In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, the boys talk about sex toys, nootropics, and why you should never, ever, ever buy a sex toy. Joe also talks about how to make your own CBD oil and other nootropic products, and how to get the most out of your money and your time in the gym. Joe also gives his thoughts on whether or not CBD should be legalized in the U.S. and why he doesn t think it should be. The episode is sponsored by The Fleshlight and Shroom Tech Sport, and is available in Vanilla, Mocha, and Salted Caramel. Special thanks to Onnit for sponsoring the show. Thanks also to ShroomTech Sport for sponsoring this episode and for sponsoring future episodes of the podcast. You can support the show by becoming a patron patron patron and getting 15% off your first purchase when you place an order through the link below. If you don't already have a membership, you can get 10% off the purchase of $99 or more when you become a patron! and we'll send you an ad-free version of the show for the next episode! Thanks to our sponsor, Onnit! We'll be giving you a discount code: "TheJoeRoganExperience" to help you save money on your next purchase. Joe Rogans Podcast, and you'll get 15% all month! Joe's Podcast! and Joe's podcast gets 15% OFF your first month. with the promo code: JOERogan Experience. JoesRoganexperience. Thank you for supporting the show, and we're giving you $10, $10 and $25,000 and $50,000 gets you a shirt, and they'll get $10 off the show gets $50 off the next month, and $55,000 off the first month gets you $35,000, and the second month gets $75, and Joe gets a VIP discount, and I'll get a discount on the rest day gets $40, and all you get $50 gets $95, and a VIP day gets the rest of the ad-day gets a discount, AND $75 gets $99, and so on, and more gets the VIP deal, and he gets it all day, plus shipping is also gets a promo code JOE ROGAN PROMOTED, AND they get it all of that, plus they also gets $5,000 PROMO, AND SO MUCH MORE!
00:03:05.000There's a lot of really interesting articles about the subject, and it's controversial, but I've been experimenting with them for years, and I enjoy them.
00:03:38.000And I have no vested interest in whether you buy it or don't buy it.
00:03:42.000If you feel like you don't want to buy it or you feel like it's too expensive, I encourage people to steal the ingredients, copy it, and make your own.
00:03:50.000Like, buy the stuff in bulk and make your own.
00:05:38.000It was the Maiaruna Indians, and they gave me a...
00:05:42.000Well, they actually didn't give it to me.
00:05:43.000It was sort of a complicated trip to find them.
00:05:46.000But they traditionally used the venom of this frog called Philomedusa bicolor that produces a venom that's rich in all these different psychoactive peptides and specifically contains this substance called dermorphin that's a super potent opioid.
00:06:53.000So I was expecting more of a stimulant-type effect, but then this chemical, Dermorphin, there's no real reason you should expect it to be a stimulant.
00:07:50.000Well, there's all kinds of psychoactive substances that have been detected in the urine of people with different sorts of mental illnesses.
00:07:58.000You know, there's 5-MeO-DMT detected in the urine of schizophrenics.
00:10:57.000I don't think it really poses that much of a risk in terms of, I doubt there's very many 5-MeO DMT hospitalizations compared to even things like LSD. It's just such a rare thing, and it lasts for such a short period of time.
00:11:11.000You can just make it like a frog kissing booth to get around the law.
00:11:15.000Don't say this is to lick or to get the drug off of it.
00:11:19.000If you want this drug, you want to kiss it.
00:11:22.000Brian, I'm going to bring you to a doctor.
00:12:40.000And now how did you start putting together these videos online?
00:12:45.000Well, I left Chicago and moved to New York, and a friend of a friend worked at Vice magazine and told the editor that I was interested both academically and in terms of writing about all these psychedelic drugs, and they wanted to do more informed drug-related content for the magazine.
00:13:05.000So they asked me to start writing a monthly column.
00:13:09.000But Vice used to have a totally different attitude towards drugs in terms of, you know, they'd give someone an ounce of mushrooms and put them in a hotel room and just record everything they did while it was happening.
00:13:22.000They weren't really interested in the science of it.
00:13:28.000Yeah, they used to have that attitude, and now they're more open-minded to discussing the scientific aspects.
00:13:34.000So do you think the scientific aspects for the longest time, was it like, I think it was like maybe Hunter S. Thompson that maybe fucked a lot of people up, because his thing was just sort of take them, blast off, and enjoy the ride of it.
00:14:23.000No, I think any way that anyone chooses to do it is perfectly fine, as long as they benefit from it and don't hurt, don't, like, stab people in the process or kill a dog or something.
00:14:33.000If it was legal, it would be great because then you would know what everything was.
00:14:38.000That would be the best way to deal with it.
00:14:42.000The idea that you're just buying stuff from people you don't know.
00:14:47.000It's so hard to cultivate a friendship where you're trusting someone to sell you something they're not supposed to be selling you.
00:14:55.000You get into a tricky situation for both parties.
00:14:58.000Well, even they don't know most of the time.
00:16:04.000Because Hamilton is doing something on isolation tanks.
00:16:09.000And we're going to check out the float lab tomorrow in Venice, where Crash, my friend Craig, aka Crash, is the mad genius, putting together the baddest float tanks in the world.
00:16:22.000We're going to go check out his stuff and his crazy cellular influence device.
00:16:27.000When did you first learn about flotation tanks?
00:16:29.000Is this something that you knew for a while?
00:16:34.000What gave you the idea to do this project?
00:16:40.000I think they're pretty fascinating for anyone that's studied the history of psychedelic drugs just because John Lilly And also, at the very beginning of psychedelic research, there were always these attempts to try and isolate the experience from the environment in some way when they were trying to quantify or qualify the different effects of new drugs in the 60s.
00:17:02.000And because it's a class that's so much based on the environment, they wanted to try and figure out a way to remove subjects from the environment and test them in some kind of unbiased setting.
00:17:13.000And the two ways they had were Sensory deprivation tanks and these Gonsfeld devices.
00:17:58.000I think it's really good to have someone be affectionate to you.
00:18:01.000Even if it's just someone rubbing you with their fingers, that's really intimate.
00:18:07.000We're pretending that it's not sexual because it's not touching your groin.
00:18:11.000But when some big, fat, sweaty woman who really knows how to rub a neck When she's getting in there with lotion and everything, that lady's fucking you.
00:18:37.000You're paying them to be ultimately affectionate to you.
00:18:41.000Because, yeah, it works the muscles and, yeah, it increases, you know, blood flow and, yeah, it breaks up scar tissue.
00:18:47.000It's great therapeutically, but it's also great because it's affection.
00:18:51.000What if they, like, finished it off with, like, rocking you in a chair where they held you for, like, 20 minutes at the end and they were just, like, playing with your hair at the very end, like a baby or something?
00:21:14.000I think what's happening is people are realizing as more people get more access to information, That they're not buying the bullshit anymore.
00:21:22.000And the only way to stop that is you're going to have to limit their access to information.
00:21:27.000You're going to have to be able to control them.
00:21:28.000You're going to have to be able to somehow or another box them up.
00:21:31.000You're going to have to be able to somehow...
00:21:32.000The trend is giving information freely through these fucking cell phones.
00:21:37.000Wireless internet connections, and they're coordinating meetings, and people are setting things up, and they can't stop it.
00:21:45.000But they can also work through the system.
00:21:47.000When you think about how many Wikipedia entries are written by the pharmaceutical companies, how much Wikipedia material is actually advertising in one way or another.
00:23:22.000A lot of people have gotten things that they didn't deserve because they kind of downloaded them illegally maybe, but how much money was lost Was there really any money lost?
00:26:57.000The thing with fries, it probably makes it super quick.
00:27:00.000It's interesting that it's the browning process, and it kind of makes sense because they say that if you eat meat and you eat it well done, like the carbon on the outside, it's really not good.
00:27:10.000It's like the black shit that people love, the crispy outside.
00:27:37.000There was a couple people that were annoyed that were vegans, and one guy I might have overreacted to, because I just get tired of people with their hashtag, I'm vegan, like they say something, and they go, I'm vegan.
00:27:47.000He was saying, because we were talking about animals getting killed in processing plants, and it does happen, you know, groundhogs and all kinds of animals die.
00:27:59.000When you buy plants from a store, unless you've got your own organic setup and you're doing it all yourself, chances are in the harvesting of the plants, some animals are going to die, unfortunately.
00:28:16.000The area is going to be devastated unless you have some really good setup or it's great composting.
00:28:27.000Unless you're doing it all yourself for your own food.
00:28:30.000If you're doing it all yourself for your own food, that's one thing.
00:28:32.000But if you're buying some shit from Whole Foods or from wherever, it's coming from a farm somewhere, even if it's organically grown, you don't think some animals are getting jacked?
00:28:41.000There's an article about how in Australia, at least, it's a greater total loss of life, but it's a different type of life if you're a vegetarian than if you're an omnivore because of all the mice that are killed in the process of harvesting grains.
00:30:26.000If I had known they were treated well, I'd feel much better about it.
00:30:29.000But, you know, the reality of, you know, you buy a Kentucky Fried Chicken or you buy any sort of, you know, meat product from any fast food, anything, you're buying something that did not live a happy life.
00:31:30.000If a jaguar doesn't take them out, can people take the cow out?
00:31:32.000we can't you're talking about extremeness though most people don't believe that even even most like normal anti-cruelty animal you know companies or whatever they're called charities uh uh even them uh they still believe in you know humane killing of animals you know But what you're talking about is people that are just like nothing.
00:33:13.000If it wasn't for people shooting those elk, the herd would be 200 the next year.
00:33:18.000It'd be 300. There's not enough predators.
00:33:20.000Unless you want more mountain lions, unless you want to start bringing mountain lions into your daily equation, you've got to do something to get rid of those elk.
00:33:27.000They have to shoot those fucking things.
00:33:29.000If we want to live there, you're going to have to shoot them.
00:34:17.000I think it just generally encourages me to be more conscious of what I'm eating, because otherwise I'm more inclined to eat just gross fast food and things like that.
00:34:27.000And I think my diet's improved enormously since I became a vegetarian.
00:34:33.000Yeah, the more plant matter you can get in, it seems like you just feel better.
00:37:15.000I'd actually been to his house a couple times beforehand and I had to be vetted by his family and all these things because a lot of people don't understand what he does and he's harassed by people.
00:37:28.000There's this ridiculous idea that inventors are somehow responsible for what is done with their creations so people think that if somebody dies of an MDMA overdose that he is somehow responsible for it which is of course totally ridiculous.
00:38:29.000I mean, I think a lot of the stuff that MAPS does is just proving these things that most people understand intuitively, but it has to be demonstrated in a rigorous scientific fashion before any regulatory authorities will accept it.
00:39:18.000It's not a subject that's easy to be approached seriously with adults.
00:39:23.000There's not a lot of them that'll engage you in it.
00:39:25.000In the regular world, you want to talk seriously about psychedelics and seriously about positive effects of them and mushrooms?
00:39:33.000Who wants to talk to you about that stuff?
00:39:35.000Yeah, I mean, now most of it has to be shrouded in scientific research.
00:39:39.000What if you were working for an insurance company, and you were like one of their top sales guys, but you're running around the office telling everybody they gotta do acid?
00:39:50.000I guess I don't even really know what public perceptions...
00:39:54.000I mean, I have an idea, but it's so hard for me to go and to really understand what it would be like in middle America or something if you worked at just an insurance office.
00:40:01.000Well, I think it's different now everywhere because of the internet.
00:40:04.000I don't think there is necessarily a middle America that's the same middle America.
00:40:09.000There were some innocent parts of the country or countries where things were a little quieter or slower.
00:40:16.000But I think because of the access to information that people have today, I don't...
00:41:21.000I would just think that it's easier to get information without going to the library now.
00:41:25.000Yeah, my mom doesn't even go to the library anymore and she would go like multiple times.
00:41:28.000Most people have access to a computer.
00:41:29.000Yeah, but then there's all these subscription-only services that are too expensive for people that are individuals to use.
00:41:35.000So it's like, if you want to use Factiva or SciFinder or LexisNexis or any of these databases, scientific databases, you have to go to a library to use that.
00:42:16.000I mean, I do have one of those things, but if I had to choose between that, like if I had the book and it was on the Kindle, I would take the book with me.
00:43:59.000Yeah, it's a pretty impressive piece of research.
00:44:02.000But he, in the book, he goes through all these different mushroom myths, but he talks about the sacred mushroom on the cross and claims that Allegro never even believed that, but that he was just so...
00:44:12.000He hated Christianity so much at that point in his career that he just was looking for some way to disprove it or dismiss it or make it look ridiculous in the public eye.
00:44:43.000I saw him speak relatively recently, and he said that his new career goal is to go through all of the Old Testament looking for instances of altered states of consciousness that might be indicative of some kind of a DMT-type experience.
00:45:00.000Yeah, recently there was some guy, a scholar from Jerusalem that was proposing that about Moses, and Moses' encounter with the burning bush might have been some reference to the acacia bush, which is a very high DMT content.
00:47:07.000It's America's oldest brewery, and it's in Pennsylvania.
00:47:11.000And it used to be this beer that living in Ohio, people I know would go to and stock up with truckfuls just so they could have it for like a year.
00:49:59.000He's got it set up where he's got videos of it where they're using the sound and they're playing music and you can see the waves in the water.
00:50:08.000Because the speakers are actually floating in the water and they're set up right by your head.
00:50:13.000And the waves are making the water splash and jump and wiggle.
00:50:58.000Yeah, his idea, this guy Crash's idea, is that he's going to develop how-to tutorials for sports and for all sorts of different things, music, language.
00:51:12.000They'll be able to teach people languages much quicker, and that in the sensory deprivation environment, with the lack of external stimuli, your brain will be more focused.
00:51:20.000Yeah, it sounds like the lawnmower man.
00:51:22.000It does sound like the lawnmower man, you're right!
00:52:07.000See, the thing about the tank is once you do it for a long time, you know, you do it a couple times, like four or five times, once you do it and you know what it is, you can just settle right in.
00:52:17.000And once you settle right in, then it's not going to be distracting at all.
00:52:34.000Have you ever been to one of those group massages where there's a shitload of people in one room and then they're playing like a movie that's on loop, like on the wall of like a house, you know, in Asia somewhere?
00:53:17.000And if he could ever figure out how to really hook it up and do it right, I mean, what a great way to, like, learn a language or something.
00:53:23.000What a great way to, like, you know, could you imagine if you took, like, if you found out that you could develop a course specifically for use inside the isolation bank, like, the optimum way to learn things and memorize things and put them to use, and you show that you could make people learn Spanish ten times quicker or something fucking nutty like that.
00:53:40.000Or just show you wolves on loop at night, like, walking slowly.
00:55:05.000And when that happens, that's going to be an alternate reality.
00:55:08.000They're going to be able to program an alternate reality.
00:55:11.000And if your consciousness, if they can figure out a way to lock your consciousness onto that alternate reality, it's almost like putting you in another world.
00:55:21.000It's almost like putting you in another dimension.
00:55:27.000That seems like what's going to happen, right?
00:55:29.000Primitive forms of it are already possible.
00:55:31.000And things like, you know, they have those implants for blind people that allow them to see with a camera that goes directly into their brain.
01:00:13.000So do you think that people died because there's just some areas where it would just come through in heavy doses and no one anticipated it?
01:00:22.000It's heavier than oxygen, if I remember correctly, and sort of settles in basements and maybe near floors, and people sleep in pools of it.
01:00:31.000And you can get radon poisoning, but it starts in your respiratory system, and then you just start wheezing and coughing a lot and shit like that.
01:01:17.000Isn't it amazing, man, when you stop and think about that so many of the different things that you've talked about are not legal?
01:01:25.000You know, different psychoactive substances.
01:01:28.000Like when you were talking to that Shulgin guy, the different things that he was talking about, the different tryptamines, and how many of them are legal?
01:02:27.000I think the nicotine is not as much of an issue.
01:02:29.000I think a lot of it is all the other shit they put in them to make it even more addictive.
01:02:34.000They say that if you smoke cigars, you know, people that smoke cigars, first of all, you're not inhaling it, but you're getting a real pure type of tobacco.
01:02:50.000before you're sucking on a crazy fucking plant that gives you nicotine all day.
01:02:53.000But what it is is a better, healthier version of that tobacco and that the 599 different additives that the Food and Drug Administration allows cigarette companies to pump into cigarettes just to mostly make them more addictive, I think.
01:03:08.000If you believe that movie with, what's his name?
01:03:31.000There's also the beta-carbolines in tobacco that may give it an additional addictive component because they may improve mood.
01:03:40.000When that movie he was talking about, and again, I don't know how much that movie is dramatically, I think it's based on a real story though, isn't it?
01:03:51.000It was terrifying to think that a company would be so evil that they would go out of their way to try to use chemists to make their shit more addictive.
01:04:35.000bad that's all it does as far as i know and in the quantities that they would be using it i can't i mean maybe it's like a in a really you know in the same way that like indole and very very very small quantities smells like jasmine but then in large quantities smells like shit so some of these things that smell bad it's probably used for smell to to sell a cigarette like when a smoker doesn't smoke and they smell a cigarette you want a cigarette bad what's Yeah.
01:05:07.000Well, I don't know if they're making it to attract other people, but they're probably making it more attractive to the people that are smoking it.
01:05:22.000Like I said, according to the Russell Crowe movie that I can't even remember the title, they've done some deep research on hooking people in deeper and deeper with all these different 599 chemicals.
01:06:01.000There's 599 chemicals, but there's, I guarantee, 599 chemicals in everything.
01:06:07.000It depends on how you want to phrase it.
01:06:09.000I'm sure the majority of those chemicals are benign, but maybe 11 of them do have some malevolent I really do think that nicotine in and of itself would be enough.
01:06:54.000What most people smoke, I would say, is Marlboro Lights or Camel Lights or a light cigarette.
01:06:59.000And it's more like having a Diet Coke.
01:07:01.000You just want a little taste of the chemical and a little smoke, but then you get these guys that are smoking Marlboro Reds where it's like having your little cigars.
01:07:18.000It's a crazy documentary that they did on these people that live in West Virginia that have been this notorious family of outlaws and wild people.
01:07:28.000And there was a woman, and her name was Sue Bob, and I swear to God, that was her voice.
01:07:33.000I was always being a sexy one in the family.
01:08:43.000I talked to you about it before we even did the show.
01:08:46.000It was so sad to watch someone that could be so calloused about his ideas like that.
01:08:52.000If you haven't seen it, Mitt Romney, a guy who's running for president, a very, very wealthy man, is standing in front of this dude in a wheelchair.
01:11:33.000This is something that he's saying helps him, makes him feel happy against his pain.
01:11:37.000Yeah, and he even said, I'm not for legalizing it for anybody.
01:11:41.000He goes, not for everybody, but for people that you can use it for medical purposes, it works.
01:11:45.000Then, Hank, you can just walk away from a guy like that.
01:11:51.000It's just disturbing that anybody would be so flippant with the idea that it's so preposterous, it's so gross to them for some fucking reason.
01:12:03.000I don't know what it is, but the idea of altering your consciousness any way other than the sanctioned ways that we've prescribed to for the last several decades, anything that steps outside of that becomes a danger.
01:12:19.000I mean, it's not a majority view, I don't think.
01:12:23.000I think it had to do with a few people who, you know, when you think about it, it only takes a few people to make these enormous changes in drug policy.
01:12:31.000Like, I don't know all that much about the history of marijuana specifically, but it was like that one guy primarily.
01:12:36.000And then with the psychedelics, it's the same kind of deal.
01:12:39.000It takes one person to die at the wrong time, and, you know, one person...
01:12:44.000He dies after smoking salvia, the guy Brett Chidester, and then it's illegal over ten states.
01:12:52.000I mean, there was a teenager named Brett Chidester who wrote in his diary, I love salvia, but I also understand that life has no meaning now, or something like that.
01:13:03.000And then a few days later, he killed himself, and his mother looked in his diary and said, oh, it was the salvia that made him suicidal and went on this crusade to have it banned in every state that she could and was...
01:13:14.000Successful in something like a dozen states.
01:13:45.000I mean, that was the official idea that was written in the news.
01:13:49.000But then when I was in Holland recently working on this new project for VBS, we were at this place called Magic Truffles, which is the largest mushroom, or was the largest mushroom farm in Holland.
01:14:00.000They make metric tons of mushrooms in this factory.
01:14:04.000But then mushrooms became legal, so they converted their entire operation to producing psychedelic sclerotia.
01:14:09.000But they say the whole thing is a scam.
01:14:11.000They think that she wasn't even on mushrooms, that the entire thing is based on a friend seeing her with a box of mushrooms in her hand on the day of the death.
01:14:20.000And then they put two and two together and decided that she must have been on mushrooms when she died.
01:14:25.000Oh god, so she could have just been depressed.
01:14:27.000Yeah, I don't think there were any toxicology reports that confirmed she was under the influence of any psilocybin at the time.
01:14:36.000I can get not wanting to give it to everybody.
01:14:38.000I just think there should be places where you can get it where someone can walk you through it.
01:14:41.000And you should be able to make an educated choice.
01:14:44.000So many people shouldn't be denied the experience because I think the experience makes people more aware and more sensitive.
01:15:00.000That's where it gets completely, totally ridiculous.
01:15:03.000It gets to the point where you're keeping something that might be beneficial to a lot of people because some people might fuck it up.
01:15:12.000Because some people might fuck with it and do something crazy.
01:15:15.000I mean, it also has to do with fashion and science and medicine.
01:15:18.000You know, it became very unfashionable in the 80s to do psychedelic psychotherapy.
01:15:22.000And there were only a number, even in places, like I think there were certain parts of Germany where any psychiatrist that wanted to could.
01:15:30.000And they chose not to just because most people weren't interested in it for a while.
01:15:34.000They thought it had limited potential.
01:15:36.000And now I think the potential is, you know, there's the...
01:15:40.000Renewal of all the psychedelic research.
01:15:41.000But in the 80s, people didn't think it was, even people that were pro-psychedelic drugs, a lot of them didn't necessarily think that it was a viable road to producing important neuroscientific research or in terms of psychotherapeutic drugs.
01:15:59.000Yeah, I recall hearing a McKenna interview where he was talking about that, about how scientists were often discouraged from going down those paths because people would say, you know, there's really nothing there for you.
01:16:13.000It's difficult to quantify the benefits of psychedelic drugs.
01:16:16.000There's a lot of anecdotal evidence that they have lasting effects on people's lives and that they have relief from depression or alcoholism or things like that.
01:16:25.000But when it comes down to really, really putting it down on paper, it's Yeah, they said they'd improve their personalities.
01:17:06.000Does it prevent the formation of certain types of tangled proteins in the brain or things that are indicative of neurodegenerative diseases?
01:17:16.000But there isn't anything like that for psychedelics.
01:17:19.000There's no single benefit that can be quantified.
01:17:23.000And I think that's one reason that it's difficult for researchers.
01:17:29.000Now a lot of people try to emphasize the positive effects that are not necessarily psychoactive.
01:17:33.000So maybe they have some kind of an immunosuppressant effect that would be useful for arthritis or some kind of inflammatory disease or something like that.
01:17:44.000That's funny that you said that because there was something I was reading just a couple of days ago about people juicing cannabis and that it doesn't have any psychoactive effects but there's a lot of great health benefits for juicing it.
01:17:57.000Yeah, and CBD, the non-psychoactive terpene, THC and CBD are the two main chemicals in it.
01:18:05.000So would you juice it like a smoothie, like blend it up?
01:18:09.000Oh, I don't know about this specific technique, but CBD is not psychoactive and has all kinds of medicinal effects.
01:18:15.000Like it's currently undergoing clinical trials as a treatment for schizophrenia.
01:18:19.000So, I mean, in addition to the psychedelic effect, there may be all kinds of things we can't, you know, maybe neuroregenerative, maybe synaptogenic, maybe all sorts of different things.
01:18:30.000The marijuana one is the biggest trip because it's got so many excellent properties, yet It makes the best paper.
01:19:01.000And it has so much fucking potential as far as, like, you can grow, like, a massive forest full of it, chop it all down, and then have another massive forest, like, six months later or a year later.
01:20:03.000And it's the same thing with mushrooms as well.
01:20:05.000They have so many benefits beyond just being vessels for carrying these psychoactive drugs.
01:20:11.000I think Paul Stamets did a lot of experiments with the Defense Department using either P-cyanescins or azorescins and using them to dephosphorylate sarin to break down nerve gases.
01:20:24.000Because in the same way that all these enzymes in the mycelium that are able to break down The cellular components of the substrate, whether it's wood or grass or some kind of seed, it's able to break it down and extract all these amino acids and then biosynthesize chemicals out of it.
01:20:42.000But it can also break down all other kinds of substrates.
01:20:46.000There's all this bioremediation where they use mushrooms to clean up oil spills because the mushroom mycelium is able to break down the aromatic hydrocarbons in the oil.
01:20:55.000And to totally detoxify it, you can even eat the mushrooms afterwards.
01:21:00.000I'd heard about something like that, that they'd use things like that in Alaska.
01:21:03.000Is that where they'd experienced that?
01:21:05.000Before the Gulf incident, that was like the last big one, right?
01:21:09.000Yeah, they wanted to do it in Japan as well to clean up radioactive waste because you can use the mushrooms to bioaccumulate radioactive fallout and then pick the mushrooms and slowly decontaminate an area.
01:21:22.000I mean, it's an extremely slow way to do it, but also effective.
01:24:16.000We were talking about Stephen Hawking and how Stephen Hawking has this idea that if we ever do make contact with aliens, the best move would be to ignore them.
01:24:24.000Because if they ever come to our planet, the chances are they're not only going to exploit us, but destroy us.
01:24:29.000I mean, he didn't say exactly those words, but he generally has a pessimistic view.
01:24:34.000And I think that that's a well-informed, intelligent view.
01:24:36.000There's no reason to have an optimistic view about that.
01:24:39.000But Daniel Pitchback seems to have this idea that we'll all be friends.
01:24:49.000If you look at every single organism that we can observe on this earth, it takes advantage of the weaker organisms, including the most intelligent.
01:25:11.000We, but with animals that we don't understand, intelligent animals we understand, we regularly enslave them for people's enjoyment to watch on television.
01:25:20.000And then we believe somehow or another that some super intelligent organism is going to show different behavior than what every single organism on this earth, including the highest us, the most aware us.
01:26:38.000If you came here, you would want to shut this whole fucking show down.
01:26:42.000You'd be like, you're going to ruin this whole planet, you stupid fucks.
01:26:46.000We would for sure shut this planet down.
01:26:49.000If we came into an area and there was a bunch of chimps, and the chimps had machine guns and tanks, and we would shut that fucking place down.
01:26:57.000There's no way we're going to let some chimps start running shit.
01:28:05.000It was kind of cool because you put yourself back in that sort of old-school comic book style of storytelling they did in the 50s and the innocent days when they made that movie.
01:28:14.000But the other thing was like, how naive.
01:28:16.000The portrait of an alien, what it would be, and just how naive the situation was in the military and the obvious bad guys and good guys.
01:28:31.000Well, even now, there's really no impressive concept of aliens.
01:28:35.000I don't know if you're familiar with the science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, but he wrote Solaris and His Master's Voice and all these books, and his main idea is that humans can't conceive of anything that is truly alien.
01:28:45.000We're only looking for ourselves in the universe, and anything that was truly unlike us, we couldn't even imagine.
01:28:50.000Right, so even like the movie Alien still is a thing that moves like us.
01:29:02.000That's always been a fascinating idea that everything has some sort of consciousness, you know, whether or not it expresses pain or even feels it or can't communicate, that everything has some sort of a type of consciousness.
01:29:15.000Well, definitely our idea of life is generally very narrow.
01:29:19.000You know, there's like a budding field of astrobiology, which is just a speculative science.
01:29:24.000But even in astrobiology textbooks from a couple years ago, there would be no mention of the possibility that arsenic could replace phosphorus in biomolecules.
01:29:33.000It didn't even seem like a possibility, and now we know that that can happen.
01:29:38.000There was like a lake, I think it's in Nevada, that had extremely, extremely high levels of arsenic in the water and this researcher, his last name was Felice, I think, collected bacteria from the lake and found that they were Producing DNA and amino acids where the phosphorus atom that's present in a lot of these molecules was replaced by arsenic.
01:30:17.000Apparently, sardines, they feed on heavy metal.
01:30:23.000Well, they don't feed on heavy metal, but they feed at the bottom of the ocean, and that's where a lot of pollution is, a lot of heavy metal pollution.
01:30:29.000And they get a concentration of arsenic, not enough really to make you sick, but enough that it shows up on tests.
01:30:35.000So you get your blood checked, and you say, holy shit, there's some arsenic in there.
01:31:21.000When I first saw Alexander Shulgin's work and saw P. Call, I was discouraged by it because I thought that it had all been done, that every single possible psychoactive Tryptamine and phenethylamine had already been synthesized.
01:31:34.000And for people who don't know, pical is phil...
01:32:41.000An educated sense of reverence about what he's done.
01:32:44.000So it's like, when you addressed all these things, you could tell that you had this great joy in getting this opportunity to talk to that guy.
01:33:00.000If you type Hamilton's Pharmacopia, that's the name of my show, on VBS, you can find it on vice.com through the video section if you just look for Hamilton's Pharmacopia.
01:34:02.000I mean, there's a bunch of different proposed mechanisms that are kind of complicated, but I don't really know how it works.
01:34:09.000That's always been, I've met a couple kids that are on Ritalin, and it's always been a very dark sort of a moment when you realize that these people are drugging their kid.
01:34:20.000I don't know if some people need it, but I know some people don't need it.
01:34:24.000I've seen some kids that are just a little bit rowdy and they need attention, they're not getting it, and then all of a sudden they're pilled up.
01:35:06.000They're like a different breed of human being.
01:35:08.000You're in here, rattling off all this scientific knowledge of neurochemistry and pharmacopoeia, and there's people that could breed with you, and they're like, My name's Sue Bob.
01:35:20.000I'm the old Zoe, the sexiest one in the family.
01:37:16.000The guy was bigger than the girl, but the problem was the guy, he had so much room to lean on the window, but he decided to lean on my side.
01:37:26.000So the whole time, he's on my lap almost.
01:37:30.000And the woman was trying to be a little bit nicer about it, but she was still, you know, pretty big.
01:37:57.000People are getting too fucking fat, you know, and it's been going on for a long time.
01:38:01.000There's an image once that I saw online from the early 1900s, and it was one of those carnivals, and it was the fat man in the carnival.
01:38:09.000Like, there would be a guy that was the fat man, and he was barely fat.
01:38:13.000I mean, in comparison to what we consider fat today, like some of these people that you see that have to get moved out of their house, they have to cut a hole out and they're attached to the couch because they haven't gotten up, they've been shitting where they sit, and their fiber, their skin has like melted into the fucking chair.
01:40:49.000No, they're just probably really weak stimulants.
01:40:54.000You know, like phenethylamine is a close derivative of amphetamine, just missing one carbon atom.
01:41:01.000And it's illegal, so you can just put tons of it into dietary supplements and it produces a short-lasting stimulant effect.
01:41:11.000It's amazing that that's one of the number one concerns that people have, getting rid of fat.
01:41:18.000It's a very strange statement when you think about how a society becomes so successful that even when people are down in the dumps, they're still fat.
01:41:59.000You know, when you have friends that are overweight and you worry, you know, after Patrice died, especially our friend Patrice O'Neal is a stand-up comedian, just died recently.
01:42:06.000You know, you have friends that are overweight and it's just, it's like a bomb, man.
01:42:11.000You know, it's going to go off eventually.
01:44:52.000It's not something I've done a huge amount of research on.
01:44:55.000Now when you say fat-soluble, somebody said that once for someone who got caught taking a performance-enhancing drug, and one of the people that was in his camp said one of the things that fucked him up was that he's too fat, and so he can't get it out of his system as quick.
01:45:13.000Like, if you were a lean person, you would get it out of your system, whereas if you were a person that had a high percentage of body weight, it would remain for longer?
01:45:21.000I mean, that's one of the main physical properties of any molecule, is that it has different solubilities and different chemicals, and some things are lipid-soluble.
01:45:30.000And if it's something like THC, and you have a huge amount of fat tissue on your body that the THC can...
01:46:48.000I never achieved any profound state of altered consciousness.
01:46:53.000I have one friend who had a girl that he knew that was a friend of his that he actually went on a trip with her.
01:47:00.000They were actually just platonic friends, but they would travel together occasionally.
01:47:04.000And she was into serious kundalini yoga, where she would get up every morning at a very specific time, and she would have to face a very specific angle.
01:47:15.000It was I don't know what she was doing, but she would do these very intense kundalini exercises for like an hour, an hour and 15 minutes, an hour and 20 minutes, and she did it every day.
01:47:27.000And she claimed that when she did it for long periods of time, because she did it so much, she could get into like an astral traveling sort of dimension traveling state of consciousness, where she would have psychedelic experiences.
01:47:41.000Yeah, actually now that I think of it, I did have some...
01:48:15.000You have to follow these different breathing techniques and then hold yourself in some kind of a weird stress position that's extremely exhausting and then all of your muscles start to vibrate like I was on that Oh, the turbosonic.
01:48:51.000But I think drugs like, there certainly are drugs that are more friendly than others, and I think 5-MeoDMT would be an example of something that has the capacity to be extremely unpleasant if you take it under the wrong circumstances.
01:49:04.000I had a friend completely flip out, taking it, because he had eaten, and so he had to throw up, and he got up to throw up, and he got to the sink just in time to throw up, but then he was just going crazy.
01:49:38.000And little bubbles were coming out of the corner of his mouth and I'm like, shit.
01:49:42.000And I'm hanging out with Doug and I'm just thinking all the chemicals that Doug throws into his body, cigarettes and beer and fucking, I mean, Doug shits on multivitamins.
01:50:32.000Ann Shulgin takes this oxygen-less mescaline derivative called desoxy and goes into a fugue state where she has a prevailing sense of unreality that lasts for months or something.
01:50:46.000It just totally feels like she's in a dream...
01:50:48.000But then I've had friends who also have used unusual substances that haven't been tested very much and have weird reactions.
01:50:56.000But even if you ingest the same substance over and over and over again, you really don't know exactly what's going to happen with the psychedelics.
01:51:03.000Taking the exact same quantity of synthetic psilocybin over and over and over again a year apart every year will feel completely different every time.
01:51:10.000So I'm always skeptical of people that feel as if they really know the effects of any substance because it's always completely different.
01:51:18.000Well, DMT always seemed like there's so much coming at you, and it was coming at you for only like 15 minutes.
01:51:23.000Like, it was almost impossible to bring back anything.
01:51:26.000It was almost impossible to record any of it.
01:51:51.000Like you do it and every time you do it you come back and then you go what the fuck was that?
01:51:54.000And then you go back in again and it's still the same thing for 15 minutes.
01:51:57.000It's just like it's too alien and too crazy.
01:52:00.000There's no way you can ever really truly get a grip on it.
01:52:02.000It's not like you can Go on a vacation to DMT land.
01:52:05.000You know, if you could take a trip, you know, or you could go somewhere for two weeks, and in that two-week time, you would, the entire time, you would be going through a DMT trip.
01:53:01.000And if you haven't read that, this is a must-read.
01:53:03.000The other thing where you were interviewing Shulgin was amazing as well, but you have to see this.
01:53:08.000This girl was a stripper, and she meets this dude who's like this big-time LSD manufacturer who has a fucking house in a silo and millions of dollars, right?
01:53:21.000He's rich as fuck, and he's like the number one LSD guy in the country.
01:53:29.000And this is another example of a story where a lot of people talk about it with an enormous amount of confidence, as if they have an understanding of what happened.
01:53:35.000They say, oh, it's all Crystal Cole's fault, or it's all X's fault, or Y's fault.
01:53:38.000But if I've learned anything from researching it over the course of years, it's that absolutely nothing is certain about the story.
01:53:44.000It's incredibly complicated, and there's so much conflicting information for absolutely every element of the story that you have to be very careful about talking about what happened with certainty.
01:54:55.000For people who don't know, Whitey Bulger was the head of the Irish Mob, and he was also working for the FBI. So if you turned Whitey Bulger in, Whitey Bulger would know from the FBI, first of all, they wouldn't arrest him, and then he would go kill you.
01:55:17.000And things like this have been happening for a long time, both in the US and internationally.
01:55:22.000You know, there's the Iran-Contras with this whole scandal about them pumping cocaine into ghettos in America to create the crack problem.
01:55:31.000I don't know that it's necessarily true, but it's a theory that a lot of people have.
01:55:35.000The same thing happened in South Africa with methaqualone, with Quaaludes.
01:55:39.000There was this whole project called Project Coast, where they were synthesizing massive quantities of MDMA and Quaaludes in order to weaponize them for crowd control, supposedly.
01:57:12.000So when they were trying to weaponize it, one of the problems is just it didn't aerosolize well, it didn't last on surfaces well, and then they settled on BZ because they thought it was a better chemical weapon.
01:57:23.000BZ. What is BZ? It's an anti-cholinergic drug, like Jacob's Ladder.
01:57:36.000What was it going to do to the troops?
01:57:38.000Just make them disoriented and you just take them...
01:57:40.000Well, yeah, I mean, can you imagine if you discovered, if you didn't know anything about psychedelics at all, and you discovered LSD, and they tried absolutely everything they could with it.
01:57:48.000They tried to see if they could use it as a truth serum.
01:57:50.000They tried to see if they could use it to, you know, they tried both good and bad uses.
01:57:56.000There were scientists using it to increase their intelligence, and then there were people trying to, yeah, use it to make people insane, to reprogram people's brains.
01:58:34.000The scariest thing that I ever heard connected to any psychedelic experience was that Timothy Leary was connected, or not Timothy Leary, the Unabobber, Ted Kaczynski, was connected to some studies at Harvard, and he had done some classified LSD studies, and they tweaked a lot of people's fucking heads.
01:58:55.000Then he went back to Berkeley, taught math for a few years until he got enough money to buy that cab and take on the technology.
01:59:02.000They might have fried that dude's brain.
01:59:22.000So it's all about different experiences that they tried to impart on people with LSD? It's about, yeah, all these attempts to weaponize LSD and to use it as a truth serum and MKUltra.
01:59:54.000And that's more recent research that came up in the last, maybe in the last five years.
01:59:58.000Yeah, I'd read it, and then I'd read a counterpoint that said it was bullshit because you can't even get acid to work in bread like that, that it wouldn't maintain itself.
02:00:26.000I mean, you could spray bread with LSD. Yeah, it was an interesting argument when I heard it.
02:00:30.000Because I had assumed that it was true.
02:00:32.000And I was like saying, like, wow, look what they found.
02:00:34.000And then I saw this counterpoint to it, and I was like, oh, okay.
02:00:36.000Is it possible that they could have created a more stable form of LSD, or could it be some other psychedelic that would have similar effects that would be stable?
02:00:46.000I mean, there's plenty of psychedelics that they were testing at that time that are more stable than LSD. LSD is unusually unstable.
02:00:58.000But yeah, I think that, you know, they recovered some communication between two operatives and they said, like, did you finish the mission with the diethylamide or something?
02:01:07.000They didn't specifically say LSD, but they used some abbreviated form.
02:01:11.000So it's not conclusive, but I think that there's strong evidence that that happened.
02:01:16.000You would think that if they knew that it would have monstrous effects, they would have to know whether or not there's something that they can monetarily get out of it.
02:02:16.000I mean, they probably had an idea, but there was these anthropological reports of what Indians do when they take peyote, but they had no idea how just some businessman...
02:02:24.000Well, apparently they started doing it once they stopped getting people that are willing to sign up for the voluntary tests.
02:02:34.000Too many people were getting fucked up by the tests.
02:02:36.000So this is what I had read, is that they switched to dosing people when they ran out of volunteers.
02:02:43.000I would imagine they would have had volunteers, especially later on in these programs, and they were becoming publicly known substances.
02:02:49.000But yeah, a lot of the early research, there's a book called Drugs and Fantasy, where it's just people being dosed with PCP. I think the France one was like 51 or something like that, wasn't it?
02:03:26.000I mean, I guess it's the same kind of stuff that happens today with psychedelics where certain people respond badly and want to jump off of things.
02:03:32.000Do you support the theory that that was the cause of the Salem witch trials and all that stuff?
02:03:44.000I know that they claim that witch brooms were an implement for vaginally administering scopolamine and atropine and all these different delirions.
02:04:12.000And apparently it has some psychoactive effects.
02:04:14.000You can get a poisoning from it, and it can give you some sort of a psychoactive effect.
02:04:19.000And they thought it was responsible for witchcraft?
02:04:20.000Yeah, they thought it could have been responsible for people that thought they were experiencing magic, and they were hallucinating, and they were getting fucked up.
02:04:27.000And they could have started blaming it on women, which is what you do when you can't get laid.
02:04:32.000So you're all fucked up on this crazy bread, this ergot.
02:04:37.000Apparently, you've never heard of ergot being psychoactive?
02:04:45.000Well, it contains just a variety of these different ergoline substances, but there's lysergic acid, amide, and they were used medicinally for a very long time.
02:04:56.000That was the reason that LSD was discovered, is because they were using these isolating different alkaloids from ergot, sclerotia, and trying to see if they had some use in preventing postpartum bleeding in pregnant women.
02:05:14.000So they weren't investigating psychoactive drugs.
02:05:15.000They had some interest in using them as potential analeptics, like drugs to reduce fatigue, and that was this one, nootropic hydrogene, was produced by Albert Hoffman in the course of that study.
02:05:26.000But they certainly weren't looking for anything like LSD.
02:06:17.000You know what you're talking about clearly.
02:06:19.000When you have an intense psychedelic experience, and when you experience what seems to be something that is not you, something that you're interacting with that does not appear to be the imagination, It could be.
02:07:06.000Yeah, I think it is, but saying just chemicals is already kind of problematic because everything is just chemicals.
02:07:12.000And just chemicals is absolutely everything you ever experience and remember and have ever lived.
02:07:16.000So everything is a chemical phenomenon.
02:07:18.000Consciousness is a chemical phenomenon.
02:07:20.000The fact that we're able to perceive any of this, that we're able to have this conversation right now, it's all an amazing chemical interaction.
02:07:27.000I don't see the need to bring in any kind of supernatural interpretation of the phenomena, because it just is not necessary, and the same reason that I don't see the need to bring in a supernatural interpretation of the universe, or of anything else, or even ghosts.
02:07:42.000If you look at a ghost phenomenon, You can look at it two ways.
02:07:46.000You can say, oh, this was a weird supernatural experience, or you can say this was a really weird moment of psychopathology and what psychological mechanism made this person so afraid that they hallucinated and thought they heard something or thought they saw another being, which is equally fascinating, if not more fascinating.
02:08:01.000Or there's a dude who didn't get enough attention from his parents and pretends to see ghosts.
02:08:06.000He's in the basement watching shit with night vision.
02:08:19.000Whereas if you actually wonder what is the true biochemical basis of this phenomenon, it's an incredibly complicated question and it won't have a simple answer.
02:08:29.000That's why it's a worthwhile question.
02:08:31.000Do you believe that it's possible that taking something along the lines of DMT or any really intense psychedelic actually opens up some sort of a door to another dimension, another place, another existence, something you can't experience, another frequency, another station on the dial?
02:08:49.000I think other dimensions of yourself, certainly.
02:08:51.000I don't know that there's another physical dimension that you're accessing.
02:08:55.000I don't see any reason to believe in that.
02:08:57.000I think there's enough inside of all of us to account for that.
02:09:00.000So you think that when you have this incredible, massive visual experience, it's all an imaginatory thing?
02:09:11.000It's not like your consciousness travels to a place or tunes into a frequency?
02:09:30.000And I've had that argument with people that are really almost like, they almost proselytize about the experience to the point where they're talking about it as if it's a religious definite.
02:09:41.000You know, this is what happens, this is what happens.
02:09:43.000And I've always said, you know, maybe it's possible, but it's also possible it's just crazy chemicals.
02:09:48.000But it doesn't mean it's not spiritual.
02:09:50.000If people have spiritual benefits, that's fine.
02:09:52.000It doesn't mean that they can't have a religious experience or they can't interpret it however they want.
02:10:10.000I mean, how many people have you ever talked to that have had a big psychedelic experience and totally stopped doing pills or totally stopped smoking cigarettes or just completely rewired their life because of one, like, emphatic psychedelic rewiring?
02:10:36.000I'm too dumb to be talking about any of this in the first place, so I'm just trying to skate by with what limited knowledge I have, but I want to pick your brain.
02:10:43.000So when you experience really profound wisdom in psychedelic states, where you have this almost feeling of being analyzed and seen through and shown all your flaws and all your craziness...
02:10:59.000And then you have this sort of like a reset thing where you kind of get a new, fresh perspective of your place in the world and what kind of an energy and what kind of vibe you're putting out.
02:11:09.000You think that that's all maybe internal?
02:11:33.000There's no reason for me to believe that that is possible.
02:11:35.000But I think that there's all kinds of things within us that we don't currently acknowledge and understand.
02:11:41.000I mean, both Shulgin and Timothy Leary talked about this idea.
02:11:44.000There's all this non-coding DNA that's sometimes called junk DNA or intronal DNA. And although it doesn't, they were probably wrong about this, it doesn't contain any kind of...
02:11:56.000Like, instinctual evolutionary knowledge, but they were using it as an example.
02:12:01.000Like, what if all this non-coding DNA contains instinctual ancient knowledge they were able to access while we were on psychedelics?
02:12:08.000But maybe not specifically with the non-coding DNA, but with parts of the brain.
02:12:13.000Who knows what sorts of things are stored within us that we don't know how to access?
02:12:17.000I think that this is actually a Scientologist idea, but I think that there's some truth to the idea that we remember absolutely everything that we experience, that it's all in there somewhere.
02:12:25.000You just need the right catalyst to remove that piece of information.
02:13:23.000Like, she can tell you, like, you can tell her, you know, June 13th, 1976, what were you wearing?
02:13:28.000She's like, I was wearing a blue dress, and because I was on my way to this and that, it was, and she can tell you, like, what temperature it was outside.
02:14:04.000And one interesting thing about the pneumonists is they all seem to have synesthesia, at least the ones that I've read about.
02:14:10.000And so when they remember something, it's a visual memory and an auditory memory, and all their memories are cross-linked over multiple sensory modalities.
02:14:20.000And then there's a lot of research in the 70s about potentially using psychedelics as cognitive enhancers.
02:14:27.000And I think that's one way that they could function is by encouraging this type of synesthetic thinking where you're experiencing everything through multiple senses and indexing information through multiple senses simultaneously.
02:14:39.000What do you think about the controversial stoned ape theory?
02:15:36.000I think the evidence that he was relying on for that theory that either it was LSD or psilocybin increases visual acuity, I don't think that that's been definitively proven.
02:15:46.000Science, even though it was published in a prestigious journal at the time, I'm not sure that all that research was methodologically sound.
02:15:55.000They had like two sticks that were in parallel lines and then they would have someone turning one stick on the other side extremely slowly to the point where they would no longer be parallel and it was who could recognize it the first and the stone people recognized it more than the non-stone people.
02:16:14.000And so his joke was that maybe being stoned you see the world better than it really is, or better than you can when you're sober, rather.
02:16:22.000Yeah, I mean it hasn't really been studied very extensively.
02:16:24.000So even though it was published it could have been horseshit, like it would have to be replicated a few times?
02:17:03.000They'd chew it and say, oh yeah, it is active, but they couldn't really characterize the effect until they had concentrated the It is a trip that they look like dinner plates.
02:17:12.000It's a trip that they just grow out of the ground.
02:18:29.000There's baocystin and norbaocystin, things like that.
02:18:31.000His theory was that that had come from an asteroidal impact, that spores could survive in a vacuum, and we know the building blocks of life and amino acids possibly came here from outer space.
02:19:32.000Again, I mean, all these things, there just isn't enough evidence either way.
02:19:37.000And I know that's like a boring answer in some ways, but I just, you know, people say, like, it's always huge news when they find an extrasolar planet that might be able to support Earth-like life.
02:19:47.000But so far, they've never found anywhere in the known universe a single planet that we could live on without a suit for a minute.
02:19:56.000So that's not really that encouraging, ultimately.
02:19:59.000But then when you also factor in the enormity of the universe, then, of course, I think it's possible.
02:20:06.000I just don't see at this specific moment in history any reason to think that in the part of the universe that we've observed, there's any life.
02:20:15.000What do you think of the theory that life does not come here In a physical sense, but comes here through your mind.
02:20:23.000And that what psychedelics are is real gateways to communicate with other life forms.
02:20:29.000And that we're hung up on the idea that something has to actually be right there to talk to you.
02:21:56.000The idea that there's knowledge and information out there and you just tune into it and that there's a record of information that literally exists that you can just tune into, and this is where creativity comes from.
02:22:06.000In creativity, when you achieve the Zen state of being completely in the moment, these ideas will just come to you.
02:22:13.000The idea is that these ideas are not just the firing of your synapses and the accumulation of your life experiences, but in fact you are pulling from a well of information that's out there that you can't quite recognize on a regular basis.
02:22:25.000and that there's knowledge inherent to the world.
02:22:30.000And I think it's called the Akashic or Akashic Records is the idea behind it.
02:22:35.000It's almost like taking account, it's almost like a crude way of explaining why we don't understand creativity.
02:23:12.000Some people believe that What you're doing is by being really creative, you're tuning in to intelligence, you're tuning in to ideas, and that the human body and its managing its consciousness is really just managing a radio.
02:23:41.000Our brains are not sufficient to create.
02:23:42.000We need to tune into some kind of a record that creates for us.
02:23:46.000It's sort of a religious idea as well, that there's a god that gives us some kind of power.
02:23:53.000I think that's a pattern in a lot of these ideas, is that they try to remove power from the individual and place it in some kind of intangible realm that we can access through being pious or through following some set of rules.
02:24:06.000But ultimately, I don't want to Right.
02:24:11.000I find that I completely agree with you, and that I think that a big part of it is that people do better with creative endeavors when they're humble, and so it's sort of a way of not taking credit for what they're doing and just tuning into the right creative frequency, and sometimes that creative frequency, the best way to do it is just give it up to a higher power.
02:24:34.000Sure, and that's not to say that it doesn't help people in the same way that religion, even if it's wrong, helps an enormous number of people.
02:24:39.000Well, I've always said that it's a great operating system for a lot of people, and it really does enhance their life.
02:24:45.000There's a lot of people that, for whatever reason, I don't know whether it's they're uninspired or whether they have brains that don't function at the right RPMs or whatever it is, but if you give them some sort of an ideology, they can live a happy life.
02:25:00.000But if you left them alone in the sea of doubt and the unknown, they could go down any path.
02:25:34.000There's a lot of doubt as to how much of life is truly random and how much of it is really created by the energy you put out, your imagination, your actions and your deeds.
02:27:28.000I've had close friends that dropped out of society for whatever reason, because they started to find it pointless, and it's difficult to argue with that if someone really genuinely feels that way.
02:27:37.000But I think there's sort of an infantilizing, generally disempowering idea in psychiatry and throughout society that we are not in control of ourselves.
02:27:47.000We see a doctor, the doctor is the expert on our mind and our body, and they tell us what's wrong.
02:27:51.000They know us better than we know ourselves, even after only talking to us for five minutes.
02:27:55.000So if you go to a psychiatrist and you say, I'm having trouble working.
02:29:07.000Nobody would create that in their own imagination for themselves.
02:29:10.000So it's not that you are completely in control of your destiny, but it seems like you have at least some sort of influence with energy and with your imagination and with the things that you create and the environment that you set up.
02:29:24.000I think that's one of the most important things that I've ever learned from psychedelics.
02:30:24.000I've had a few kind of close to what I would consider overdose of psychedelics where the dose is just so high that I think there might be some physical toxicity.
02:30:33.000But with those sorts of cases, it's very difficult to differentiate between what is motivated by fear.
02:30:41.000You know, a lot of people, even when they're sober, they'll...
02:30:44.000I don't think they're having a heart attack, but it's just a panic attack, or it's not even a panic attack.
02:30:49.000The mind is so informed by the body, especially in a psychedelic state, that it's very difficult to say if you're drinking ayahuasca and suddenly your heart starts beating fast.
02:31:00.000Is your heart beating fast because you're scared, or are you scared because your heart is beating fast?
02:31:04.000Do you concentrate on the heart or the fear first in order to calm yourself down?
02:32:20.000That's the MDMA? Yeah, and it was very...
02:32:23.000I've noticed something recently doing shrooms, and it happened for some reason with Molly this last time, so it makes me wonder how much of it was really Molly.
02:32:32.000But I can see so much better when I'm on a psychedelic.
02:32:36.000Like, it seems like my eyes work, you know, because your pupils are bigger, so you're probably looking more...
02:32:48.000Yeah, and it makes me, and I had this thing I was thinking of, like, it would be weird if, like, all the shit that you see when you're shrooming is there all the time, but your eyes adjust to this certain lightness or this certain level of being open that you see it more when you're on shrooms.
02:33:05.000So, like, when you're seeing, like, you're looking at your hand and you're seeing, like, this crazy shit all around it, like these, like, vines that are growing over it, what if, like, that shit's there all the time, but you're just, like, focusing in on that layer of Hamilton Morris, we throw to you.
02:35:03.000Well, I mean, there's this issue of linguistic relativity and color naming.
02:35:08.000There's been a lot of scholarly research into the issue where certain primitive societies have fewer names for colors, and so they'll only have black and white, and black will encompass red and blue, and white will be green.
02:36:00.000I've only done MDMA, and I only did it once.
02:36:02.000You take your wife to Hawaii, you sit on the beach, and you do two each, and you just sit there, and you will fucking have the most beautiful time in the whole entire world, and you're going to have a reset.
02:38:12.000Brian, why don't you talk while I'm trying to find this?
02:38:14.000Hey, please vote for me on the Shorty Awards.
02:38:16.000Go to desklaw.tv and at the top of it click on vote for me.
02:38:21.000I'm getting beat by a WWE wrestler that has half a million hits so I won't win, but it just makes me feel happy that I'm in second place at least.
02:38:28.000Hamilton Morris only has one tweet and this is it.
02:38:30.000In the realm of scientific observation, luck is granted only to those who are prepared.
02:40:42.000The idea that they can just come in and take down your site at their discretion, and this is right after the NDAA, National Defense Authorization Act, passed, which is another terrifying thing.