Oh, yeah.
00:41:54.000 So I found though that if I was willing to talk about these issues and my experiences in a matter-of-fact way, mainstream journalists would respond in kind.
00:42:05.000 And so I've been on like CBS Morning Show and Terry Gross and Fresh Air and And we've had a kind of, you know, conversation where we're looking at these as tools.
00:42:14.000 What are they good for?
00:42:15.000 What are they not good for?
00:42:17.000 Without getting caught up in the usual craziness that's associated with these drugs.
00:42:25.000 And so that's what I'm trying to do is take that 60s crust off these things and take a fresh look.
00:42:31.000 Well, for someone like me, who's been a psychedelic advocate for a long time, it was extremely exciting news that a guy like you were stepping into the fray because you're so well-established and well-respected already that I knew your approach on it was going to be very clean and that I knew that people were going to have to start looking at this like,
00:42:53.000 wait, it's Michael Pollan's looking at this.
00:42:55.000 Like, this might not be completely crazy.
00:42:57.000 Yeah.
00:42:57.000 But the cultural attitudes about psychedelic drugs or drugs in general were so childlike in our view on drugs.
00:43:05.000 I mean, I have a friend, wonderful person, talks all kinds of crazy shit about people smoking pot and takes Xanax every day. 0.79
00:43:13.000 He's like, people don't, oh, I just need a glass of wine and Xanax and I'm good. 0.98
00:43:17.000 I don't know why you people need drugs.
00:43:19.000 Why? 1.00
00:43:20.000 Like, you're fucking crazy. 1.00
00:43:22.000 But our cultural attitudes on the substances that are prohibited and that are accepted, they're so strange. 0.99
00:43:30.000 And they, because of our social standing, because we don't want to be perceived as foolish or reckless or in some sort of a midlife crisis or what have you, we're like these journalists that are shutting the microphones off and wanted to talk to you about these profound experiences that they had that they should be shouting about from the rooftops.
00:43:47.000 I agree.
00:43:48.000 Look, it's really, to normalize this, people have to come out of the closet.
00:43:51.000 And some do.
00:43:52.000 I was talking to a journalist in Boston who was the local NPR host, and he, on the air, live, talked about his experiences and how important they were in shaping his identity and the experiences he had in college.
00:44:04.000 So I think we're going to see more people come out of the closet and have this kind of conversation.
00:44:09.000 And we can actually look at this experience in the same way.
00:44:12.000 Now, yes, it's still illegal, but the fact that there is all this legal research going on has created a space where you can talk about it.
00:44:20.000 And I'm interviewing all these people, and they're describing their trips, and they're very straight people, and they've had profound experiences.
00:44:29.000 I think the culture is changing.
00:44:31.000 I really do.
00:44:32.000 I definitely think it is.
00:44:33.000 I think your book is helping it.
00:44:35.000 Well, I hope so.
00:44:35.000 I didn't write it with that idea that I had this authority that I'd earned in talking about food and nutrition and I'm going to apply it now to drugs.
00:44:43.000 I don't think that way.
00:44:44.000 I was just like, I was starting from scratch.
00:44:46.000 Right.
00:44:46.000 But I do realize that.
00:44:48.000 And people scare me a little when they say, you know, psychedelic people say, you know, you're going to do for psilocybin what you did for food.
00:44:56.000 So it's really different.
00:44:58.000 You know, I mean, or this woman, I was speaking at Google in Seattle and this...
00:45:03.000 This woman stands up and she says, well, after I read your book, I had to slaughter a pig. 0.99
00:45:08.000 I had to learn how to slaughter a pig. 0.89
00:45:10.000 You made me want to do that.
00:45:12.000 And when I was driving to work today, I didn't think I'd ever take LSD or psilocybin, but now I feel like I need to.
00:45:19.000 I don't want to do that to people.
00:45:21.000 I don't want them to feel they have to have this experience.
00:45:23.000 You can learn a lot about...
00:45:25.000 The mind.
00:45:26.000 This book is as much about the mind as it is about psychedelics.
00:45:29.000 This is a book that uses psychedelics to explore this really interesting mystery called consciousness.
00:45:36.000 And it's also exploring the nature of addiction, the nature of depression, all the illnesses that psychedelics turns out to be very helpful.
00:45:46.000 But I'm not holding a brief that people should do this.
00:45:50.000 I'm not an advocate.
00:45:52.000 I'm not an advocate for psychedelics.
00:45:54.000 I'm an advocate for the research at this point.
00:45:56.000 I don't know enough to say, yeah, everybody should do this.
00:45:58.000 This is what our culture needs.
00:46:00.000 I'm not in that Timothy Leary head.
00:46:02.000 I think we have a powerful agent that there's good data now that this can help heal people who are really suffering.
00:46:11.000 And the other reason for the openness that's going on right now that surprised me Because I expected to get a lot of pushback from the psychiatric establishment, and I looked for it.
00:46:22.000 I called around, you know, I want to hear the critical voice on the Hopkins work or the NYU work.
00:46:27.000 And what I kept hearing blew my mind.
00:46:29.000 It was like, I remember calling the head of the National Institute of Mental Health to get what I thought would be a really negative quote about psilocybin research.
00:46:36.000 And he was like, no, we have to look at this.
00:46:39.000 This is really interesting research.
00:46:41.000 Former heads of the American Psychiatric Association.
00:46:44.000 And the reason they're so open to it is that mental health treatment in this country is just a mess.
00:46:51.000 I mean, we only reach half of the people who are struggling with mental illness at all, have any exposure to the system.
00:46:58.000 If you compare mental health treatment to any other branch of medicine, oncology, cardiology, infectious disease, it's accomplished very little.
00:47:07.000 It hasn't prolonged lifespan.
00:47:08.000 It's not saving lives.
00:47:11.000 And yet we have, you know, soaring rates of depression.
00:47:15.000 Depression is now the leading cause of disability worldwide.
00:47:18.000 There are 300 million people with major depression or treatment-resistant depression in the world right now.
00:47:25.000 And suicide rates are way up.
00:47:27.000 Partly it's the vets, but in general, the taboo has come off suicide, and suicide is climbing rapidly, and addiction, as we know, is rampant.
00:47:36.000 So they need some new tools.
00:47:38.000 There hasn't really been innovation in mental health treatment since the early 90s, late 80s with the introduction of the SSRI antidepressants, drugs like, you know, Paxil and Prozac.
00:47:51.000 They need some new tools.
00:47:52.000 And that's why they're open to this.
00:47:54.000 And that's why I think it will be embraced eventually by the medical world.
00:48:00.000 Well, isn't it on the ballot in 2018 in California?
00:48:03.000 They haven't quite gotten it.
00:48:05.000 They're doing their petition drive right now and in Oregon, too.
00:48:08.000 And so I don't know that it'll get through this time.
00:48:12.000 It's a weird item to put on the ballot because actually a small minority of people know what psilocybin is.
00:48:18.000 On this show, you're the first person who didn't say the ingredient in magic mushrooms.
00:48:24.000 You have some confidence that your audience knows what psilocybin is.
00:48:27.000 But it's an unfamiliar word to most people.
00:48:30.000 So I don't know how people vote on that.
00:48:33.000 It may be premature is what I'm suggesting.
00:48:35.000 Well, it's all dependent upon getting the word out.
00:48:38.000 I think if people understand what like the John Hopkins research or just the anecdotal research that some of these people have had these incredibly life-changing experiences.
00:48:50.000 But I think one of the things that you're saying is I think it's very important.
00:48:53.000 Is that this isn't for everybody and that if you have problems with normal consciousness, this is likely not for you.
00:49:00.000 If you're one of those people that has schizophrenia in your family, perhaps...
00:49:04.000 Forget it.
00:49:04.000 Yeah, don't do it.
00:49:05.000 And in fact, those people are screened out of this research very carefully.
00:49:09.000 Schizophrenia...
00:49:09.000 It's a real issue with people with psilocybin and many psychedelics, right?
00:49:14.000 Yeah, what happens with schizophrenia is if you are at risk for it, either because of inheritance, a psychedelic trip can set you off, can be the trigger.
00:49:27.000 Yeah.
00:49:54.000 So, yeah.
00:49:55.000 So, if you're at risk for that or bipolar...
00:49:57.000 And marijuana as well, by the way.
00:49:58.000 That's right.
00:49:59.000 Oh, yeah.
00:49:59.000 Marijuana can do it also.
00:50:01.000 I think the numbers, though, mirror the numbers in standard populations in terms of, like, I think it's one out of ten.
00:50:09.000 Like, one out of ten people have some form of schizophrenia, and that's mirrored in marijuana use.
00:50:16.000 I didn't know that.
00:50:17.000 That's really interesting.
00:50:18.000 I think it's the same.
00:50:18.000 I think the problem is, you know, it can exacerbate it or it can trigger it or...
00:50:24.000 Depending upon, I mean, everyone's biology is different.
00:50:28.000 And everyone's, the way they absorb these chemicals is different.
00:50:33.000 Yeah.
00:50:33.000 And, you know, if you are at risk, something's going to do it eventually.
00:50:38.000 So, you know, we don't have any evidence.
00:50:42.000 Of someone thrown into a situation of schizophrenia or other serious mental illness as a result of strictly because of a psychedelic experience.
00:50:52.000 It may have been the trigger, but there might have been it was going to happen anyway.
00:50:55.000 We just don't know.
00:50:57.000 But in general, if you've got serious, if you have personality disorder, if you have bipolar, if you are at risk for schizophrenia, they will not accept you into these trials and you should stay away from these drugs.
00:51:07.000 Yeah, that is a real problem with it being prohibited.
00:51:13.000 The prohibition has really set back research and understanding decades.
00:51:17.000 I mean, we should have been studying this stuff since the 60s.
00:51:19.000 We had 30 years of hiatus in the research.
00:51:22.000 I don't know of another time where you had a promising line of scientific inquiry all through the 50s and early 60s that just choked off.
00:51:31.000 And for 30 years, nothing happened.
00:51:33.000 I mean, think of what we would know if we had 30 more years of research with these drugs.
00:51:37.000 So now we're picking up the thread and all that research is being resumed.
00:51:41.000 But your point about prohibition is really important.
00:51:43.000 When you have prohibition, you can't regulate something.
00:51:46.000 It's a free-for-all.
00:51:48.000 Whereas if you did legalize...
00:51:52.000 Psilocybin, let's take as an example.
00:51:54.000 You could set rules.
00:51:55.000 You could say that it can only be administered by licensed guides or in a medical context or that no one under a certain age can have it.
00:52:04.000 I mean, it gives you a chance to regulate.
00:52:06.000 And that's why it's saner to legalize, not in a free-for-all kind of way, but in a very considered way.
00:52:14.000 Than to have the system we have now, where people are going to take the drug, whether they should or not, without any kind of clearance.
00:52:22.000 And by the way, who knows what you're getting?
00:52:24.000 You can also regulate the strength.
00:52:28.000 In the case of LSD, in the 60s, there was this period where there was a lot of pure LSD around, and then the mob got interested in it, and they started cutting it with speed and all sorts of things.
00:52:39.000 And people got into a lot of trouble.
00:52:41.000 It's also the issue with scheduling, like Schedule 1s for things that have zero medical value, and that's where a lot of these drugs find themselves in.
00:52:49.000 Psychedelics are all Schedule 1. Yeah, which is just bananas, especially DMT, with the old Terrence McKenna line, everyone's holding.
00:52:57.000 We all have DMT in our bodies.
00:53:00.000 We all have a Schedule 1 substance flowing through our veins, which is the most asinine thing in the world to make your body a Schedule 1 substance. 0.79
00:53:09.000 Yeah, it is.
00:53:10.000 And the fact is that Schedule I means that these drugs have a high potential for abuse, which isn't really true with psychedelics because they're non-addictive, and that they have no accepted medical use, which is now no longer true either because these studies have shown that they do have a medical use.
00:53:26.000 Yeah.
00:53:26.000 So, you know, what I hope happens and what we're on track to see happen is that these trials, these drug trials, will expand.
00:53:36.000 There will be now Phase III drug trials, which is the last step before FDA approval.
00:53:42.000 If the results of those trials are anywhere near as good as the Phase II trials, the FDA will then approve psilocybin as a medicine and MDMA, which probably happened first.
00:53:54.000 They're looking at that too, for use in treating people with trauma.
00:53:58.000 And then we will be in a world where they'll have to reschedule it to two or three.
00:54:04.000 You know, the opiates are two.
00:54:06.000 I mean, actually, the drug causing most suffering in our country right now in death is not a schedule one, it's a schedule two.
00:54:13.000 I think it's two, it might be three.
00:54:16.000 And so that we may see this in the next five years or so, which is kind of amazing.
00:54:22.000 Well, we've got to get someone like Jeff Sessions out of there.
00:54:25.000 That guy has some really archaic ideas about marijuana.
00:54:28.000 I agree about marijuana.
00:54:29.000 You know, I thought that, okay, in this administration we're going to have another backlash.
00:54:34.000 But one of the things that surprised me is that there are voices on the right supporting this research.
00:54:40.000 You're seeing more of it.
00:54:41.000 Rebecca Mercer has given money to MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, for their work on MDMA. And Steve Bannon has spoken out in approval of this research.
00:54:54.000 And Peter Thiel is investing in a psychedelic pharmaceutical company that's getting started in England.
00:55:02.000 So I don't think it may not break down in the usual right-left way that we're so accustomed to.
00:55:08.000 And that may give it some protection.
00:55:10.000 Well I think one of the things that'll help is anyone who has a loved one that's going through a terminal illness and experiences these things and sees the profound alleviation of anxiety and this just lessening of the worry of passing on.
00:55:24.000 And Larry Hagman was once on like a real straight television show like CBS or Fox News or something like that and they asked him about his life and like what what makes him so happy and he said he had a profound acid trip.
00:55:39.000 And you see the host going, what?
00:55:41.000 He goes, yeah, well, I took a really powerful dose of LSD, and it completely alleviated my worries about dying.
00:55:49.000 Amazing.
00:55:50.000 And, you know, I remember seeing him on television going, wow, they didn't know this was coming.
00:55:54.000 No. 1.00
00:55:55.000 And seeing this straight interviewer just trying to uncomfortably move past this subject, okay, well, the guy from Dallas is a fucking drug addict. 0.99
00:56:03.000 It's like they didn't know what to do with it, but he was so warm and smiling and... 0.98
00:56:08.000 I believe it was a piece on his house because he had some crazy off-the-grid sort of life and some eco-friendly house and all solar-powered and used a well and all those different things.
00:56:19.000 And, you know, they were asking him what made him so happy, and I'll never forget that.
00:56:23.000 He was saying, well, he did acid once.
00:56:25.000 A really powerful experience.
00:56:26.000 You know, Cary Grant also had 60 guided LSD trips in the late 50s.
00:56:34.000 And he gave an interview in 1959 to a very famous Joseph Hyams, who was the gossip columnist of that time, saying this had changed his life.
00:56:44.000 He was using a low dose.
00:56:46.000 There were a lot of psychiatrists in LA who were giving low dose LSD to people in their normal talk therapy sessions.
00:56:53.000 Essentially, it was called psycholytic therapy because it was mind loosening therapy.
00:56:57.000 And it would give you more access to your unconscious and make you be able to talk about things that you might otherwise feel very defensive about.
00:57:05.000 And he had 60 of these sessions, and he said he was born again.
00:57:08.000 And he said that it had made him a much better actor because he no longer had an ego.
00:57:13.000 He wasn't crippled by his ego.
00:57:14.000 But then he also said, and it made me irresistible to women, which sounds a little egotistical.
00:57:21.000 Hey, I have no ego, but chicks love me. 1.00
00:57:25.000 That's hilarious.
00:57:26.000 Are you aware of any of the research they're doing now with ketamine and depression?
00:57:32.000 And there's a lot of people that are getting administered pretty high doses of intravenous and intramuscular ketamine for depression, including one of my good friends, Neil Brennan.
00:57:43.000 He's gone through it several times and talked about it on the podcast and said it was a real game-changer thing.
00:57:48.000 Yeah, there's a lot of excitement in psychiatry about ketamine.
00:57:51.000 Ketamine is an anesthetic.
00:57:53.000 It's a dissociative.
00:57:55.000 It makes you feel separated from your body, and that helps with pain.
00:57:59.000 So I don't know if it's strictly speaking a psychedelic.
00:58:02.000 It's certainly not a classic psychedelic.
00:58:04.000 It doesn't work on those brain networks.
00:58:06.000 But it is legal because it's been used as an anesthetic for years, and it's relatively safe as an anesthetic compared to some of the others that are used.
00:58:14.000 It's the one they use if you come into the trauma center and you've been shot or you need surgery and they don't have time to check whether you're allergic to any other drugs.
00:58:23.000 That's the safe one to give you in a crisis.
00:58:25.000 They also would carry it around during times of war.
00:58:27.000 That's right.
00:58:29.000 Yeah.
00:58:30.000 And they don't really understand how it works, but they give people what is kind of a psychedelic dose.
00:58:38.000 They go way out there.
00:58:39.000 It's fairly brief, I believe.
00:58:42.000 And many people with depression have found relief.
00:58:46.000 It's not permanent.
00:58:48.000 It looks like they need to do it again every six months or something like that.
00:58:52.000 But it seems to kind of reset the brain in a way that many people are finding helpful.
00:58:59.000 And this is all legal.
00:59:00.000 I mean, there are ketamine clinics where you can go and psychiatrists who are administering it to people.
00:59:08.000 So for people who are struggling with depression and can't wait for psilocybin therapy to be approved for depression, which is still several years away, ketamine is worth exploring.
00:59:20.000 What about ibogaine?
00:59:21.000 Did you look into that at all?
00:59:22.000 A little bit.
00:59:24.000 Ibogaine is a psychedelic from a root of a tree that grows in Africa.
00:59:29.000 And it has been used specifically to treat opiate addiction.
00:59:33.000 And that's, God, if we need something now, a tool to deal with opiate addiction.
00:59:37.000 There are clinics in Mexico where they- I have a friend who has one down there.
00:59:40.000 Really?
00:59:41.000 He opened it after he had his own personal problems with pills.
00:59:43.000 He had a back injury, got hooked on pills, was really struggling to get off them, went to Mexico to do Ibogaine, got completely off of it, felt amazing, realized like, oh my god, I have to help people, and then opened up his own clinic.
00:59:56.000 That's amazing.
00:59:57.000 I mean, there's a bunch in Guadalajara.
00:59:58.000 I don't know where he is, but there is people doing it.
01:00:01.000 I don't know exactly what the legal status is in Mexico, whether it's legal or just tolerated.
01:00:06.000 Well, I think most drugs have been decriminalized in Mexico, including LSD and mushrooms and a lot of other things to try to do something to curb the violence that they're experiencing from the drug cartels.
01:00:16.000 At least keep it non-local.
01:00:18.000 A lot of the violence is coming from the drug cartels getting money to ship everything to the United States.
01:00:23.000 Right.
01:00:24.000 And we are driving that violence with our use.
01:00:27.000 It is very strange that our insistence on prohibition is actually funding one of the largest drug and violence epidemics we've ever seen in terms of what's happening south of the border.
01:00:38.000 Well, yeah.
01:00:39.000 And think about Colombia, too.
01:00:40.000 The Civil War in Colombia was funded by our cocaine interest.
01:00:45.000 So, Ibogaine is a very intense drug.
01:00:48.000 It is...
01:00:49.000 Did you do it for this?
01:00:50.000 No, I didn't.
01:00:51.000 I didn't.
01:00:51.000 And I wouldn't do it, I don't think, because it has big implications for your heart.
01:00:57.000 Really?
01:00:57.000 Yeah.
01:00:57.000 And in fact, when you...
01:00:59.000 So, it is more toxic to the body than the so-called classic psychedelics.
01:01:03.000 And it can last like 36 hours.
01:01:05.000 It's a very long trip.
01:01:07.000 It's really intense.
01:01:08.000 In these clinics, you have to be on a heart monitor while you're doing it.
01:01:12.000 And that was like...
01:01:14.000 I have a minor heart issue that made me stay away from MDMA, which is an amphetamine.
01:01:24.000 I'm the kind of guy who goes to his cardiologist before he has six psychedelic trips to check it all out and make sure it's okay.
01:01:29.000 What's wrong with your heart?
01:01:30.000 I have something called AFib, atrial fibrillation, which you can manage with medicine or there's a procedure you can get.
01:01:39.000 It's just a kind of occasional irregularity.
01:01:42.000 It just happens sometimes.
01:01:44.000 But my cardiologist warned me off of MDMA because it can raise your heart rate.
01:01:49.000 Although I've subsequently learned if you take a beta blocker, it's okay.
01:01:54.000 So anyway, I've never experimented with that.
01:01:58.000 But anyway, in light of that, I would stay away from Ibogaine.
01:02:03.000 But I'm really curious about it just because we have such a crisis with addiction.
01:02:07.000 But psilocybin is being used successfully for addiction.
01:02:11.000 I talked to smoking people, lifelong smokers who broke their addiction with a single or two psilocybin journeys.
01:02:18.000 And they had extraordinary stories to tell.
01:02:21.000 I didn't understand how you could have one trip and then give up a lifelong habit.
01:02:26.000 And I asked people about this.
01:02:27.000 And I talked to this one woman.
01:02:29.000 She was about 60. And she was an Irish book editor.
01:02:32.000 And I said, so what happened?
01:02:35.000 How'd you stop?
01:02:36.000 She said, I... Well, first I grew wings, and I flew through European history, and I visited the site of Shakespeare's Globe Theater, and I saw the Salem Witch Trials, and I died three times, and I saw my body rising from a funeral pyre on the Ganges, 0.99
01:02:54.000 and I realized the universe was so amazing, and there were so many incredible things to do, that killing yourself with cigarettes seemed kind of stupid. 0.80
01:03:02.000 I was like, I could have told you that. 0.98
01:03:05.000 But see, it goes back to that noetic quality, that she had a perspective on her life she'd never had, or on the universe, and that she believed that smoking was stupid in a way she knew before, but it didn't have that conviction, 0.97
01:03:22.000 that rock-hard, revealed-truth conviction. 0.97
01:03:26.000 And I heard that from many people.
01:03:28.000 And I asked the doctor about it.
01:03:29.000 The psychologist who was running the study says, yeah, everybody has these duh moments on their psychedelic trips that end up being transformative.
01:03:38.000 Did you have a duh moment?
01:03:40.000 I had a lot of insights.
01:03:43.000 I don't know if I... Yeah, I did, actually.
01:03:45.000 How many different trips did you have while you were doing this?
01:03:46.000 I had six or seven.
01:03:48.000 So I did two psilocybin trips, one guided, one not, an LSD trip guided, a couple ayahuasca circles, and then I had a really weird psychedelic called 5-MeO-DMT, which is the smoked venom of the Sonoran Desert toad.
01:04:06.000 Who figured that out?
01:04:07.000 She gets some kind of prize.
01:04:10.000 That's a pretty potent one.
01:04:12.000 Very potent, and thank God, short-lived.
01:04:15.000 It was actually a horrible experience.
01:04:18.000 Really?
01:04:18.000 That was my worst.
01:04:19.000 I had a great experience on it.
01:04:20.000 You did?
01:04:20.000 Yeah.
01:04:21.000 What was wrong with it?
01:04:24.000 I, you know, you take like one puff and before you exhale, I was, I mean, there's a synthetic version too, right?
01:04:31.000 I was taking the venom.
01:04:33.000 You're shot out of a cannon.
01:04:35.000 There's no lead up.
01:04:36.000 It's no warm up.
01:04:37.000 It's like, and I felt like I was actually like strapped to the outside of a rocket, you know, going through space and through clouds and like the G-force was pulling down my cheeks and it was just this mental storm without any...
01:04:53.000 Nothing to orient myself.
01:04:55.000 There was no space.
01:04:56.000 There was no time.
01:04:57.000 There was no self.
01:04:59.000 And it was just unendurable, this punishing roar in my ears.
01:05:04.000 And someone who had done it said eventually it's like a takeoff and you get into orbit and it's very nice at that point.
01:05:12.000 But what happened with me is I had the...
01:05:16.000 I had the storm.
01:05:17.000 I mean, I felt like it was like – the metaphor I use in the book is like – I said, I can't explain this.
01:05:22.000 You can't tell a story without place, time, and character, right?
01:05:26.000 I had none of those.
01:05:29.000 It was just this inchoate energy.
01:05:31.000 And I said it was like before the Big Bang.
01:05:34.000 You remember that?
01:05:35.000 Well, obviously nobody does.
01:05:36.000 But there was pure energy and no matter yet and no time yet.
01:05:40.000 I mean, that's where I was.
01:05:41.000 And it was horrible.
01:05:43.000 It was terrifying.
01:05:43.000 And I thought I was dying.
01:05:45.000 But then you come down.
01:05:48.000 It was kind of a suborbital flight.
01:05:49.000 And then I started coming down.
01:05:52.000 And suddenly I could feel, oh, I've got a body.
01:05:54.000 You know, I was touching my legs.
01:05:55.000 I have a body.
01:05:56.000 And like, oh, there's a floor.
01:05:58.000 There's space.
01:06:00.000 And then there's time.
01:06:01.000 And the universe kind of reconsolidated.
01:06:04.000 And I had this feeling of incredible gratitude.
01:06:07.000 Not just for being alive.
01:06:10.000 Which all of us have had at one point or another, but that anything existed.
01:06:14.000 I was grateful for the fact that there is something and not nothing, because I'd seen what nothing was like.
01:06:20.000 And so, in that sense, it ended up kind of positive, but you wouldn't want to go there to have that experience.
01:06:26.000 So, subsequently, somebody said to me, a very experienced psychonaut who I was telling this story to, he said, you didn't have enough.
01:06:34.000 That's what I was just going to tell you.
01:06:35.000 Really?
01:06:35.000 Yeah, because you only took one hit.
01:06:37.000 You usually take three.
01:06:38.000 You take three and the rocket ride leads you somewhere.
01:06:42.000 It takes you to the center of the universe.
01:06:43.000 You take three, three, three?
01:06:44.000 Three in a row.
01:06:46.000 At the same time.
01:06:47.000 Take a big one, blow it out, take a big one, blow it out, take a big one.
01:06:51.000 And as you're taking the third one, you're already seeing the world crystallize in front of you.
01:06:54.000 It already starts turning into geometric patterns.
01:06:57.000 You put the pipe down, lay back in the chair, and...
01:07:01.000 You just shoot off to the center of the universe.
01:07:03.000 The terrifying thing is you cease to exist.
01:07:06.000 It's the one drug that I've ever taken where you're not there anymore.
01:07:10.000 Even NN-dimethyltryptamine, which is the difference between 5-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine is just an oxygen molecule attached to it.
01:07:19.000 But NN-dimethyltryptamine is incredibly visually stimulating.
01:07:23.000 5-methoxy is not.
01:07:24.000 It's just white.
01:07:26.000 It was white.
01:07:27.000 It was definitely...
01:07:28.000 I don't know how I could have taken three hits because I hadn't exhaled the first one when I was gone.
01:07:33.000 Well, I don't know what you're...
01:07:34.000 I only did the synthetic version of it.
01:07:36.000 You're doing this frog version.
01:07:38.000 And the person I know who did the synthetic version had a very different experience and they felt like they were installed in the firmament as this happy star.
01:07:45.000 But I didn't get there.
01:07:46.000 So it...
01:07:47.000 Who knows?
01:07:47.000 I did something wrong.
01:07:48.000 Okay.
01:07:48.000 I don't think you did.
01:07:49.000 I just think you had a different experience.
01:07:52.000 Obviously, there's got to be some sort of chemical difference.
01:07:55.000 You're probably getting other things in that frog venom as well as pure DMT. That's right.
01:08:00.000 That may be it.
01:08:01.000 I don't know the answer to that. 1.00
01:08:02.000 It's fucking frog spit. 0.99
01:08:06.000 By the way, no frogs were harmed in the making of this drug. 1.00
01:08:10.000 It's excreted on the outside of their body.
01:08:12.000 You can milk them.
01:08:13.000 Yeah, you rub them on a glass and then let it dry off and then you scrape it off the glass and then you smoke it.
01:08:20.000 It crystallizes.
01:08:20.000 Yeah.
01:08:21.000 I heard you just kind of squeeze them and then it sprays the glass and overnight it turns into, it looks like brown sugar.
01:08:26.000 Yeah.
01:08:27.000 It's an amazing thing.
01:08:28.000 You're the first person who knows anything about it that I've, who has interviewed me.
01:08:31.000 We used to be able to buy it.
01:08:32.000 Used to be able to buy it.
01:08:32.000 It was legal until recently.
01:08:34.000 2011. I bought a fucking jug of this shit. 1.00
01:08:35.000 Oh my god. 1.00
01:08:37.000 Offline.
01:08:37.000 I bought it from some company, American Chemical Company or something, and they send it to you, and I had enough to get the entire state of California high for several days.
01:08:46.000 Because it doesn't take much.
01:08:48.000 It doesn't.
01:08:48.000 But it's not something you want to do very often.
01:08:50.000 And I don't think it has the same kind of healing properties, because you're not bringing back information that's usable.
01:08:56.000 Oh, I brought back a lot.
01:08:57.000 You did?
01:08:57.000 Yeah, I brought back a lot about myself and one of the things that I realized like as I was I recorded What I would do is post trip I'd hit a tape recorder right when I became conscious again and start talking about the experience and what I remember saying About the 5-methoxy DMT experience.
01:09:14.000 It's like, as I'm trying to recount what happened, I feel my ego trying to retake hold of the situation and even use words in a way that might impress you with my ability to describe things.
01:09:29.000 Or as a professional comedian, too, I was aware that a lot of what you're doing, you're saying things in a way that's pleasing to people so that they get excited about hearing you talk.
01:09:39.000 And I was very aware of that while I was doing that.
01:09:41.000 I'm saying, I'm trying to explain things that are not possible to explain because the words that we're using were all invented for a world that doesn't exist in the DMT dimension.
01:09:53.000 And once you break through, it is so...
01:09:57.000 Profoundly alien.
01:09:59.000 And liberating?
01:10:01.000 Yes.
01:10:01.000 Yeah.
01:10:02.000 Well, in a way, I mean, it may be really, truly realized that we are in a soup of atoms and that it's not – there's not like Michael Pollan, Joe Rogan, and Jamie Vernon in a room, here's a wood table, there's oxygen between us.
01:10:15.000 No, we're in a universal stew of particles.
01:10:19.000 Yeah, diffused.
01:10:20.000 Yeah, and it breaks those – Or at least it gives you a view into that.
01:10:25.000 And you cease to exist, which is the most bizarre thing, because it's so similar to NN-dimethyltryptamine chemically, but so different in the fact that you're not there.
01:10:36.000 While you're doing regular NN-dimethyltryptamine, which is the active ingredient in ayahuasca.
01:10:41.000 Have you done that, the pure version of it?
01:10:43.000 No, not the pure version.
01:10:44.000 The pure version is like a very short, much more intense ayahuasca experience.
01:10:50.000 I've never done ayahuasca.
01:10:51.000 I've only done the DMT version.
01:10:54.000 By injection?
01:10:55.000 No, smoking it.
01:10:57.000 But what you get out of it is you're there while this is happening.
01:11:01.000 And you're just blown away.
01:11:03.000 And you're like, I can't believe what I'm seeing.
01:11:05.000 But there's all these entities that are trying to calm you down.
01:11:08.000 Relax, relax.
01:11:10.000 Take it in.
01:11:11.000 Settle down.
01:11:12.000 Settle down.
01:11:13.000 They're all trying to calm you down and alleviate.
01:11:17.000 Yeah, it's weird. 1.00
01:11:20.000 They're also fucking with you. 1.00
01:11:21.000 They give you the finger. 1.00
01:11:22.000 I had a bunch of jokers that were dancing around me, giving me the finger.
01:11:25.000 Did you have machine elves, too?
01:11:40.000 Wow.
01:11:42.000 Wow.
01:11:48.000 Impossibly large, infinite well of souls.
01:11:52.000 Just these things dancing around you, and they were never one thing.
01:11:56.000 They would be one thing for a second, and they'd change into something else, and then they'd change into something different.
01:12:01.000 And the more profound the experience has got, the more profound the next one would be.
01:12:07.000 And they kept saying, like, look at this.
01:12:09.000 Look at this.
01:12:10.000 But the words weren't real words.
01:12:12.000 That's the other thing.
01:12:13.000 It's like I'm saying the words, look at this.
01:12:15.000 And I would have that in my head, but I never heard anybody say it.
01:12:19.000 It was almost like it was triggering the concept of those words in my mind.
01:12:23.000 Right, right.
01:12:25.000 It's pre- or post-linguistic, some of these experiences. 0.93
01:12:28.000 So you asked about dumb moments, though, but...
01:12:32.000 You know, I had one where I had this, like, cascading sense of flood of love. 0.85
01:12:38.000 And I was thinking about my family.
01:12:39.000 I was thinking about my son and my wife and my parents.
01:12:43.000 And, you know, it sounds like so banal.
01:12:46.000 And one of the things that happens is that these platitudes, that love is the most important thing there is, okay?
01:12:53.000 Take that, for example.
01:12:53.000 That could be on a Hallmark card.
01:12:55.000 Right.
01:12:55.000 But suddenly it's infused with like, yes, that is so profound.
01:13:00.000 And you know what?
01:13:01.000 It is profound.
01:13:02.000 But we have these defenses against seeing it that way, because we've heard it so many times.
01:13:07.000 You know, a sense of banality is just from repetition.
01:13:11.000 But you're put back in touch with, you know, a platitude...
01:13:17.000 Yeah.
01:13:31.000 But is that right or is that right?
01:13:33.000 And I actually think the experience is more truthful than the ironic, cynical perspective that we bring to it in our everyday lives, which is a defense against powerful emotion and being overwhelmed every day by, wow, love, you know, whatever it is.
01:13:49.000 So you end up revaluing those kind of things.
01:13:52.000 So that was a really important takeaway for me.
01:13:55.000 The other was having an experience of ego dissolution.
01:13:58.000 That, which can be scary, can also be very blissful if it's then followed by emerging with nature or other people.
01:14:06.000 And I do think that is the therapeutic agent in the people who are healed, that our ego does keep us from perceiving certain things.
01:14:17.000 And it enforces really destructive stories we tell ourselves.
01:14:21.000 Like, I can't get through this day without a drink.
01:14:24.000 I'm unworthy of love.
01:14:26.000 You know, the voice of self-criticism.
01:14:28.000 And we get trapped in these loops.
01:14:31.000 And especially as we get older.
01:14:33.000 And that's one of the reasons I think psychedelics are actually more valuable the older you get.
01:14:37.000 Because we are creatures of habit.
01:14:39.000 And by now we have these mental algorithms that organize our response to everything.
01:14:44.000 Sure, that's very efficient, but it blinds you to experience.
01:14:49.000 It blinds you to the everyday wonders.
01:14:52.000 Psychedelics softens those habits and helps you get out of those grooves.
01:14:58.000 For me, that was really useful.
01:15:03.000 I think it's the experience of ego dissolution that allows you to...
01:15:07.000 because your ego enforces those habits.
01:15:09.000 And you get a little break.
01:15:10.000 There's a beautiful metaphor.
01:15:11.000 One of the scientists I interviewed in the book, a Dutchman working in Imperial College in London, he said, think of your mind as a hill covered in snow, and your thoughts are sleds going down that hill.
01:15:23.000 And after a while, after a lot of thoughts have gone that hill, there'll be these grooves, and they're going to get deeper and deeper.
01:15:28.000 And at a certain point, you can't go down the hill without slipping into those grooves.
01:15:33.000 That's who we are, as we're like, you know, at this age.
01:15:36.000 And what psychedelics do, he said, is flatten the snow.
01:15:40.000 Lots of fresh powder.
01:15:42.000 And you can then take the sled any way you want to go.
01:15:45.000 That's a great way of describing it.
01:15:47.000 Isn't that beautiful?
01:15:47.000 I've always talked about predetermined patterns and grooves that people fall into, so it's amazing hearing him say it that way, but that's a much better way of describing it, like snow.
01:15:56.000 Yeah.
01:15:57.000 Sliding these thoughts down these already existing patterns.
01:16:00.000 That's amazing.
01:16:02.000 You know, what you said about love and being cynical, that's so important too, because there's something that's...
01:16:10.000 Something that people avoid sincerity.
01:16:16.000 There's something about it that makes you too vulnerable or too open to criticism or too open to ridicule, and we're worried about being sincere.
01:16:25.000 And I do think that that's one of the primary benefits of psychedelics.
01:16:28.000 Yeah.
01:16:28.000 We live in an ironic culture, and we defend ourselves against strong experience or self-exposure by adopting this stance that's ironic.
01:16:37.000 Cool.
01:16:38.000 And psychedelics is not a cool experience.
01:16:41.000 It's the opposite.
01:16:42.000 Well, it's cool when it's over.
01:16:45.000 But yeah, it's serious stuff.
01:16:48.000 How much did you pay attention to McKenna's theory about the evolution of the human brain, the stoned ape theory?
01:16:56.000 Yeah, I looked at it, but I didn't find it persuasive.
01:17:01.000 And in fact, if you press Terence McKenna, he didn't find it entirely persuasive.
01:17:05.000 It's an interesting speculation.
01:17:07.000 It's kind of a mind game.
01:17:09.000 I don't see how...
01:17:11.000 I can see how psychedelics would influence the mind and create new ideas, new memes, and might contribute to language.
01:17:22.000 But how does it get into the genes?
01:17:24.000 The genes.
01:17:25.000 The genes.
01:17:26.000 Because he said it changed us at the genetic level.
01:17:29.000 Mm-hmm.
01:17:29.000 I see psychedelics as having had a profound effect at the level of cultural evolution.
01:17:34.000 That there are lots of interesting innovations that people who had psychedelic experience introduced to our culture.
01:17:42.000 We talked about religion earlier.
01:17:44.000 That could be one.
01:17:45.000 I had a wonderful interview with Stuart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog.
01:17:49.000 And his insight, he had this profound insight during a psychedelic trip on the roof of his house in North Beach.
01:17:57.000 And he saw the curvature of the earth in a way he hadn't before.
01:17:59.000 And he said, God, if we could have a – this is 1966. We had never seen a picture of the Earth from space yet.
01:18:05.000 And he said, if we had a picture of the Earth from space and we could see it as this round spaceship, that would change everything.
01:18:11.000 Because if you think of the Earth as flat, as most of us instinctively do, it's endless.
01:18:16.000 There's endless resources.
01:18:18.000 You don't have to worry about limits in any way.
01:18:21.000 But if we had that image and he realized, I have to start a campaign to get NASA to turn the cameras around.
01:18:26.000 They're on their way to the moon.
01:18:27.000 Show us the Earth from space.
01:18:29.000 And he said, I'm going to make a campaign.
01:18:31.000 I know.
01:18:32.000 This is on LSD. I'll make a button.
01:18:35.000 Very important medium in 1966. I'll make a button.
01:18:38.000 And what should the button say?
01:18:39.000 It should be a little paranoid to get people's attention.
01:18:42.000 Why haven't they shown us an image of the Earth from space?
01:18:45.000 Yeah, that's what he would do.
01:18:46.000 And he started a campaign.
01:18:47.000 He started selling these buttons.
01:18:48.000 And the campaign got in the newspapers.
01:18:50.000 And it goes viral, as viral as you could get in 1966. And two years later, NASA produced that image.
01:18:58.000 And he put it on the whole Earth catalog.
01:19:00.000 And that image galvanized the environmental movement.
01:19:02.000 So it's those kind of memes that psychedelics introduces into culture.
01:19:07.000 And that changes culture.
01:19:09.000 That image changed culture.
01:19:11.000 And I think there are hundreds of them.
01:19:13.000 I mean, Steve Jobs talked about, you know, his use of LSD is very important to his formative experience.
01:19:19.000 And in fact, there's a whole tradition of computer engineers going back to the 50s using LSD that I wrote about in the book.
01:19:24.000 But I don't see how we were selected genetically because there was an advantage to the people who were taking a lot of psychedelics.
01:19:34.000 That's where he loses me.
01:19:35.000 I don't think that's necessarily his theory.
01:19:36.000 Maybe I'm misrepresenting it.
01:19:37.000 His theory is that it coincides with climate change and these lower hominids experimenting with different food sources. 1.00
01:19:46.000 So as the rainforest receded into grasslands, I think?
01:20:08.000 Yes.
01:20:08.000 Make you a better hunter, make you more in tune with what you're doing.
01:20:12.000 That it would make you more...
01:20:13.000 Central nervous system arousal, including sexual arousal, make you more horny, which would make you procreate more often.
01:20:21.000 And that the very unusual effect that psilocybin has on the mind could have led to language and could have also led to the expansion of neurons.
01:20:31.000 The language could be part of cultural evolution.
01:20:34.000 Sure.
01:20:34.000 Yeah.
01:20:35.000 The doubling of the human brain size, though, was the particular thing.
01:20:38.000 That it coincided, according to McKenna, it's been – there's a lot of people that disagree with him.
01:20:44.000 But his brother makes a very compelling case for him.
01:20:46.000 His brother Dennis, who's still alive.
01:20:48.000 And he's a brilliant, brilliant guy.
01:20:50.000 He talked about it on this podcast.
01:20:52.000 He talked about his take on the stoned ape theory scientifically, why he believes it's really what happened.
01:20:59.000 But that it does coincide with the change in climate.
01:21:02.000 Yeah.
01:21:02.000 These, you know, ape-like people trying out different things.
01:21:07.000 And that the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years is like one of the greatest mysteries in the entire fossil record.
01:21:13.000 Yeah, but there are alternative theories.
01:21:14.000 I mean, I wrote about one of my last books.
01:21:16.000 But I think they probably all coincide.
01:21:16.000 They may be.
01:21:17.000 Cooking with fire can explain the increase in the brain size because you get more nutritional value from cooked food than raw food.
01:21:23.000 The throwing arm, the desire to hunt all these different animals, calculating all these different ways to do that and communication.
01:21:30.000 I think there's probably a bunch of coinciding factors.
01:21:34.000 Yeah, and it may well be that people were eating everything, right?
01:21:38.000 Our ancestors, it's amazing what they ate.
01:21:40.000 And no doubt they ate psychedelic mushrooms, and no doubt.
01:21:44.000 I mean, he also believed that language was a form of synesthesia, you know, in the way that synesthesia, you can smell a musical note or something like that.
01:21:52.000 That you're taking a sound, a meaningless sound, you know, and you're attaching it to a concept that maybe that happened on psilocybin.
01:22:02.000 But he had a bunch of ideas that never panned out. 0.92
01:22:05.000 Ridiculous ideas. 0.67
01:22:05.000 Look, he was an incredibly creative person. 0.67
01:22:08.000 Yeah.
01:22:09.000 And they're all...
01:22:11.000 You know, really interesting to think about.
01:22:13.000 Some of them, I think you could probably discredit based on what we understand about genes and evolution.
01:22:19.000 But others are just really provocative.
01:22:21.000 Well, that's where his brother comes in.
01:22:23.000 Because his brother is a strict scientist.
01:22:24.000 Strict scientist.
01:22:25.000 He doesn't tolerate any of the woo-woo. 1.00
01:22:28.000 And he goes straight to...
01:22:29.000 And he's skeptical of some of his brother's ideas, too.
01:22:31.000 Oh, yeah, openly.
01:22:32.000 Yeah.
01:22:32.000 I mean, loved his brother, but he was like, hmm, he's had a lot of things that weren't really accurate.
01:22:35.000 But also, Terrence McKenna, too, would say, well, you know, I'm just putting these ideas out there.
01:22:39.000 Well, the guy was...
01:22:40.000 We're good to go.
01:23:01.000 Pretty much every Terence McKenna lecture and speech he's ever done available for free.
01:23:06.000 You can download it.
01:23:07.000 And Lorenzo has taken these and digitally remastered them so the sound is better.
01:23:11.000 And it's really awesome that he's got this resource.
01:23:14.000 But the idea that these lower hominids experienced, ancient hominids experimented, rather, with psilocybin, and this was what... 0.91
01:23:24.000 Advanced culture, advanced language, advanced their understanding of each other.
01:23:29.000 It's a very compelling idea.
01:23:31.000 Yeah, it is.
01:23:31.000 And I think, I mean, the way I think about drugs like psychedelics in evolution, in the same way like in genetic evolution, radiation causes mutations.
01:23:41.000 And some of those mutations turn out to be really valuable.
01:23:44.000 You know, purely by accident, some great new trait is introduced to the species and it increases fitness in that person or that individual lives on.
01:23:54.000 In the cultural realm, psychedelics are like radiation.
01:23:57.000 They're mutagens.
01:23:58.000 They create change, variation.
01:24:00.000 And that advances cultural evolution.
01:24:03.000 All that variation.
01:24:05.000 All those wild ideas. 1.00
01:24:07.000 99% of them are stupid and useless, I'll bet. 1.00
01:24:10.000 But that 1% can change the world. 1.00
01:24:13.000 Yeah, absolutely.
01:24:14.000 All right, let's let you go, because I know you've got to get out of here.
01:24:16.000 I wish I had more time, because we've got a lot more to talk about.
01:24:19.000 Anytime you're back in town, please do, please do.
01:24:21.000 And the name of your book, once again?
01:24:23.000 How to Change Your Mind, What the New Science of Psychedelics is Teaching Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.
01:24:31.000 And is it available in audio form as well?
01:24:33.000 Yes.
01:24:33.000 Yeah, and I recorded the audio book.
01:24:35.000 Excellent.
01:24:36.000 I'm so happy to hear you say that.
01:24:37.000 I hate it when other people read people's books.
01:24:40.000 I did too.
01:24:40.000 And they told me my first couple books, no, you've got to have an actor do it.
01:24:44.000 And people complained.
01:24:45.000 They said, that's not you.
01:24:46.000 So now I insist on doing it.
01:24:48.000 It takes a week out of my life each time.
01:24:50.000 It's not easy.
01:24:51.000 But I'm very proud of this audiobook, so I hope people will check it out.
01:24:54.000 That's awesome.
01:24:54.000 Thank you very much, Michael.
01:24:55.000 Thank you, Joe.
01:24:56.000 This was a pleasure.
01:24:57.000 Michael Palm, ladies and gentlemen.